The Most Uncomfortable Truths About Linux
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- A few days ago I asked you guys for some uncomfortable truths about Linux and whilst some of you misunderstood the assignment we got some very fun takes a long the way.
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One of the most uncomfortable truths is that a lot of Linux projects have never heard of "UX design". The user wants to do a simple thing and has to look up some terminal command, which worked for the previous version of the project, but not the current one. Then they have to go on some IRC channel, ask for help, get berated for "not reading the documentation", which is still work in progress and way too technical for anyone unfamiliar with the project. In the end you decide the change ou want to do isn't worth it, because it'll break soon anyways.
100% agree. Sometimes the UX of Linux projects are truly awful.
Do you mean FFMPEG?
Yeah I wouldn't mine contributing some of my UX design skills to projects but I just don't have the knowledge to keep track of how tool kits work and change, I use KDE and want to contribute but man learning QT is one hell of a hurdle to jump through. The best I can do with my time is bug reports and running bleeding edge so I can at least catch bugs and report them
That's why I like EndeavourOS and not usually upstream Arch Linux.
Arch Linux is almost exactly what you are describing. EndeavourOS, if you know even a little bit about the command-line, is very welcoming to new users of the distro. (That's not to say it's a good first distro for somebody new to Linux, but for a more experienced type distro, it's very welcoming.)
@@cameronbosch1213 Having to rely on the commandline is a bad UX design. In that case, this pointless Arch Linux fork is not much better.
13:34 This is the problem for copyright as a whole. Unless you have loads of money and an army of lawyers - it basically doesn't exist for you. The only thing that protects small creator is a threat of community outrage, but that has nothing to do with copyright law.
Copyright law is peak "rules for thee, but not for me".
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7it’s more so, laws mean nothing without the ability to enforce them. It’s why the legal system exists to enforce the laws.
@@rexthewolf3149 Except that in practice, the legal system fails people massively here, and in many other scenarios and legislations where there's strong economic inequality involved. And that isn't right. Legal pursuit and defense should not be tied to either party's economic wealth whatsoever.
In terms of copyright, both initiating and defending a copyright claim in court is expensive to the point of pricing out the general public. Meaning that in practice, copyright is a weapon only wielded by large corporations already brimming with wealth and power, crushing their competition with bogus claims they don't have the money to defend against properly.
Copyright belongs to a larger set of opressive laws that seemingly function under "guilty unless proven otherwise". And worse yet, "proving otherwise" basically boils down to "how much money can you waste?"
And if you're a little guy coming up with a fresh new idea, corporations can steal it from you and go unpunished. Because you don't have the money to defend yourself.
"Rules for thee, but not for me".
@@rexthewolf3149 Except the legal system fails massively when there's large economic inequality involved. Hmm, I wonder why...
Hmm? Maybe it's because the entire thing was designed by the wealthy, for the wealthy?
Except the legal system fails massively when there's large economic inequality involved. Hmm, I wonder why...
Hmm? Maybe it's because the entire thing was designed by the wealthy, for the wealthy?
Man I can’t tell you how it feels to see someone give accessibility a voice, that’s super rare and massive thanks. Sorry I got wordy so I’ll keep this brief:
Wayland wasn’t the issue. Cinnamon on Wayland is working fine on arch with orca. Orca doesn’t even read GNOME on Xorg now. KDE has always been an issue but they didn’t write orca, gnome did. So Gnome recently got a million ish to revamp orca. I suspect it works on cinnamon because it’s a fork of gnome 3. So after the revamp, will it work on cinnamon at all? I don’t know. Will I have to switch up my DE again after the changes get pushed? I don’t know. There’s so much to this I’d actually like to chat one on one with you about it if you’ve got the time because there’s plenty of stuff people can do to fix the accessibility in general.
I want to start an organization that forces every desktop to put accessibility as a first class consideration. We can make change happen if we work together.
Can you tell me more about this?
@@MrGamelover23 where can I reach you? Other social platforms, linked in or literally anything else :)
@@MrGamelover23 my comment doesn’t seem to have posted, if there’s a way of finding me on socials then I’m happy to talk.
@MrGamelover23 It would probably be much more practical to raise funds for development of accessibility features than it would be to try to get regulations passed that force open source devs to build working accessibility features before being allowed to work on other features
I'll throw mine into the mix: Ubuntu and mint are fine for most people.
Absolutely.
0:22
I've swapped most of my computers to mint, specifically my laptops and a desktop that windows 11 won't support.
The best thing i've ever done, i'm completely new to linux and i love mint.
@@thatoneannoyingtornadosire8755 I'm starting my journey there too.
My hot take is that unless you are using Mint, chances are high that the only reason you are using the distro you are using is because you think it makes you look cool, rather than because you truly, honestly feel that there is a positive difference.
Here's some hot takes I can think of off the top of my head, particularly when it comes to 'the year of the desktop Linux':
1) Not every piece of software will be FOSS
2) Not everyone wants/can switch to FOSS alternatives
3) Linux needs to improve/become easier e.g. less reliance on the terminal, more compatibility between distros, etc.
4) OEM support is crucial, especially selling in places where the mass market buys from.
With things as they stand, I just can't see mass market adoption of Linux, at least not without something else happening e.g. EU laws, mass marketing (especially towards older generations), more software working on Linux (e.g. Adobe), etc.
1) Not every piece of software needs to be FOSS - there is room for both FOSS and commercial software.
2) See above - you have a choice. If you're commercial application doesn't run on Linux then use Windows. Stop trying to be a "Linux poseur" if it doesn't do what you want it to do.
3) Terminal usage creates power usage. If you need your backside wiped and aren't willing to put in time and effort to learn the terminal, then good luck to you. But don't aim to be a Linux power user - again, it's your choice at every level.
4) It might be for you, it's not for me. I build Linux my way with Gentoo Linux anyway. Again, you have a choice - buckle down and learn it, or stick with Windows or Mac.
Have to hard agree here.
1) Yep. Just a simple truth.
2) More times than not, it is an option of "can". Working in media, countless times you encounter software that is exclusive to a device or OS. There have been times, where I have had to make a Win7 or 8 VM just to run a software that is outdated. Most of the companies dont have the resources to make a software AND keep it updated or ported. Or for example when you got to a recording studio, and you have to use the computers there because setting up your own means you need to reconnect and reroute (physically and software wise) hundreds of things and when you get billed hourly, that option is not there. Also many times I have had to help my engineer dad with some software since some measuring equipment or data pluggers are exclusive. Additionally, I dont like using Google, but their live editing capabilities of Docs, Sheets and Slides are too useful for group work. Yes, alternatives exist, but 99% of people have a google drive account and it means no setup required to start collabing.
3) Ooooh this is a hot topic. Every time this gets discussed, people understand it as "getting rid of terminal" or "getting rid of terminal commands". No. I think that having the terminal is crucial and that terminal based access and commands should be a standard. However, we should aim higher, because we can. GUIs are not hard to render or make anymore, and it makes transitioning and usage for most people easier. The option or capacity of doing everything through terminal should ALWAYS be there, but not the ONLY way. Also I heavily disagree with the statement that "terminal makes people power users". No, it doesnt. That is not the thing that makes people power users, and is a large but not main thing that makes power users.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 FOSS can be commercial
@terrydaktyllus1320 First of all, my post wasn't based solely on my personal opinion but my experiences of others (including retail experience, guess what, allot of people exist who need an automatic 'backside wiper') and complaints from others about Linux being 'complicated', I even knew someone who literally wiped a data drive trying to install Ubuntu and I had to help.
However, unlike you I don't believe in gatekeeping Linux for the masses and would rather see it improved at least on mainstream distros like Mint.
It may shock you to learn that not everyone wants to be a power user and I do believe that some of the reasons Windows is successful is because of OEMs and applications/hardware support not available on Linux, macOS is also better compared to Linux in this regard even with limited host hardware support.
There's a reason I referred to the 'year of the desktop Linux', because that phrase implies mass market adoption, which I doubt will happen anytime soon as things stand, regardless of what Windows does for the worse.
3) yeah, lets see about terminal reliance when LLMs would provide most part of the UI
"The license is just a file if you can't afford lawyers" _may_ not be completely true. In _Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. vs. Vizio, Inc._ The Superior Court of CA has denied Vizio's motion of summery judgement which was under the argument that SFC couldn't sue because they aren't the copyright holder. This is still an ongoing case, and there's still appeals to happen, but it's certainly it good sign that _anyone,_ not just the copyright holder, can enforce the GPL.
