I'd like to use linux, and install it from time to time, but am always eventually worn down by problems, some trivial & some less so, that could mostly be solved, but at the cost of research & fiddling time I'm not interested in spending.
The issues largely fall into two categories - missing software, and missing or undercooked hardware support. If Microsoft did signal to the market an increased long-term support for Linux with a concomitant warning about Windows' longevity, I suspect these issues would be mitigated. Bring it on.
I'm in the same boat and have the same thoughts. I'm essentially trapped on OSX, and have been for a decade - sure, with enough pain and effort I might be able to kinda-sorta get by on linux, but in practise the barrier is just too high. And windows has never really even been an option until fairly recently.
I'd love to see real competition in the OS space for people who need both a decent app ecosystem and open source developer tools.
> I'm essentially trapped on OSX, and have been for a decade
Me too until this May, when it was past time for my aging MB Pro to retire. I really couldn't justify a new one given I don't even like them any more (the Touchbar was the coup de grace).
Hence a Dell XPS 15, running Windows 10. I won't pretend the latter is anywhere near as good as OSX (less stable, less consistent UI, generally lower quality apps), but it does manage all the hardware well & gets the job done. WSL makes it livable-with.
I'd prefer linux though for its window manager choices, single-rooted filesystem, lack of nags & faster file io (among other things).
> I'd love to see real competition in the OS space for people who need both a decent app ecosystem and open source developer tools.
I've never seriously considered working primarily in a VM. For performance reasons, I suppose, but given how far the VM scene has come, that may well be an out of date prejudice. Maybe Linux under Windows (it would have to be that way round) would work. Worth considering, yes.
You'll get snapshots with VM. That's awesome. While you could setup them with Linux (not easy, AFAIK, but doable with some tinkering), for Windows it's a game changer. You could install anything and just roll back. Don't like that Windows update? Roll back.
I don't think there's a developer edition of the 9570 model (there's no linux driver for the fingerprint scanner for example), and in any case we rarely get the Dell developer editions here in Australia.
I am certainly saying that a fresh install of Ubuntu (and a reasonable attempt to get over the initial issues eg. using a respin available on github) has too many problems for me to either live with or spend time investigating. Others may have more tolerance for fiddling around with OSs, but I've done my dash with that kind of stuff.
I think it's a bit contradictory to choose an insecure OS because a more secure one doesn't support a nice-to-have piece of security hardware. That aside, I'd be interested in the specifics of the "too many problems" that you anticipate on supported hardware (which includes most configurations of the XPS and Precision).
> I think it's a bit contradictory to choose an insecure OS because a more secure one doesn't support a nice-to-have piece of security hardware.
Maybe. But that has nothing to do with what I wrote.
> I'd be interested in the specifics
Would you? Or would you like to gather factoids in pursuit of your belief that everyone must make the choices you make?
> that you anticipate on supported hardware
Not "anticipate". Experienced, after installation (more than once). It was more trouble than it was worth to me.
> on supported hardware
As I say, I don't think there's a developer edition of the 9570. There isn't an extant linux driver for the fingerprint scanner, which surely there would be if Dell preinstalled linux on this model.
I don't see obvious evidence of 'curiosity' in your replies - they seem more like someone who roughly throws all statements about linux into assumed "linux rocks" vs "linux sucks" buckets. If I've misinterpreted you, I'm sorry for my part in that. You've clearly misinterpreted what I've written, and to the extent that's due to my lack of clarity, I'm also sorry about that. But in any case I'm a linux admirer - I doubt I've had a work day in the last decade that hasn't involved using linux on servers.
As I thought I had made clear, the issues I found with my laptop Ubuntu installations are probably largely fixable with reading & research. There's a fair bit of information about them in (for example) the Gentoo and Arch linux doco sites. But I'm not looking for answers because that's not how I choose to spend my time. There's enough else to deal with in life, and I am no longer an OS hobbyist who does this stuff for fun.
Have you guys tried Linux on the desktop recently?
There's a host of folks in my org running Ubuntu on Dell XPS laptops. Issues do arise, but they're pretty rare. I made the switch from Mac almost two years ago and it's been great.
Yep, on the XPS this year (the last time a new Ubuntu install a couple of weeks ago). Many problems. Some fixable, but a poorer use of my time than running or sailing or any number of three-dimensional activities I choose over screen flatland when not working.
