I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
> I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair.
Nor me. A lot of it has been small things in my experience though, like this trackpad being terrible, or GNOME crashing once in a blue moon. I've definitely not experienced the level of pain you had with Optimus, or the rendering issues, which seems like a good thing. Although... on the subject of rendering issues, Firefox doesn't like it when the system is woken from sleep and has a really weird glitching effect until you maximise and restore the window.
On this laptop Linux hasn't been that bad, honestly the worst thing for me is this genuinely bad trackpad driver that has massive jutter and is hilariously broken. I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I do agree on your last point(s). It's got substantially better, but as always there are little things that majorly hold it back (trackpad!) when the rest of the system isn't actually that bad. I'd much prefer it to Windows, despite its flaws.
Actually, outside of having trouble disabling tap to click, I haven't had a ton of issues with the trackpad.
I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
> I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I've thought about that too. If I weren't on Apple now I probably would have already started on that, but the closest thing I've done to any kind of "driver" has been to make custom FUSE mount.
> Actually, outside of having trouble disabling tap to click, I haven't had a ton of issues with the trackpad.
Ahh, interesting! Not sure why, but it seems that some people have a horrible experience with the trackpad on Linux, while others have a great time (from a quick observation, anyway).
As a dumb guess, maybe it's due to different drivers being used? It's exactly the same on Wayland and Linux, so I'm guessing it's happening a lot lower in the stack (I read something about libinput? Not sure where that lies at the moment.)
Grr, so much to think about! Perhaps one day I'll have a much better trackpad...
> I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
Ahh, what graphics card is that? I'm guessing it's not NVIDIA.
I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.