Also lawyers aren't sorcerers, they're just people who study the law.
@@Tubeytime That's kind of the point. M.Ds. are not sorcerers, they are just people who study medicine. I've never heard of complex cases (not small claims court level stuff) which turned out good for a person who chose to represent themselves. Especially if you are suing with a rather large company, a task which is sometimes too much for actual lawyers.
@@Tubeytime They are not simply people who study the law either.
The reason high-level lawyers are worth their money versus a very talented lawyer of less esteem is that they have connections and backwater channels.
So much of the US law system is like hacking/exploits, and relationships.
When you hire a lawyer in a criminal trial he usually knows other legal professionals both private and public associated with your case. He may even know the judge, and will know he can make requests that the judge will honor because they have a prior relationship.
Lawyers find ways to bend the law, and everyone in the room can know that the way it was written was not intended to be interpreted in this way. But they'll collectively "damnit, he's good".
@@Tubeytime But, as an analogy, e.g. sysadmins aren't sorcerers either but they can easily seem like ones to people who don't know much about computers. The law and the legal process might be *slightly* more intuitive things but they can still be very difficult for the uninitiated.
Now we need "unconfortable truths about BSD"
ɯspq
BSD users have less empathy than Linux users have
The issue with BSD users is that they have all internalized and accepted what is uncomfortable to the point where they are completely comfortable with it
Someone already made that.
ruclips.net/video/2oLuJSFZKEs/видео.html
@@Its-Just-Zip just like we did with GNU? heheh
This is Brodie trying to do a “Linux Sucks: Community Edition”.
@@HPLovecraftsCat9 I expected more people to react to this, maybe I am one of the only few veteran enough to remember him. (I know he is still doing stuff, but he moved to lbry, deleted every toutube video, then he move again to locals and so on)
@@fcolecumberri he actually still uploads to youtube
@@whathd579 yea I know, but only a few things.
Uncomfortable truths? Linux is scarily easy to break. Signed, someone that somehow accidentally broke his Linux desktop
I agree. Yesterday I used all my disk space with a Timeshift backup. So I had to use a RM command to delete the backup; if I had done that command wrongly...
Counterpoint: Unless you're power user you won't break it. Now, whether that means that everything you want will work is another question.
I don't agree fully, because unless you don't know what you are doing, it is almost always easily fixable. Deleted your kernel? Use a live usb to install a new one. Deleted your entire desktop environment? sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop. Like seriously, if windows breaks there is nothing you can do except reinstall, with Linux you can fix almost anything, I've used windows for 8 years and literally reinstalled it 20+ times over all my devices combined just because some crap broke, I switched to Linux 6 years ago and I'm still on the same install.
@@MrTurbo_ sudo rm -rf /
@@jefrie7144 that's not breaking your os on accident, that's being a moron on purpose. You can do that on any os, for example, try opening cmd as administrator on windows and run rmdir c:\ /s /q
You are absolutely right and hit the nail on the head.
Another thing is help in the forums! Linux nerds have nearly zero patience for new users from Windows. Just today I nearly lost my cool in the Ubuntu forum after a "put down" by members there when I asked how to format my external hard drive, which has windows on it, so that I can use it on Linux since Linux will not touch an "open" file. Either forums want new users from Windows or they don't. Which is it? No reason for the theatrics.
you forgot the circle of market. Gamers use Windows because all games are made for windows, and Game dev create Games for Windows because all Gamers are on Windows. Same goes for Photo/Video editing on Mac and tech guys on Linux. This circle is almost unbreakable. Like how much did Valve's effort on Gaming on Linux and WSL for tech guys worked
I have had the exact same idea for such a long time but have never been able to make my mouth say it in such a clear way.
Well, Steam Deck is actually pretty successful because people like having their games portable, so in a sense Valve has had a not insignificant impact on things. Flow on effect is that more and more games are either Linux compatible or even native.
WSL, as much as I dislike it, gave corpos an excuse to force a lot of developers onto their Windows SOEs, so again, the impact is certainly not negligible.
Don't get me wrong, these things aren't decisive in their impacts, but a landslide always starts with a few pebbles so it's hard to say either way whether a technology is going to lead to widespread change.
@@MaidenLoaf steam deck artificially increase numbers. In the end still nobody uses Linux on their PC for gaming
@@kiankazem3846 not my point. The steam deck being successful in turn makes games on regular Linux viable, and unless you're a time travelling wizard you can't really say one way or the other what the longer-term impacts of that will be.
@@kiankazem3846 RUclips's doing that thing where i have no idea if my comment was deleted or not, so I'll reply again. Sorry if it appears twice.
My point was more that you can't know what the longer term impacts will be, because it's not so much that Steam Deck having high adoption means Linux became popular for gaming, but more that as a side-effect Linux gaming becomes more and more viable every day because of all the work done on Proton and WINE. You already see this where a lot of developers are now just outright delivering Linux native games.
Not adding window decorations on Gnome is a bug, not a feature.
@3:10 you misunderstood. It isn't about people forgetting, it is about how there was nothing to it for people to be mad about, but misinformation and bad communication made rumours and FUD spread like wildfire that burned bright and as you say, went out shortly thereafter.
BTW, if you remember, the whole thing was about the devs opening discussion about having opt-in telemetry to make their lives easier in knowing what to improve. These are the facts. But then the storm was about, somehow, opt-out telemetry that would be sold to third parties and making it mandatory to let go of authorship of whatever you produce using Audacity etc etc etc...
So here is my🔥 hot take - the Linux community is disproportionately filled with reactionary people who are too quick to grab a pitchfork as soon as a note in the wind suggest there might be a witch somewhere somehow. Red hat issues that misinformation survives TO THIS DAY, the Audacity thing, the Nix drama, all these things... The community is PRIMED AND READY to eat up misinformation.
🔥
Not that the community is always wrong (I don't know yet for sure if Nix stuff is nothingburger or serious stuff), the thing I believe is an uncomfortable truth is that the community is TOO QUICK, whether they turn out to be right or wrong.
Systemwide libraries allow KSM to reduce not just disk space, but active ram usage. Even without enabling and configuring KSM, the disk cache is much more efficient if the frequently loaded libraries are held in common. Incredibly important on low-spec machines.
About the Audacity fiasco: there's three reasons why people stopped talking about it
1. People who actually cared about sound engineering were already using better options (Reaper)
2. People who actually cared about data security changed to better options (Reaper)
3. People who didn't care stopped talking about it
Here is mine: Linux will never be mainstream, and that's okay.
Exactly, I've said this for years and will continue to say it; as good as a FOSS future is we have to keep in mind normies couldn't care less about that sort of thing even if they switch to Linux they'd still be using proprietary software and there are simply a lot of grifters
In my opinion, it's already mainstream
I respect your opinion, but as a semi-new user, I disagree
While I don’t think it’ll be soon like next year or something like that, I do believe that later down the road it will be popular, might not overtop windows, but will be an alternative for normies
If we compare Linux now from 20 years or even 5-10 years ago, we have already had huge progress on making Linux user-friendly. And with valve and red hat’s push, it doesn’t seem to be slowing down, in fact in the past 2-3 years Linux usage went up 1-2%
Plus, the only the desktop isn’t dominate, both mobile phone and server use is hugely popular rn….
This is all my opinion, but desktop Linux is gaining slightly more attraction, even by a smudge, and Linux desktop is slowly becoming even more user-friendly
Er, desktop use of Linux has leapt from 1% to 4% in just 18 months. MacOS use stands at 5.7%. I understand over 12% of US users are now running desktop Linux.
On the one hand Windows is NEVER going to go away due to Big Business. Windows is now as entrenched in Government and business systems as COBOL is in banking. It cannot be removed now! But a mass of factors are pushing Linux forward. Steam having made gaming for Linux viable, even GOOD - and better than Mac - which is helping a lot. But also, people are being forced by Microsoft to upgrade their hardware to run new versions of Windows. In the current economic climate worldwide, that is just not going to happen! I have had to put Linux on a number of laptops here to allow people to run their 'Google stuff' on ten year old laptops that they cannot replace!
Add in the the fact that Windows and Apple are both creating walled garden in which people cannot install and run the software they want but only that which is 'approved' and increasingly looking like subscription only, and people are going to cease to be able to afford to run Windows! (Apple users have money to burn or they would not be Apple users!)
I do not see Linux toppling Windows but I do see it overtaking MacOS and becoming THE choice for home owners. Businesses already using Windows, though... they are locked in now, and I think Microsoft is moving towards leaving the home market to Linux and just squeezing cash out of business through subscriptions.