I'm not going to pretend there aren't issues, but subjectively it feels to me like there are few. The UI is decent and usable.
For me the dealing with the few issues that arise is a better use of my time than wrestling with things like Docker on Mac, homebrew, ancient python, and weird VPN issues that seem to pop up with every upgrade.
No doubt every case is different, so there's no contradiction here. If it's efficient for you, great. Ubuntu wasn't worth it for me. The UI is fine, but there's too much that just doesn't work, or works poorly, and I'm not going to do the research involved to overcome these things.
I don't really believe Microsoft is going to do a linux as a consumer-grade replacement for Windows, but if it did, I suspect the issues I have would go away. Hardware vendors would write drivers, missing software pieces would be filled in, etc.
[Edit: I committed the cardinal sin - or is it a common convention? - of commenting on an article before reading it. A mistake in this case - I realise now the article is just silly speculative hand-waving]
I still cannot to this day get pip working correctly on my mac -- it is eternally damned to never run python correctly, and if it wasn't for rvm and shell magic, the same would be true for ruby.
I have an evaluation DeV Edition XPS 13 to try out.
So far I’ve tried it out with Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, Fedora and Intel Clear Linux. There’s not much set up involved in getting any of these installed and working.
The only issues I've seen have been, the trackpad’s a bit jumpy and I still don’t have a HiDPI and 1440 mix working nicely together under Gnome.
Currently I’m trying out Arch which is great as a learning tool.
I still have an old Mac for day to day work but I’ll be permanently switching to Linux soon I think.
The question is are they just "changing OS" issues or are they specific to Ubuntu/Linux distros? Changing from Win7/8 to Win10 was a massive headache (I don't use it daily, just admin for friends and family).
For Ubuntu on XPS 15 there are a couple of specific issues. Gnome has a weird UI bug that causes input to hang. This manifests in Wayland. The fix requires an entire re-architecture of GDB which isn't going to happen for gnome 4.x.
Works fine on X11, which is why I think Ubuntu shifted to Wayland and then back to X11, but at this point, X11 is no closer to dying.
Nvidia hardware doesn't like to behave well in Linux. One has to get just the right driver, and the correct kernel options to prevent hangs and poor standby behavior. However, I'm not sure this is terribly different than my experience with Nvidia drivers on Windows.
Sigh. No offense but it's comments like this that remind me why no, I haven't tried desktop linux recently. No, I am not going to mess around trying KDE Plasma or SomethingElse Tumbleweed or OpenWuffe SnufflePuss XL or any other of the billion permutations of half-baked shit which might or might not work. I am mid-career, I have money, I have little time and even less interest in fucking around with any of that just to get a working computer that meets my needs.
I want a big company, who I trust will follow through, to take my money and solve my problems with The Desktop Linux™. I need office apps, I need music apps, I need image processing, I need some sort of integrated cloud offering, and I'd like a unix-like back end. I'll pay money for this. I will not pay in time. Apple does this for me currently; MS is possibly the only possible other company which could take on such a challenge, hence the interest in the idea.
It's sort of ironic to me that one of the main reasons I like linux on the server - which I use exclusively - is because I perceive it as "just working" in a way that MS servers never do. The situation is entirely inverted on the desktop - OSX, and to a lesser extent Windows, "just work" and the solutions to all of my problems are, at most, an install and possibly a few dollars away. Linux is very far from that currently, and until it gets a whole lot closer - and it will probably take a big company to actually do it - that door is closed to me, and people like me, for the foreseeable future.
I see from the obtuse responses you've received, there's really little point in summoning the effort to type anything besides either 'linux sux' or 'linux rocks'.
> It's sort of ironic to me that one of the main reasons I like linux on the server - which I use exclusively - is because I perceive it as "just working" in a way that MS servers never do. The situation is entirely inverted on the desktop
If "just works" is what you're going for, then install a rock-solid distro on the desktop - Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS and OpenSUSE Leap are the ones which are really in the running, IME; Ubuntu LTS is a distant possibility if commercial support or third-party applications are a priority for you - and, just as importantly, accept its limitations. No, it's not going to support the office, music or image-processing apps that you're used to. But there's plenty that it can do, that many, many users will be absolutely fine with. (The fact that so many people are fine with something as incredibly basic as ChromeOS is proof positive of this. A Linux desktop gives you plenty more than that, and you can easily get it to run on extremely cheap hardware that would not manage to run any other modern OS.)
