My parents (both over 80) daily use Linux Mint for a decade now.
They don't know it, simply last time we bought them a PC I put it there, explained how to open the web browser, play solitaire/FreeCell/whatever other game they like, how to shut it down etc. I live in another city and I almost never had to adjust anything there in all these years, differently on what happened when they had windows (they unknowingly installed a lot of spyware and bloatware, I had to clean it up periodically).
Still, for me this is one of the few experiments that went well, probably because the only "complex" need they have is a web browser. Now if a friend (not a technical one) needs a new computer advice I tell him to buy a second-hand MacBook and enjoy. No one ever complained (in fact all compliment me for the choice). The vast majority of users is not like my parents, has some specific needs, like they need Microsoft Office, or Photoshop, or they play on PC and still don't want to face the challenges you need to overcome if you want to do everything with Linux.
I would never use MacOS on my PC (not because it's not good, just because I'm a FOSS maniac), but it's the perfect operating system for casual users and even for many power users. The only rule I adopt for OS advice is "avoid Windows unless you are actually forced to use it (gaming, specific legacy programs etc)".
That's the only major roadblock left, rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work. I'm not sure how Valve could address this without people getting angry. They could eventually leverage their immutable rootfs setup to enable attestation of the system stack and run the games in security hardened containers?
My feeling is that Valve's approach via using wine/proton is pragmatic in terms of getting something that works for them and reduces how much they're held hostage to windows, but it's a missed opportunity to go further and decouple PC gaming from windows. As it stands they are downstream of whatever MS does to the 'reference' platform and how developers use it (because that's where the majority of users are).
I'd love to see what would happen if a consortium was formed to take responsibility for gaming on the PC platform, and I wouldn't be surprised if MS wouldn't mind abdicating maintenance especially if their xbox fortunes have waned and there's less mutual benefit for them.
Valve basically tried the later approach with the initial Steam for linux push which included steam machines and the steam controller. It did have some level of initial success but clearly had lost momentum and the developer support it had seemed to fade after a few years. There were quite a few direct ports during that time though. I think they would have preferred that approach but ultimately decided it was a bridge to far.
If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Kernel level anti cheat is a failure. You need to control the hardware to do it properly. The only hope is to wait for less locally intrusive and more robust anti cheat solutions.
Basically the only possible solutions at this point lie in the AI space.
> If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Yes it is, given that unlike Windows you still ultimately know what code being executed on your computer and have some degree of control over it.
Should add, this isn't necessarily something I want, lucky for me I don't really play the games that require anti-cheat. But it is something that Valve could conceivably do.
You have as much control over it as you do over windows in this state: i.e. uninstalling the OS.
Just because you know what the base is doing, doesn't mean you get to see what the proprietary kernel level drivers, loaded at runtime, are doing.
Really it's effectively as good as having windows and running an open source web browser, or an open source kernel driver. It doesn't change the fact that your computer is being fundamentally controlled by components you can't change, some/many of which are also proprietary.
This isn't a problem unique to what we're talking about, virtually every desktop PC on the planet has proprietary blobs running regardless of the OS used. I agree it sucks, but they're also not strictly necessary to run the containerized setup I proposed (any more than they're necessary to run the computer itself). It's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source.
While it's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source. If you look at widevine you will quickly notice how that's very unlikely to happen. While it's possible to do this in containers, if you look at how DRM is built into the HDMI protocol, you will notice that it's unlikely you'll ever get to control a base while running the proprietary stuff in a container.
Your idea is somewhat possible, but it's never going to happen in reality. I can already run windows in a VM for the exact same result.
It's unlikely sure, but I look at the alternatives and they seem even less likely. I really doubt consumers would be happy with normalizing rootkits on Linux, even those at Valve wouldn't want that. So what other choices are there? That question left me with the answer I gave.
Running Windows in a VM would be less efficient than running a stripped down Linux stack inside of a container. Going the Linux+Wine route requires less proprietary code and would be free to license. Hardly an exact same result.
There already are games with anti-cheat on Linux, they're just using (arguably) less effective versions of them.
Valve are financially incentivized to get as many games working as possible, I don't think it makes sense for them to do nothing at all about this. They have a head start now due to the general crappiness of Windows on a handheld but Microsoft's mobile offerings could catch up and given that would have Call of Duty among a lot of other heavy hitters available while Deck wouldn't, that is a problem that Valve would need to solve in order to not get stomped.
I think there are three fundamental categories of cheating threat models that actually matter: State poisoning, Information leakage, and Input automation
State poisoning means your game was poorly written, period. Either that's a vuln within the code itself or badly implemented netcode. A 2-player game can have total asynchronous client separation and still be peer-to-peer. A more-than-two-player game is almost always run on a server that serves as the single source of truth. In either case, a game that doesn't make the fundamental guarantee that the inputs available to a player and maybe some initial random seeds are the sole determinant of the gamestate have no hope, and rootkitting your computer because they wrote their game's statemachine or interfaces like shit is not the correct solution. If your answer to this is that big game studios shouldn't have to learn how to write more solid code, this means that the sanctity of their game isn't that important to them, not that they should get to root your computer
Information leakage may be somewhat harder. Often you want the simulation to be running client-side, so a naive model of netplay would have the full state available to all clients from a technical perspective... but this doesn't have to be true. In most cases, you can do partial state with rollbacks to make it much harder to cheat from a technical perspective, even making no guarantees about the clients themselves. I think even when this is hard, the correct path here isn't rootkits, it's approaches that start to approximate zero-knowledge proofs. This also means there's a rich literature of zero-knowledge proofs to draw on
Input automation, to be honest, is basically hopeless to prevent upfront regardless of what you do. If you can plug external hardware into your device at all, you can rig up something that automates your inputs. This can be hard to even verify in person, let alone through even a rootkit. I don't personally think it's worth worrying about that much, but if you care about macros and the like, it's really difficult to prevent. However, if there's money on the line or something, there are good analytic forensic techniques to detect this kind of cheating after the fact. Maybe this is where "AI" could actually help, as some kind of sequence-based anomaly detection that can run in real time might be able to detect unusual input clusters, but I worry that the false positive rate is going to be super high. Honestly seems like a lost cause. But crucially, not a lost cause that you get around via compromising the OS at a kernel level
Anti-cheat that "needs to own your kernel" is more user-hostile corporate bullshit. Most games work fine on linux, but frankly no game is worth a rootkit, and no game needs one. The fact that some companies demand it should be viewed as those companies trying to scam you. That's not how the security of anything on the internet works. It's only how security of a bunch of mobile stuff works because Microsoft has trained generations of otherwise smart people to believe their total lies about security, and Google and Apple have taken advantage of this to secure a massive amount of control and surveillance over everyone who owns a smartphone (Which is increasingly required because they've also convinced people that fake 2FA that's just your phone as a single source of identity that can in fact often effectively be 1FA because it can override other authentication methods in most cases is somehow secure. The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized - to say nothing of privacy, and that's a huge accomplishment given all that Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have done and still do to compete for the title)
Giving a corp a backdoor to your computer doesn't secure anything except that corp's ability to fuck with you. Don't believe Microsoft, Apple, Epic Games, The NSA, or anyone else who tells you that the best way to secure something is to give them a backdoor. Fuck all those people. They have not only gotten their slimy tendrils in a ton of people's stuff through these lies, but have propagated bad information about how to do security to a ton of organizations. If someone who works at one of these scummy companies or agencies responds to this with some condescending corp-speak at me, I've got a bunch of work to do so I'll probably not get to you immediately, but I pre-emptively say that making this argument at all fundamentally undermines your credibility, and also I hate you on a personal level. You've been a spook too long and it's rotted your brain, hypothetical internet stranger who might not even exist, quit your job and fix your heart
Basically, don't believe any of this "We have to own your computer for your own good" nonsense. That's a scam. Every time. Also, proprietary software should be assumed inherently insecure by default, not the other way around. A better world is possible
The reason companies seem to bother at this point is that, by implementing increasingly intrusive anti-cheat, they force cheaters to be increasingly subtle. With sufficiently intrusive anti-cheat you end up with gamers believing that the game they're playing has no cheaters.
This currently happens in at least some of the games which utilise kernel level anti cheat, as demonstrated by numerous videos on the topic which also shed light on massive communities of cheaters who just end up buying or making their own hardware based cheats.
Gamers will believe anything a company they like tells them. The fact that these companies can attract arguably the most insufferably delusional audience of frothing bootlickers to ever walk the earth to defend them doesn't justify their decisions on a technical or an ethical level
If the explanation for why a company needs a rootkit is "they don't want to spend effort on a better solution" that means that solving cheating isn't a priority for them, and if we care about that we shouldn't buy their game. It especially doesn't mean you should accept a rootkit to buy their game
I view self-identified "gamers" as a cult at this point. If my goal were to persuade them of anything, I'd probably fail. I'm not in marketing for a reason. But the fact that a bunch of fools believe in something doesn't make it true
I bit of anger or at least disappointment in your post. However, "The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized" is completely true.
You should be angry at people who try to hack your computer with the express intent of spying on you or controlling your behavior. I am angry that people will waste my time trying to defend this behavior to me, whether it's about phones, smarthomes, or video games
Also, the thing where people think being angry makes you automatically wrong has gotta be a holdover from lead paint. I truly can't believe people are that stupid naturally
I just gave an in-depth breakdown of why that's not true. Your reply amounts to saying "nuh uh!" with no justification. There is nothing to engage with in this reply. It doesn't even attempt to have any substance
Your in depth breakdown doesn't address the substance of the argument at all, it's mostly a distraction.
Servers can not bear the entire weight of guarding against cheat, it's impossible. If you don't understand that then you are not in a position to be writing any sort of breakdown.
Several games and game protocols require security on the client side to be able to stop cheats. You can't have security on the client side if the client has full access to the hardware and OS.
It's not more complicated than that, and your 'breakdown' doesn't adequately address that. You can dismiss this point if you like as you did when I made it in my previous reply, but it doesn't make it any less a fact.
That's ridiculous. A server only needs to be capable of running a single authoritative copy of the game and handling dead simple network requests to prevent every kind of cheating that matters except input automations, which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway. If you have a case where this isn't true, feel free to expand on it instead of just blindly believing it must exist. You don't need client-side control to make very powerful guarantees of systemic security in much more serious contexts than a game. You're not only doing special pleading, but you're doing it for a scenario that, as far as I can tell, has no theoretical reasoning and no examples, because you haven't provided any. I have to conclude it's imaginary. I gave you a good breakdown of what threat models I think exist and some sketches of technical solutions, like client separation and authoritative servers. I speak from both sound theory and experience implementing netcode here. Maybe you are too, but I can't tell from what you're saying, because again all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!" I see no why, how, or when in that argument. Is the problem you can only fix by having total control over the whole platform of every client in the room with us right now?
> every kind of cheating that matters except input automations
So basically, except the most common types of cheating.
> which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway
Yes, this is basically what I was saying when I said you can't stop cheating so long as the consumer has control of the hardware.
> instead of just blindly believing it must exist
Well, with respect, I think it is you who is blindly believing all cheating can be stopped server-side. I find that claim to be patently ridiculous.
> no examples, because you haven't provided any.
> all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!"
You're right, I haven't provided examples because this is common knowledge in the industry or to anyone that knows anything about trying to prevent cheating. I wasn't prepared to have to give a lecture to defend my point. But really, if what you are saying was correct, then all these companies must just be incredibly incompetent for not preventing cheating server-side, right? Because it's just so easy?
More than that, it's a very basic principle in security that if someone controls that hardware, most security can be defeated. The exception is stuff with DRM and things like a TPM where the consumer doesn't have full control, and that is the only way to truly prevent cheating. That's just a fact.
So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing? Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well? How can you guarantee there isn't a SoC on someone's keyboard that sends a bunch of signals that they didn't have to type? Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
Anyway, the fact that industry giants want to be in the very lucrative business of controlling the computers people use and have made up all manner of silly justifications for it is not news to me, but I have no reason to believe them, and saying "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling. If you don't expect to need to justify your position why even bother making the claim? I don't assign automatic unquestioned epistemic authority to you just because you claim to be espousing the consensus view of an industry, and it's an industry full of crooks built on an industry full of crooks in the first place
> So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing?
Can you quote where I said that? I'm certain I said no such thing.
Are you really reducing any client side cheat to just macros? That's either disingenuous or willfully ignorant.
> Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well?
Ideally, yeah. Look at Playstations for example. People can't play with cheats running on the same OS interfering with the game because they don't have control of the hardware. They can still cheat with peripherals though, as the situation with the Cronus Zen showed, and so yes, to stop cheating control of the peripherals is needed. With a recent real world example to corroborate.
> Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
There is a reason GTA5 on console has no cheats and on PC they are rampant, and it isn't because Rockstar are completely inept at preventing cheats serverside, it's because that isn't possible.
> "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling.
My stance isn't based on faith but detailed understanding. You have yet to support your position with any evidence, and so far your point is refuted multiple times over by real world evidence. Occam certainly isn't on your side.
If you want to support your argument you're going to have to do better than trying to dismiss mine as just being the result of an appeal to authority fallacy. Do better, or admit you had no idea what you were talking about and were just speculating/guessing.
I actually listed three threat models for cheating in video games that I think matter, and then explained that for those broad classes as I described them, one was a solved problem (If players can change the state of the game in unintended ways directly, your netcode is not just bad, but worse than ready-made standardized solutions that exist), another is solvable with netcode (probably provably so. For example, garbled circuits protocols are a subset of zero-knowledge proofs and can be used to obfuscate domains as broad as any input a neural network is training on, and those are general function approximators about which we can't really make good structured assumptions about what information they will need), and the third is not even solved by a rootkit. You then quoted me about the third, input automation (I then shorthand this later as "macros"), and say
> So basically, except the most common types of cheating
So yes, I concluded from this reply that your concern is about macros, or context-free input automations. With good computer vision models we could also externalize certain classes of context-aware automation from the base system via a camera and an edge GPU on the external device, but this is exotic enough that I assume you're not worried about it. For macros, you can use a keyboard or mouse or joystick modified with a circuit to automate inputs that come from the device in a way that's indistinguishable from those generated by a human user, except perhaps approximately through forensic sequence analysis, which you could do in the network layer or on a server just as well
> You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
I am, as I said, well aware that tech companies are plunging us ever-further into a pervasive dystopian panopticon, which may sound like a silly thing to say about older game consoles, but not ones with cameras and microphones, and which may intercept network traffic, and which you have financial information tied to, and it is certainly not a stretch to say about phones. This is neither hyperbole, sarcasm, nor even subtext. In fact, it is the crux of our disagreement. If your conceit here is that I should accept this as inevitable and not oppose it at all, we have nothing to talk about. Really, if you're going to repeatedly insist that you have epistemic authority and it should exempt you from having to make any actual arguments, the least you could do is to keep up with the conversation.
Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits. Video games are here used as one justification for why it's good that your computer is being controlled remotely by a tech company instead of you. You are here acting as the advocate for that position, essentially that the price of freedom to control the device you play a video game is people cheating in video games. Your arguments so far are "This is the only way" and that this is "common knowledge in the industry", and then I guess a bunch of condescension about how my disagreeing with this premise automatically makes me naive or foolish*. You are correct that I haven't cited specific examples, because I am the one making the general argument, which I've defined in terms of three threat models I'm claiming exhaustively cover the ways someone could cheat at a video game that one could plausibly hope to prevent. Really, your job here is a lot easier, as all you need to be right is one (1) specific counterexample to my claim, a single case where it is definitely impossible to prevent cheating without controlling the computer of the game client, but where it is possible with that control. I'm well aware already that many video games implement "anti-cheat" measures this way, so I wouldn't count "Well they did it here and here and here" as counterexamples. To do this, you could point to a case where one of those classes of threats has no other feasible solution, given control of the server or even on the assumption that at least one player isn't cheating in a p2p context. You could even say "Actually you missed a whole kind of cheating in your threat model", and then demonstrate that it would still be cheating and that it requires a rootkit to accomplish, or something like that. But also, you don't need a counterexample. Maybe my reasoning's wrong somewhere, and pointing out something about it that falls down would at least be a starting point. Instead, you say "This is obvious, everyone knows this, I can't believe I have to explain this", which is you trying to use status in place of an argument. I don't respect that in almost any context, but even if I did, you have not established here and I have no reason to assign you this epistemic status. So in effect, you have not made anything resembling a compelling argument for your position, empirical or otherwise, as I said. As you said, you are under no obligation to, but if that's your tack, it's weird that you bothered to reply at all
*To be fair, I made a really similar argument in my first reply! It applies equally in both directions, and is pretty facile - a combination of an ad hominem attack and begging the question - in both directions. I wrote it in a tone intended to convey that it was more meant as partisan invective than actual argumentation, but regardless of whether you got that subtext, it's not exactly a pillar of my claim here
> Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits.
No, I'm not confused. You're just very simply wrong. No question about it, it's not a matter of subjectivity, you are 100% absolutely unequivocally incorrect on this issue.
I can only assume at this point you are incredibly stubborn. You clearly have a lack of experience and knowledge in this area, yet you are doubling down on your position, despite it being trivially shown to be false by numerous real world examples and very basic, irrefutable facts and logic.
But you're the type of person who thinks that you're right no matter what, and that all these game developers must just be inept, right? I feel that I've already wasted time pointing out you are wrong and I'm not interested in an is-not/is-too argument with someone that would rather write essays and argue semantics than have the basic decency to admit they have no clue about what they are talking about. No one's even reading this discussion anymore, is your ego really so great?
I won't be continuing this convo, but feel free to have the last word. Good luck.
Dang you sure are great at saying nothing really confidently. I'm not even being stubborn here, you just refuse to explain yourself. Not only do I have no reason to care what you think, I don't even know what you think, except for "You're wrong." I've said it before and I'll say it again: Why bother to write a reply at all if you're not going to say anything meaningful? I can't even say your argument is ill-formed because you simply haven't made any such thing at all.
I honestly don't know what you're asking me to do here. You show up and say "Nuh uh you're wrong" and I say "Why?" and you say "I can't believe how stubborn you're being!"
What the fuck?
Like the one example you cited is an instance where even on a console this control-based paradigm didn't work, and your only conclusion was that this obviously means you need to control even more stuff, instead of even considering other approaches. It's a real "When your only tool is a hammer" type scenario far as I can tell
My days of thinking AAA gamedev must be a terrible culture in which to make software are certainly coming to a middle. This has downregulated my willingness to take "I'm an experienced gamedev" as an argument for epistemic authority in the future
I definitely explained my position and provided an argument. If you can't see it, it's only because you are letting your own voice and thoughts drown it out. Which, from your post history, seems to be quite a typical behavior for you.