Noooo, we need to gatekeep harder, keep normies out!!!
8:40 that's why I run NixOS. It's unbreakable by design. Give me any mutable distribution and I **will** get it into a situation where I have to reinstall it within two weeks.
I run fedora (but I'm currently making a nix config in a new computer, which I will use when I switch to nix on my main computer), and I broke GLIBC schemas for flatpaks, and half of them won't work now. I still don't know how I broke it
Honest question: how do you manage to break things so easily? What exactly do you often do?
I've never had a system so broken I had to reinstall it in 30 years of using Linux, bar fatal filesystem corruption. One of the great things about Linux (and UNIX generally) is you can fully know and understand how the system works and therefore fix any issues.
I truly don't know how I'm able to break stuff so often. Often times it's just an update that goes wrong for some inexplicable reason. I generally don't try to troubleshoot if it's borked to a pretty bad degree because it doesn't take that long to reinstall and I have really good backup habits.
I know it's possible to, with sufficient knowledge, unbork a system. But the thing is, it's often just better for me to bite the bullet and wait 15 minutes for the OS to reinstall than to spend who knows how long troubleshooting. And when it's something like networking that breaks, which for me was the thing that ended up breaking the most often, I'd rather not have to look up documentation on my phone.
@@pandapip1 Fair enough, but I mostly use Gentoo so starting again from scratch is to be avoided if possible! 😉
I liked Linux but had to go back to Windows 10 because of incompatibility issues I didn't want to deal with. When support for 10 ends I will try it again to see if the community fixed them
Linux has too many distro and most of them are completely unnecessary
@@Xorg462 two things can be true.
To you. They're unnecessary to you. Nobody else is you, so don't project your personal opinions on others.
@@SnakePlissken25lol this whole video and comment section are personal opinions, why are you taking mine so personally? You are free to disagree.
@@hypnotico7051 You're right. I guess it was something about the phrasing that made me take it personally. Sorry :)
I chosen one. MX KDE. Not going to look anywhere else. Not going to try out another distro. I believe this, if you choose one. Than there is only one. Bingo you won.
5:31
with 128 GB disk space, it not a 'litte' bit.
for example, dropbox:
deb package: 425,0 kB
flatpak: 3,5 GB
I don't know, if there are uncomfortable truths about Linux for me, but one that I know of, that still bugs a lot of people, is GNU :) Without Richard Stallman, there would be no Linux.
Shared global Libreries not only save disk space (and that matters in SSD era, also because SSDs slow down a lot when they are partially full) but they also save RAM and improve startup time. On my system I don't have flatpak and the like, but I do have a couple of apps (Insync and WPS Office) that have their own QTs and don't use the system ones. They happen to be the slowest apps to start, are the most demanding in terms of occupied RAM, as well as having other problems.
5:53 I mean, NixOS 100% agrees with that take. Nix is just a different way to avoid global installation of libraries and system-wide dynamic linking compared to static linking or flatpak and friends
2:01 Customization and process automation are the two strengths of the linux DE. Adopting methods and UX from other mainstream OS to make linux DE more appealing to newcomers won't bring any newcomers, but it will only alienate the existing audience. Most "regular users" won't use linux, because they do not know what OS is, and when they buy a computer, it comes with Windows or Mac. Most newcomers on linux will always be advanced/power users that got infatuated fighting and hacking their other mainstream OS and those will always be a very small percentage of all users. Thus linux OS will never be famous and mainstream, and especially distros that appeal to its current audience.
This is gonna sound counterproductive and wrong, but I assure you I will try my best to explain this fully.
Linux needs to be more like windows. Not windows 11, but windows 7. Whenever newcomers hear the word Linux, they think that it is a complicated technical system that requires a systems engineering degree to use
If we want to overtake (or atleast threaten Microsoft's monopoly), we should build the distro around the regular man. People are gonna be easily Diswayed from having to use the terminal so we should make it so that a regular person doesn't have to touch it at all.
And people like easy. People are gonna use Linux if it is easy to use. If it cannot be done by a simple button press, people are simply not gonna like it.
other ways of encouraging Linux adoption is if it becomes a status symbol (Like Apple), causing people to feel inadequate for using windows.
>other ways of encouraging Linux adoption is if it becomes a status symbol
Honestly, in some cases one may consider linux a "status symbol"
you described apple. apple already exists.
I don't want it. it's much too expensive for the value provided. but it checks every box you mentioned.
You make a funny calling Crapple a status symbol.
@@blarghblargh Recently Apple devices haven't been that bad in terms of value considering what you're getting. The issue is people compare apples to oranges, no pun intended.
Sooooo... Mint?
i agree with Aunty to a point ... "so many options" is a double-edged sword in Linux ... its a big pro but (even for us non-newbies) it can also be a big con too
like the fragmentation of different stuff ... its a pro to a point ... but also can be a con (even just dev time and effort wise)
Your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength.
There is not really any such thing as an "intuitive" user interface. What people actually mean when they say this is some combination of "familiar" and "discoverable." What's familiar depends on your background. Command line interfaces, though, are not really discoverable, and that is the major advantage of a GUI. Of course, a command line interface is more efficient for certain tasks, so the people who are familiar with that won't want to give it up.
Most people I know think of Windows 7 as the best version of Windows at the time it was out (personally, for me it was Windows 2000, but most people never used that very much). They think 10 sucks, but not as much as 11 does, and certainly not as much as 8 did. I don't really see where people are moving on to saying that newer versions of Windows are "the best." It's just that they essentially have to pick a favorite from currently supported versions. That doesn't mean Windows is not going downhill in a lot of ways.
The reason why nobody went after the X-Window standard is not because they didn't think it violated Unix principles as much as systemd; it was because they considered X-Window a necessary evil, and they didn't think systemd was necessary.
1:30 i came to Linux to be different, I stuck because of freedom
These days, the main "issues" with Linux for widespread adoption are: too much fragmentation, and distributing software. On Windows you have basically just one system to support, with a lot of backwards compatibility. I have apps written 20 years ago that still run fine on recent Windows, from their binaries, directly. Try that with Linux. Almost guaranteed to fail.
Flatpak and similar partially address this problem, but it's still a PITA to distribute software on "Linux", which is why most commercial companies releasing Linux software do target *only* one or a couple distributions (usually Ubuntu and/or Red Hat, at a given version) and that's it.
With that said, we may not actually want for Linux to become widespread. The consequences of that are likely not to be pleasing.
5:32 No, this is just wrong. This is the easiest solution that sacrifices efficency and security. It's not only about storage but also the ram usage is higher.
again and i hate that i have to say it over and over RAM usage doesnt really matter for 90% of all users, storage usage doesnt matter for 95% of users
Both ram and storage is not only fast, but dirt cheap these days.
"Efficiency" for whom? Certainly not the developer or end user.
MacOS and their "single file app in the Applications folder" has always been the best experience for both developers and end users. At least we have Flatpack/Snaps these days
@@Dark9204 that's ok technically but it does penalise groups of people who don't want to buy a new computer every 3-5 years (or have more important things where the money _has_ to go on.
But they shouldn't be excluded from a decent user experience.
Sure those with a nice case can upgrade storage and RAM at will but if stuck with a basic workaday laptop that's not a given either.
global installation only works if it supports seamless, infinite SxS. if SxS isn't supported, or is limited in some way, or isn't 100% bug free (provided the library doesn't do anything hacky), then you drive people to vendoring and static linking.
@@UKprl it would have to be basic laptop from 10 years back to not have enought ram and storage for such a person
Proton is the reason I was able to fully move to linux.
9:00 or until changing is unaffordable. I've been in talks with two people about helping them move to linux *purely* because they can no longer afford a new computer, and are staring down the barrel of the TPM2 limitation. I've been slowly talking them through VM, Live Booting, and one is even on dual-booting rn. One loves the idea, the other hates it, but straight up is being squeezed out of a choice. They don't have enough income to replace *anything*, and are not sure when they will, so decided they would rather have Linux as a safety net, rather than potentially be out of a computer by the end of the year.
I have a Macbook from 2011 that runs just fine on an old version of OS X and a PC from 2013 that runs WIndows 10 that can't be upgraded to 11. I do all my engineering design work on that machine. There are ZERO problems with using either computer. You are talking absolute nonsense. If you don't know how to make emergency repair discs and backups for old Windows computers that can be use to replace installations after a hard drive failure, then you are the last person on Earth who should be meddling with people's computers. If you have much older hardware than that, then it's more than likely that the decoupling caps around the CPU will fail soon, anyway, which results in a dead motherboard that you won't be able to repair, either.