As a mid-career DINC in a 2% income bracket married to a 1%'er, I too, have money but not much time. That is why I will never not use a Linux desktop. Everything just works on my XPS 13 arch + i3. I also own the previous gen mbpro, I think I used that last year may. Just the idea of me wasting time with osx or windows is sneeringly ludicrous.
> and it will probably take a big company to actually do it
The lack of a company controlling Linux is exactly why it's Linux. I am surprised that someone who is mid-career, has money, and little time doesn't know that.
I always saw Canonical as trying to do this, considering what pains they used to go through to not use the term 'Linux' in their marketing. They were playing things as though Ubuntu was their own platform (and in many ways, given the different ways that Ubuntu used to break compatibility with plain Debian, it was) — their own software centre, their own desktop, their own services.
Many of those seem to have gone by the wayside: Unity deprecated in favour of GNOME 3, Ubuntu One dead. It makes me wonder if Canonical found out that it just can't be done, that pissing off the people involved in the projects upon which Ubuntu depends by sacrificing some of the sense of community in exchange the It Just Works™ magic towards which they have been working is ultimately a fool's game in the current ecosystem.
I find that a shame. I thought Ubuntu had the potential to be a sort of macOS for Linux: built upon a free base, contributing heavily to other projects from which it takes, but also adding Ubuntu-specific stuff (still open source, of course) that disrupts the Linux desktop ecosystem to make the current other players (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, etc.) feel like amateur hour. At one time, it felt like Unity could've been Ubuntu's macOS desktop and I could swear they were heavily promoting some Python API for desktop apps that might've been to Ubuntu as Cocoa is to macOS. That also seems to have changed.
> you know that everything that unity was doing can be done in KDE […]
Please re-read what I said.
I said that I was hopeful that Ubuntu would create something that would make KDE and GNOME seem like amateur hour. I never said Unity was the thing for which I was hoping, merely that it was Ubuntu's attempt (which, to my mind, was a failure), and I never said KDE or GNOME __are__ amateur — although, you forced my hand with the next bit.
> […] if you take 20 minutes to configure it
This is exactly what I'm talking about as "amateur", though.
Try thinking like a regular user, who just wants everything to work properly out of the box, rather than a technical user who might be happy wasting 20 minutes on the fruitless endeavour of getting KDE to work Just Right This Time And I Swear I Won't Spend Another Couple of Hours Reconfiguring It Again Later When I'm Bored™, because that very way of thinking is exactly why the Year of Linux Desktop will never come.
At some point, my threshold for irritation to run a Linux desktop dropped low enough that I was willing to make the jump. My threshold for irritation for Mac also went up.
I was only willing to do so if I could install a stock standard distro and get to work without having deal with a bunch of configuration hassle. That's pretty much true for Ubuntu. However, there are a couple of issues that one may need to address that I didn't mind so much, but I readily admit, I'm not an average user.
I switched when Unity was still a thing and was surprised to learn that it was pretty good with only a little refinement needed. I was pretty disappointed when Canonical dropped Unity settled on Gnome and here we are two years later at precisely the same place, with the aforementioned refinements still needed.
Like you, I was hopeful that Canonical would produce a generally usable Linux desktop, but that still remains to be seen.
You hit the nail on the head, I agree completely. But:
> Try thinking like a regular user, who just wants everything to work properly out of the box, rather than a technical user
I'm by any measure a technical user, with over a decade in software dev and a decade before that in network admin and corporate IT, and I absolutely insist on things working properly out of the box. Anything else is Work™ and I'm simply not going to do it for personal devices. Sure, I'll spend hours tweaking a server to get it behaving exactly the way I want. I am almost OCD about reliable, robust, version controlled environments. Just the other day I spent literally hours massaging some stupid nginx config file so it did exactly the right thing, all of the time, in exactly the right way. And all was right with the world.
My personal stuff though? I have zero, and I mean zero tolerance for any of that shit. My personal stuff better work perfectly first time, every time, or I will be taking it back for a refund or throwing it in the fucking river (regretfully this is not a metaphor). At work I am all linux and open source. At home I am the biggest Apple whore you ever met. I just want things to work.