I'm legit not seeing where that is. You say some games, or "game protocols" require client-side protection... why? Just saying it's the only way doesn't explain anything at all. You have confusingly tried to give me examples of... anticheat mechanisms that rely on the total control of some hardware. I know those exist? That's not what's in question.
Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that? I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it, just more "This is the way it is. This is the way it's done". I know that already. I am saying it doesn't have to be. You're not engaging with the question in any way, just getting upset with me for not conceding that you're right and trying to insult me about it. "I looked up your post history and I see that you argue with people here a lot". You got me I guess?
If it upsets you so much to have this argument, you probably should disengage from it, but I'm genuinely baffled by the whole thing.
> Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that?
lol. More personal attacks. Your entire thought process is wrong, laughably so. Maybe your only experience is speculating on things you don't have a great knowledge of on HN?
Please, just tell me, if you are so sure you are correct, why these game companies can not solve the problem as you suggest? It's because they are all inept and simply not as smart as you? That's it, right?
> I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it,
Nah. You're just willfully ignoring it. I don't think you're engaging in good faith at all. I'm not confused in the least, despite your constant accusations, and I've been pretty clear and unambiguous.
Your post history shows you as someone who can't ever admit when they are wrong and frequently resorts to ad hominems, and can't bear not having the last word. That's all this is. Now, since you want to play, I guess we'll see how long this goes on for.
I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so. Of course anti-cheat that backdoors a bunch of people's computers is good for the company. They get anticheat and a backdoor that could be valuable for selling data later, or preventing piracy too, or responding to subpoenas and being a hero that caught a terrorist. I dunno. Surveillance and control is popular for a reason. It's not because it's necessary for everything it's billed as necessary for. That's a sales pitch
Also, I guess you're not reading my post history very carefully when deciding it's a good ad hominem attack to use, because just this week I had a heated argument about some culture war shit and the nature of governments and ended up realizing I was being an asshole and making assumptions about someone, and apologized for it. I get that I'm pretty belligerent, especially on topics like how we live in an orwellian dystopia of surveillance and a majority of people in my trade seem to range from complicit to actively advocating for its necessity, but it really sounds like you're responding emotionally to my verbosity and tone and using this to try to discredit me instead of having anything substantive to say about the topic at hand. It is exactly an ad hominem attack, no more, no less
Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position and you are only using ad hominem and appeals to authority. My fundamental claim is that anticheat mechanisms for multiplayer games are possible without client-side control, wherever they are possible at all. So far, in opposing this claim, you have not given any justification whatsoever, opting instead to claim this is obvious and well-known and thus requires no justification. I made the only good faith argument either of us have made in this whole thread right at the beginning, the post you initially responded to, and you refuse to engage with it in any sense. Every reply you've made is argument to incredulity, ad hominem, or naked appeal to the authority of your supposed expertise, the consensus of the games industry, etc. I would love to engage in good faith with substantive arguments. You are doing neither.
"You think all the smart people in the games industry are wrong?" is just another appeal to authority. I don't think they're stupid, I think they have no incentive to value the privacy and autonomy of their userbase and look for other solutions
> I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so.
This is your root assumption underlying everything else. This also doesn't make any kind of sense. These companies put a lot of money into trying to stop cheaters. People don't want to play a game that is rampant with cheaters, it's bad for business.
The incentive is there. The incentive is more than there. As are their well reported attempts which end up making some gaming experiences incredibly negative for consumers, reporting in incredibly negative receptions which put a big dent in sales.
To say the incentive is not there is just...silly. Or disingenuous. Either way it's simply not true.
So, again, why hasn't Rockstar or Activision made these trivial modifications to completely and entirely stop cheating serverside? The cheating gives them negative press, hurts sales and turns people away from their software. So why haven't they fixed this since it's so easy?
> Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position
You keep repeating this but honestly I think it's bs. My point is clear and been repeated several times. You continue to try and refute the points I make; if you didn't understand my point, you wouldn't be able to do that. Honestly, I think most of your reply here is nothing but noise. Just focus on answering the top part of my reply, because eventually, inevitably your claims will be shown to be false, and the assumptions you rely on will be shown to be incredibly unlikely. I don't expect you to be able to admit that or concede, but I expect it will be entertaining for future readers and useful to those who are unfortunate enough to engage with you in the future.
I swear it's insane that anyone's this obtuse. Read better. I said companies do not have an incentive to respect users' privacy and autonomy. They have anticheat solutions that work for their customers willing to take that hit. That's not in question here. We're talking through each other because you either can't read or are willfully misunderstanding. You have conflated anticheat with kernel access when the whole argument is about whether it's possible to prevent cheating without it. If you're going to insult people's intelligence it would behoove you to be able to read. This isn't some minor quibble either. Nearly every post you've made has fundamentally missed the point of the one it's replying to. I can either assume you're not arguing in good faith or that your language comprehension is inadequate to communicate meaningfully. Either way this is a waste of both of our time
> I swear it's insane that anyone's this obtuse. Read better.
Arrogance and ad homs, as expected. These particular ad homs giving your recent comments are particularly amusing and ironic though.
> I said companies do not have an incentive to respect users' privacy and autonomy.
Your actual claim, the only claim I care about and stepped in to correct you on, is that all cheating can be solved serverside. That's it. I know you like to write essays in place of giving an answer, but that's the only relevant point here.
> You have conflated anticheat with kernel access when the whole argument is about whether it's possible to prevent cheating without it
The entire argument is refuting the nonsense claim that all cheating can be solved serverside. You've yet to provide any proof of that, demonstrate even reasonably grounds to assume that, and dismissed the numerous real world examples and facts that show that case to be unlikely.
> Nearly every post you've made has fundamentally missed the point of the one it's replying to.
If you really believe that, then that's on you for not being clear at all. I've continually backed up my points and addressed yours, all while you constantly disingenuously claim you don't understand my point, lol.
I've outlined what the main point is above. Hopefully you won't still be confused by it.
So please, stop delaying and procrastinating, and just support your fucking claim so we can be done with this, or grow some balls and admit you were wrong, so I can be done with you.
Almost every comment you make takes the dumbest possible interpretation of the comment you're responding to and runs with it, probably because setting up and flicking over strawmen like you're doing gives the illusion that you're smarter than you actually are to those who aren't paying attention (though based on how unpopular your posts are I guess it isn't working that well).
Not sure if it's deliberate or not. It makes you a miserable person to talk to in any case.
my problem with them is that they open room to a lot of risk when the dev fuckup and they don't even work. plenty of motivated cheaters bypass them you can even find tutorial on youtube for that. that mean they only make the experience worse for linux user.
The Anti cheat stuff along with some graphical glitches on some games (namely the original Deus Ex, ancient I know but I love it) meant I couldn't fully commit to Steam on Linux. But booting up the Master Chief Collection and signing into Xbox live to play Halo 3 on Linux at better framerates than Windows really tickled my sense of irony, what a feat they've managed!
And I also miss community maintained dedicated servers, with some opinionated admin who boots off cheaters. I don't like installing the kernel-level anti cheat stuff even on Windows, it is no better than that Sony BMG rootkit that kicked up a storm years ago, now we just accept it in the rear for some reason. Centralisation ruins everything.
Community servers can't offer strong cheat protection. If you can modify the client then you can cheat most of the time, and the server can't necessarily do anything.
> rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work
Yeah, that's called piracy. The ant-cheat stuff isn't going anywhere, and even without it plenty of games require DirectX which has no Linux equivalent.
It isn't piracy, anti-cheat technically isn't DRM. Many games let you disable it for the purpose of running mods. Even Halo: Master Chief Collection, a Microsoft game, has concessions made by the developer so that it works properly on Linux given anti-cheat is disabled (they've mentioned it in patch updates).
Judging by the second bit in your post there I guess you haven't been paying much attention to gaming in the Linux space in the last 6 years or so, lol.
Ripping out the DRM absolutely is piracy, and it's the only way to do it since the companies themselves are not doing it.
Anti-cheat absolutely is DRM, a lot of the time. It explicitly uses DRM tech from companies that make DRM technologies. At the very least I guess if we want to be precise we could say DRM is often a component of anti-cheat technologies even if anti-cheat isn't explicitly DRM.
I've been paying attention to the gaming space, and I know it still sucks unless you use Steam and Proton (which can't be used without Steam). Valve even pretty much gave up on their console because the developer support just isn't there.
Lmao, c'mon dude. Many companies are, in a literal sense, doing it, I gave you an example of one. Splitting hairs about the definition of DRM misses the point that it's treated as a separate thing. I was also only making the point that it's the anti-cheat that stops the games from working rather than issues stemming from compatibility layers, getting your panties in a bunch because of the mere theoretical possibility of removing anti-cheat from a game is ridiculous.
Proton can be used for software outside of Steam (though isn't designed for it) but is made up of open source components that definitely can be used separately from Steam. Proton is a Codeweavers-led project and the vast majority of the improvements Valve and it's contractors have made to Wine and it's supporting projects that Proton rely on have made it upstream. Steam Deck is selling extremely well and major publishers are testing their games and making changes specifically for the platform. Steam Machines was a decade ago, the state of play has changed.
You didn't say DirectX was a big deal, you said 'DirectX has no Linux equivalent'. It does, it's provided by Wine and it's supporting libraries wrapping DX and D3D API calls to SDL and Vulkan. Feature parity is strong and performance is in the same ballpark, as it would need to be given the software is being developed in mind for an anemic mobile AMD SoC. Though in spite of that even DLSS and ray tracing works on hardware that supports it.
I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
> I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
I'm not incorrect. I don't think you have experience with what you say. Have you actually tried to use Proton without steam? Yes, the changes eventually make their way back into WINE but Proton is basically unusable without Steam unless you want to do a lot of work.
Saying Linux has a DirectX equivalent via WINE is preposterous. WINE is offering compatibility with the WINDOWS solution because Linux DOESN'T have an equivalent. WINE might forward some to SDL and Vulkan, but neither of those are anywhere near to being a complete replacement for DirectX.
And I'm not 'getting my panties in a bunch', I was just pointing out a fact. If you want to turn it into semantics and throw insults, that's your choice.
SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous. Is it a complete implementation with perfect compatibility? No, but that's not a realistic goal or expectation even on Windows. One of the first steps I take to get older D3D9 games to work on Windows is to use DXVK, Microsoft's own implementation of their APIs isn't perfect either, having atrophied over the years.
Outside of Steam I use Lutris, which works fine. Though it's rare that I actually need to use it, given I have Steam and the vast majority of my games library is on that platform (as is just about everyone elses). Saying that the reliance on Valve's store is a problem is I guess a valid one in a ideological sense, but practically? Steam dominates PC gaming, it's what matters, even more so than Microsoft's own store.
You're the one who tried to spin up a semantic argument over your overly broad application of the term DRM, I had no interest in getting into that.
> SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous.
SDL and Vulkan are no where close to being equivalent to DirectX. What they are is useful in some scenarios, and good alternatives to some parts of DirectX.
It's not preposterous at all, and I'm sorry to say you clearly have a lack of knowledge in this area to claim otherwise.
Since that's beyond clear to me with your last reply, I'm just going to bow out of this discussion at this point. Good luck.
"equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject. Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
> "equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject.
Yeah? You got a source? Can you show it wasn't in a particular limited context and was used in the same sense you are using it now?
> Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
Nah. They are still not even close to being equivalent in purpose. SDL is a little closer, since it wants to be the API for all aspects of gaming and 3d development, but it isn't quite there. Before you double down on your point, maybe you should really look at everything DirectX offers, and everything the alternatives you claim to be equivalent offer.
> That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
LOL! You've described yourself here and only yourself. I'm not the one arguing semantics. You claimed two things were equivalent, which are not. I simply pointed that out, and instead of just taking the L you, and only you, are arguing semantics. I absolutely agree, it is desperate and stupid.
How about just...actually supporting your claim, if you really believe you are correct? You know, instead of arguing semantics, or trying to deflect and falsely accuse me of doing so?
I'm not up on gaming on Linux because I'm not a gamer (in last 12 months I played no more than 10 hours for that Stellantis game I found on Steam because it's natively compatible with Linux, and never tried emulation/whatever in last decade), so I guess you're right. But usually the need for advanced games is one of the (few) reasons that I consider enough to "allow" a friend to install Windows instead of going for MacOS. Anyway I'll try to catch up a bit about the state of the art of Linux gaming, just to give an alternative to anyone that seeks for any kind of help in that.
Same, same. My sister uses the same Ubuntu LTS laptop with Google Chrome since 2013. Has only issues with Word documents and printing, and she also found she can’t backup her iPhone to the computer. Besides that nothing.
She still uses it, does the dist upgrade and never changed anything or broke anything for the past 11 years.
And I also disagree with the article. I bought a new laptop in 2011, installed Windows 8 on it and used it semi-regularly until 2019, I also never upgraded from Windows 8. I also had no issues at all. I only have computer issues if for example corporate manages my laptop.
I think it's weird/lucky that you had such luck recommending macs - most of my non-technical friends just find them confusing and unintuitive, and it's not because they were only used to windows or something.
As for Linux just working untouched...doesn't mean it doesn't have problems or is secure. I've seen plenty of older people use their browser fine after not running updates for years.
Linux is more of a nuisance to set up, although that can be mitigated by buying hardware with Linux pre-installed. I just did (although I ended up reinstalling because I changed my mind about what distro I wanted).
Once installed it is a lot less troublesome.
I think there are a lot of users like your parents than you think. I think you are right about artists using Photoshop, and gamers wanting the full range of games, but I know Windows small business users who use LibreOffice. A lot of my clients use MS Office, Teams and other MS stuff and I have no problems working with them.
I think that for the "casual user" distros (like Mint) the set up problem is not an issue if you can choose the PC before.
For eventual friends that want Linux I always tell them to find a second-hand T-series ThinkPad. They have a fairly large second-hand market where you can buy one for even 200/300€, they are solid laptops (at least the old generations...), they fully support Linux.
Sometimes someone arrives with an old entry level laptop that "doesn't work anymore" (translated: it suffers with Windows) and in those case it might happen that you need to to some tricks to make everything work, but these are usually just post-installation procedures, nothing to worry about after everything is set up.
I mean... nuisance... maybe 10 years ago or if you try to install Arch from source, but nowadays the big distros all have very nice and beginner friendly installers. Totally on par with Windows, if not even more user friendly because you don't have to deal with forced logins and navigating dark patterns.
Yea Linux distros are beating out windows now. I trying popOS at the moment and the install process was a couple of clicks. No assistant screaming up me, no internet connection required. Beautiful.
At first glance "10 years ago" seemed right, but then I did the math and it's more like 20 years ago. 10 years ago there was Steam, Plasma 5, Dell sold Linux laptops and Unity has been the default in Ubuntu for a few years already. Time flies.
I had similar luck with another flavor of the distro. but things get complicated with handling files, like opening word files.
I had to switch out due to display drivers, anti-cheat and specific professional applications. we need more work on desktop use in linux just like there is attention to detail on linux for servers and windows/macos for desktop use.
Been on Slackware for over a decade, other linuxen for decades since 2000. Did end up getting a Windows laptop for power usage of Excel, which it's the only thing that'll run, but otherwise don't know why anyone puts up with all the BS that comes with it as a primary system. I'm far too lazy for all that.
Windows is a lot slower than linux, and poses significant hardware requirements. Many people will have to / already have replaced their system in order to be able to run Windows 11. (Windows 11 doesn't even support first gen Ryzen CPUs.)
Linux usually supports hardware for a very long time.
Since (for whatever reason) Microsoft hasn't figured out how to make its store actually useable, Windows users have to download (most of) their apps via the browser. That's not just a lot of effort, it also vastly increases the amount of adware/malware non-technical people download and install.
On linux, installing apps is a breeze; the stores are actually good.
Disk encryption hasn't been an option on (non-pro) Windows until very recently. This means someone who steals your laptop has access to all the data stored on the device.
Linux supported disk encryption since forever.
I could go on. Windows is lacking in various ways.
The only benefit Windows enjoys is being the most used operating system. It is therefore more likely that you're already familiar with Windows and that that specific app you want to use or your employer wants you to use runs only on Windows. (Most notably: Adobe Software, MS Office Software, Video Games.)
The core benefit of using Windows is not even a part of Windows.
I use it on my "corporate job" PC because our architecture is based on .NET and we are still forced to adopt it (at least until we'll definitely pass to .NET Core becoming a bit more agnostic).
All I can say is that it's... overwhemingly slow... and it gets progressively slower while times goes on. Every time I install something new that I need it occupies more RAM and I'm forced to control it periodically opening the task manager and killing tray bar processes. People can say "well you could be more careful while installing stuff" but the point is that I am. Moreover the majority of times I need stuff I let the corporate sysadmins to install it on my machine. Options to avoid programs being invasive are hidden, you need to search everywhere to understand how to, let's say, avoid Microsoft Teams to load on OS boot.
Someone should explain to me how it's possible that my forklift notebook is a T450 with a 9 years old 15W TDP i5 CPU with Arch Linux installed, and Firefox opens in 2 seconds, and my corporate PC is a fucking stove with a 45W i7 recent CPU and Firefox needs at least 10 seconds to open.
And if I, a self-considered kind-of-technical dude, have issues in keeping a work computer clean (so without any game or "casual" program installed), imagine what happens to my less-skilled friend who likes games and needs cracked Photoshop: he will inexorably seek for help from me after things go progressively bad.
It happened few months ago with a friend. I took his old T450 (another one) I made him buy to have a PC (now it's my second debian server). Now he has a second-hand MacBook and he's never been so happy. Can't be sure that MacOS actually works better because I avoid it too, but at least people are happy and (I assume) tries to solve their eventual problems alone.
Yes our platform is developed on .NET Framework, adopts Microsoft SQL-server and it's deployed on IIS servers. These are old company choices related to legacy support for some customers that we (the "new" generation developers) are slowly pushing away with the help of system administrators.
But till then I need to have a copy of the architecture on my laptop for debug/test. Of course things could be improved i.e. with a Windows Server VM into a linux PC, but with colleagues we try to keep stuff on our machines as much similar as possible to avoid conflicts.
That's unfortunate for 2024, doubly so as you can have .NET 8 ASP.NET Core application that would launch for local dev loop using Kestrel, but then get deployed and plug into IIS with ANCM, I did run at some point into the fact that as the time goes on, the ecosystem diverges further and more packages that used to target .NET FW become unmaintained requiring more rewrite work.
Yes, that dog there did bite your brother and sister and cousin and neighbour but that is months ago so basically irrelevant reasons in 2024. Go on, give it a hug.