The uncomfortable truth is that at some point you WILL face some unexpected issues and will spend hours looking for solution, and you DO NEED to use console and understand at least it's basic commands and language. Basically Linux encapsulates any other FOSS experience - these tools are surprisingly good at performing some really complex tasks, but prone to SUDDENLY punch you in the face on some simple things.
9:39 The absolute audacity to tell a blind person "Go and have a look and see if ..." XXXD
i would say it was Fedora core that started the "linux desktop" packaged.... though ubuntu pushed it a bit more a year later :P
Mandrake was better than Fedora on the desktop back then.
@@helloimatapir You're right man I forgot about old Mandrake.. Those where the good ol' days. Thanks for reminding me.
The only downside about Linux is that by the time you progress well into exploring Linux, you become a sort of computer expert yourself
the "no-global-system-libraries" thing could not be *more* wrong. that is peak not-a-programmer perspective
Ask the programmers who are pushing for flatpaks and you might change your mind, you mean it's not a distro maintainer perspective
@@BrodieRobertson the push for flatpaks is absolutely relvant, but "user-level" application software (as flatpak software so often is) is the exception to the rule. global libs are critical for the hundreds of far, ~far~ more "fundemental" programs to exist w/o bloating the size of any default install for x distro by a hefty factor. even then, stuff like vulkan et al, that require a significant amount of code to be linked to operate at all already require runtime-linking (loading the library in code) as a result of their size
Not only that, but as an end user - I want full control of what versions of which libraries I want on my system, I want them patched at the pace that my distro goes at, and not at the whim of some dev that is too lazy to address vulnerabilities, and I most certainly don't want duplicates.
@@BrodieRobertson If you're going to shove all your dependencies into a containerized app then you entirely miss the point of an operating system. It's there to provide resources for you, so that you don't have to bring your own. This flatpak horseshit is for people who think electron is a good idea - their ideal "operating system" is just a kernel that switches between instances of google chrome.
@@kyle8952 consider the idea of shared computers and Bring Your Own Device (byod). If I can't trust the place to have that computer set up, I am going to byod. Yes it might not be secure, but at least it will be the way I set it up, and someone else can't go and change the workflow without my permission. Which is why flatpacks/docker is a thing.
Also the fact that different places set up their computers differently, so you have to adjust to each one. Vs byod.
If people united in libraries and agreed to never break user space I don't think flatpak and others would have prospered in the way they have.
5:40 you're wrong. The point isn't just to save space. Dynamic linking of libraries also means that:
1. when there is a security problem you only have to update a single library to fix it. If you use static linking then you have to play wack-a-mole to hunt down every program that comes bundled with the bad library and update each one. Furthermore, packagers or whoever upstream also has to deal with it and your hands are tied until they do (for each and every program using the compromised library).
2. Software devs update their software in accordance to what's going on in the community. If some software depends on an outdated library then that gets reported as a bug and addressed. As a result, users benefit whenever functionality improves for a library and you don't have to deal with software randomly becoming buggy because of mysterious issues due to out of date libraries.
We have to keep in mind that the Linux space is NOTHING like the Windows space when it comes to software which is largely designed to stay mostly the same and continue supporting old busted ass software. In the Linux space we constantly have lots of huge changes in progress. Think about all the things that only kind of work with the current state of Wayland or Pipewire adoption or whatever. The Linux space is a big ecosystem of software and it moves forward together.
True, but it's also the reason why most games from 2000-2010 will still run fine out of the box on Windows, whereas to run games that old on Linux, you're better off just running the Windows version through Proton than trying to get the native ports working anymore. Games are not and will never be part of that moving ecosystem; they're made by people who want to move on with their lives and not keep on maintaining forward compatibility forever.
@@stevethepocket Yeah, I agree. Games are definitely a special case. I haven't used Windows in ~15 years, so I don't know if things have changed, but the way Proton works (where each game has its own wine bottle and and you can choose different Proton versions for each game) actually seems better than the way gaming worked on Windows back when I last used it.
Also, ever so slightly less memory usage (if you link to Musl Libc statically it isn't too bad though, as opposed to if you link GLibc)
I do feel like Posix is a bad standard, though, and it's not about scripting. In order to create a new process, you have to fork something. This means copying the memory of an entirely different process just so you can deallocate it and replace it seconds later.
POSIX spawn?
@@vladlu6362 It still has a fork() step, its just for smaller devices and has an extra "housekeeping" step.
I can second the font issue. My main uses for a laptop are writing/typing and reading. I've spent two hours playing with the fonts in KDE Fedora, but after a while something happens with the display scaling and the screen seems to put 'lines' through vertical rows of pixels containing fonts, blurring/distorting partial bits of words. GNOME fonts just look blurry and sharp at the same time, but KDE has scaling/hinting issues at least on the `1080p HP Elitebook display I've used.
My Windows 10 just crashed. It worked without any problems for 3 years. Oh, wait... it wasn't my Windows 10. My SSD developed premature CRC errors. It was a hardware defect. When was the last time you had to reinstall Linux because of a hardware defect? Never, right? You always had to reinstall it because of a software defect. ;-)
Profit motive isn't the issue, it's the collective ownership what made Linux what it is and the internet what it is.
9:52 That's why Mint is the ideal option for the vast majority of people, because the vast majority of people just need an OS!
Google, Chrome, and the increased focus on web apps was the biggest improvement to desktop Linux
No more hoping WINE would be good enough, or dealing with the theoretically more functional but in practice worse designed Linux equivalent, or just sticking with Windows because I needed MS Office
Chrome is my OS, Linux is just the device driver
chrome (and web stuff in general) is cringe tbh
there are much better ways to create the same kind of portability
It doesn't take long to get to grips with gtk css files if you want to develop your own desktop theme.
Linux will save you when you're at the edge. Just last week my laptop suddenly stops working ( I can't even reboot ) so I have to dettach/reattach battery for it to reboot.
Then Windows is failing to start. You can imagine the headaches this gives me because all my work is here. Windows Boot Manager says something changed in my hardware. Really? I booted up Linux Mint(USB boot) and laptop was fine. So I was able to backup files and even recovered some important registry key/values. Saves a lot of headaches
Sure there are bad things in Linux. But I think it is far better than having stucked on Windows
The KDE Has Too Many Options thing is why I bounce off of KDE. It's not that I think it's bad, I actually kind of love it - and that's the problem. On KDE I will spend more time tweaking the setup than I do actually using it. I do think some KDE apps are more cluttered looking than they need to be (I dislike Kate for this reason; I don't always, or even usually, need a bunch of advance features in my face when I open a txt file). KDE also has one "feature" that I despise with all of my being, although it's actually more of a Dolphin thing I think: every time I drag and drop, it pops up that menu for move or copy. You cannot set a default. This just annoys the piss out of me. Same drive, move, different drive/partition, copy. There, done.
I actually love KDE, I just can't use it.
Linux still isn't there for Desktop. Something tends to break or not work when I need to do something and I spend an hour with 50 tabs open trying to solve it. Still too much friction vs Windows for day to day use.
"If your recommending something to a new user, don't give them choices, just give them something and if they don't like that something, then provide a new thing"
From now on, i'll use LFS and say "I use LFS btw" to every new user of linux, give them the book, and leave them alone.
GNU/Linux is many things to different people. Hell, I remember the days when I had to install Linux with a stack of 54 floppies. Since your subject is mainly about desktop distros, Mandrake was a great Red Hat based 1998 distro. Ubuntu is doing a great job since 2004 at helping Linux newbies land in the world of Linux, among others. As far as Desktops, KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Maté and others are fine.
For those that have been in the (desktop) field for a while, nothing beats LXDE (the one that is supposed to be discontinued). Most Linux users don't care if Linux becomes number one. Like gold, you don't go around telling everyone where you found it.
Now, back to my terminal to see how the server is doing. Gamers are welcome.
The Majority of the population that uses computers are not truly computer literate across the board. Linux is perceived as the operating system for engineers, not for the hundreds of millions of people that work office jobs, for example.
Additionally there is a whole segment of computer users, like me, that are not Linux savy as we learned our computer literacy BEFORE Linux existed and who were also not engineers. I can also say I used computers before there was Windows and before there was a Mac. Our brains are a bit too old to absorb the huge amount of stuff that goes into a Linux user unless we make it a full time obsession for several years and can managed to find local classes by folks that can explain things in a simpler way than most engineers do.