I am also disappointed in Canonical, who I thought might do as you suggested and create "MacOS for Linux". I think such a thing is sorely needed. They haven't succeeded, though - perhaps MS could. I'd like to see that if they did it, and I'd give it a solid chance.
Of course I know that. I'm explaining why the lack of somebody capable taking responsibility for providing a "curated" linux with a world-class UI and backing it up with deep and broad app and services ecosystem means that it won't ever be acceptable to the vast majority of desktop users, including me.
Canonical has totally failed to deliver this. Maybe someone else could, maybe not. We're just speculating here.
I cannot stand windows for 5 minutes. to me it's just a terrible unresponsive, incoherent and unusable mess. Linux Desktop is a jewel in comparison.
I'm kind of starting to realize that small nuances in Linux are not forgiven, but they are easily overlooked in Windows.
People are just used to Windows and it's problem's are overlooked.
Anyways, Desktop Linux has always been a mostly volunteered project. There are billion dollar industries around server but most of the drive on desktop is just pure volunteered.
Considering that fact, I think it's doing amazing.
I agree, Linux desktop is much better than Windows. But I prefer Linux without a desktop environment (this is not the same as a window manager; I do use a window manager, but not a desktop environment).
Having had a decent go at all three major OSes (windows, osx and Linux) in the past few years, I've found all of them to have a whole bunch of annoyances that stop me being able to do what I want, how I want it.
Absolutely. I've been f/t on each for varying amounts of time over the years, and have found each wanting. There really is no good desktop OS in 2018. I have found OS X the best for my purposes, but it exclusively runs on hardware that doesn't interest me, and only gets worse over time.
Definitely. It's more a matter of choosing the one that sucks the least for your needs than anything else. And since they all seem to be drifting farther and farther away from what I actually want in a personal computer I've started entertaining the idea of making my own (not a new kernel, just most of the stuff on top of it, a new "operating environment"). But it's a ton of work and I'm not really qualified to do most of it, plus I have other projects. It would be great if there was a community with a similar conception I could work with, but I haven't found one yet.
Not quite. Those are the kind of people who would write their own kernel for fun. The kind of community I'm looking for would be focused on building a practical personal computing platform.
> The issues largely fall into two categories - missing software, and missing or undercooked hardware support.
I've trying every Fedora release for about two years, with a view to switching (back) from macOS. Everybody has their priorities, but Fedora is now there on software and features for my uses. If I switch back now, I'll lose the official Google Drive client, but that's it.
In the past, I've run Linux desktops without hardware issues by buying slightly older ex-corporate laptops with Intel CPUs and graphics. Today, there seem to be a bunch of vendors offering Linux preloaded, so I don't expect to this to be a big problem.
Yep. My problem is always the same - lack of documentation and transparency for the desktop side of things.
Example - I installed latest ubuntu on my laptop. Few days later, I needed to share my internet connection from wifi to ethernet. Ok, no problem, I'll just google it. Answer says it's easy as anything, you just open the connection manager, tick two boxes and done. Except....on latest version of ubuntu, the connection manager looks nothing like the one shown in screenshots, and doesn't have that option. Ok, so I start digging(and it's not easy, because almost every result on google shows me something that doesn't exist anymore). Finally, I find a command to open the old network manager, because of course it still exists - and voila, it works straight away. Except that I wanted to set up some filtering where only certain ports would be allowed through...no issue, I'll just use iptables. Fine. But since the last time I used Linux, someone had a moronic idea to change the interface names from easily understandable (eth0 for ethernet, wl0 for lan) they are now all something like eb239xsd83d, because of course that's easier to remember and type. And there is no way to instinctively tell what is ethernet and what is wifi anymore. Lovely.
Like, this is all extremely minor and easy to fix with some googling, but it feels like every damn time I want to do anything on Linux, I have to use the terminal. Ughhhh.
I'm sure you don't care but interface names were redone to be stable, as in if you have two ethernet cards or you replace one with another you don't end up in a situation where `eth0` today is `eth1` tomorrow just because of random chance timing during init.
The issues largely fall into two categories - missing software, and missing or undercooked hardware support. If Microsoft did signal to the market an increased long-term support for Linux with a concomitant warning about Windows' longevity, I suspect these issues would be mitigated. Bring it on.