What does Apple have to do with this? Also why not mention Google, or Samsung, or Huawei or any other supplier of something which resembles an operating environment?
The article is about Linux so it's assumed the alternative to whatever Microsoft tries to push is found there, not at the Fruit Factory or the Googleplex or the CCP.
Read the original comment I replied to. It's relevant because they mentioned Windows, macOS, and Linux but swear not to use Windows. And people often blindly bash Windows and Microsoft when macOS and Apple are 10x worse, which was my most recent point.
Every time I'd speak to some relative, the conversation would invariably turn to "Can you do something about my computer? It's so slow!"
And then I'd go take a look and find it riddled with spyware and bloatware and a thousand million processes running in the background that actively try to undermine uninstalling this garbage. I mean, why the hell does a MOUSE DRIVER require 2GB of space??? And the virus scanners - these are the worst offenders of all!
Linux is a smaller market with fewer threat actors. It's not being pushed into an advertising platform. It runs everything that 90% of computer users want. I can trust most distributions to keep things light and snappy.
It's just no contest when it comes to non-tech-savvy people. Linux makes it all so much better once you get it going. I wouldn't install it on someone's laptop, though (unless the laptop was specifically designed for it). If they want a laptop, macbook.
Microsoft is doing a good job of leveraging MS365 to make sure Linux isn’t an option for business users.
Besides that, desktop Linux frustrates me in some way every time I try it and I’ve been trying since you could get it on floppy disks. The last few years it’s been display scaling. I swear every Linux developer on the planet must be using 1080p screens because the display scaling sucks. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but the settings panel (in Debian and Ubuntu) is always flaky and the fractional scaling might as well not exist.
Yes, there are unresolved issues, and that's not going away
But consider the alternatives:
1) ads in your menu bar an a pc that calls home to Redmond every 10s
2) a pretty candy-themed adventure in la-la land that you pay through the nose for and where, like in the fabled Hotel California [1], you can never leave.
I'll take the minor annoyances every day of the week.
"Yes, there are unresolved issues, and that's not going away"
Why?!?
It is totally possible to get rid of those "minor annoyances". Some obscure driver bug, yeah, those are hard as there are millions of different devices and combinations. But UI scaling and other pain points like consistent UI and UX? That can be solved and it would make life on linux easier for everyone who is not comfortable with the terminal - which is the vast majority of humanity.
But I've been using Linux since '96, and Unix for way longer than that, and it has always been the case, so likelihood of it remaining that way is high at this point.
Second, I believe it is a characteristic of the Open Source world: anything can be forked and evolved, which leads to a very complex ecosystem, especially when it comes to GUIs. The commercial OS vendors don't really have to deal with that issue.
Third: hardware evolves, and very fast. Super hirez screen are a good example, and the need for thinking about GUIs in centimeters rather than in pixels is something that has caught all OS builders by surprise. Commercial providers built a a solution quickly, and the OpenSource world will eventually catch up, but they'll be late to the game, as usual.
Another example is CPU's with heterogeneous cores, which it took the Linux folks quite a while to adjust to.
Or at a more trivial level, the back-lighting of my laptop keyboard.
This state of affairs (OpenSource software lagging behind wrt H/W evolution) is very likely to continue: H/W makers have, in general, almost zero incentive in providing drivers and/or early technical support for Linux.
Oh, and btw: people believe they do that because opensourcing drivers would expose their intellectual property (see NVidia as one of the worst offenders). In reality, the truth is that it would expose for all to see how shitty, buggy and badly written their software actually is, and therefore they never do it.
Net result: H/W has to be adjusted to after the fact by the OSS community (reverse engineering and whatnot), systematically leading to this chronic problem with OpenSource and H/W.
I buy a new laptop every two years, wipe windows and install Linux. In over thirty years of doing this, I have yet to see a single time where every device in the laptop worked properly right after the install. Never happened.
Yet, I am still a happy user: I do, to a large extent, control what happens on my computer.
The same can't be said anymore of either of Android, OSX, Windows, Chrome
"In over thirty years of doing this, I have yet to see a single time where every device in the laptop worked properly right after the install. Never happened."
In 15 years I experienced it 2 times by chance. But yes, the battery life was probably still lower than on stock windows. But not having to fight your system, but bugs, is a different feel. I still cannot completely deactivate windows antivirus on my all the time offline laptop. Shit like this. If linux would reliably work out of the box, standards might change. But it is a long way, but I believe it can change. There is momentum (and Valve's engagement helped).
As a happy citizen of la-la land, what am I missing with desktop Linux (I use server Linux daily for ML and dev stuff) that’s worth all of the significant drawbacks that come with leaving la-la land?
What freedom? You can use almost all of the OSS on macOS too, but you also have better options available (often at a cost). So, how does your freedom manifest itself exactly?
I'm really surprised by this - I use Arch (btw) with KDE Plasma (5 and 6) and I've been using 150% on a 4K monitor for a long time and it has worked very well. Modern Qt apps work fine, browsers too.
I find the GTK side of things a lot flakier, though.
Same here, using KDE Plasma + Wayland on openSUSE Tumbleweed and AMD GPU and have no problems with 3 monitors all set to different fractional DPIs. No complaints for a long time. But yeah had lots of problems in GNOME or other GTK desktops. Not just with fractional DPI but by multi-monitor support in general.
I had trouble with it, but when Ubuntu Wayland support appeared it pretty much solved the problem. Curious as to whether the parent post tried before or after that switch over. Prior to Ubuntu+Wayland it really was unusably bad with mixed screen resolutions for me.
Ah, I find mixed DPI/resolutions is a disaster on Windows too - apps break when moved between monitors quite a lot.
The trick for me was going all in - 4K monitors at 150% only on both Windows and Linux - on Mac I have a 4K portrait and a 5K landscape, and that works fine there.
I've been using 150% on both X11 (since late 2021/early 2022) and Wayland on AMD hardware and it's been pretty much fine.
I agree with you on the repeated frustrations of Desktop Linux. I'm not aware of your experience but personally, I've hopped from Distro to Distro and DE to WM to DE for years and I've come back to Pop!_OS as the choice for my own and friend / family laptops and desktops.
They seem to give me the fewest frustrations in setup and compatibility with all sorts of hardware from Nvidia GPUs to Realtek WiFi and Bluetooth Chipsets.
Their development team is also actively working on a replacement to GNOME that has actual HDR and scaling support. Right now, Pop!_OS is the only one that has given me a decent scaling experience with 3840x2160, even with fractional scaling. I've yet to try their (system76) own hardware but I'm already finding it quite decent for people testing the waters and jumping ship from Microsoft Spyware while not willing to break the bank on the newer Macs (though the M1 Air is still excellent).
Nevertheless, we ought to keep in mind that every new year is the 'Year of Desktop Linux'.
Yea I know your pain when it comes to display scaling on a 3840x2160 monitor.
I use Kubuntu and found that if you set display scaling you need to restart to properly have the settings take effect. I normally have it at 150% scaling
As of this month, fedora has been perfect for me. I run a 980ti so often times fedora bugged my screens out, or simply resorted to basic drivers. Really enjoying it now though!
I've been on and off Linux desktop for more than 25 years.
I always gave it a chance, for home use and work use as well. And it always failed to prove it worth the effort.
For home use it failed most miserably when it booted up with a black screen after a version update due to an already reported bug with the Nvidia driver, which no one cared to fix before release. Then struggled again for years with finding useful applications, even games, without success, so I gave up.
For work use (as a software engineer) I tried to make myself productive on Linux, and yes I liked the terminal, and that was it. Everything else just sucked. Coming back from suspend e.g. was gambling. Multi-monitor usage sucked. PDF editor? Forget it. Productivity suite on desktop, OneDrive synchronization, DTP, Music - all half-baked, full of bugs and incompatibilities. Thank you, not any more.
For a server, of course I'd use Linux. For a phone, of course. But for desktop, if 30 years was not enough to mature to something usable, I would stop hoping for seeing it as a gold mine. Always promised, always failed.
Sometimes its just a tiny thing: systemd-login started to suspend machines per default from around 2015. This has resulted in countless "not working" Linux installs on all machines that have a buggy suspend. I literally could not run systemd GNU/Linux on my Acer Aspire because it would "crash" after some time.
I've only used Fedora for the last 3 years as my main OS but some things you've mentioned (which I consider important examples) are far better than you might think. What I know of that has been solved well:
- "Multi-monitor usage sucked" - GNOME with Tactile extension gives you basically what PowerToys doeas for managing windows in Windows which is the top productivity experience of what you can gat on the desktop in general. Better than anything on MacOS for instance. And zero issues with multi-monitor.
- NVIDIA drivers failing on updates - I dind't have a chance to experience that during the last 3 years and I use one of the worst GPU setups that are known to have stabilibty issues on Linux - a gaming laptop with 2 GPUs, Intel + Nvidia.
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Moreover, the overall OS stability is top notch. If it's not a clever GNOME extension called Another Window Session Manager saves my work and all opened windows every couple minutes or so (a GNOME session can be revoked after restart).
- "Music (half backed)" - a free Strawberry music suite is one of the best you can get and if that is not enough you can buy Jriver which is one of the top 3 best music platforms in the world. Or host a Logitech Media Server in a docker container locally. Plenty of very good options.
(I'm a hardcore audiphile myself).
> "full of bugs and incompatibilities" - I wouldn't say that at all. I consider myself a kind of person that doesn't like even minor unnecessary issues in my life and if Linux wasn't good enough for me I would not use it.
(With a disclaimer that the fact that there's nothing like Linux from the privacy and freedom standpoint I'm willing rarely to swallow an issue with it here and there to remain free person in the lengterm).
> Linux might not be OK for content creators, though. Or people depending on a lot of niche software, etc. In that case do what I did and find alternatives. Before you start thinking about switching an OS! Apps are more important than the OS.
To be honest I'm pretty sure that with what the future might bring regarding how major operating systems work (as hostile entities) one might want to consider alternatives now regardless of how inconvenient it might feel... Linux is fine. You'll make it work if you want to.
I've been giving Linux a chance every few years since the 90s. Last year I got a new Framework and decided to try again. I tried Fedora and Pop and I can say I'm here to stay. It's Pop's version of Gnome with the tiling manager that I love. Windows has nothing close to it.
I do a decent amount of work in pdfs and I'm surprised that's not good for you. If you're willing to pay for some software there are some really good options. I was using Acrobat before and I am more than happy now, not just because I'm no longer paying $15/mo.
I haven't had a hardware problem on Linux in a while. When was the last time you tried to install it? If you have modern hardware you might be pleased with that part of the experience now.
Pop OS's keyboard experience is phenomenal as well. There's something incredibly intuitive about how easy it is to manage tiled windows + workspaces + accessing common apps with the keyboard shortcuts on popOS that I can't imagine working with anything else now.
Uh, windows has pretty great tiling builtin (albeit disabled by default) and it gets even better by installing Microsoft powerToys (FancyZones) .
It's not fully automated (or "dynamic") like i3/sway but works great. it's in many ways a lot better (i.e the preconfigured tiling setups you can quickly activate by hovering over the maximize buttons etc).
In other ways it's indeed worse, mainly because its not dynamic. But it's not just worse
But if you'd want workspaces you'll get exactly 4 from another 'power toy' and it'll break some video conferencing software for unclear reasons.
I use Windows sometimes and have people I work with that use Windows and in comparison Debian is a breeze. No problems with drivers, no waiting for three minutes because some kernel adjacent service wants to check every file you're deleting in a batch of some thousands, no ads or useless popups about the weather two hours ago, &c. &c.
I agree. Certain DEs and WMs are fun to play with, Void Linux is a fun minimal system to tinker with, Debian is perfect for a fire up and forget server but ultimately commercial software always has the polish and edge I need to get things done at home or for work.
I.e. Affinity vs GIMP, or MS Office vs LibreOffice, Sony Vegas vs whatever crashfest NLE I install on Linux.
So my current pattern is a neutered W10 LTSC for gaming and video editing complimented by a Macbook for work/coding/internet.
I will say that for my parents who just want a desktop with a web browser and basic word processing, Linux Mint + MATE is fine and much more predictable than Windows. I don't have to teach them everything from scratch every few months, as would be the case if they were on Windows and some PM rules that everything must be revolutionised again.
I can confirm. Using latest KUbuntu + KDE. It's very nice usually, but almost every time I do a major upgrade something breaks. Now, after suspend, the freaking keyboard is not detected. Like, at all. It thinks I am on a tablet, I believe, maybe because I have a touchscreen monitor. This only started after the latest upgrade, and I spent hours trying to fix it, to no avail :(.
And this is a laptop that came from factory with Ubuntu (Dell XPS13)!
Quite frustrating. I really like the KDE DE but because of this sort of problem (it has been touchpad problems and sound issues before) I am seriously considering something else, probably plain Ubuntu though I hate the defaults they come with nowadays.
I use Linux in both my work and personal machine, and I fully agree with you. It's kind of painful. In my case I keep using it because I just cannot stand windows UI, and because I do a lot of work on docker/linux for servers, a d I prefer not to have a virtualization layer.
But yeah, sleep/wakeup never works properly, bluetooth connections are unstable and battery life is abysmal. Among others.
I wish Dell would make their own custom distro tailored to their hardware.
> While there are technical differences between Snap and Flatpak, the gist is the same. Offer a sandboxed, isolated, and universal package format for Linux. Universal package formats are an overall win in my opinion. And make Linux feel a little bit more like one operating system. Still, they are now yet another choice that the developer needs to make when distributing their software on Linux.
Someone has yet to explain to me how the Linux desktop is supposed to just agree on a universal standard for everything without a proprietary ecosystem, at which point it would just be a shittier Windows. And that's not even touching on the fact that alternatives often exist for valid reasons, i.e. Pipewire being obviously better than Pulse, which used to be a de facto standard. Or the fact that some companies like Bitwig have already demonstrated that commercial Linux software via Flatpak is viable - Adobe simply does not care, and they never will.
The irony of Windows users sharing their opinions on the Linux desktop is that they often sound how they picture existing Linux desktop users: people who treat their computers as toys. We're fully aware that using Linux has major caveats.
It's okay to just not like Linux, man. Nobody is forcing you to.
The same article was written billions of time in the past 20 years (at least).
Few thoughts:
- Popularity may imply things that are fundamentally incompatible with the way Linux works. Imagine Windows or Mac giving the possibility of fork, and of course, you will have seen plenty of "distributions" where people tried to fix all of these things that don't suit them, with a lot of hardware problems and software incompatibilities. The author says it himself: Windows 8 was the worst OS they used. So, if Windows 8 would have been forkable, of course plenty of parallel version trying to fix the problems would have appeared. Additionally, not sure forkability is compatible with some economic model such as "getting popular by doing a lot of adverts and costly initiative to win market share, paid by revenue we got by doing user-unfriendly-things (ads everywhere in the interface, capturing users, ...)"
- There are more brands of car or of dish-washing liquid than obviously-not-anecdotical Linux distributions. I'm still not sure why people are so confused about the number of distributions. Just do what you do when you buy a car or a dish-washing liquid bottle.
- Popularity does not really matter. As soon as there are incentives to not be ignored by hardware or software makers (and there is now for Linux, the amount of "compatible with Linux" is impressive when you think of the market share. Probably due to the fact that it is an important systems for some sectors and that Linux users are building bridges), then it does not matter at all to me if my neighbor is using Linux or not, it does not affect me in any way. I'm not sure I understand what is the point of being popular.
Of course, at work, I use Windows. It is bloated. That is not an attack on the OS in general but the added fluff on top of it. I dont want it.. yet on next bootup I see co-pilot at the bottom right of my screen. Eff-off!
Remember -- software piracy is wrong... but I don't actually own it, either! I remember the old license agreements on Windows 95, etc.. I would not be surprised if Windows today is still based on "rights to use it" or similar.
I am not here saying distros like debian could replace windows. A lot of users comftable on Windows will struggle to change. A number of alternative software is a learning curve.. even if it is just as good (or better) than what is used on Windows. We also have IT departments who have to relearn... login system, security, etc, especially if their world is windows-focused.
My wife uses Linux. My eldest child uses Linux. They have no issue.
Of course, there may come a time when my eldest needs a peice of software that is Windows only.. but will get to that when I have to (and possible alternatives) -- but I am also a realist... if a child has a specific need (especially a career-based one) then I will install Windows if there really is nothing else.
I would like to properly see the "year of gnu/linux" but despite Microsoft making poor decision with Windows, it will still have things a Linux distro wont... with added budgets at the forefront with PR, legal, marketing.. and all the other departments it has!
Big Companies will also "buy microsoft" for the support whether they think it is good or not.. it is a safety net for job security.
That's not "of course" at all! I've used Linux on my laptop in all of my last four jobs. Five jobs ago I had two computers and one of them was mandated to have Windows...
I can see the guys at System76 filling in this gap. They have excellent hardware and their own PopOS is really user friendly for newcomers. Gaming support is also pretty decent paired with Steams Proton.
The problem with onboarding people to use Linux is like trying to convince an iPhone user to use an Android device. Many people are stuck in their respective ecosystem and are used to familiarity, they're not going to switch to linux unless you can get over the burden of switching.
In my anecdotal experience, I installed Linux for a teacher of mine and he had some issues with getting used to it but his kids quickly figured it out and weren't used to Windows or MacOS which made it significantly easier. Putting Linux computers in students hands is honestly the best way to increase adoption and Chromebooks are a perfect example of this.
Has System76's hardware improved in the last few years? I bought a Gazelle 15 during the pandemic, and it has been the worst computer I've ever had. Display issues, overheating, keyboard dies at random, monitor has an increasing number of dead pixels (had several on arrival from manufacturer), had to have an entire motherboard replacement because the power port stopped being able to hold the power cable after just a couple of months and it refused to fully boot without being plugged in (despite having a battery), the battery life is a joke (less than two hours even on low performance mode), the whole case is cheap plastic, the video card will occasionally just not be recognized by the firmware and will only allow me to use the integrated graphics, and so on.
I spent weeks working with System76 support and they tried their best, but the laptop is just a piece of junk, especially for the two grand price point. My next purchase will probably be an ASUS laptop that I'll load either Popos or Linux Mint on.
I have a Lemur and it's the best laptop I've had- great battery life, everything feels snappy and I haven't had a single issue. Bought it during lockdown as well though, so not much of an argument for their hardware improving.
"The first obstacle you run into as a newcomer, is the ridiculous number of different operating systems that exist under the Linux umbrella. The Linux community loves to call them "distros" as a way to express that there are not many differences between them."
I have been trying various distributions over the years. Being someone who likes to compile software, and coming from BSD, I am still not into package managers. (Yes, I tried Gentoo.)