Going for the second best solution is a good strategy to keep competition alive. I have used Cyrix and AMD cpus not because I hate Intel.
Just now I'm looking for a car and while the availability of repair parts is an important decision, I do not want to go for the largest and most popular vendor in my country, although they are the only ones running a repair shop in walking distance ...
Except that Linux is not in competition against Apple or MS. Its openness allows it to be free from the burden of having to compete for the lowest common denominator (that mythical beast that some people call "the average user"), and that's a good thing.
Linux, in it's current state, is not for everyone. and it doesn't have to be, but it'd be nice if it were. To that end here we go with the biggest pain points for most PC users that aren't also devs:
1. Documentation - outside of the archwiki, LFS, and some parts of the Gentoo Handbook, it's virtually non-existent in a manner that the average end user will be able to grasp. The man pages tend to be just all over the place. Either overly wordy, or completely blank.
It needs to very concisely:
A. Tell you what the program is.
B. Tell you a brief description of what the program does.
C. Tell you exactly HOW it's intended to be used, with several examples.
D. Tell you might/will happen if you use it wrong.
What the documentation in linux tends to do is:
A. tell you what the program is through some long drawn out book length article(which will make the average user's eyes glaze over).
B. starts rambling about various side thought processess the author had while writing. (adhd goes brrrrrrr)
C. if you're lucky there might be one example command. If you're really lucky it might even pertain to the app in question!
D. often leaves you more confused than when you started reading.
TL;DR of 1: current documentation reads like it's not intended for a user to actually be reading it, but instead like the comment section of someone's source code whom was treating it more like a personal journal and nobody wants to read through all of that just give them the TL;DR.
2. UX - Yeah, if wider adoption is the goal the terminal should be the fallback option not the first, especially if someone or, ideally, several dozens of someones, doesn't solve problem 1. The terminal is where the average person only dares tread if everything else is on fire and doesn't work. This is regardless of the OS in question. More things simply need to have a GUI for the average person whom likely barely knows how to power on their PC in the first place. When the system in question is not being used as a server, treat the terminal like an emergency staircase - it's there for when the elevator(GUI) cannot be safely operated. Things need to work as expected or better than expected than they do on Mac and Windows. That needs to be the standard.
My Personal hot-take:
3. Distros not working with Secure Boot+nVidia cards or making it incredibly more difficult than it needs to be to get it working - OpenSuSE created what ends up being a semi-automated solution for this forever ago, they need to quit crying and adopt their solution already. needing to disable "security features" to install a "more secure OS" is dumb and distro maintainers should feel bad for even suggesting it. the OS installs a new kernel and or driver, and on reboot it presents me with a prompt asking me to enroll the new key, I hit spacebar, it enrolls it, and boots normally, and I have to fuss with exactly nothing extra until the next kernel/driver update.
IMO, the above makes up most of the problems Linux has as a whole, that can actually be solved by the community. the rest are just things like convincing/bribing game companies to enable anticheat for the linux platform. I don't think that one will ever get solved though. Proton/proton-GE/Lutris sort of solves the compatability issues, though it needs a little more work as WINE tends to only use integrated graphics, and won't even attempt to use a dedicated card if an integrated chip exists. Granted this is only a problem for those with IGPs. Basically, this is mostly an issue for just laptop users and desktops with AMD APUs that also have a separate addon graphics card.
Who reads documentation in windows anyway? Most people barely know how to set a custom wallpaper. What normies need is an intuitive system so that they don't have to read any documentation
@@catto-from-heaven "Power users", mostly. the vast majority of people don't need to on Windows. Virtually everything has a GUI, and 99% of the time just works exactly as expected.
We don't exactly live in that reality under linux at the moment, so the better the documentation the better the experience is. until such a time we do start living in that reality, it's the most immediate best thing we can do.
Of course it's often better to show people how to use something rather than making them read something. But who's gonna start making those RUclips videos, hmm? 🤔
@@imzesok I don't really get what you mean. The experience for "power users" is way better on Linux than on Windows. I'm not a Linux expert and have been just around 1 year using it, and still I've been able to diagnose and solve any issue I've had on Linux so far; I can't say the same when I was using Windows.
@@catto-from-heaven I was merely answering the question you posed: "Who reads documentation in windows anyway?". 🤷
There was no hidden meaning. you can stop looking. 🤣
Just showing everything into /opt would take up too much space
I actually don,t care about normal people, they always be normal, there are always small amount of smart people use different things
9:57 Is more than a truth, a fact, a religion... It's the way the world works.
I think the static linking thing is actually interesting and we probably need to do it.
To those who say Windows 10 was the last good Windows, you are wrong, that was 7 Pro SP1. The last GREAT Windows was XP Pro SP3.
Snaps are FANTASTIC for CLI and dev stuff. But Flatpaks trash snaps for UI, so I end up having to use both 😂
I don't use either on MX.
@@johanb.7869 Congrats?
Thanks😉
Wayland, in mine experience and sentience, it's good; however, my Being still won't use it because with Wayland, some of the extensions are not that steady, as they are with X-org. And when it comes to using Plank, and Dock, they don't work in Wayland; and that's just a few.
Give me a Linux alternative even if there is a challenge from the community to keep it up. Just knowing there is a place in which the overseers have less interest. We don't want them in any case.
It's not that Linux doesn't have issues, it's just that I'd rather deal with Linux's issues than Windows'.
Honestly, same.
With the exception of some poorly documented apps like ffmpeg, awk, Qemu, and Ghostscript, everything on Linux is practically telegraphed just by launching it through a terminal.
Meanwhile Windows just says there's a problem, but almost never bothers trying to explain it. Sometimes the problems just...happen, with no warning, and often times for no reason. It's why I always dread trying to fix a problem on someone's Windows PC
Lastly MacOS' problems always leave me confused in the end. They're all easy fixes, but why they happen in the first place is always a mystery
@@usualrain7082Windows is black box, error messages are not informative, web search brings "solutions" that looks like fortune telling, most issues solved by reinstalling Windows.
@BeTechAwarealways rm -rf --no-preserve-root / or dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/nvme0n1
Me too.
What issues? I use Windows at home, macOS and Linux at work daily. So i know all 3 pretty well. Windows just works. I never have any trouble with it. I start it it runs the shit i want to use and thats it. And that shit does not run on Linux.
Here's a take for you, the average user NEVER wants to use terminal....EVER. They want an intuitive GUI experience that JUST WORKS. No tinkering with commands or github or documentation to figure out a work around...they just want it to work and work in a GUI environment because the average computer user has never used anything else.
Linux folk seem to forget that the average computer user needs 3 things. A start button, a file explorer, and an internet browser. The rest is extra, or unneeded to them. We need to stop developing everything in Linux with a Linux user in mind and try to make some distros that really are about the average user experience. Mint, and Ubuntu are good starts. Until we do, we will never see Linux build much market share.
And don't forget that for gamers with a busy life (work, college, etc.) having to sit down for like an hour to fix something that doesn't work out of the box is a pain in the ass, even more when you only get like 2 or 1 hour to play
I wanted to show my brother a VR game but ALVR didn't want to work no matter what I did. That's annoying and it's a deal breaker when it happens continuously. The worst thing is that most Linux users will say "bruh deal with it" and that is why Linux isn't mainstream
I agree. Although I wouldn't use "the average user needs 3 things" as an argument, because there needs to be GUI also for users who need more than those 3 things.
But yeah, if Linux hopes to win users over from Mac and Windows, the only way that will realistically happen is if absolutely everything can be done through the GUI.
They already have all three of those things with linux, they need to learn that there's more things than that to live comfortably.
People in the community like to shit on ubuntu. But honestly, its one of the most popular linux operating systems for a really damn good reason. While i have my issues with ubuntu, its the one i usually recommend people to use, the pc i set up for my mom (who has basically zero linux expertise at all) has ubuntu mate on it for her to use for netflix and facebook and stuff and it works amazing for her. She never has to open up the terminal, even if its left as an option. Which she really loves.
Its popular because it actually just works. You dont gotta fiddle around with shit much. Thats what the average user wants in an operating system
@@Maske4I won’t be switching to Linux until SteamLink works with quest on Linux. I feel your pain lol
The only uncomfortable truth I know is that installing Linux didn't make me cool. Turns out I was just always cool ;)
The Sephiroth profile pic clued me in. 👍
@@Your_Degenerate You will survive the Reunion.
Immolo is here, let's goooooo!
You sure are and always were!
