I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

The Register ^ | 8 June 2022 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[ShadowAce]

Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.

Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.

Many Linux desktop distros are great. I've been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I'm also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That's a problem right there.

We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market.

It's been like that since people first started talking about Linux stomping on Windows on the desktop. But dream as we might of a true year of the Linux desktop, it won't happen. As Forrester senior analyst Andrew Hewitt recently pointed out: "Overall, just 1 percent of employees report usage of Linux on their primary laptop used for work. That's compared to 60 percent that still use Windows... It is very unlikely that Linux will overtake Windows as the main operating system."

He's not wrong.

That's not to say that Linux can't be a successful end-user environment. It is. Indeed, you can argue that Linux, not Windows, is the most successful end-user operating system. That's because there are over 3 billion Android phones out there and Android is just a smartphone-specialized Linux distro.

It's not the only Linux hiding in plain sight. Chromebooks, which you'll find in every school in the land, and in my travel bag, are everywhere. Chrome OS is simply Chrome reworked as a web browser and interface on top of Linux.

Add it all up and you can say with a straight face that Linux has actually long been the most popular end-user OS of all.

But that's not what Linux desktop fans want. They want Windows crushed and bleeding underneath the Linux juggernaut.

Sorry. That's not happening. Linus Torvalds already told us why we'll never see a classic Linux desktop on every PC: fragmentation.

Think about it. Besides over 200 distros, there are 21 different desktop interfaces and over half-a-dozen different major ways to install software such as the Debian Package Management System (DPKG), Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), Pacman, Zypper, and all too many others. Then there are all the newer containerized ways to install programs including Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage.

I can barely keep them all straight and that's part of my job! How can you expect ordinary users to make sense of it all? You can't.

None of the major Linux distributors – Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE – really care about the Linux desktop. Sure, they have them. They're also major desktop influencers. But their cash comes from servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The desktop? Please. We should just be glad they spend as many resources as they do on them.

Now, all this said, I don't want you to get the impression that I don't think the conventional Linux desktop is important. I do. In fact, I think it's critical.

Microsoft, you see, is abandoning the traditional PC-based desktop. Oh, Windows isn't going away, but it is moving. In its crystal ball, Microsoft sees Azure-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as its future. Sure, Windows users will still see what looks like a PC on their desk, but really it will just be a smart terminal hooked into a Windows 365 Cloud PC. The real computing smarts will be in the cloud.

That means that the future of a true desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux. As someone who remembers the transition from centrally controlled mainframes and minicomputers to individually empowered PCs, I do not want to return to a world where all power belongs to Microsoft or any other company.

The Linux desktop will never be as big as Windows once was. Between DaaS's rise and the fall of the desktop to smartphones, it can't be. But it may yet, by default, become the most popular true conventional desktop.

So will 2028 be the year of the Linux desktop? What do you think? ®

[WildHighlander57]

I found that if a laptop had a broadcomm wifi card, Ubuntu wouldn’t connect to the internet.

Not sure what package fixed this.

[BiglyCommentary]

“but really it will just be a smart terminal hooked into a Windows 365 Cloud PC”

There is no way in hell I’m going to have my main Windows systems sitting out in some cloud.

I love a lot of things that Linux has such as the ZFS filesystem. You can’t get a filesystem comparable on Windows unless you are running the very expensive versions such as Workstation or Enterprise. And like you said, the problem is always the big apps. Many just aren’t available on Linux.

[texas booster]

PING! out for true Windows customization.

[Dr. Sivana]

Is that because it’s difficult to write software to support all the distros, or simply because it looks like the future promise of a Linux hay day has come and gone?

Different reasons, in my opinion. For instance, I find FileMaker Pro to be head and shoulders above anything else out there for what I use it for, but Apple, who owns Claris, has no interest in porting the app over to Linux.

LibreOffice and its variants has taken the oxygen out of the room for any competitors. There is also the problem that many Linux users aren't just interested in control and privacy and reliability, but they don't want to pay for any software. There is ONE product I know for Linux that will provide a full-featured driver interface for my old but trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap S300. It is $100. I will get it one day, but not yet, as the trial version worked well.

Decades ago, Corel tried to jump hard into Linux by porting WordPerfect 7 over. The product crashed like crazy. Corel was having a rough go, and Microsoft poured money in. However, after that Corel dropped the Linux project, permanently.

[tahoeblue]

I'm able to run most Windows-only things on a Windows VM, while getting my real work done on the Linux host. That's been a great way to not be forced into one solution or the other when you constantly need to do things on both.

[Nateman]

There is an advantage to Linux being a minority on the Desktop. The bad guys write their viruses for the big market and usually leave Linux alone.