I have arrived at Frankenstein Linux. It's a hybrid of glibc/musl, various portable BSD stuff and custom text-processing utilities. Linux distributions contain multitudes of software I never use; I removed all of it. Every program is statically-linked, even GCC; I keep no libraries other than what comes with the compiler. There is also an area for running dynamically-linked binaries using a musl or glibc dynamic linker, when that need occasionally arises.
I am not a graphics person so Frankenstein Linux is command-line only, textmode. It's smaller than LFS but larger than Tinycore. In the process of creating and using it, I have discovered many interesting compilation-time and run-time facts about various software I use, stuff I see written about nowhere. Linux overall seems generally hyperfocused on binary packages. When in a rush, these can be convenient but I do not think I will ever prefer binary packages over software I compile myself. I am not a fan "package maintainers". I learn nothing about the software I use by choosing binary packages and these maintainers too often make compile-time choices I would never make myself.
> In the process of creating and using it, I have discovered many interesting compilation-time and run-time facts about various software I use, stuff I see written about nowhere.
Doesn't the LFS documentation serve as an entry point for most of this stuff?
For some people it might. But the problems I encounter when compiling software are not addressed in LFS. These problems are usually solved through reading the documentation from the software authors, if any, reading the source code and through experimentation, trial and error.
There is no single project that includes everything I need/want nor that excludes everything I don't want. Also LFS recommends only GNU software; I use some BSD versions of common utilities and other stuff. To me, LFS was one person's project to construct a userland for the Linux kernel according to his own preferences. In that tradition I am doing the same. His choices might seem "conventional" but they are choices and in fact can be varied considerably.
The interesting thing to me about LFS is that it predates all the projects people recommend today as "source-based" distributions or projects for building "embedded" systems. There are so many different choices and variations, enough for endless online debates over what some project "is" or "isn't" and which is better or worse. To me this simply represents the freedom that Linux, as a kernel-only alternative to BSD, allows to construct a userland any way one wants. Not according to some pre-ordained rules.
Compiling each item of userland software oneself, without using a third party's shell scripts and/or makefiles, leads to discoveries of all the author idiosyncracies and quirks that come with it. Some folks might not want to know. Others might discover some useful knowledge. Truthfully, I prefer to spend time learning about the compilation of the individual software rather than spend it learning how to use someone's automated system used to compile all of it in one go.
With BSD, it is easy to trim the userland down to only what one needs. Most of it is in one place, a single source tree. With Linux, I am doing the opposite, building the userland up from nothing. The resources are in various places, spread across the internet. In both cases, I am seeking to understand how the ssytem works.
I like a lot of this article, and broadly agree that Linux Desktop _could_ take off in a bigger way if people like me and you started putting open source developer time into making good apps for it.
However, I think the author vastly overestimates the current state of the art by conflating Andriod and ChromeOS with Linux.
Yes these are technically Linux distros, but their entire environment is build on a stack (JVM or Web) whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible.
A world where JVM GUI apps or Web apps rule the desktop market is not quite the same thing as "Desktop Linux" taking off. However, web apps ruling the desktop market does have the interesting side-effect that it makes the barrier to using Linux a lot lower than it was in the past, so there's that. The fact that it implies "Desktop" is dying doesn't help, though.
ChromeOS is clearly making moves to being more than just a frontend for Chrome with PWAs and an Android subsystem people only use under duress. Google wouldn't have added support for Linux applications and Steam if they wanted to keep it like it was.
>whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible
That's exactly how it should be. To most users noticing what operating system they're on means something has gone wrong, because what they care about is run software, they don't care what OS they're on, and they shouldn't. I want Linux to win because it's open source, not because so enthusiasts with penguin t-shirts can declare a sort of Sid Meier's Civilization's cultural victory. Android and ChromeOS to that end have done a fantastic job, as has the SteamDeck, because it simply works.
>However, I think the author vastly overestimates the current state of the art by conflating Andriod and ChromeOS with Linux.
>Yes these are technically Linux distros, but their entire environment is build on a stack (JVM or Web) whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible.
When the most successful consumer Linux distros are the ones that try to be as not-Linux as humanely possible, maybe the problem lies somewhere that many do not want to admit?
Linux is a massive foot-gun in the hands of someone random, it is built with certain assumptions in mind that don't bode well with how companies want to ship you stuff, and how they envision to "keep you safe".
Of course if a company wants to ship you something linux-based is going to be brutally adultetred, or otherwise you might even be able to really own the thing and do whatever you want with it, which is very much the opposite companies want when they sell you something.
I've had a slowish laptop (intel gpu) with Manjaro (Arch derivative) and Steam for a few years now. It's not my main laptop but I fire it up once or twice a week for some light gaming (I have some indie games that I like). It works great for that despite Intel performance not being great, obviously. Every few weeks I use the Manjaro settings tool to update the kernel to the latest and greatest. And of course I update packages regularly with a command line tool called yay.
I can't say it has been completely without issues. But so far I've been able to solve these issues. And this doesn't happen a lot. But probably not a great distribution for beginners as you are expected to solve problems on the command line. But if you know what you are doing, this is pretty nice and stable. I like having rolling updates and not missing out on all the latest stuff.
Having Steam means that Windows is now optional for gaming. You don't need it for most games. They'll work fine on Linux. There are exceptions of course but mostly everything I have just works fine. And between Mac and Linux, I just have no patience for the dreary experience that is Windows.
Most other work stuff you can get via snap/flatpak (I use both). IMHO both need work but software availability is pretty good. But for things I care about, I tend to install them manually anyway so I don't have any middlemen to deal with between me and the software project. E.g. Firefox can update itself if you just install the tar ball from them. Works great.
With most linux distributions, the main differentiators seem to be the amount of effort they do to have users needing to use a terminal window with various degrees of success. With most Linux distributions, you'll find yourself needing a terminal window sooner or later.
IMHO having a good desktop linux distro (or a proper desktop linux experience) doesn't have to correlate to a gold mine, and I'm not sure why the author conflates the two.
If the linux desktop space is advancing so slowly is precisely and because of the opposite: because desktop linux is made and maintained by a bunch of people who do it for free.
Alas, valve has done a pretty good job with proton and steamdeck which is helping the ecosystem. here's to hoping wayland and nvidia drivers 555 with explicit sync[1] we might get something decent next few months.
You answered your own question. I don't want my great-grand-children to be the first to have a great Linux Desktop. Ideally, I would like to have it now. Unfortunately, as things go in capitalism, the easiest way to accelerate development of something is with money.
Where's the incentive in any of that? Pour money in linux desktop development for what? (So we can have linux desktop... sooner?)
If there were any money to be made in linux desktop, it would have already happened imo, or otherwise the cost-opportunity is still to high.
If anything, more than a gold mine, looks like a gold sink to me
And don't get me wrong, been on arch for 7 years and i've long since ditched win. But I still don't think there's any meaningful incentives for companies to push for linux desktop.
I got a Windows computer for my six year old because we have to have Roblox and Roblox Studio.
I was stunned by how much clutter, hassle, and adware I had to fight through just to achieve a simplisticity I take for granted with a standard Linux install.
With the tsunami of AI clutter coming for Windows, I suspect desktop linux will finally, after all these decades, have its day.
I've been using GNU/Linux as my daily driver full time since 2012. It does everything I need: I can send and receive e-mails, LibreOffice works well enough for my needs, I can listen to music, watch videos, and play video games (I have an embarrassing total of over 1,000 hours in Fallout New Vegas and Dragon's Dogma combined).
But I recognise that my experience isn't universal and people who have specific needs should use the system that meets those needs.
Desktop operating systems take vast resource to be consistently behaved and presented.
And the strength of Linux is that it is the inverse of consistent…… it’s a bunch of stuff that works well together.
Function over form.
I’d never use a Google desktop os but I might use steam. Steam seems like the most likely desktop os contender, and they have the designers and the developers and the money to make it consistent. The problem is there’s no reason why they’d make a desktop Linux.
The thing about Linux is that it is such a delightful, vibrant and flourishing development environment. There are so many great ways to get an application built for that environment, packaged up, and in the hands of masses of users.
Its not just about the Desktop. There are plenty of window managers with the requisite desktop functionality.
Its also about having the applications users need.
Personally, I'd love to spend the next 10 years building on Linux apps. Its an opportunity for some great advances to be made. I'd focus on multimedia and audio apps, personally. The environment is so conducive to creativity.
They are competing against large roving armies of pure scum at Microsoft, who land up at the door of whichever large corp or govt org that decide to switch, with unmatchable discounts, freebies, bribes, lies and threats to ensure their rent collecting empire is defended at all cost.
The reason Microsoft wins much more than tech is related to tactics used in sales, financial engineering, demand engineering(PR/marketing/advertising) etc.
The EU looked like it was going to do something about the Desktop Market by targeting Microsoft Desktop domination specifically with the Digital Markets Act but what they ended up with some weakass shit about allowing people to uninstall some of the preinstalled apps Microsoft ships.
If Big Tech has to be disintermediated the first step is to understand there is lot more going on outside the realm of Tech that needs to be disintermediated. And a pure one dimensional technology based approach has no chance of making a dent.
>Microsoft, who land up at the door of whichever large corp or govt org that decide to switch, with unmatchable discounts, freebies, bribes, lies and threats to ensure their rent collecting empire is defended at all cost.
I'm relatively new to the industry, but we just saw the exact pattern in our switch from Splunk to Sentinel. A massive discount, and a severely inferior product.
I think Valve's combination of KDE, Flatpak and an immutable rootfs is the right combination (Kinoite also does this, but it plays second fiddle to the Silverblue which uses Gnome). ChromeOS has also been making moves towards becoming a proper Linux distro with their adoption of Wayland, separation of Chrome from the underlying OS, support for running native Linux applications and even Windows applications through Steam.
A lot of people scoff at getting Google involved, but if they put their weight behind Linux applications (or even Wine) then that could mean filling some of the gaps in software support. Adobe might not care about desktop Linux, but ChromeOS? It has widespread adoption in business and particularly education and given a native port, that means every Linux distribution could get access to it too.
Windows has stalled, they're throwing all their effort into AI features that customers don't want. It's a perfect time to make a move.
I’m a long-time advocate of using the best appliance (a Mac) to connect to a “real computer” (a linux-x86_64 build with an NVIDIA card in it).
But the times are changing and paradoxically I have almost the opposite view in 2024 vs 2021.
Desktop Linux can render fonts really well now, you can generally play audio now, ditto 802.11 and BlueTooth and damn the drivers are just good now.
Conversely Apple gear is becoming a pretty credible threat as an on-tile HBM accelerator platform, and while I’m sick unto the death of getting my damned window border radius to me by people other than Steve Jobs himself, I want a Studio on my desk or a Pro sled in the closet, the Sillicon is just too good to ignore now, and the MLX people aren’t sleeping.
I care a lot about darwin-aarch64 now, and could give a fuck less about a windowing system worse than Windows.
I agree with his description of the Arch forums, I've been using them for years as a source of info for solving problems along those provided by Gentoo, and never felt in the mood to write anything there because the community seems pretty hostile towards any kind of ignorance while asking for help or even worst, in the very strongly enforced forum rules. Pity because Arch is really a great distro and provides a solid base for other distros as well. Maybe is not always like that but... Arch forums feel to me like highly elitist and unwelcoming with newcomers. Not even bugzilla.kernel.org feels like that.
It's one of a billion of "Here's my proposal for improving Linux: Make it like Windows!" articles that keep getting written, and have been written for 20+ years now.
> All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win.
and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft
What's funny about this is that Google used to be supposedly the new, friendly company that wasn't as scummy as Microsoft and Apple, and look where we are now.
There are actually several problems for desktop linux, or more exactly, for linux on the home computer.
Some are independent of linux itself: the lack of drivers, the lack of some very common software is external to whatever the linux devs (both linux the OS and linux the distributions). I would even say there are very good at compensating it, even if it is not sufficient.
Then there are the things that are linux dependant, such as the publication of software, the updates, the choice paralysis etc
lack of drivers, for what exactly? linux actually has tons of drivers for old like for new stuff.
on the other hand, i recently bought a new windows laptop and tried putting in a new bigger ssd and guess what; when trying to reinstall windows on that the setup program didn't even find that ssd. no, you had to get an extra driver from intel.com - embarrassing. linux comes with all drivers included.
Last time I installed linux on a personal PC was several years ago but it was a nightmare to install the wifi. I just checked a film scanner on my desk and it is impossible to be ran on linux without paying a 100€ third party software. On windows you may have to download the driver yourself, but at least you have one
You cannot make a product without profit. Linux wins in the data centre because the corporations who make money off selling compute have commoditized their complement. "Linux" wins when it's Android because Google used Linux as a kernel for their offering - which IMHO is still worse than Apple but fine if you prefer Android. It's not open source, though, none of the apps people use on Android are open source, it's just a cheap software component. The Steam Deck, again, exists to sell closed source games.
I used Linux on the desktop for about 10 years. I left it and never looked back. I have a residual affection for the people who actually write open source. But the zealots, with their rants about evil corporations, their Boy Scout fantasies about running the digital economy on volunteer effort, their response to any criticism with "it works for me, you must be stupid/lying", their poor sod grandparents for whom they've kindly installed Arch ... those people are toxic and deserve to be laughed at.
Zealotry/enthusiasm tends to float to the top and is, perhaps, what you see on the surface when you look at any community.
However, I think that most users of open source software prefer it, not because of their political beliefs, but because of their curiosity. Open source software is made by the community for the community; not to entice outsiders or sell to any would-be customers. The main draw of open source software for a curious person is that they can look inside and tinker with it and they can modify it to conform to their needs.
Saying things like "I tried your software and it doesn't work for me" or "I left it and never looked back" (usually phrased in a less polite manner) doesn't really achieve anything constructive. An open source software developer isn't interested in that kind of "feedback". After all, they're not selling anything. They're just making software for their own needs and/or to satisfy their thirst for knowledge and understanding.
If you are not curious about the inner workings of software, then open source is not for you, and that's fine.
> I used Linux on the desktop for about 10 years. I left it and never looked back. I have a residual affection for the people who actually write open source. But the zealots, with their rants about evil corporations, their Boy Scout fantasies about running the digital economy on volunteer effort, their response to any criticism with "it works for me, you must be stupid/lying", their poor sod grandparents for whom they've kindly installed Arch ... those people are toxic and deserve to be laughed at.
Despite a lot of words written there, you don't mention which issues you had with Linux that made you switch away from it after 10 years.
I made the opposite route. Two years ago I switched to Linux (Linux Mint, to be more specific), and I couldn't be happier. Everything has been working like a charm, and I honestly have to do less tinkering around to keep things working than I used to on Windows (which I had basically to do a yearly fresh install).
Too many duplicated efforts, the wayland migration while needed was a complete mess, and actually the worst time I had using Linux since like 2005. This kind of complete breakage of user experience is unimaginable even in MacOS and it's hostile approach to power users.
I think otherwise it's going to continue being a frustrating two steps forward one step back.
> "To fix this fragmentation of package formats, two new formats have been introduced...Snap and Flatpak"
The Nix package manager trounces these two options utterly and completely for anything that's not GUI-based, and even for desktop software if you're prepared to go all-in with NixOS.
Every post i read with the title "My first experience with Linux" starts with a breaking and an unpleasant experience. because nothing works/worked? I guess Linux distros should prove they work seamlessly. cause the Fedora i installed 1 year ago could not detect my monitor resolution. and i have to write a custom script to fix it. a very hard challenge event for me which is a programmer. i don't think normal users have the tolerance to bother stuff like this.
a lot of other stuff did not work too. and i don't think 1 year is enough time to fix them
My first experience with GNU/Linux was back in 2012. I had just accidentally borked my Windows 7 install on my desktop PC by mucking with the registry and needed to reinstall.
Of course I had data on the machine which I wanted to keep, so I needed a way to get it off my desktop PC and onto my laptop. A quick internet search pointed me to using a Ubuntu live USB. Using it my desktop booted fine and I was able to back my data up with no problems.
Afterwards I reinstalled Windows 7 and tried to go on the internet. Which failed because I hadn't installed the ethernet driver yet. Remembering that the internet worked just fine under that Ubuntu thing I decided to install that instead. It worked fine, and I've been using GNU/Linux ever since. I, however, haven't used Ubuntu since the whole fracas around the Amazon lenses got me distro hopping until I landed on my current mainstays of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch.
I have a Surface Pro that's just been telling me Win10 is soon coming to its end, and Win11 won't run on this device. I'm considering Linux Mint which is just fine for what I use that device for (mainly web browsing).
I guess part of the problem is if you commit to building a bazaar instead of a cathedral, there's some things (like majestic roofs that don't leak) which are harder to realize.
And then there's the bit where I'll be choosing Mint/MATE (if I don't go full XFCE) because something something GTK3 mumble Adwaita.
A few days ago I had a bad experience installing sshfs on MacOS. On desktop Linux, this was so simple. I really don't understand how people can think that Linux is somehow less user friendly.
Until you get some sort of grass roots movement or large shift from Windows or MacOS, Linux desktop shells will always be niche for the foreseeable future.
> Linux desktop shells will always be niche for the foreseeable future.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing: like every social escape hatch on the planet, the moment it becomes mainstream, it'll likely cease t be an escape hatch and start to become bastardized and unusable for users that don't fit the lowest common denominator profile.
> Desktop Linux is an untapped gold mine! All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win.
Ah, yes. Everything must be monetized.
Very well then, let us ask what is the business model for this monetized desktop Linux?
* People who already use Linux won't suddenly decide to start paying money for support that they never relied on before.
* People who were never into Linux before aren't going to suddenly start jumping ship just because they can choose to pay for a supported distro. Let's face it, most people don't like spending their time thinking about what OS to run, and maybe that's even healthier, since the more I learn about computing, the more I realize it all kind of sucks in one way or another.
* If the idea is sell proprietary software to people on Linux desktops, it's not impossible (as shown by success stories like Steam and Matlab.) However, it also needs to compete with the ecosystem of free software, as well as web-based apps which are inherently OS-agnostic, along with the pre-existing markets like Steam.
* Before our glasses get too rose-tinted, let's remember that although Linux works fine on desktop, it's not easy. You either need to go the Ubuntu route of being opinionated and one-size-fits-all, or you need to accept that the flexibility of Linux makes support difficult. I've been using Linux exclusively for 15 years, so I'm used to fiddling with all the knobs required to keep it ticking over smoothly. I would thoroughly resent any pressure anyone would put on me to change the way I do things. On the other hand, I would never suggest to a newbie that they should try doing things the same way as me. In fact, I advise against it. "Kids, just try ubuntu first. If you like it, great. Come and talk to me again when you're sure you really want to be a weirdo."