Based Sephiroth
7:10 I love how the piano analogy fits perfectly with gnome, as if you set the theme to dark you get a mix of some completely white apps and some completely black apps
The hardest part of linux is definitely trying to ask questions to the community, they are either: « this works for me so idk » or « don’t use linux if you are gonna ask some dumb question »
In my case, I usually don't even receive replies, no matter how well I put things together.
Don't forget diabolical shit like "Just use xubuntu , fedora kde is trash" when you something you asked for is only available as deb for example
"Use another distro" is also quite common.
As a developer the this works for me response always bugged me. All it demonstrates is the obvious fact it's not a global issue. If it always happens obviously it would have been fixed during development.
What this response really means is the person doesn't understand what most bugs are, almost by definition something NOT seen by devs and testers. Thus a valuable report since they may have exposed something unhandled.
Most users are terrible bug detectors and a small subset have this rare gift and should be cherished.
The main thing required is to rapidly determine if possible real issue or user error. Some distros are very good with this because their forums have good technically competent users and others are truly terrible. But not the ones you might think.
@@noname-ll2vk try to imagine me, a unexperienced end user thats not very computer literate.
I use linux because they're not adding a built-in ai that you can't remove, or installing random crap that I will never touch.
yet. even then, different distros will be forked and create more fragmentation
Ads in the start menu
Exactly why I installed linux. One day a "copilot" button appeared on my taskbar, I couldn't remove it, so I booted fedora
@@brunopanizzi I had the same tipping point.
@@polinskitom2277Fragmentation is good, actually. It means more end user choice.
13:29 Counterpoint: the Mastodon devs successfully forced Truth Social to share their source code under the AGPL with only the _threat_ of litigation.
That's true but there was still the threat, if they didn't think it was serious would they have cared?
Ok, but it still has to be a credible threat. If the guy making the threat was just Bob in Nebraska who nobody cared about, nothing would have happened.
The Mastodon devs had enough public backing to make it credible that they could afford to mount a legal case if they needed to. There's a ton of people that would've donated to that purely to spite Truth Social.
Yeah everyone seems to forget that copyright law in the US has fee shifting baked in with punitive damages on top. Brazen violation of the GPL could get very expensive for a company if the devs actually realize what their rights are and do a tiny little bit of paperwork. It's not just the threat of litigation, it's the threat of litigation combined with the fact the company is now on notice, so any further violations are going to look willful.
@@FireStormOOO_ Meanwhile same DMCA: Pirates take down Minecraft launcher because they registered someone's trademark.
Copyright law is a joke, and GPL enforcement is harder than you think.
For what it's worth, I, a random person and not a lawyer, was successfully able to, with a single email and the assistance of only ChatGPT, successfully demand that a company known for being secretive (specifically, magic leap) hand over the source code for its bootloader under the blind guess that it was based on DAS U-Boot. Maybe I just got lucky, but so far my requests have (well, request, singular) had a 100% success rate.
Additionally, I'm pretty sure that the FSF will provide legal funding for any open source developer who wishes to sue under the terms of the GPL.
7:40 this one makes a lot of sense for one big reason IMO: tech support
Less literate people may be frustrated by a bad UX, but they will be even more frustrated by a UX they have trouble getting help with. I say that, because there’s no way for IT supports to know the ins and outs of all major Linux DEs or even expect their customers to know which one they’re working with.
I mean, we have RHEL and Ubuntu Pro
@@catto-from-heavenno thank you
@@ringwoorm7985 Well, continue using Windows, that's up to you
@@catto-from-heaven those are for server not desktops. and they are often not that great for desktop use. That's why im excited for system76.
@@ringwoorm7985 I wasn't talking to you, but ok
Linux gives you exactly what you want. Downside, Linux makes you learn how to *ask* for exactly what you want. Usually with terminal commands and man pages. Sometimes with build options.
And sometimes with code. And sometimes with Assembly code. And sometimes with graphical design. And sometimes with font making. And sometimes with audio sequencing. And sometimes...
You get the idea.
@@jeffpelevin assembly code? when did you have to use that?...when would anyone be forced to use that? lmao (i get everything else)
@@jeffpelevinwhat did you smoke
So did MS-DOS before Windows came along. That didn't prevent the normies from learning to use it.
DOS is nothing compared to Linux. One is like reading a primer while the other is a college textbook.
I'm forcing myself to start using Linux again because the Microsoft Copilot/Recall stuff creeps me out really bad, but trying to do certain things in Linux is like pulling teeth. Mounting a network drive in Windows and having it auto-mount upon every login takes less than a minute. On Linux, it took creating mount points with the proper permissions and editing fstab and was generally a PITA. It's things like that which make people bounce off Linux and head back to Windows.
The true is uncomfortable but is worth knowing it. The 2 about big companies are super true, we like to fantasize about this being a community project, and parts of it are, but we would be in big trouble without valve, google and red hat.
Linux desktop needs big companies support to succeed
what's the most funny about that is valve went from barely involved to entirely essential in a timespan of roughly 5 years (or less, from a user standpoint).
@@blarghblargh I sometimes fantasize how linux desktop would be if all or at least some of the most influential tech companies rallied behind linux jajjaja
And that’s a good thing! If you ever follow a single more ambitious modding project for a video game you know how community projects usually go…
Have we really needed mega corps to make linux desktops? i see years of development without such.
anyone who tells you compiling a program from source is easy is either a programmer who is used to guessing what dependencies are missing and/or fixing other people's code to work with newer compilers or has never done it.
Meh,I used Slackware for years. Just read what's on the monitor and follow along.config make make install, get deps, do e.
I mean to be far the compiler errors typically give you very good places to start to find the missing dependencies. I admit if there are a lot of missing dependencies it can get tedious
That global system library one is definitely an annoying issue. Windows improved a LOT when more applications just had their own copies of libraies locally. On Linux the problem is a big enough issue that we have entire software projects that basically deal with this issue. Things like conda not only create custom python environments they ALSO allow you to have custom libraries for your application separate from the rest of the system. There are also all those tools we use on servers to dynamically swap around environments. This is just so much easier on Windows or Mac by comparison. Each program should be in its own directory with its own bin, lib, etc directories.
If your are interested in this topic I recommend reading the phd thesis "The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model" by Eelco Dolstra. He analyses the problems you describe and started the Nix project as a solution. It's a good read and easy to understand.
Better yet, we do have the space for duplicate libraries as well, so it isn't like this would cause more problems or something.
@@luckyLaserface I am familiar with the Nix project it is pretty interesting.
@@lamename2010 when the tradeoff to use shared libraries was made I think it made a lot of sense. It saved on both ram and storage space and both where in short supply but the tradeoff was stability. We now have a lot of ram and storage and the stability tradeoff is not worth it for most libraries.
I don't see why. Only problem with global libraries imo is that they're not all versioned properly. We have pkg-config, so we should use that to the fullest to let software just get the correct version of the library...
Having only static libraries would be a security nightmare for abandoned software. Sure you can recompile it yourself if you know there's an issue and know the software is abandoned
In the words of Ton Roseendaal: "We don't need another rendering engine or more coders. We need people that like other people."
The feedback loop from developer to user is deliberately gimped by corporatocracy. File A Bug Report In The Jira
@@mrlithium69 It's definitely GIMPed.
Systemd is NOT optional if you want to have hassle free Linux gaming for an example.
Steam, games and Wine will break when they do not find systemd, you can work around it, but it is a lot of work to do so, and this is something Chris Titus highlighted when he tried it in one of his livestreams a while ago, using Artix Linux (Arch without Systemd)
Nothing worthwhile is ever easy.
ditch the games. you're the one being played
Gaming is only one aspect of an OS platform.
@@mrlithium69 don't hate the player hate the game!
I don't have systemd, have done no work arounds, and Steam/Proton work fine for me. (Using XOrg/AMD, haven't tried Wayland yet)
Linux desktop just isn't ready yet. Really. Fractional Scaling, HDR, NVIDIA GPUs, screen sharing, software support (not only things like Photoshop, but just the fact we have many breaking changes), and the UX...all of those are a mess right now.
We need to fix that instead of keep arguing about Systemd or something ridiculous like that.
Agree. But if we are not ready then Windows desktop is a 2 year old toddler.
@@musicalneptunian Hard, hard disagree. Never had problems with my NVIDIA card, fractional scaling works with any app and with multiple monitors with different resolutions each, native HDR support, Windows don't break their APIs since NT so I can run software that was compiled 20 years ago, I can capture my screen without any problems from any apps....the list goes on.
Windows has its problems, but those things are much better there, full stop.