[dennisw]

My favorite advantage of Windoze 11 (10 too) is that it has a built in red shift for filtering out blue light at night. Plus you can install flu.x to further adjust your red shift. Linux red shift for Mint is pitiful.

_____________

https://justgetflux.com/
Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.

f.lux
f.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

[Dr. Sivana]

I have considered that. I wonder though, how much info does the Windows VM send back to MS? Which VM environment do you use? (It would be nice to move data between without two reboots).

[ducttape45]

Good article ShadowAce

Sure, Windows users will still see what looks like a PC on their desk, but really it will just be a smart terminal hooked into a Windows 365 Cloud PC.

Not as long as I can help it. Sure, we all browse the Internet, pay our bills online, etc, but my computer will never become a dumb terminal. None of the programs I use run in a cloud based environment. If I can't install it and use it on my local machine, I won't use it.

[martin_fierro]

[martin_fierro]

[daniel1212]

"20 years ago you had to futz around to get Linux to run smoothly. Now it works out of the box with just about any hardware out there. Windows is now like that, as evidenced by all the add-ons you’ve shown to make it usable."

No: rather in both cases the OS is "usable" (some Linux distros less assuredly) but both take getting "used to," while to enhance speed, efficiency, and capabilities then customization is needed - which in scope and debt is easier to quickly do with Windows. However, most users engage in customization for these reasons (such as was seen with the quick dominance of functionally handicapped (at the time, Chrome browser compared to Firefox at the time). Few use AutoHotKey, or remapp keys, nor care about the approx. 200 tweaks just one proven software utility can enable?

[daniel1212]

Correction: However, most FEW users engage in customization for these reasons (such as was seen with the quick dominance of functionally handicapped Chrome browser compared to Firefox at the time). Sorry. Good thing I do not write code.

[dayglored]

Desktop Wars Revisited ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".

Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!

[dayglored]

Linux has been my work desktop for a decade, mainly because I spend 90% of my time in Bash sessions, either local or remote. Add browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Brave), credential manager (Keeper), RDP clients (rdesktop, Remmina), and a few more, and my work environment is complete except for email, which is Outlook by company mandate, and for that I prefer the Windows native version. So I have a Win10 VM to run Outlook (and occasionally the other Office apps).

The underlying hardware is Apple (MacBook Pro/MacOS) with VMware Fusion to host the Linux desktop as a VM.

At home the hardware is Apple (MacMini/MacOS) with VMware Fusion to host both a Linux Desktop VM and Win7 and Win10 VMs.

I switched from CentOS to Ubuntu around 2015, but still run the classic Gnome "Flashback" package since I hate the default Ubuntu scheme.

I move seamlessly between Linux, MacOS, and Windows desktops constantly all day long, copy/paste between apps on the various desktops, and love it. But I admit it was some initial config work to get it all cooperating.

My personal "ideal desktop" would probably be the Windows 7 "Classic" theme, with Linux as the OS. MacOS is also acceptable (good GUI over BSD Unix).

But overall, my days hacking around with desktops are largely over. I just want to get things done, choosing the best tool for whatever task is at hand. And so having one each of the major OSes, all in front of me all the time, is perfect.

[Gene Eric]

I like linux headless, like my women.

[Bob434]

I thunk most users who are inexperienced just want to browse the net and read their email, so Linux is fine for them and easy enough these days (course they jught wanna have someone savvy set it up for,them, but they could probsbly do it themselves without much issue. It’s getting really easy to install it these days. Not much different than Installing windows. My elderly friends have dual boot, which defaults onto Linux desktop, and beleive me they ain’t computer literate at all. They might mess around with settings and not know,how to,fix them if they accidently change them, but they wouldn’t know how to,with windows either. Other than that though, they just turn on the computer and go about their browsing and emailing, and have for years. They even dreaded getting wifi thinkingmit was gonna be a nightmare to do, but everything is just so automatic these days, that setting it up was a breeze.

Novices thougN who,want to get more into the computing process will,have a harder time for sure thoug.h. it can be ver complicated if one runs into problems, and sure there are “help” sites, but my goodness ya gotta be a guru to decifer what they say in many instances. But then again windows can be pretty complicated for some issues too

[Bob434]

I had to buy computer glasses tk filter outmthe blue light. My eyes were hurting at the end of the day without them. Made a huge difference.

[Bob434]

Anyone know a fairly easy way to get Linux set up the way you like, with all the programs you want, or most anyways, and make an instalation disk out of it? (I’ve got it down to about 3-4 hours getting Linux set back,up after reinstall, but putting back all,the settings and programs takes time. Woild be nice is one installation disk could get everything back with ease.

[Bob434]

I know I can do backups, but I’d like to have everything on a disk because sometimes backups fail