Agreed. One of the reasons I use Linux and other open source software, is not to be dependent or beholden to a single company. I can't count the amount of times I experienced or read about others experiencing a company doing a rug pull on users of their software by either changing direction, abandoning the product, or changing licensing terms.
I do donate monthly to a number of open source projects because I like their work, and want them to stick around. But even if they don't, as long as the software is there and the user base is there, someone will pick up the baton and move it forward, even if it is at a slow pace.
I used Linux on personal machines for decades but recently switched to Mac because I no longer have the patience to deal with the constant jank (and these M1/2/3 macbooks are so good).
I would pay for nice vertically integrated Linux laptop where everything works well and I don't have to deal with numerous small problems that amount to a suboptimal experience.
You forgot about people who used Linux and were put off by all that maintenance work required to have updated and stable environment. I would gladly pay subscription for a stable Linux desktop experience.
I am currently using Windows, hate it, but I know that I can update it and be almost certain that it will work tomorrow.
I understand what you're saying, although my experience with Windows was the opposite.
I would have had much less motivation to switch from Windows to Linux all those years ago if I could rely on Windows to just work. Except for some brief optimism surrounding Windows 7, nothing I've heard in the intervening 15 years makes me think that Windows is more stable than it used to be.
I'm not sure what Linux you tried before, but your mention of requiring an updated and stable environment without much work makes me suspect that you never tried a rolling-release distro. Or maybe you did, but didn't update often enough? I've tried a few different rolling release distros, and invariably find that they remain both stable and bleeding-edge so long as you remember to regularly give them a quick update. That way, if there is something wrong with one package, it's easy to identify what changed and roll it back for a bit, and it won't affect everything else in a systemic way.
In the last 5 years I used Windows on 3 different computers with different configuration (during the same time: 1 for work, 2 at home). I have never had any significant problems with updates nor with stability.
When I used Linux (it was quite a long time ago, but checking comments about desktop on Linux makes me think that not much has changed since then) usually it took less than one year before reinstall or lengthy system repair was needed. I used "versioned" distributions (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora) and rolling releases (Gentoo and Sabayon).
Ironically, I had to do more tinkering to keep Windows running smoothly over the years than I had to do on Linux in the two years since I switched over.
Same here. I am so glad my parents and aunt decided to switch to GNU/Linux. I live quite far away from them and with Windows had to travel a lot for constant problems with Windows (about each month). Since they switched to GNU/Linux, it is mostly just set and forget and now it happens less than once a year that they need my help with their computer. And even if they do it is so much easier to do it remotely.
The one set of people that have made monetized desktop Linux work are Valve. And that's because, like Apple, they provide a vertically integrated solution. They sell the hardware and the software that people want to run, with Linux on Steam Deck sitting as a little slice in the middle that isn't directly monetized.
> Chrome OS is Linux based. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux said that Chromebooks might be the way Linux finally wins on Desktop.
I'd love it, but I don't see most non-techie people consciously adopting free software out principle. On the other hand, I reallh can't see how new platform developers like the people behind Android, Chrome OS and the Steam Deck wouldn't choose linux. It's there, customizable and works great.
From that angle, it seems like unless Windows or Apple continue to be the desktop platform of choice indefinitely, (i.e. there won't be any new desktop platforms) something linux based taking market share of the desktop at some point becomes inevitable.
Running Linux on my main productivity PC since 2003
Mainly laptops, but also a couple of desktops.
It's not always been easy, especially before 2015-2016.
I tried Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Ubuntu and, finally, Arch Linux.
It is still not easy, but at least quite well documented.
To me everything works pretty well. Everything but a single thing.
Hw-accelerated WebRTC.
Almost all browsers are chromium-based. And Google supports hw-accelerated WebRTC only on Android and ChromeOS. I can imagine the latter (which is a browser centric OS), but why Android?
Firefox hw-accelerated seems not to work too.
My Linux box gets on its knees when doing Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack with video on.
I think this is either intentional or simply stupid.
I do a couple of hours in video conferencing a day on Linux and don't consider it particularly resource intensive. It's another service than those you mention plus one way video on Teams because they don't allow video in Firefox because they hate us all, but still, I think it's a WebRTC thing.
People on Windows seems to have more issues with performance than me.
> This one really annoyed me. I mean. Canonical knows for a fact that everyone is going to install these codecs anyway. Why not include them to save the end user some trouble ?
> not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft
People want the easiest possible thing, but Evil Corp wants the easiest possible thing to be the thing that screws you. The reason those codecs aren't installed by default is because of legal restrictions. "Just STFU and make it work" often involves requiring the user to agree to something which is bad for them, and putting at least a minimum amount of friction in the way of that is a good thing.
And it also puts the friction on other people. If the codec isn't installed by default and then someone else is using it, you will notice this instead of seamlessly using the proprietary one, and possibly complain to them and try to get them to use a free codec like AV1.
The cost, of course, is that it's a minor deterrent to adoption. But the endgame of valuing market share over principles is Microsoft.
This minor deterrant to adoption scales up with lots of other minor deterrents. Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
Desktop Linux must match or exceed that base level of experience if it wants to drive meaningful adoption.
Let's be practical: give users a brief explanation of the downsides before they make choices like installing proprietary codecs. Treat them like adults. Let them have an easier life in favor of getting them on board.
> Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
It isn't. With Apple they get "it works or it doesn't" which is crap when it doesn't, because you can't fix it and Apple won't. With Microsoft things are commonly broken, often by accident, and no easier to fix than installing codecs on Linux. But worse, with both of them, is when things are broken on purpose. Almost like Linux. Only not for your benefit, but for theirs, at your expense.
Which puts some lie to the notion that easier always wins. It isn't easier to use Windows, it's a mess of bad code and half of it is out to get you. People use Windows because they have to, or because it came on their computer when they bought it. If you want adoption you need to address that -- do something about the Windows-only apps. Get more Linux PCs into the stores.
Which are the things that are happening. Things that used to need Windows are now websites or mobile apps. Google's money got Chromebooks onto the store shelves. And if you include ChromeOS, Linux has gone from <1% market share in 2010 to now having as much desktop market share as Mac did back then. All of which at the expense of Microsoft, because now Mac has twice that much.
Being opinionated isn't the problem, it's a feature. The competition is opinionated too, but its opinion is that you're cattle to be milked.
"All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win."
... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop. Snaps, which the author lauds, are their thing! The author laments that Ubuntu didn't install the media codecs, but they have a panel during install asking if you want to install commercial stuff including such things. That could be more prominent, admittedly.
The real problem is that there's just somuch commercial software out there and most of it runs on Windows or (often rather grudgingly) on Mac. It's been an issue for decades.
Back in the mid 90s I was working with "Windows for Workgroups" at the same time as messing with Linux. Linux was enormously superior at that point; pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protection, high quality scheduling, and an excellent networking stack versus a very clunky OS balanced precariously on top of DOS.
But Linux didn't have Microsoft Word, it didn't have Excel, it didn't come pre-installed if you bought a PC, and it couldn't run MS DOS software. Windows won, and once Windows NT was out it was a much more even race even on the technical qualities.
The best thing that ever happened to desktop Linux was the commercialisation of the web, because it effectively made a huge swathe of important software usable on Linux. This is sufficiently the case that I've been able to use Linux (usually Ubuntu) at work for several of my recent gigs, but I still can't use it at my current day job (for example) because the miscellany of Data Loss Prevention software doesn't run on it but does run on Windows or MacOS.
I'm not sure Linux will ever "win" the desktop, though the share of desktop might increase in proportion to the dwindling of that market versus mobile devices.
Yup. I recently read a fascinating article about Apple selling a Mac emulator (similar in usage to the open source Basilisk and SheepShaver emulators) for Solaris back in the mid-1990s. There actually was a market for Unix workstation users who needed access to proprietary software packages that only ran on Windows or Mac OS. Even though Unix ran circles around DOS-based Windows and the classic Mac in terms of stability and power, Unix users still needed to be able to collaborate with their Windows- and Mac-using colleagues.
Come to think of it, this also reminds me of why certain Lisp machine vendors such as Texas Instruments and Symbolics made Lisp machine expansion cards for Macs: this provided Lisp machine users the opportunity to use desktop software tools without having to buy two physically separate computers, a very expensive purchase in the early 1990s. (While I’m on the topic, even Apple shipped some Mac models with expansion cards that had x86 chips for the purpose of running DOS and Windows).
The hardest thing to solve here is standardizing the ecosystem of freedom. What's "lovely" about this ecosystem is that nobody cares and nobody tells you how to run your desktops. Want something lightweight? Go with TinyCore or Puppy. Into gaming? Check out SteamOS. Home theater? Use Kodi. Focused on security? Kali is the way to go.
I even built my own distros for my product to automate endoscopy machine interfaces. You can build whatever you want to solve whatever problems you have.
Trying to solve this problem is like merging all the transcontinental countries into one union called USSR.
I really admire any billionaire or community that continues Mark Shuttleworth's effort to raise awareness about Linux desktops.
I really love Linux Mint. I actually loved it so much that I kept using it for years.
Yeah, me too. I discovered recently that I had been using Linux Mint for 10-12 years. In 99.99* percent of cases, it just works out of the box. And it has all those proprietary codecs and other things that are a pain to add with many other distros.
As far as I'm concerned, Mint just works so don't try to fix it.
* I neglected to add a WiFi card to my desktop when I was customising the order from the Lenovo factory. I just threw a USB WiFi dongle into it without investigating what sort of weird chip it used. That means I just run a script to install a driver for it during installation of a fresh system. No biggie.
The problem is not only to make a desktop, nobody would implement it (NIH-Syndrom, thats why we have 12 karillion Linux Distributions), you have to ship your own distro.
Desktop Linux can not be a goldmine from its nature and its userbase. People using Linux does not want to pay for anything and first thing which they will do is to fork your code and "release it" for free because of GPL.
When you have no chance to monetize it, how it can turn into a goldmine?
Fun fact, I spent more money on GNU/Linux and donations to FOSS projects then I ever have for Windows and its software. Why because it is just better more user respecting and is constantly improving, and the opposite is true for Microsoft and their malicious business practices and bad products that are getting worse by each release.
Google made money on Android. As long as you're not making direct changes to Kernel code, you're free to close source anything you add. The existence of AOSP didn't prevent the Playstore or google play service from making Google the sole controller of Android. That's how it turns into a goldmine.
Android is kind of pointless without phones it is running on, so having a code does not mean you have any use for it. Same for routers using Linux. Kind of pointless to have source code when you don't have the hardware.
"Linux fanboys have ruined it’s (Linux's) image. Most of them take pride in doing simple things in an over complicated manner and wonder why people won’t switch."
(Couldn't find the source, Linus might not have said this)
I really wish there was a filter for HN articles. These threads are so useless, boring, and stupid. I feel like I could recite all the fanboy cliche from every major OS by heart at this point.
Originally you say it was a kind of kiosk operating system that ran a Web browser with Google apps deeply integrated to enable things like a little local file storage.
Some years ago, they enabled you to access a real local Linux operating system, and install and run arbitrary things.
I think but don't know that local Linux gives me a container or windows subsystem for Linux vibe.
It's sufficient to use a chrome book as a local dev machine, and I think googlers do that daily.
My parents (both over 80) daily use Linux Mint for a decade now. They don't know it, simply last time we bought them a PC I put it there, explained how to open the web browser, play solitaire/FreeCell/whatever other game they like, how to shut it down etc. I live in another city and I almost never had to adjust anything there in all these years, differently on what happened when they had windows (they unknowingly installed a lot of spyware and bloatware, I had to clean it up periodically).
Still, for me this is one of the few experiments that went well, probably because the only "complex" need they have is a web browser. Now if a friend (not a technical one) needs a new computer advice I tell him to buy a second-hand MacBook and enjoy. No one ever complained (in fact all compliment me for the choice). The vast majority of users is not like my parents, has some specific needs, like they need Microsoft Office, or Photoshop, or they play on PC and still don't want to face the challenges you need to overcome if you want to do everything with Linux. I would never use MacOS on my PC (not because it's not good, just because I'm a FOSS maniac), but it's the perfect operating system for casual users and even for many power users. The only rule I adopt for OS advice is "avoid Windows unless you are actually forced to use it (gaming, specific legacy programs etc)".
Agree on all points, except regarding games. Via Steam and Proton, gaming on Linux is now better than Mac.
The gaming part is still windows. With all these kernel level access rootkit anti-cheat games, online games are a pain
That's the only major roadblock left, rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work. I'm not sure how Valve could address this without people getting angry. They could eventually leverage their immutable rootfs setup to enable attestation of the system stack and run the games in security hardened containers?
My feeling is that Valve's approach via using wine/proton is pragmatic in terms of getting something that works for them and reduces how much they're held hostage to windows, but it's a missed opportunity to go further and decouple PC gaming from windows. As it stands they are downstream of whatever MS does to the 'reference' platform and how developers use it (because that's where the majority of users are).
I'd love to see what would happen if a consortium was formed to take responsibility for gaming on the PC platform, and I wouldn't be surprised if MS wouldn't mind abdicating maintenance especially if their xbox fortunes have waned and there's less mutual benefit for them.
Valve basically tried the later approach with the initial Steam for linux push which included steam machines and the steam controller. It did have some level of initial success but clearly had lost momentum and the developer support it had seemed to fade after a few years. There were quite a few direct ports during that time though. I think they would have preferred that approach but ultimately decided it was a bridge to far.
They didn't put a fraction of the effort into Steam Machines that they have put in the Linux ecosystem since then.
Wouldn’t this hypothetical consortium need to be made up of fairly large players?
As in Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, and friends?
I’d imagine they’re pretty happy with the status quo.
If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Kernel level anti cheat is a failure. You need to control the hardware to do it properly. The only hope is to wait for less locally intrusive and more robust anti cheat solutions.
Basically the only possible solutions at this point lie in the AI space.
> If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Yes it is, given that unlike Windows you still ultimately know what code being executed on your computer and have some degree of control over it.
Should add, this isn't necessarily something I want, lucky for me I don't really play the games that require anti-cheat. But it is something that Valve could conceivably do.
You have as much control over it as you do over windows in this state: i.e. uninstalling the OS.
Just because you know what the base is doing, doesn't mean you get to see what the proprietary kernel level drivers, loaded at runtime, are doing.
Really it's effectively as good as having windows and running an open source web browser, or an open source kernel driver. It doesn't change the fact that your computer is being fundamentally controlled by components you can't change, some/many of which are also proprietary.
This isn't a problem unique to what we're talking about, virtually every desktop PC on the planet has proprietary blobs running regardless of the OS used. I agree it sucks, but they're also not strictly necessary to run the containerized setup I proposed (any more than they're necessary to run the computer itself). It's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source.
While it's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source. If you look at widevine you will quickly notice how that's very unlikely to happen. While it's possible to do this in containers, if you look at how DRM is built into the HDMI protocol, you will notice that it's unlikely you'll ever get to control a base while running the proprietary stuff in a container.
Your idea is somewhat possible, but it's never going to happen in reality. I can already run windows in a VM for the exact same result.
It's unlikely sure, but I look at the alternatives and they seem even less likely. I really doubt consumers would be happy with normalizing rootkits on Linux, even those at Valve wouldn't want that. So what other choices are there? That question left me with the answer I gave.
Running Windows in a VM would be less efficient than running a stripped down Linux stack inside of a container. Going the Linux+Wine route requires less proprietary code and would be free to license. Hardly an exact same result.
There just won't be any rootkits or games which require such anti cheat on linux. That's the most likely end result.
There already are games with anti-cheat on Linux, they're just using (arguably) less effective versions of them.
Valve are financially incentivized to get as many games working as possible, I don't think it makes sense for them to do nothing at all about this. They have a head start now due to the general crappiness of Windows on a handheld but Microsoft's mobile offerings could catch up and given that would have Call of Duty among a lot of other heavy hitters available while Deck wouldn't, that is a problem that Valve would need to solve in order to not get stomped.
Jokes
I think there are three fundamental categories of cheating threat models that actually matter: State poisoning, Information leakage, and Input automation
State poisoning means your game was poorly written, period. Either that's a vuln within the code itself or badly implemented netcode. A 2-player game can have total asynchronous client separation and still be peer-to-peer. A more-than-two-player game is almost always run on a server that serves as the single source of truth. In either case, a game that doesn't make the fundamental guarantee that the inputs available to a player and maybe some initial random seeds are the sole determinant of the gamestate have no hope, and rootkitting your computer because they wrote their game's statemachine or interfaces like shit is not the correct solution. If your answer to this is that big game studios shouldn't have to learn how to write more solid code, this means that the sanctity of their game isn't that important to them, not that they should get to root your computer
Information leakage may be somewhat harder. Often you want the simulation to be running client-side, so a naive model of netplay would have the full state available to all clients from a technical perspective... but this doesn't have to be true. In most cases, you can do partial state with rollbacks to make it much harder to cheat from a technical perspective, even making no guarantees about the clients themselves. I think even when this is hard, the correct path here isn't rootkits, it's approaches that start to approximate zero-knowledge proofs. This also means there's a rich literature of zero-knowledge proofs to draw on
Input automation, to be honest, is basically hopeless to prevent upfront regardless of what you do. If you can plug external hardware into your device at all, you can rig up something that automates your inputs. This can be hard to even verify in person, let alone through even a rootkit. I don't personally think it's worth worrying about that much, but if you care about macros and the like, it's really difficult to prevent. However, if there's money on the line or something, there are good analytic forensic techniques to detect this kind of cheating after the fact. Maybe this is where "AI" could actually help, as some kind of sequence-based anomaly detection that can run in real time might be able to detect unusual input clusters, but I worry that the false positive rate is going to be super high. Honestly seems like a lost cause. But crucially, not a lost cause that you get around via compromising the OS at a kernel level
Anti-cheat that "needs to own your kernel" is more user-hostile corporate bullshit. Most games work fine on linux, but frankly no game is worth a rootkit, and no game needs one. The fact that some companies demand it should be viewed as those companies trying to scam you. That's not how the security of anything on the internet works. It's only how security of a bunch of mobile stuff works because Microsoft has trained generations of otherwise smart people to believe their total lies about security, and Google and Apple have taken advantage of this to secure a massive amount of control and surveillance over everyone who owns a smartphone (Which is increasingly required because they've also convinced people that fake 2FA that's just your phone as a single source of identity that can in fact often effectively be 1FA because it can override other authentication methods in most cases is somehow secure. The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized - to say nothing of privacy, and that's a huge accomplishment given all that Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have done and still do to compete for the title)
Giving a corp a backdoor to your computer doesn't secure anything except that corp's ability to fuck with you. Don't believe Microsoft, Apple, Epic Games, The NSA, or anyone else who tells you that the best way to secure something is to give them a backdoor. Fuck all those people. They have not only gotten their slimy tendrils in a ton of people's stuff through these lies, but have propagated bad information about how to do security to a ton of organizations. If someone who works at one of these scummy companies or agencies responds to this with some condescending corp-speak at me, I've got a bunch of work to do so I'll probably not get to you immediately, but I pre-emptively say that making this argument at all fundamentally undermines your credibility, and also I hate you on a personal level. You've been a spook too long and it's rotted your brain, hypothetical internet stranger who might not even exist, quit your job and fix your heart
Basically, don't believe any of this "We have to own your computer for your own good" nonsense. That's a scam. Every time. Also, proprietary software should be assumed inherently insecure by default, not the other way around. A better world is possible
The reason companies seem to bother at this point is that, by implementing increasingly intrusive anti-cheat, they force cheaters to be increasingly subtle. With sufficiently intrusive anti-cheat you end up with gamers believing that the game they're playing has no cheaters.
