I feel like I've read over 20 of these articles lately.
I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me.
I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar.
I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some additional due diligence on your hardware. If you think that is troublesome, try installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. Now that can be a real adventure.
> I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another
> since 1998. It works, trust me.
So have I, since 1998-1999. It never really "worked" as a desktop compared to windows. Never. Gnome 2 (the latest few versions) was the best they managed to get together. It was always borderline unusable, but it worked somehow. But the latest versions are literarily killing off all Desktop Linux achieved in the last 15 years.
Personally, I've had enough. The moment when no distro offers Gnome 2 any more, and when I'm forced to use Gnome3, Unity or Kde4, I'm going back to windows.
Do you find Gnome 2 more usable than KDE 3.5? It seems that each major version of both major DEs added new layers of abstraction that slowed things down, but I think the usability+features to performance ratio peaked with the last revision of KDE 3.5.
Still, I think it's a bit drastic to say you'll go back to Windows. I've been trying Unity on my (1080p) laptop just to give it a fair chance, and I agree it's not that great, but I can disable it and switch to Gnome 2 or a customized KDE4 and still be more productive than in Windows.
i moved to xfce4 when arch moved to gnome3, and so far i've been perfectly happy with it. one or two annoying bugs, but on the whole it's a very usable desktop environment.
I've recently started using a Linux desktop again, in a very well supported corporate environment. Even with very professional people supporting my exact configuration (so hardware support is not much of an issue), it's still barely usable for me. Many major applications have significant usability problems, sound support is extremely spotty, window management on the desktop has absurd bugs (focus stealing apps not showing up in alt-tab order), and so on.
It's not that it strictly doesn't work, it's just death by a thousand papercuts, and my general unwillingness to put up with that. I'm currently back to using a Mac laptop to run my desktop environment, ssh-ing into the Linux desktop to run essential programs (exported through X, which brings a nice flavor of ugly to my desktop...).
I've recently started using a Linux desktop again ... I'm currently back to using a Mac laptop
So which is it? It sounds like you switched under some compulsion (corporate policy etc). I have seen this attitude. It is not so much that "things don't work" as "things have to be configured". It took me a solid week to get used to Unity (on Ubuntu 11.04) and the jury is still out on how I feel about it.
One thing to consider when you are going over to the Linux desktop is that the end user has to be a lot more participatory in the overall setup. It takes a little time to get everything as you want it.
A Mac laptop out of the box is a lot more ready. After a few weeks my hp laptop with Ubuntu is irreplaceable. (and I would imagine the same with Arch or Fedora, etc)
I have used a Linux desktop in the past, without being forced, so I'm not totally opposing it for religious reasons. Quite the contrary: I couldn't stand working on Windows, without a proper shell and all its extremely annoying notifications.
Some things have to be configured, but the things I find most enraging are all the usability issues in Gnome (on Ubuntu).
Which kind of makes sense - there is no single authority ensuring quality and consistency, and most applications just got the 20% effort to fulfill their job, but not the 80% polish to be really good at it.
The problem isn't Linux. The problem is GNOME, and to a lesser extent, KDE.
GNOME is just not a good desktop environment, yet it has often been pushed as "the" Linux desktop by various distros and vendors. New Linux users end up using GNOME, finding that it's a pretty bad experience, and then they blame Linux and OSS as a whole. Had they used XFCE, for instance, they'd probably think otherwise.
If recent experience is any indicator, it isn't getting any better. People are not happy with Ubuntu's use of Unity, for instance. Anything GTK+-based or GNOME-based ends up being a miserable experience for most people.
I personally think the whole "Linux Desktop" issue is a bit of a red herring. GNU/Linux (and, I assume, other libre Unixes) is the only widely-available OS I know of where it is even possible to use a graphical environment without the "desktop" metaphor, which I see as a huge step forward.
To me, the "desktop" is all about entrenching the various kinds of boring, repetitive work that computers are supposed to relieve. This insidious metaphor is implicit in everything about how desktop environments are used and developed: the way users are encouraged to scatter icons across their screen for fast access to files, instead of encouraging organization and fast access via searching; the presumed importance of "office" software that most users could replace with a typewriter and a calculator; the focus on making the environment "intuitive" from the first moment one uses it, at the expense of training the user to eventually learn to use their computer more effectively and efficiently.
