> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible.
This claim is usually made by Windows users who don't want to invest any effort and time to learn another desktop -- which they had to do in Win8 anyway.
Linux offers several nice desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, E17, etc.) which we can freely choose from. I am a Linux user since the 90's and I have always used it as my primary desktop. It works perfectly well for me. I consider the new Windows metro "desktop" more horrible than even simple Linux desktops.
Freedom has a price. Education has a price. Both require the sincere willingness to do something for it.
I used to make this claim as someone who had been using desktop gnu/linux for several years. I've been using OSX now for a year and so stopped making the claim. But it is really frustrating to hear people say "it works for me" to rebut claims that it doesn't work for most people. Such counters and arguments over them are basically single data points. If the point under discussion is "does desktop linux work well enough to gain massive amounts of market share?", then you need to run actual large scale trials comparing how hard it is for people to...
1) Start up a spreadsheet program and do things
2) Check social media and play some random video
3) Play League of Legends
4) <insert your favorite thing here>
Some of these things are indeed comparably easy in, say Ubuntu (or were pre-unity) for me, but I was an MIT undergrad that hung around SIPB, the computer club. My massive amounts of tech privilege make it impossible to individually evaluate if the user experience someone has with spreadsheets is acceptable unless I put real study into it. The same is probably true of many HN commenters. So until someone spends the time and money to run actual user experience studies, we have no data to say that the linux desktop can take over the world.
Also, there isn't even one "Linux desktop". There is mint, Ubuntu+gnome classic, Ubuntu+unity, ubuntu+some weird xmonad setup.
Another argument I often see for why Desktop Linux has an advantage is that "Linux is free as in beer". But it is not. If someone making $15/hr takes more than 8 hours (not unrealistic, at least for an MIT CS student back in 2010) fiddling with things and trying to get them to work, then desktop Linux is more expensive.
Regarding your points 1) to 4) this is exactly what I mean with investing some effort to discover how these things work in Linux. For 1) there are LibreOffice and gnumeric, for 2) there are mplayer, vlc, and several other tools, for 3) I don't know because Linux is not a gaming system but a workhorse. A modern Ubuntu distro provides thousands of applications for many purposes. If you don't like Unity or Gnome 3 then there are Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. Google is your friend.
Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX. It requires serious effort to become powerfully useful but then you never want to miss it because there is nothing that can actually compete.
OSX and Windows are easier to handle at the first place but if you get into the details then you may have more trouble than in Linux (driver problems, document formats) because there is no obsolescence in Linux. In OSX and Windows you depend on the cooperation of the manufacturers. In Linux drivers, applications, and document formats written decades ago still work.
My point isn't that I personally find Linux too hard, it is that for a large chunk of people, switching to Linux is far too expensive and this makes predictions about the rise of Desktop Linux too optimistic.
> Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX
This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
> This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
Nevertheless LaTeX is still the favorite DTP system among scientists. LaTeX is actually not too hard to learn. It just requires some mental effort to get it. Scientists are willing to do that. Some people obviously don't.
Linux is free as in speech, not free as in beer. You're free to use, copy, modify and distribute it subject to its license. It's not about price and never has been.
One of my gripes with Linux is that software all tends to feel like it was designed to look nice on the developer's particular flavor of window manager. The system as whole comes across as an inconsistent pile of different UIs. OS X has benefited a lot from interfaces all being put together in Xcode with elements snapping to the HIG standardized margins. And when something doesn't match (looking at you, cross platform Java apps), the users notice.
Maybe the average Linux user is OK with this, but I can't help but be bugged by it. Cost of having so many options, I suppose.
Elementary does better than most, but only by including a set of software designed explicitly to fit there.
I would point out that Windows programs written for different versions of the OS will appear different when running on the same machine. For instance, in my Windows 7 VM, LibreOffice has a white X on a red button to close the window, while Word has a black X on a grey background.
Hm, I haven't seen different versions of the close glyph, but I believe it. There are about 10 variations on contextual menus depending on what you're right clicking. I don't love that about Windows either.
As far as the general look and feel though, it still manages to feel more consistent. There are enough conventions like "clickable things have a hover effect" and relatively consistent styling of UI icons (pre-10 anyway) for it to feel like it's all one system.
Well, I don't think that Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio are that similar. Both of them are using style different than the system default. Throw apps from other vendors into the mix, see Photoshop or Lightroom for example and it gets very difficult to argue, that the Windows desktop has unified style. Let's not go into the whole 'with WPF you can style your app any way you want' topic, because that's when the whole differentiation thing exploded.
Not that OSX is any better - Apple's own Pro apps always had different look that the rest of the system. iTunes was always experimenting with looking odd. Also, third party apps look different - Office, Adobe apps, etc.
So, it nothing wrong with Linux, all systems are like this.
It's funny, but my gripes with linux aren't the UI.. I use an Ubuntu Server VM via SSH most of the day... my desktop is windows, my laptop is OSX, and the computer I use the most not working is my Ubuntu HTPC (Unity)... I actually like Windows 7's UI the most.. though 10 is tolerable after disabling all the damned search options.
That said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
The time before that I couldn't get both monitors to work... twice before that I picked recommended hardware for linux support (straight intel graphics) and hit weird regressions when the OS updated on one, and the other just some wierd suspend issues..
I agree "works fine" for the desktop is a huge stretch... it does appear to mostly work okay for my HTPC, except when it resumes from suspend there's no sound (fortunately it's got an ssd and reboots fast), or that if I happen to turn it on too early before the TV is on, the display doesn't come on the screen (guessing it picks the DV port instead of the HDMI)...
either way.. still stuff that's worked in windows/osx forever, without issue.
> hat said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
was this in the 90s, early 2000s? Linux hasn't had those issues in a decade.
Suspend/Resume is horrible on Windows of me as well, my linux systems do so flawlessly, but there is a good 10% chance of blue screen when undocking my corporate windows laptop out of suspend.
The HTPC suspend issue is with current Ubuntu 15.04, Actually, I'm in pre-release channel because of another audio bug that rolled into regular updates for my chipset, I had no audio at all after said update. I had hoped the fixes would also fix the suspend issue with audio disappearing, but it hasn't.
The issue with booting was mid-late 2013, I haven't tried running Linux as the main OS on my desktop since, Windows 10 has me considering it.
This claim is usually made by Windows users who don't want to invest any effort and time to learn another desktop -- which they had to do in Win8 anyway.
Linux offers several nice desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, E17, etc.) which we can freely choose from. I am a Linux user since the 90's and I have always used it as my primary desktop. It works perfectly well for me. I consider the new Windows metro "desktop" more horrible than even simple Linux desktops.
Freedom has a price. Education has a price. Both require the sincere willingness to do something for it.