This currently happens in at least some of the games which utilise kernel level anti cheat, as demonstrated by numerous videos on the topic which also shed light on massive communities of cheaters who just end up buying or making their own hardware based cheats.
Gamers will believe anything a company they like tells them. The fact that these companies can attract arguably the most insufferably delusional audience of frothing bootlickers to ever walk the earth to defend them doesn't justify their decisions on a technical or an ethical level
If the explanation for why a company needs a rootkit is "they don't want to spend effort on a better solution" that means that solving cheating isn't a priority for them, and if we care about that we shouldn't buy their game. It especially doesn't mean you should accept a rootkit to buy their game
I agree, but I am not the kind of person you need to persuade not to buy spyware.
I am just explaining the kinds of reasoning I've heard first hand coming from "gamers".
I view self-identified "gamers" as a cult at this point. If my goal were to persuade them of anything, I'd probably fail. I'm not in marketing for a reason. But the fact that a bunch of fools believe in something doesn't make it true
I bit of anger or at least disappointment in your post. However, "The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized" is completely true.
Biggest scam ever!!!
You should be angry at people who try to hack your computer with the express intent of spying on you or controlling your behavior. I am angry that people will waste my time trying to defend this behavior to me, whether it's about phones, smarthomes, or video games
Also, the thing where people think being angry makes you automatically wrong has gotta be a holdover from lead paint. I truly can't believe people are that stupid naturally
> Basically, don't believe any of this "We have to own your computer for your own good" nonsense. That's a scam. Every time.
Not really. It's all they can do to stop PC gamers cheating without having control of the hardware.
I just gave an in-depth breakdown of why that's not true. Your reply amounts to saying "nuh uh!" with no justification. There is nothing to engage with in this reply. It doesn't even attempt to have any substance
Your in depth breakdown doesn't address the substance of the argument at all, it's mostly a distraction.
Servers can not bear the entire weight of guarding against cheat, it's impossible. If you don't understand that then you are not in a position to be writing any sort of breakdown.
Several games and game protocols require security on the client side to be able to stop cheats. You can't have security on the client side if the client has full access to the hardware and OS.
It's not more complicated than that, and your 'breakdown' doesn't adequately address that. You can dismiss this point if you like as you did when I made it in my previous reply, but it doesn't make it any less a fact.
That's ridiculous. A server only needs to be capable of running a single authoritative copy of the game and handling dead simple network requests to prevent every kind of cheating that matters except input automations, which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway. If you have a case where this isn't true, feel free to expand on it instead of just blindly believing it must exist. You don't need client-side control to make very powerful guarantees of systemic security in much more serious contexts than a game. You're not only doing special pleading, but you're doing it for a scenario that, as far as I can tell, has no theoretical reasoning and no examples, because you haven't provided any. I have to conclude it's imaginary. I gave you a good breakdown of what threat models I think exist and some sketches of technical solutions, like client separation and authoritative servers. I speak from both sound theory and experience implementing netcode here. Maybe you are too, but I can't tell from what you're saying, because again all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!" I see no why, how, or when in that argument. Is the problem you can only fix by having total control over the whole platform of every client in the room with us right now?
> every kind of cheating that matters except input automations
So basically, except the most common types of cheating.
> which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway
Yes, this is basically what I was saying when I said you can't stop cheating so long as the consumer has control of the hardware.
> instead of just blindly believing it must exist
Well, with respect, I think it is you who is blindly believing all cheating can be stopped server-side. I find that claim to be patently ridiculous.
> no examples, because you haven't provided any.
> all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!"
You're right, I haven't provided examples because this is common knowledge in the industry or to anyone that knows anything about trying to prevent cheating. I wasn't prepared to have to give a lecture to defend my point. But really, if what you are saying was correct, then all these companies must just be incredibly incompetent for not preventing cheating server-side, right? Because it's just so easy?
More than that, it's a very basic principle in security that if someone controls that hardware, most security can be defeated. The exception is stuff with DRM and things like a TPM where the consumer doesn't have full control, and that is the only way to truly prevent cheating. That's just a fact.
So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing? Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well? How can you guarantee there isn't a SoC on someone's keyboard that sends a bunch of signals that they didn't have to type? Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
Anyway, the fact that industry giants want to be in the very lucrative business of controlling the computers people use and have made up all manner of silly justifications for it is not news to me, but I have no reason to believe them, and saying "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling. If you don't expect to need to justify your position why even bother making the claim? I don't assign automatic unquestioned epistemic authority to you just because you claim to be espousing the consensus view of an industry, and it's an industry full of crooks built on an industry full of crooks in the first place
> So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing?
Can you quote where I said that? I'm certain I said no such thing.
Are you really reducing any client side cheat to just macros? That's either disingenuous or willfully ignorant.
> Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well?
Ideally, yeah. Look at Playstations for example. People can't play with cheats running on the same OS interfering with the game because they don't have control of the hardware. They can still cheat with peripherals though, as the situation with the Cronus Zen showed, and so yes, to stop cheating control of the peripherals is needed. With a recent real world example to corroborate.
> Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
There is a reason GTA5 on console has no cheats and on PC they are rampant, and it isn't because Rockstar are completely inept at preventing cheats serverside, it's because that isn't possible.
> "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling.
My stance isn't based on faith but detailed understanding. You have yet to support your position with any evidence, and so far your point is refuted multiple times over by real world evidence. Occam certainly isn't on your side.
If you want to support your argument you're going to have to do better than trying to dismiss mine as just being the result of an appeal to authority fallacy. Do better, or admit you had no idea what you were talking about and were just speculating/guessing.
I actually listed three threat models for cheating in video games that I think matter, and then explained that for those broad classes as I described them, one was a solved problem (If players can change the state of the game in unintended ways directly, your netcode is not just bad, but worse than ready-made standardized solutions that exist), another is solvable with netcode (probably provably so. For example, garbled circuits protocols are a subset of zero-knowledge proofs and can be used to obfuscate domains as broad as any input a neural network is training on, and those are general function approximators about which we can't really make good structured assumptions about what information they will need), and the third is not even solved by a rootkit. You then quoted me about the third, input automation (I then shorthand this later as "macros"), and say
> So basically, except the most common types of cheating
So yes, I concluded from this reply that your concern is about macros, or context-free input automations. With good computer vision models we could also externalize certain classes of context-aware automation from the base system via a camera and an edge GPU on the external device, but this is exotic enough that I assume you're not worried about it. For macros, you can use a keyboard or mouse or joystick modified with a circuit to automate inputs that come from the device in a way that's indistinguishable from those generated by a human user, except perhaps approximately through forensic sequence analysis, which you could do in the network layer or on a server just as well
> You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
I am, as I said, well aware that tech companies are plunging us ever-further into a pervasive dystopian panopticon, which may sound like a silly thing to say about older game consoles, but not ones with cameras and microphones, and which may intercept network traffic, and which you have financial information tied to, and it is certainly not a stretch to say about phones. This is neither hyperbole, sarcasm, nor even subtext. In fact, it is the crux of our disagreement. If your conceit here is that I should accept this as inevitable and not oppose it at all, we have nothing to talk about. Really, if you're going to repeatedly insist that you have epistemic authority and it should exempt you from having to make any actual arguments, the least you could do is to keep up with the conversation.
Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits. Video games are here used as one justification for why it's good that your computer is being controlled remotely by a tech company instead of you. You are here acting as the advocate for that position, essentially that the price of freedom to control the device you play a video game is people cheating in video games. Your arguments so far are "This is the only way" and that this is "common knowledge in the industry", and then I guess a bunch of condescension about how my disagreeing with this premise automatically makes me naive or foolish*. You are correct that I haven't cited specific examples, because I am the one making the general argument, which I've defined in terms of three threat models I'm claiming exhaustively cover the ways someone could cheat at a video game that one could plausibly hope to prevent. Really, your job here is a lot easier, as all you need to be right is one (1) specific counterexample to my claim, a single case where it is definitely impossible to prevent cheating without controlling the computer of the game client, but where it is possible with that control. I'm well aware already that many video games implement "anti-cheat" measures this way, so I wouldn't count "Well they did it here and here and here" as counterexamples. To do this, you could point to a case where one of those classes of threats has no other feasible solution, given control of the server or even on the assumption that at least one player isn't cheating in a p2p context. You could even say "Actually you missed a whole kind of cheating in your threat model", and then demonstrate that it would still be cheating and that it requires a rootkit to accomplish, or something like that. But also, you don't need a counterexample. Maybe my reasoning's wrong somewhere, and pointing out something about it that falls down would at least be a starting point. Instead, you say "This is obvious, everyone knows this, I can't believe I have to explain this", which is you trying to use status in place of an argument. I don't respect that in almost any context, but even if I did, you have not established here and I have no reason to assign you this epistemic status. So in effect, you have not made anything resembling a compelling argument for your position, empirical or otherwise, as I said. As you said, you are under no obligation to, but if that's your tack, it's weird that you bothered to reply at all
*To be fair, I made a really similar argument in my first reply! It applies equally in both directions, and is pretty facile - a combination of an ad hominem attack and begging the question - in both directions. I wrote it in a tone intended to convey that it was more meant as partisan invective than actual argumentation, but regardless of whether you got that subtext, it's not exactly a pillar of my claim here
> Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits.
No, I'm not confused. You're just very simply wrong. No question about it, it's not a matter of subjectivity, you are 100% absolutely unequivocally incorrect on this issue.
I can only assume at this point you are incredibly stubborn. You clearly have a lack of experience and knowledge in this area, yet you are doubling down on your position, despite it being trivially shown to be false by numerous real world examples and very basic, irrefutable facts and logic.
But you're the type of person who thinks that you're right no matter what, and that all these game developers must just be inept, right? I feel that I've already wasted time pointing out you are wrong and I'm not interested in an is-not/is-too argument with someone that would rather write essays and argue semantics than have the basic decency to admit they have no clue about what they are talking about. No one's even reading this discussion anymore, is your ego really so great?
I won't be continuing this convo, but feel free to have the last word. Good luck.
Dang you sure are great at saying nothing really confidently. I'm not even being stubborn here, you just refuse to explain yourself. Not only do I have no reason to care what you think, I don't even know what you think, except for "You're wrong." I've said it before and I'll say it again: Why bother to write a reply at all if you're not going to say anything meaningful? I can't even say your argument is ill-formed because you simply haven't made any such thing at all.
I honestly don't know what you're asking me to do here. You show up and say "Nuh uh you're wrong" and I say "Why?" and you say "I can't believe how stubborn you're being!"
What the fuck?
Like the one example you cited is an instance where even on a console this control-based paradigm didn't work, and your only conclusion was that this obviously means you need to control even more stuff, instead of even considering other approaches. It's a real "When your only tool is a hammer" type scenario far as I can tell
My days of thinking AAA gamedev must be a terrible culture in which to make software are certainly coming to a middle. This has downregulated my willingness to take "I'm an experienced gamedev" as an argument for epistemic authority in the future
I definitely explained my position and provided an argument. If you can't see it, it's only because you are letting your own voice and thoughts drown it out. Which, from your post history, seems to be quite a typical behavior for you.
And with that, I truly am done. Again, good luck.
I'm legit not seeing where that is. You say some games, or "game protocols" require client-side protection... why? Just saying it's the only way doesn't explain anything at all. You have confusingly tried to give me examples of... anticheat mechanisms that rely on the total control of some hardware. I know those exist? That's not what's in question.
Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that? I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it, just more "This is the way it is. This is the way it's done". I know that already. I am saying it doesn't have to be. You're not engaging with the question in any way, just getting upset with me for not conceding that you're right and trying to insult me about it. "I looked up your post history and I see that you argue with people here a lot". You got me I guess?
If it upsets you so much to have this argument, you probably should disengage from it, but I'm genuinely baffled by the whole thing.
Ahh, you baited me again. Excellent job!
> Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that?
lol. More personal attacks. Your entire thought process is wrong, laughably so. Maybe your only experience is speculating on things you don't have a great knowledge of on HN?
Please, just tell me, if you are so sure you are correct, why these game companies can not solve the problem as you suggest? It's because they are all inept and simply not as smart as you? That's it, right?
> I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it,
Nah. You're just willfully ignoring it. I don't think you're engaging in good faith at all. I'm not confused in the least, despite your constant accusations, and I've been pretty clear and unambiguous.
Your post history shows you as someone who can't ever admit when they are wrong and frequently resorts to ad hominems, and can't bear not having the last word. That's all this is. Now, since you want to play, I guess we'll see how long this goes on for.
I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so. Of course anti-cheat that backdoors a bunch of people's computers is good for the company. They get anticheat and a backdoor that could be valuable for selling data later, or preventing piracy too, or responding to subpoenas and being a hero that caught a terrorist. I dunno. Surveillance and control is popular for a reason. It's not because it's necessary for everything it's billed as necessary for. That's a sales pitch
Also, I guess you're not reading my post history very carefully when deciding it's a good ad hominem attack to use, because just this week I had a heated argument about some culture war shit and the nature of governments and ended up realizing I was being an asshole and making assumptions about someone, and apologized for it. I get that I'm pretty belligerent, especially on topics like how we live in an orwellian dystopia of surveillance and a majority of people in my trade seem to range from complicit to actively advocating for its necessity, but it really sounds like you're responding emotionally to my verbosity and tone and using this to try to discredit me instead of having anything substantive to say about the topic at hand. It is exactly an ad hominem attack, no more, no less
Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position and you are only using ad hominem and appeals to authority. My fundamental claim is that anticheat mechanisms for multiplayer games are possible without client-side control, wherever they are possible at all. So far, in opposing this claim, you have not given any justification whatsoever, opting instead to claim this is obvious and well-known and thus requires no justification. I made the only good faith argument either of us have made in this whole thread right at the beginning, the post you initially responded to, and you refuse to engage with it in any sense. Every reply you've made is argument to incredulity, ad hominem, or naked appeal to the authority of your supposed expertise, the consensus of the games industry, etc. I would love to engage in good faith with substantive arguments. You are doing neither.
"You think all the smart people in the games industry are wrong?" is just another appeal to authority. I don't think they're stupid, I think they have no incentive to value the privacy and autonomy of their userbase and look for other solutions
> I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so.
This is your root assumption underlying everything else. This also doesn't make any kind of sense. These companies put a lot of money into trying to stop cheaters. People don't want to play a game that is rampant with cheaters, it's bad for business.
The incentive is there. The incentive is more than there. As are their well reported attempts which end up making some gaming experiences incredibly negative for consumers, reporting in incredibly negative receptions which put a big dent in sales.
To say the incentive is not there is just...silly. Or disingenuous. Either way it's simply not true.
So, again, why hasn't Rockstar or Activision made these trivial modifications to completely and entirely stop cheating serverside? The cheating gives them negative press, hurts sales and turns people away from their software. So why haven't they fixed this since it's so easy?
> Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position
You keep repeating this but honestly I think it's bs. My point is clear and been repeated several times. You continue to try and refute the points I make; if you didn't understand my point, you wouldn't be able to do that. Honestly, I think most of your reply here is nothing but noise. Just focus on answering the top part of my reply, because eventually, inevitably your claims will be shown to be false, and the assumptions you rely on will be shown to be incredibly unlikely. I don't expect you to be able to admit that or concede, but I expect it will be entertaining for future readers and useful to those who are unfortunate enough to engage with you in the future.
I swear it's insane that anyone's this obtuse. Read better. I said companies do not have an incentive to respect users' privacy and autonomy. They have anticheat solutions that work for their customers willing to take that hit. That's not in question here. We're talking through each other because you either can't read or are willfully misunderstanding. You have conflated anticheat with kernel access when the whole argument is about whether it's possible to prevent cheating without it. If you're going to insult people's intelligence it would behoove you to be able to read. This isn't some minor quibble either. Nearly every post you've made has fundamentally missed the point of the one it's replying to. I can either assume you're not arguing in good faith or that your language comprehension is inadequate to communicate meaningfully. Either way this is a waste of both of our time
> I swear it's insane that anyone's this obtuse. Read better.
Arrogance and ad homs, as expected. These particular ad homs giving your recent comments are particularly amusing and ironic though.
> I said companies do not have an incentive to respect users' privacy and autonomy.
Your actual claim, the only claim I care about and stepped in to correct you on, is that all cheating can be solved serverside. That's it. I know you like to write essays in place of giving an answer, but that's the only relevant point here.
> You have conflated anticheat with kernel access when the whole argument is about whether it's possible to prevent cheating without it
The entire argument is refuting the nonsense claim that all cheating can be solved serverside. You've yet to provide any proof of that, demonstrate even reasonably grounds to assume that, and dismissed the numerous real world examples and facts that show that case to be unlikely.
> Nearly every post you've made has fundamentally missed the point of the one it's replying to.
If you really believe that, then that's on you for not being clear at all. I've continually backed up my points and addressed yours, all while you constantly disingenuously claim you don't understand my point, lol.
I've outlined what the main point is above. Hopefully you won't still be confused by it.
So please, stop delaying and procrastinating, and just support your fucking claim so we can be done with this, or grow some balls and admit you were wrong, so I can be done with you.
what a nonce.
If you can't keep up with or follow the discussion, that's fine, but please don't insult those of us engaging in good faith discussion.
There is nothing about your posts that are good faith.
It's a real shame you think so. Every comment I make is in good faith.
Almost every comment you make takes the dumbest possible interpretation of the comment you're responding to and runs with it, probably because setting up and flicking over strawmen like you're doing gives the illusion that you're smarter than you actually are to those who aren't paying attention (though based on how unpopular your posts are I guess it isn't working that well).