Not to mention macOS that transitioned between CPU architectures better than Ubuntu transitions between LTS releases
I should really go learn why anyone is complaining about systemd. seems fine to me, so far.
@@blarghblargh Maybe you shouldn't
Before watching the full video, my takes:
1) People don't care about privacy, and selling it will not attract anyone
2) Users care more about eye candy than performance unless it lags
3) The best UX is the one the user is using now
Edit, a new one
4) Downstream packaging is a mess for end user programs and should be only for system packages
I agree. Flatpaks are great, I think it only makes sense that the developer of an application should be the one to package it for linux, he developed the app so he knows best how to package it.
All operating systems suck. Today I wanted my MacBook to stay on when I close the lid, easy according to instructions all over the net, but no there is no longer such a button to click or even the settings panel it was on. Finally had to do it via some arcane "pmset" command in a terminal. My Windows machine refuses to update to Windows 11 as the hardware is not supported, that PC is not so old. The Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia's Jetson machines is just awful. And somebody please tell me why in 2024 with USB plug and play everything it is still impossible for any OS to tell the language and layout of any keyboard that gets plugged in? Everyday I find my self battling with some brokenness of some OS or other. I despair.
4:41 Well, on the Roblox dev forums a Roblox dev said that WINE was intentionally blocked, but that making the game compatible with it is a priority for them. And I strongly believe that that is just corporate speak for "F off, Linux users. You chose to not use a mainstream OS, so you chose to not play Roblox".
So what happened was they decided they needed an anti cheat because of all the hackers, and their anti cheat didn't work on Linux so they just disabled Linux. Later they did add Linux support again for a while but because of how many hackers there were on Linux, because their anti cheat doesn't support Linux so it was just as easy as before, they had to close it down again indefinitely
I will gladly choose not to play Roblox
That sucks for the children playing roblox, true.
@@Wither_Strike
Their current anticheat (Byfron) supports running on WINE but has the opt-out feature to block WINE. And Roblox deliberately didn't disable that option.
@@JaeDaorl Roblox is cringe. *oof.*
I've tried to be a Linux on the Desktop convert but I keep backsliding. My biggest problem is that so much stuff I try simply didn't work at all, there were no error messages to look up or obvious ways to troubleshoot, and all the tech support I got was "works for me".
I'm a begrudging Windows 10 user, I would still be using Windows 7 if it could run on my hardware, and I really wish Linux would stop being a worse experience than a Windows I already don't like.
The one about global libraries is so true. There is no difference between Linux's global libraries and Windows' DLL Hell. Microsoft went to a lot of trouble to fix DLL Hell, and Linux is going to have to do the same.
"like they did with Windows 8
like they did with Windows 7
like they did with Windows XP"
Windows Vista: ok where the *hell* is me?
Vista and ME are the two windowses that no one would dare to say they were the last good windows, because they just weren't good at all.
Last version of Vista is first version of 7. 7 fanboys can pull out all the pitchforks they want, but the only thing their version accomplished was removing the bad rep Vista had because of its early bugs and lies about insane system requirements before they were affordable. So Vista dying changed a few UI elements, that's it
Hell.
@bvd_vlvd I actually liked Vista. ME, 8/8.1, and 11 all were straight up trash though.
ME was unstable as 💩. Literally doing anything useful on the OS would cause a BSOD; you could continue past it, but often the system would still be broken until you restart.
8/8.1 forced an entirely new UI/UX paradigm that really wasn't good or even fully committed to. It's sad that Linux couldn't capitalize on that OS's failure because of GNOME 3's release, and the early versions of GNOME 3 at that. And don't get me started on Windows 8.1's Smart Search. It was the beginning of the end for privacy on Windows.
11 is trash in almost every way.
11
@@cameronbosch1213 Way to overlook 8.1's improvements over 8. It's like people that believed that Wii U was a Wii upgrade like DSi to DS, if you know what I'm talking about. 8.1 dying on the same day as 7 cemented it as a version of windows 8 which is such a massive misconception.
My friend had to reinstall his laptop and they didn't have 8.1 because it was EOL so they put Windows 10 on it and it couldn't do anything anymore because it's a weak 2016-ish laptop that couldn't handle 10's bloat. Talk about 8.1 being worse than 10.
But sure, it's always all gnome's fault for manufacturers never shipping Linux on their computers, if Plasma was the de-facto Linux distro it would *surely* have been different. And by different, I mean even less enterprise Linux would have been used because Plasma is the least enterprise DE I can think of. I'm so done with you KDEyboard warriors man, just let me live with my cool touchpad gestures and funky extensions
Uncomfortable Truth about Linux:
It will NEVER BE A HOUSEHOLD DESKTOP OS until more namebrand hardware companies start shipping it installed by default.
Most normal, non-technical people dont want to install their own OS via USB stick (nor do they know how).
They just use the OS thats on the computer they bought.
Why don't computer companies ship with nice, user-friendly distros like PopOS or Ubuntu?....
Not really sure. Maybe its just too soon. I think Cosmic desktop might change this.
(PS i know Lenovo and Dell both have like one laptop they ship with Ubuntu but you cant buy them in stores)
It's not that hard to learn how to install Linux or even how to use it. Windows 10 forced me to learn Linux because I didn't want to deal with Windows 10 malware.
@@russellmania5349 i never said it was hard. i said normal, everyday people dont want to install their own OS. They want to go to best buy, buy a laptop, and use it. They dont even know what an OS is lol.
Desktops with Linux installed by default wouldn't have a market at all. People would be taking their computers back because it's "broken" since it doesn't do things how they expect it to. Nearly the only sort of person who would deliberately buy a computer with Linux pre-installed would be someone who wouldn't have a problem with installing Linux to begin with.
Buying a desktop with Linux pre-installed would be nearly indistinguishable from a scam from the perspective of a user who doesn't know any better, and would just make Linux hate grow to people who didn't know that Linux exists beforehand.
@@escthedark3709 You're thinking too shallow. Obviously, PopOS as is wouldn't be ready.
I'm assuming that you can install any game on Linux that you can install on Windows by then.
I'm also assuming that you can install Microsoft Office Suite tools from the Cosmic Store by then.
There's obviously a few things that need to happen for this to be viable, no doubt. But once the default apps that all the "normies" need is available, there's no reason for them to say "it's broke". Just because it doesn't work how they expect doesn't mean they'll think its broke. Windows and Mac look and act completely different, yet people accept that. Linux will be no different. You click on a your browser button to go to your browser, you click on the settings button to go to your settings, it's intuitive now that we have a GUI and a Cosmic Store.
But that wasn't even my point. My point is that it will never be a household desktop until it gets to that point.
People who *want* linux on a computer will buy a computer with no OS and then download and install exactly what they want for no money and for extra time. They surely will not give like 5€ of additional money to a store that has installed whatever distro plus some added bloatware.
I have recently migrated to Linux and it's absolutely thanks to valve. If steam/proton was not as good as it is, I would have never transitioned.
There is no real support and propper user focused documentation for Linux, especially for the new user, and most communities are unhelpful, elitist and rude.
Another uncomfortable truth.
I secretly want AND don't want Linux to increase it's userbase because there's positive aspects to both obscurity and popularity.
The comfortable truth is that you're allowed to use any operating system you want. Don't let anyone judge you
completely unrelated: i need that big stupid looking dog plushie in the back of shot. it would fix me, i'm sure.
When will Linux get an installation wizard like program that does the tinkering for me to get programs to work?
Honestly this is really one of the biggest things for me. Each program has its own weird installation procedure. In windows, there's an installer. Just spam through, click on accept, and you have the program installed. Even MacOS has something similar. It's baffling that Linux doesn't have it
@@contramuffin5814 And sadly a lot of shady programs will also install malware if you select the wrong options, but that is the fault of the individual developer, not the fault of having an installer. Anyways it wouldn't be that hard to implement either, just run the same 10 commands you would be running anyways, but save me the time of having to look up the commands. I know so many people who would switch in a heart beat if the installation process wasn't so complex.
The difficulty would be getting devs to actually implement a wizard, but I agree that installing things on Linux can be very unintuitive. Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows user who knows almost nothing about Linux and try to install Libre Office by doing the standard Windows thing of going to their website to look for keywords like "download" "install" and a theoretically promising keyword "instructions".
Go on, give it a go.
Font rendering sucks hard on Linux, and this is the improved version we're using now.
Windows has the best font rendering, ever. Its small font rendering is simply amazing. Font anti aliasing is also way better (and pixel perfect).