I would much prefer to see the free software community put its efforts into building graphical environments that eschew the desktop metaphor, and instead focus on making it easy for the user to off-load work to the machine. Part of that task is making it easy for the user to discover what the components of the environment are, how they work, and how to recombine them in novel ways.
A good test for this, I think, is how well a graphical environment supports a task like data entry, because it's the kind of thing that just about every computer is going to have to do at some point, and it is often a mind-numbing task. It's often mind-numbing not because the task is boring, but because most "desktop" environments provide no way to offload the cognitive advances you can make while doing it. After a few records, you know you have to check that field C looks a certain way relative to fields A and B, or that it's faster to enter field E before fields D and B, etc.; but the software you're using provides no way to encode this information, so you have to remember this boring algorithm and execute it repeatedly yourself, instead of letting the computer handle the algorithm while you focus on edge cases.
The challenge is to build an environment that a user can offload the algorithmic aspects of their work onto, without requiring the user to be a full-on programmer, at least not at first.
Free software has already taken some significant steps in this direction. Tiling window managers, the OLPC's Sugar interface, and even to some extent programs like Emacs are examples. We're ahead of the game when it comes to building a new metaphor for working with a computer. We just need to recognize it.
I briefly played with Unity as included with Ubuntu 11.04 and felt that it was interesting, but unfinished. I find Gnome 2 very usable now, though it had rough edges for years. Unity is less usable due to its rough edges.
Distributions intended to bring new users to Linux might do well to focus more on testing than new features. I've been using Linux on various laptops for almost 10 years now and I don't want to deal with instability and broken things on my production machine. New users looking for an alternative to Windows will likely find the grass is not greener on the other side. I'm not talking about ugly UI or inconsistency. I'm talking about the fact that my Thinkpad won't suspend, that my sound sometimes stops working, that my notification icons for Skype and a couple other apps were 1px for over a month while the bug was well-known.
Not all Ubuntu users are using a laptop. It is absurd to penalize desktop users with a UI that just isn't suited to desktop use.
OEMs often don't truly understand the needs and wants of their customers, as well. The recent backlash, even among laptop users, shows this quite well.
Funny - I get drawn in too, especially on HN. I think I might learn something or figure out a new way of doing things. But usually turns out to be 'whining about wine...' and other such topics that are not really that useful.
I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD.
What he meant was that he'd come to Linux from FreeBSD. He was charged with going "back" to Windows, but you don't go "back" to something if that's not where you came from in the first place.
Installing os x on a non-Apple machine is a hack. Installing linux on simple hardware was never supposed to be a hack. As the author says, the drivers of even linux friendly companies like intel and nvidia don't support their latest developments which forces desktop linux user to get on with inferior hardware.
Nvidia's binary drivers nearly always support their latest cards, sometimes even before release. It helps that people use Nvidia cards in Linux for doing Serious Work like rendering movies and analyzing stock trends.
Thank you. I've been using Linux for more than 12 years now and it works. Every user got to make its own choice. I tried OS X, Windows and Linux and I will stick with the latter.
Ditto. I use XP at work, have had a chance to use Windows 7 in the past, and have a Mac at home that I use for Lightroom. Being in regular contact with the competition helps me have a balanced attitude towards the downsides of Linux. Sure, Flash crashes a lot. Sure, you get lied to about the user-readiness of desktop apps and environments. Those things are worth bitching about, but I use Windows every work day, so I know switching to Windows won't be an improvement, at least not for me.
I do not know why I should install OS X on non-Apple hardware, besides maybe safe some money. But with Linux it is already a pain to buy some basic multi-purpose printer/scanner. I went through this last time and believe me, the cost of the time that I spent on choosing the right printer that will work with Linux was higher than the printer itself. And in the end the printer still was not supported out of the box and I had to download some packages from the constructors web-site. In the end it works now - but my wife would never be able to make it work.
I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me.
I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar.
I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some additional due diligence on your hardware. If you think that is troublesome, try installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. Now that can be a real adventure.