Not sure if it's deliberate or not. It makes you a miserable person to talk to in any case.
my problem with them is that they open room to a lot of risk when the dev fuckup and they don't even work. plenty of motivated cheaters bypass them you can even find tutorial on youtube for that. that mean they only make the experience worse for linux user.
They shouldn't exist, yet here we are.
The solution to that is dedicated/community servers not stronger cheat prevention.
The Anti cheat stuff along with some graphical glitches on some games (namely the original Deus Ex, ancient I know but I love it) meant I couldn't fully commit to Steam on Linux. But booting up the Master Chief Collection and signing into Xbox live to play Halo 3 on Linux at better framerates than Windows really tickled my sense of irony, what a feat they've managed!
And I also miss community maintained dedicated servers, with some opinionated admin who boots off cheaters. I don't like installing the kernel-level anti cheat stuff even on Windows, it is no better than that Sony BMG rootkit that kicked up a storm years ago, now we just accept it in the rear for some reason. Centralisation ruins everything.
Community servers can't offer strong cheat protection. If you can modify the client then you can cheat most of the time, and the server can't necessarily do anything.
> rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work
Yeah, that's called piracy. The ant-cheat stuff isn't going anywhere, and even without it plenty of games require DirectX which has no Linux equivalent.
It isn't piracy, anti-cheat technically isn't DRM. Many games let you disable it for the purpose of running mods. Even Halo: Master Chief Collection, a Microsoft game, has concessions made by the developer so that it works properly on Linux given anti-cheat is disabled (they've mentioned it in patch updates).
Judging by the second bit in your post there I guess you haven't been paying much attention to gaming in the Linux space in the last 6 years or so, lol.
Ripping out the DRM absolutely is piracy, and it's the only way to do it since the companies themselves are not doing it.
Anti-cheat absolutely is DRM, a lot of the time. It explicitly uses DRM tech from companies that make DRM technologies. At the very least I guess if we want to be precise we could say DRM is often a component of anti-cheat technologies even if anti-cheat isn't explicitly DRM.
I've been paying attention to the gaming space, and I know it still sucks unless you use Steam and Proton (which can't be used without Steam). Valve even pretty much gave up on their console because the developer support just isn't there.
And like I said, DirectX is still a big deal.
Lmao, c'mon dude. Many companies are, in a literal sense, doing it, I gave you an example of one. Splitting hairs about the definition of DRM misses the point that it's treated as a separate thing. I was also only making the point that it's the anti-cheat that stops the games from working rather than issues stemming from compatibility layers, getting your panties in a bunch because of the mere theoretical possibility of removing anti-cheat from a game is ridiculous.
Proton can be used for software outside of Steam (though isn't designed for it) but is made up of open source components that definitely can be used separately from Steam. Proton is a Codeweavers-led project and the vast majority of the improvements Valve and it's contractors have made to Wine and it's supporting projects that Proton rely on have made it upstream. Steam Deck is selling extremely well and major publishers are testing their games and making changes specifically for the platform. Steam Machines was a decade ago, the state of play has changed.
You didn't say DirectX was a big deal, you said 'DirectX has no Linux equivalent'. It does, it's provided by Wine and it's supporting libraries wrapping DX and D3D API calls to SDL and Vulkan. Feature parity is strong and performance is in the same ballpark, as it would need to be given the software is being developed in mind for an anemic mobile AMD SoC. Though in spite of that even DLSS and ray tracing works on hardware that supports it.
I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
> I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
I'm not incorrect. I don't think you have experience with what you say. Have you actually tried to use Proton without steam? Yes, the changes eventually make their way back into WINE but Proton is basically unusable without Steam unless you want to do a lot of work.
Saying Linux has a DirectX equivalent via WINE is preposterous. WINE is offering compatibility with the WINDOWS solution because Linux DOESN'T have an equivalent. WINE might forward some to SDL and Vulkan, but neither of those are anywhere near to being a complete replacement for DirectX.
And I'm not 'getting my panties in a bunch', I was just pointing out a fact. If you want to turn it into semantics and throw insults, that's your choice.
SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous. Is it a complete implementation with perfect compatibility? No, but that's not a realistic goal or expectation even on Windows. One of the first steps I take to get older D3D9 games to work on Windows is to use DXVK, Microsoft's own implementation of their APIs isn't perfect either, having atrophied over the years.
Outside of Steam I use Lutris, which works fine. Though it's rare that I actually need to use it, given I have Steam and the vast majority of my games library is on that platform (as is just about everyone elses). Saying that the reliance on Valve's store is a problem is I guess a valid one in a ideological sense, but practically? Steam dominates PC gaming, it's what matters, even more so than Microsoft's own store.
You're the one who tried to spin up a semantic argument over your overly broad application of the term DRM, I had no interest in getting into that.
> SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous.
SDL and Vulkan are no where close to being equivalent to DirectX. What they are is useful in some scenarios, and good alternatives to some parts of DirectX.
It's not preposterous at all, and I'm sorry to say you clearly have a lack of knowledge in this area to claim otherwise.
Since that's beyond clear to me with your last reply, I'm just going to bow out of this discussion at this point. Good luck.
"equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject. Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
> "equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject.
Yeah? You got a source? Can you show it wasn't in a particular limited context and was used in the same sense you are using it now?
> Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
Nah. They are still not even close to being equivalent in purpose. SDL is a little closer, since it wants to be the API for all aspects of gaming and 3d development, but it isn't quite there. Before you double down on your point, maybe you should really look at everything DirectX offers, and everything the alternatives you claim to be equivalent offer.
> That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
LOL! You've described yourself here and only yourself. I'm not the one arguing semantics. You claimed two things were equivalent, which are not. I simply pointed that out, and instead of just taking the L you, and only you, are arguing semantics. I absolutely agree, it is desperate and stupid.
How about just...actually supporting your claim, if you really believe you are correct? You know, instead of arguing semantics, or trying to deflect and falsely accuse me of doing so?
I'm not up on gaming on Linux because I'm not a gamer (in last 12 months I played no more than 10 hours for that Stellantis game I found on Steam because it's natively compatible with Linux, and never tried emulation/whatever in last decade), so I guess you're right. But usually the need for advanced games is one of the (few) reasons that I consider enough to "allow" a friend to install Windows instead of going for MacOS. Anyway I'll try to catch up a bit about the state of the art of Linux gaming, just to give an alternative to anyone that seeks for any kind of help in that.
Same, same. My sister uses the same Ubuntu LTS laptop with Google Chrome since 2013. Has only issues with Word documents and printing, and she also found she can’t backup her iPhone to the computer. Besides that nothing.
She still uses it, does the dist upgrade and never changed anything or broke anything for the past 11 years.
And I also disagree with the article. I bought a new laptop in 2011, installed Windows 8 on it and used it semi-regularly until 2019, I also never upgraded from Windows 8. I also had no issues at all. I only have computer issues if for example corporate manages my laptop.
I think it's weird/lucky that you had such luck recommending macs - most of my non-technical friends just find them confusing and unintuitive, and it's not because they were only used to windows or something.
As for Linux just working untouched...doesn't mean it doesn't have problems or is secure. I've seen plenty of older people use their browser fine after not running updates for years.
Linux is more of a nuisance to set up, although that can be mitigated by buying hardware with Linux pre-installed. I just did (although I ended up reinstalling because I changed my mind about what distro I wanted).
Once installed it is a lot less troublesome.
I think there are a lot of users like your parents than you think. I think you are right about artists using Photoshop, and gamers wanting the full range of games, but I know Windows small business users who use LibreOffice. A lot of my clients use MS Office, Teams and other MS stuff and I have no problems working with them.
I think that for the "casual user" distros (like Mint) the set up problem is not an issue if you can choose the PC before. For eventual friends that want Linux I always tell them to find a second-hand T-series ThinkPad. They have a fairly large second-hand market where you can buy one for even 200/300€, they are solid laptops (at least the old generations...), they fully support Linux. Sometimes someone arrives with an old entry level laptop that "doesn't work anymore" (translated: it suffers with Windows) and in those case it might happen that you need to to some tricks to make everything work, but these are usually just post-installation procedures, nothing to worry about after everything is set up.
I mean... nuisance... maybe 10 years ago or if you try to install Arch from source, but nowadays the big distros all have very nice and beginner friendly installers. Totally on par with Windows, if not even more user friendly because you don't have to deal with forced logins and navigating dark patterns.
Yea Linux distros are beating out windows now. I trying popOS at the moment and the install process was a couple of clicks. No assistant screaming up me, no internet connection required. Beautiful.
At first glance "10 years ago" seemed right, but then I did the math and it's more like 20 years ago. 10 years ago there was Steam, Plasma 5, Dell sold Linux laptops and Unity has been the default in Ubuntu for a few years already. Time flies.
I had similar luck with another flavor of the distro. but things get complicated with handling files, like opening word files.
I had to switch out due to display drivers, anti-cheat and specific professional applications. we need more work on desktop use in linux just like there is attention to detail on linux for servers and windows/macos for desktop use.
Been on Slackware for over a decade, other linuxen for decades since 2000. Did end up getting a Windows laptop for power usage of Excel, which it's the only thing that'll run, but otherwise don't know why anyone puts up with all the BS that comes with it as a primary system. I'm far too lazy for all that.
> The only rule I adopt for OS advices is "avoid Windows
Why?
Windows is a lot slower than linux, and poses significant hardware requirements. Many people will have to / already have replaced their system in order to be able to run Windows 11. (Windows 11 doesn't even support first gen Ryzen CPUs.)
Linux usually supports hardware for a very long time.
Since (for whatever reason) Microsoft hasn't figured out how to make its store actually useable, Windows users have to download (most of) their apps via the browser. That's not just a lot of effort, it also vastly increases the amount of adware/malware non-technical people download and install.
On linux, installing apps is a breeze; the stores are actually good.
Disk encryption hasn't been an option on (non-pro) Windows until very recently. This means someone who steals your laptop has access to all the data stored on the device.
Linux supported disk encryption since forever.
I could go on. Windows is lacking in various ways.
The only benefit Windows enjoys is being the most used operating system. It is therefore more likely that you're already familiar with Windows and that that specific app you want to use or your employer wants you to use runs only on Windows. (Most notably: Adobe Software, MS Office Software, Video Games.)
The core benefit of using Windows is not even a part of Windows.
Heres a few:
* The UI is slow (compared to linux/gnome and osx).
* There are ads in it.
* There is a lot of unnecessary telemetry.
* Viruses, malware.
* No good first-party packaging solution.
* Real linux > WSL.
* I could go on.
Newest item to add to your list:
* Recall
* (some?) LLMs run better on Linux than Windows - some people report a 50% improvement in tokens/sec.
A lot of that is nonsense. Only the ads and telemetry are issues, recent issues at that.
- The UI is emphatically not slow and is faster than the most popular DEs,
- Viruses and malware have not really been an issue in a decade and Windows has significantly better security than Linux at the moment,
- The Microsoft store is a first party packaging solution frequently used
- Real Windows > WINE
There are problems and issues to be sure, but technically it's actually very sound.
The Windows 11 UI is slow. The Settings app in particular is stupid slow.
I use it on my "corporate job" PC because our architecture is based on .NET and we are still forced to adopt it (at least until we'll definitely pass to .NET Core becoming a bit more agnostic). All I can say is that it's... overwhemingly slow... and it gets progressively slower while times goes on. Every time I install something new that I need it occupies more RAM and I'm forced to control it periodically opening the task manager and killing tray bar processes. People can say "well you could be more careful while installing stuff" but the point is that I am. Moreover the majority of times I need stuff I let the corporate sysadmins to install it on my machine. Options to avoid programs being invasive are hidden, you need to search everywhere to understand how to, let's say, avoid Microsoft Teams to load on OS boot. Someone should explain to me how it's possible that my forklift notebook is a T450 with a 9 years old 15W TDP i5 CPU with Arch Linux installed, and Firefox opens in 2 seconds, and my corporate PC is a fucking stove with a 45W i7 recent CPU and Firefox needs at least 10 seconds to open. And if I, a self-considered kind-of-technical dude, have issues in keeping a work computer clean (so without any game or "casual" program installed), imagine what happens to my less-skilled friend who likes games and needs cracked Photoshop: he will inexorably seek for help from me after things go progressively bad. It happened few months ago with a friend. I took his old T450 (another one) I made him buy to have a PC (now it's my second debian server). Now he has a second-hand MacBook and he's never been so happy. Can't be sure that MacOS actually works better because I avoid it too, but at least people are happy and (I assume) tries to solve their eventual problems alone.
Why can’t you use Rider? Are you on .NET Framework?
Yes our platform is developed on .NET Framework, adopts Microsoft SQL-server and it's deployed on IIS servers. These are old company choices related to legacy support for some customers that we (the "new" generation developers) are slowly pushing away with the help of system administrators. But till then I need to have a copy of the architecture on my laptop for debug/test. Of course things could be improved i.e. with a Windows Server VM into a linux PC, but with colleagues we try to keep stuff on our machines as much similar as possible to avoid conflicts.
That's unfortunate for 2024, doubly so as you can have .NET 8 ASP.NET Core application that would launch for local dev loop using Kestrel, but then get deployed and plug into IIS with ANCM, I did run at some point into the fact that as the time goes on, the ecosystem diverges further and more packages that used to target .NET FW become unmaintained requiring more rewrite work.
VFAT patent enforcement was sufficient to declare a permanent personal vendetta against MS.
Needless to say MS did half dozen such things during the 00s.
So basically irrelevant reasons in 2024.
Yes, that dog there did bite your brother and sister and cousin and neighbour but that is months ago so basically irrelevant reasons in 2024. Go on, give it a hug.
Right. Becuase Apple has never, gasp, done anything anti-competitive or shot down open standards.
What does Apple have to do with this? Also why not mention Google, or Samsung, or Huawei or any other supplier of something which resembles an operating environment?
The article is about Linux so it's assumed the alternative to whatever Microsoft tries to push is found there, not at the Fruit Factory or the Googleplex or the CCP.
Read the original comment I replied to. It's relevant because they mentioned Windows, macOS, and Linux but swear not to use Windows. And people often blindly bash Windows and Microsoft when macOS and Apple are 10x worse, which was my most recent point.
What your point here exactly?
They are both shit companies who peddle shit and anyone with half a brain would be wise to steer clear.
Oh god, Windows is a maintenance nightmare!
Every time I'd speak to some relative, the conversation would invariably turn to "Can you do something about my computer? It's so slow!"
And then I'd go take a look and find it riddled with spyware and bloatware and a thousand million processes running in the background that actively try to undermine uninstalling this garbage. I mean, why the hell does a MOUSE DRIVER require 2GB of space??? And the virus scanners - these are the worst offenders of all!
Linux is a smaller market with fewer threat actors. It's not being pushed into an advertising platform. It runs everything that 90% of computer users want. I can trust most distributions to keep things light and snappy.
It's just no contest when it comes to non-tech-savvy people. Linux makes it all so much better once you get it going. I wouldn't install it on someone's laptop, though (unless the laptop was specifically designed for it). If they want a laptop, macbook.
Microsoft is doing a good job of leveraging MS365 to make sure Linux isn’t an option for business users.
Besides that, desktop Linux frustrates me in some way every time I try it and I’ve been trying since you could get it on floppy disks. The last few years it’s been display scaling. I swear every Linux developer on the planet must be using 1080p screens because the display scaling sucks. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but the settings panel (in Debian and Ubuntu) is always flaky and the fractional scaling might as well not exist.
> desktop Linux frustrates me
Yes, there are unresolved issues, and that's not going away
But consider the alternatives:
I'll take the minor annoyances every day of the week.[1] https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics
"Yes, there are unresolved issues, and that's not going away"
Why?!?
It is totally possible to get rid of those "minor annoyances". Some obscure driver bug, yeah, those are hard as there are millions of different devices and combinations. But UI scaling and other pain points like consistent UI and UX? That can be solved and it would make life on linux easier for everyone who is not comfortable with the terminal - which is the vast majority of humanity.
> Why?!?
I really wish that wasn't the case.
But I've been using Linux since '96, and Unix for way longer than that, and it has always been the case, so likelihood of it remaining that way is high at this point.
Second, I believe it is a characteristic of the Open Source world: anything can be forked and evolved, which leads to a very complex ecosystem, especially when it comes to GUIs. The commercial OS vendors don't really have to deal with that issue.
Third: hardware evolves, and very fast. Super hirez screen are a good example, and the need for thinking about GUIs in centimeters rather than in pixels is something that has caught all OS builders by surprise. Commercial providers built a a solution quickly, and the OpenSource world will eventually catch up, but they'll be late to the game, as usual.
Another example is CPU's with heterogeneous cores, which it took the Linux folks quite a while to adjust to.
Or at a more trivial level, the back-lighting of my laptop keyboard.
This state of affairs (OpenSource software lagging behind wrt H/W evolution) is very likely to continue: H/W makers have, in general, almost zero incentive in providing drivers and/or early technical support for Linux.
Oh, and btw: people believe they do that because opensourcing drivers would expose their intellectual property (see NVidia as one of the worst offenders). In reality, the truth is that it would expose for all to see how shitty, buggy and badly written their software actually is, and therefore they never do it.
Net result: H/W has to be adjusted to after the fact by the OSS community (reverse engineering and whatnot), systematically leading to this chronic problem with OpenSource and H/W.
I buy a new laptop every two years, wipe windows and install Linux. In over thirty years of doing this, I have yet to see a single time where every device in the laptop worked properly right after the install. Never happened.
Yet, I am still a happy user: I do, to a large extent, control what happens on my computer.
The same can't be said anymore of either of Android, OSX, Windows, Chrome
"In over thirty years of doing this, I have yet to see a single time where every device in the laptop worked properly right after the install. Never happened."
In 15 years I experienced it 2 times by chance. But yes, the battery life was probably still lower than on stock windows. But not having to fight your system, but bugs, is a different feel. I still cannot completely deactivate windows antivirus on my all the time offline laptop. Shit like this. If linux would reliably work out of the box, standards might change. But it is a long way, but I believe it can change. There is momentum (and Valve's engagement helped).
As a happy citizen of la-la land, what am I missing with desktop Linux (I use server Linux daily for ML and dev stuff) that’s worth all of the significant drawbacks that come with leaving la-la land?
> what am I missing with desktop Linux
Freedom.
Not something that matters much for many people, apparently.
But to each his own.
[EDIT]: And "significant" is not what I would call it. More like minor annoyances. Living in a golden cage is a much more significant issue AFAIC.
What freedom? You can use almost all of the OSS on macOS too, but you also have better options available (often at a cost). So, how does your freedom manifest itself exactly?