Mac users complain because they use very high PPI monitors ("Retina"). Apple bruteforces font rendering, otherwise Mac OS font rendering is bad too (due to Windows patents, lol).
I hate to say it, but we really, REALLY need to do what Microsoft and Apple did with the terminal and fucking bury it for the end user. By all means, keep the terminal for technical users who want to do technical stuff, but if linux is ever to take off with the mainstream, then a user MUST be able to use every feature of the operating system without ever interacting with the terminal. Remember - we want as many people to use linux as possible: this means ipad kids who've never installed a .exe in their lives, old folks who get scared the moment a single error message appears, Bob from accounting who just needs to crunch numbers all day, and Sally who wants to write her thesis in a coffee shop on a mac. We need to welcome these people in to get Linux to the mainstream, and I'd be happy to see a lot of Linux features and tools obfuscated and redesigned to get us there.
And one more thing. We need to overhaul how programs are installed. Installing from the store doesn't always work, and when it doesn't, I'm left trying to find a flatpack or a snap to install, and if they aren't available, I have to download a tar all and hope that opening the tarball with the store will install it, or - god help me - I have to copy/paste like twelve lines of script into the terminal to install them and then have something break during install because it's missing dependencies I don't already have for some reason.
Phew, that was a lot off my chest.
100% agree. As someone who currently uses Fedora 40 KDE on a laptop, it's damn close, but still not quite there.... A regular user is not interested in using the command line at all..... Point and click for everything is what is popular...
when I use Mint or Tumbleweed, I don't even use the terminal at all, it's amazing
Not that dynamically linking libraries isn't a pain... but we *really* don't want to have the inability to replace vulnerable libs quickly.
System-wide libraries are such a pain in ass for half a century now.
Every modern environment have evolved with native package format to unify things, but not Linux. (To be clear, it's already there in day one of Linux, but nobody really use it properly. Maybe because it's too complex, and the way C linking works. Also, for many applications, people keep exploiting it as workarounds for various reasons. dpkg/apt/yum/dnf/snap doesn't solve this, simply because the metadata are written for "managing", not for linking).
Imagine there will be a new distro just to deal with this🙃
Isn’t that why Flatpak and snap exist?
@@Patricia-kk8tr snap doesn’t solve the problem by creating some new problem
Linux is not a silver bullet. First installing it is just one part of the grand journey. It is an alternative, not a greater OS as a Desktop OS.
5:31 is completely wrong. If your library has a security vulnerability, you want patching it to be as simple as replacing one file, not relinking all programs on your system.
This is one of my biggest tech pet peeves. We solved problems decades ago, but didn't bother teaching the kids *why* we solved those problems. Now the kids are grown up, and have this "wtf, we don't need to do this, its hard'... and now we have to suffer and solve the same problems all over again.
Basic shit, like not having multiple copies of the same libs with different versions unmanaged and untracked. A normal user will have no way of knowing if their 'one click, no linux bullshit' app has the next major 0day.
Like, "hey guys, turns out the MS model wasn't that bad, look how *easy* we can make it!"
idiots.
both you and the hot take you are responding to are missing a key part of the problem: making shared libraries a singleton doesn't work.
global is fine, and can be good, but if and only if it supports SxS and semver is properly followed. otherwise it's just trading one intractable nightmare for another.
@@blarghblargh Exactly, there's a reason why the Windows only was able to solve the problem at the cost of allowing multiple versions to be installed.
DLLs do work, but if you're going to pretend the entire system needs to use only one version for all software, then its literally better and cause less problems if you just statically link everything.
Debian is the worst offender, stupid package system. Also, "npm".
Side-By-Side is required for DLLs to work, at the best of the efforts, you allow for security patches to be applied on top of all the versions installed as a "revision" and you try to keep the versions to the minimum, and allow for semver to upgrade DLLs, but only WHEN possible, not forced.
The problem is this approach of either all or nothing.
I'm still angry at the stupid libc6 and the libinput on debian, only because I wanted to use Plasma KDE and not that Gnome bullshit. Ridiculous.
Linux on the desktop will NEVER happen, we could as well give up, take Android and try to make a desktop out of it.
So you replace that one file, and the patch is incompatible, and breaks all your programs. So now you have the choice of putting the vulnerability back or waiting for all your apps to update, as you would have to do if they were all staticly linked.
Or there's a security vulnerability in one of your programs, so you update it, but it breaks because the new (secure) version requires a newer version of a shared library that's not available on your system. If you try to manually update that shared library, you'll break other things on your system.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with you, but sticking purely to dynamic libraries causes its own problems. There's a reason devs started pushing to containers or static linking.
@@JD-kx4rh I commonly call that the circle when I'm teaching Linux classes and it will always continue.
I always liked the idea and ideals of Linux but never had a good reason to decide "this is the day i switch" ... then i bricked my windows install while gutting out bloat (so much) and unnecessary bits (they were) that were steps away from spyware.
Never going back.
2:25 Give them Mint if they have an older computer
And pop os if they have something newer or if there is anything nvidia involved
remember , dont present them with both options , based on their hardware you should make the call for one or the other and then give them what you choose as the "best choice"
Very true. The vast majority of computer users are just that, users, give them a desktop and stability and they'll be happy as pigs in slop. Most people have much more interesting (to them) things going on in their lives that they don't want to be overburdened with things that are trivial in the grand scheme of things.
I would add Tuxedo OS if they want something a but more customizable or even more Windows like, but I agree otherwise.
Well... I still recall that the first Linux Mint machine I prepared was a Dell laptop with a Intel T8100 2c/2t and 4GB DDR2 memory. That thing went from unusable with Windows Vista to perfectly fine accessing modern internet.
I still need to explore Pop OS a bit more, but I must say that Linux Mint with Cinnamon or XFCE were a much more enjoyable first glance experience when compared to the hideous POP OS stock desktop environment with that dock thing... Immediately changed it to KDE to see if it was a bit more enjoyable.
Frankly, I stayed in Windows for too long and there are certain things I will expect on how a system looks and feels. Linux Mint certainly takes the W when it comes to transitioning from Windows to Linux.
Gaming on Linux is still not exactly an out of the box experience for anything that isn't on Steam or requires some anti cheat stuff. Not even mentioning if you are enjoying the games via GamePass... In that case, dual boot or deploying a VM will be a thing for a while.
There is also a few issue with RGB, backlight keyboards, power control and fan control, especially for laptops. I am lucky to have a random Chinese Clevo based laptop, because I just slapped some pieces together with Tuxedo and made the keyboard spring back to live with proper colors... Although it resets to some default color every boot. 😆 lol
I don't recommend Pop! OS because of the name.
Linux Mint always.
Windows is Windows
Mac is Mac
Linux Mint is Linux
Super easy to understand, it just works and I don't know why it's called Pop! OS..... I thought originally they were related to Funco Pop figures in some way lol
Pop os deserves some recognition for its attempt at minimising the pain of Nvidia for noobs on Linux, especially those with a MUX switch Nvidia laptop. I have a few friends who have gotten a "gaming" pc and never installed GeForce drivers on Windows and just use older WHQL drivers pushed through Windows updates because they didn't know any better. So I don't think this should be I underestimated. That being said, the name POP! OS is a little gimpy. Mint is where it as for me though. I prefer it's stability and customisation and take the couple of fps hit in games on the chin for it...
There are several groups of PC users out there.
- Middle and huge Corporations - they almost all chose windows and there is very little possibility to create a momentum in the next years for change.
- Small companies - almost the same but it depends on the owner of the company. In most cases they still chose windows or even mac but here at least is a little market. To make it bigger, see below.
- Private users that want to use the PC especially for gaming. They also chose windows for good reason although you can try SteamOS - but this is only done by a few folks who want to experiment
- Private users who only need some standard apps, like Mail, text program, internet browsing, etc. THIS is the group you could approach. BUT... these people usually buy a computer/laptop - not an operating system. And now watch how many cheap or midranged laptop are shipped with Linux on it? Exactly. Almost none. Those people dont wanna install an OS themselves.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is no direct offer to customers for a system with Linux out of the box. All the details you are discussing here about GNOME, etc... they are just irrelevant because our economy works like it does. Customers buy and "consume" computer/laptops, no operating system.
8:35 absolutely agree with that guy's take. I switched to Linux in late 2021, one week after upgrading my PC to Windows 11 and seeing how awful that thing was (I didn't even know about all the ads and other annoyances coming later).
The first time I tried Linux was in 2016 with Ubuntu and I didn't stick with it because 1) it was to hard to understand for me and 2) Windows 7/10 was good enough for me.