> I'll take the minor annoyances every day of the week.
Maybe some Linux decision makers share this mindset with you, and that's why we are where we are:)
I'm really surprised by this - I use Arch (btw) with KDE Plasma (5 and 6) and I've been using 150% on a 4K monitor for a long time and it has worked very well. Modern Qt apps work fine, browsers too.
I find the GTK side of things a lot flakier, though.
Same here, using KDE Plasma + Wayland on openSUSE Tumbleweed and AMD GPU and have no problems with 3 monitors all set to different fractional DPIs. No complaints for a long time. But yeah had lots of problems in GNOME or other GTK desktops. Not just with fractional DPI but by multi-monitor support in general.
I had trouble with it, but when Ubuntu Wayland support appeared it pretty much solved the problem. Curious as to whether the parent post tried before or after that switch over. Prior to Ubuntu+Wayland it really was unusably bad with mixed screen resolutions for me.
Ah, I find mixed DPI/resolutions is a disaster on Windows too - apps break when moved between monitors quite a lot.
The trick for me was going all in - 4K monitors at 150% only on both Windows and Linux - on Mac I have a 4K portrait and a 5K landscape, and that works fine there.
I've been using 150% on both X11 (since late 2021/early 2022) and Wayland on AMD hardware and it's been pretty much fine.
I agree with you on the repeated frustrations of Desktop Linux. I'm not aware of your experience but personally, I've hopped from Distro to Distro and DE to WM to DE for years and I've come back to Pop!_OS as the choice for my own and friend / family laptops and desktops.
They seem to give me the fewest frustrations in setup and compatibility with all sorts of hardware from Nvidia GPUs to Realtek WiFi and Bluetooth Chipsets.
Their development team is also actively working on a replacement to GNOME that has actual HDR and scaling support. Right now, Pop!_OS is the only one that has given me a decent scaling experience with 3840x2160, even with fractional scaling. I've yet to try their (system76) own hardware but I'm already finding it quite decent for people testing the waters and jumping ship from Microsoft Spyware while not willing to break the bank on the newer Macs (though the M1 Air is still excellent).
Nevertheless, we ought to keep in mind that every new year is the 'Year of Desktop Linux'.
I've had an xorg-config with 125% scaling for almost a decade and it works well.
This is on Void Linux.
Yea I know your pain when it comes to display scaling on a 3840x2160 monitor.
I use Kubuntu and found that if you set display scaling you need to restart to properly have the settings take effect. I normally have it at 150% scaling
> I swear every Linux developer on the planet must be using 1080p screens because the display scaling sucks.
Or 43" 4K screens, which don't need display scaling either...
Agreed. 100% or 200% scaling only is unusable for almost all modern monitors at their top resolution.
As of this month, fedora has been perfect for me. I run a 980ti so often times fedora bugged my screens out, or simply resorted to basic drivers. Really enjoying it now though!
Office has always been the reason to buy Windows since Windows 2, especially for organizations.
Without Office Windows and MS would not be the leading OS and large company.
I've been on and off Linux desktop for more than 25 years. I always gave it a chance, for home use and work use as well. And it always failed to prove it worth the effort. For home use it failed most miserably when it booted up with a black screen after a version update due to an already reported bug with the Nvidia driver, which no one cared to fix before release. Then struggled again for years with finding useful applications, even games, without success, so I gave up. For work use (as a software engineer) I tried to make myself productive on Linux, and yes I liked the terminal, and that was it. Everything else just sucked. Coming back from suspend e.g. was gambling. Multi-monitor usage sucked. PDF editor? Forget it. Productivity suite on desktop, OneDrive synchronization, DTP, Music - all half-baked, full of bugs and incompatibilities. Thank you, not any more. For a server, of course I'd use Linux. For a phone, of course. But for desktop, if 30 years was not enough to mature to something usable, I would stop hoping for seeing it as a gold mine. Always promised, always failed.
Sometimes its just a tiny thing: systemd-login started to suspend machines per default from around 2015. This has resulted in countless "not working" Linux installs on all machines that have a buggy suspend. I literally could not run systemd GNU/Linux on my Acer Aspire because it would "crash" after some time.
I've only used Fedora for the last 3 years as my main OS but some things you've mentioned (which I consider important examples) are far better than you might think. What I know of that has been solved well:
- "Multi-monitor usage sucked" - GNOME with Tactile extension gives you basically what PowerToys doeas for managing windows in Windows which is the top productivity experience of what you can gat on the desktop in general. Better than anything on MacOS for instance. And zero issues with multi-monitor.
- NVIDIA drivers failing on updates - I dind't have a chance to experience that during the last 3 years and I use one of the worst GPU setups that are known to have stabilibty issues on Linux - a gaming laptop with 2 GPUs, Intel + Nvidia. | Moreover, the overall OS stability is top notch. If it's not a clever GNOME extension called Another Window Session Manager saves my work and all opened windows every couple minutes or so (a GNOME session can be revoked after restart).
- "Music (half backed)" - a free Strawberry music suite is one of the best you can get and if that is not enough you can buy Jriver which is one of the top 3 best music platforms in the world. Or host a Logitech Media Server in a docker container locally. Plenty of very good options. (I'm a hardcore audiphile myself).
> "full of bugs and incompatibilities" - I wouldn't say that at all. I consider myself a kind of person that doesn't like even minor unnecessary issues in my life and if Linux wasn't good enough for me I would not use it. (With a disclaimer that the fact that there's nothing like Linux from the privacy and freedom standpoint I'm willing rarely to swallow an issue with it here and there to remain free person in the lengterm).
> Linux might not be OK for content creators, though. Or people depending on a lot of niche software, etc. In that case do what I did and find alternatives. Before you start thinking about switching an OS! Apps are more important than the OS. To be honest I'm pretty sure that with what the future might bring regarding how major operating systems work (as hostile entities) one might want to consider alternatives now regardless of how inconvenient it might feel... Linux is fine. You'll make it work if you want to.
I've been giving Linux a chance every few years since the 90s. Last year I got a new Framework and decided to try again. I tried Fedora and Pop and I can say I'm here to stay. It's Pop's version of Gnome with the tiling manager that I love. Windows has nothing close to it.
I do a decent amount of work in pdfs and I'm surprised that's not good for you. If you're willing to pay for some software there are some really good options. I was using Acrobat before and I am more than happy now, not just because I'm no longer paying $15/mo.
I haven't had a hardware problem on Linux in a while. When was the last time you tried to install it? If you have modern hardware you might be pleased with that part of the experience now.
Pop OS's keyboard experience is phenomenal as well. There's something incredibly intuitive about how easy it is to manage tiled windows + workspaces + accessing common apps with the keyboard shortcuts on popOS that I can't imagine working with anything else now.
Uh, windows has pretty great tiling builtin (albeit disabled by default) and it gets even better by installing Microsoft powerToys (FancyZones) .
It's not fully automated (or "dynamic") like i3/sway but works great. it's in many ways a lot better (i.e the preconfigured tiling setups you can quickly activate by hovering over the maximize buttons etc).
In other ways it's indeed worse, mainly because its not dynamic. But it's not just worse
But if you'd want workspaces you'll get exactly 4 from another 'power toy' and it'll break some video conferencing software for unclear reasons.
I use Windows sometimes and have people I work with that use Windows and in comparison Debian is a breeze. No problems with drivers, no waiting for three minutes because some kernel adjacent service wants to check every file you're deleting in a batch of some thousands, no ads or useless popups about the weather two hours ago, &c. &c.
I agree. Certain DEs and WMs are fun to play with, Void Linux is a fun minimal system to tinker with, Debian is perfect for a fire up and forget server but ultimately commercial software always has the polish and edge I need to get things done at home or for work.
I.e. Affinity vs GIMP, or MS Office vs LibreOffice, Sony Vegas vs whatever crashfest NLE I install on Linux.
So my current pattern is a neutered W10 LTSC for gaming and video editing complimented by a Macbook for work/coding/internet.
I will say that for my parents who just want a desktop with a web browser and basic word processing, Linux Mint + MATE is fine and much more predictable than Windows. I don't have to teach them everything from scratch every few months, as would be the case if they were on Windows and some PM rules that everything must be revolutionised again.
> Coming back from suspend e.g. was gambling.
I can confirm. Using latest KUbuntu + KDE. It's very nice usually, but almost every time I do a major upgrade something breaks. Now, after suspend, the freaking keyboard is not detected. Like, at all. It thinks I am on a tablet, I believe, maybe because I have a touchscreen monitor. This only started after the latest upgrade, and I spent hours trying to fix it, to no avail :(.
And this is a laptop that came from factory with Ubuntu (Dell XPS13)!
Quite frustrating. I really like the KDE DE but because of this sort of problem (it has been touchpad problems and sound issues before) I am seriously considering something else, probably plain Ubuntu though I hate the defaults they come with nowadays.
I use Linux in both my work and personal machine, and I fully agree with you. It's kind of painful. In my case I keep using it because I just cannot stand windows UI, and because I do a lot of work on docker/linux for servers, a d I prefer not to have a virtualization layer.
But yeah, sleep/wakeup never works properly, bluetooth connections are unstable and battery life is abysmal. Among others.
I wish Dell would make their own custom distro tailored to their hardware.
> While there are technical differences between Snap and Flatpak, the gist is the same. Offer a sandboxed, isolated, and universal package format for Linux. Universal package formats are an overall win in my opinion. And make Linux feel a little bit more like one operating system. Still, they are now yet another choice that the developer needs to make when distributing their software on Linux.
Someone has yet to explain to me how the Linux desktop is supposed to just agree on a universal standard for everything without a proprietary ecosystem, at which point it would just be a shittier Windows. And that's not even touching on the fact that alternatives often exist for valid reasons, i.e. Pipewire being obviously better than Pulse, which used to be a de facto standard. Or the fact that some companies like Bitwig have already demonstrated that commercial Linux software via Flatpak is viable - Adobe simply does not care, and they never will.
The irony of Windows users sharing their opinions on the Linux desktop is that they often sound how they picture existing Linux desktop users: people who treat their computers as toys. We're fully aware that using Linux has major caveats.
It's okay to just not like Linux, man. Nobody is forcing you to.
The same article was written billions of time in the past 20 years (at least).
Few thoughts:
- Popularity may imply things that are fundamentally incompatible with the way Linux works. Imagine Windows or Mac giving the possibility of fork, and of course, you will have seen plenty of "distributions" where people tried to fix all of these things that don't suit them, with a lot of hardware problems and software incompatibilities. The author says it himself: Windows 8 was the worst OS they used. So, if Windows 8 would have been forkable, of course plenty of parallel version trying to fix the problems would have appeared. Additionally, not sure forkability is compatible with some economic model such as "getting popular by doing a lot of adverts and costly initiative to win market share, paid by revenue we got by doing user-unfriendly-things (ads everywhere in the interface, capturing users, ...)"
- There are more brands of car or of dish-washing liquid than obviously-not-anecdotical Linux distributions. I'm still not sure why people are so confused about the number of distributions. Just do what you do when you buy a car or a dish-washing liquid bottle.
- Popularity does not really matter. As soon as there are incentives to not be ignored by hardware or software makers (and there is now for Linux, the amount of "compatible with Linux" is impressive when you think of the market share. Probably due to the fact that it is an important systems for some sectors and that Linux users are building bridges), then it does not matter at all to me if my neighbor is using Linux or not, it does not affect me in any way. I'm not sure I understand what is the point of being popular.
I am very happy on my GNU/Linux Debian distro.
Of course, at work, I use Windows. It is bloated. That is not an attack on the OS in general but the added fluff on top of it. I dont want it.. yet on next bootup I see co-pilot at the bottom right of my screen. Eff-off!
Remember -- software piracy is wrong... but I don't actually own it, either! I remember the old license agreements on Windows 95, etc.. I would not be surprised if Windows today is still based on "rights to use it" or similar.
I am not here saying distros like debian could replace windows. A lot of users comftable on Windows will struggle to change. A number of alternative software is a learning curve.. even if it is just as good (or better) than what is used on Windows. We also have IT departments who have to relearn... login system, security, etc, especially if their world is windows-focused.
My wife uses Linux. My eldest child uses Linux. They have no issue. Of course, there may come a time when my eldest needs a peice of software that is Windows only.. but will get to that when I have to (and possible alternatives) -- but I am also a realist... if a child has a specific need (especially a career-based one) then I will install Windows if there really is nothing else.
I would like to properly see the "year of gnu/linux" but despite Microsoft making poor decision with Windows, it will still have things a Linux distro wont... with added budgets at the forefront with PR, legal, marketing.. and all the other departments it has!
Big Companies will also "buy microsoft" for the support whether they think it is good or not.. it is a safety net for job security.
> Of course, at work, I use Windows.
That's not "of course" at all! I've used Linux on my laptop in all of my last four jobs. Five jobs ago I had two computers and one of them was mandated to have Windows...
It is for me -- all companies I work for (except one) during my career has been Windows.
I can see the guys at System76 filling in this gap. They have excellent hardware and their own PopOS is really user friendly for newcomers. Gaming support is also pretty decent paired with Steams Proton.
The problem with onboarding people to use Linux is like trying to convince an iPhone user to use an Android device. Many people are stuck in their respective ecosystem and are used to familiarity, they're not going to switch to linux unless you can get over the burden of switching.
In my anecdotal experience, I installed Linux for a teacher of mine and he had some issues with getting used to it but his kids quickly figured it out and weren't used to Windows or MacOS which made it significantly easier. Putting Linux computers in students hands is honestly the best way to increase adoption and Chromebooks are a perfect example of this.
Has System76's hardware improved in the last few years? I bought a Gazelle 15 during the pandemic, and it has been the worst computer I've ever had. Display issues, overheating, keyboard dies at random, monitor has an increasing number of dead pixels (had several on arrival from manufacturer), had to have an entire motherboard replacement because the power port stopped being able to hold the power cable after just a couple of months and it refused to fully boot without being plugged in (despite having a battery), the battery life is a joke (less than two hours even on low performance mode), the whole case is cheap plastic, the video card will occasionally just not be recognized by the firmware and will only allow me to use the integrated graphics, and so on.
I spent weeks working with System76 support and they tried their best, but the laptop is just a piece of junk, especially for the two grand price point. My next purchase will probably be an ASUS laptop that I'll load either Popos or Linux Mint on.
I have a Lemur and it's the best laptop I've had- great battery life, everything feels snappy and I haven't had a single issue. Bought it during lockdown as well though, so not much of an argument for their hardware improving.
"The first obstacle you run into as a newcomer, is the ridiculous number of different operating systems that exist under the Linux umbrella. The Linux community loves to call them "distros" as a way to express that there are not many differences between them."
I have been trying various distributions over the years. Being someone who likes to compile software, and coming from BSD, I am still not into package managers. (Yes, I tried Gentoo.)
I have arrived at Frankenstein Linux. It's a hybrid of glibc/musl, various portable BSD stuff and custom text-processing utilities. Linux distributions contain multitudes of software I never use; I removed all of it. Every program is statically-linked, even GCC; I keep no libraries other than what comes with the compiler. There is also an area for running dynamically-linked binaries using a musl or glibc dynamic linker, when that need occasionally arises.
I am not a graphics person so Frankenstein Linux is command-line only, textmode. It's smaller than LFS but larger than Tinycore. In the process of creating and using it, I have discovered many interesting compilation-time and run-time facts about various software I use, stuff I see written about nowhere. Linux overall seems generally hyperfocused on binary packages. When in a rush, these can be convenient but I do not think I will ever prefer binary packages over software I compile myself. I am not a fan "package maintainers". I learn nothing about the software I use by choosing binary packages and these maintainers too often make compile-time choices I would never make myself.
> In the process of creating and using it, I have discovered many interesting compilation-time and run-time facts about various software I use, stuff I see written about nowhere.
Doesn't the LFS documentation serve as an entry point for most of this stuff?
For some people it might. But the problems I encounter when compiling software are not addressed in LFS. These problems are usually solved through reading the documentation from the software authors, if any, reading the source code and through experimentation, trial and error.
There is no single project that includes everything I need/want nor that excludes everything I don't want. Also LFS recommends only GNU software; I use some BSD versions of common utilities and other stuff. To me, LFS was one person's project to construct a userland for the Linux kernel according to his own preferences. In that tradition I am doing the same. His choices might seem "conventional" but they are choices and in fact can be varied considerably.
The interesting thing to me about LFS is that it predates all the projects people recommend today as "source-based" distributions or projects for building "embedded" systems. There are so many different choices and variations, enough for endless online debates over what some project "is" or "isn't" and which is better or worse. To me this simply represents the freedom that Linux, as a kernel-only alternative to BSD, allows to construct a userland any way one wants. Not according to some pre-ordained rules.
Compiling each item of userland software oneself, without using a third party's shell scripts and/or makefiles, leads to discoveries of all the author idiosyncracies and quirks that come with it. Some folks might not want to know. Others might discover some useful knowledge. Truthfully, I prefer to spend time learning about the compilation of the individual software rather than spend it learning how to use someone's automated system used to compile all of it in one go.
With BSD, it is easy to trim the userland down to only what one needs. Most of it is in one place, a single source tree. With Linux, I am doing the opposite, building the userland up from nothing. The resources are in various places, spread across the internet. In both cases, I am seeking to understand how the ssytem works.
I like a lot of this article, and broadly agree that Linux Desktop _could_ take off in a bigger way if people like me and you started putting open source developer time into making good apps for it.
However, I think the author vastly overestimates the current state of the art by conflating Andriod and ChromeOS with Linux.
Yes these are technically Linux distros, but their entire environment is build on a stack (JVM or Web) whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible.
A world where JVM GUI apps or Web apps rule the desktop market is not quite the same thing as "Desktop Linux" taking off. However, web apps ruling the desktop market does have the interesting side-effect that it makes the barrier to using Linux a lot lower than it was in the past, so there's that. The fact that it implies "Desktop" is dying doesn't help, though.
ChromeOS is clearly making moves to being more than just a frontend for Chrome with PWAs and an Android subsystem people only use under duress. Google wouldn't have added support for Linux applications and Steam if they wanted to keep it like it was.
>whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible
That's exactly how it should be. To most users noticing what operating system they're on means something has gone wrong, because what they care about is run software, they don't care what OS they're on, and they shouldn't. I want Linux to win because it's open source, not because so enthusiasts with penguin t-shirts can declare a sort of Sid Meier's Civilization's cultural victory. Android and ChromeOS to that end have done a fantastic job, as has the SteamDeck, because it simply works.
>However, I think the author vastly overestimates the current state of the art by conflating Andriod and ChromeOS with Linux.
>Yes these are technically Linux distros, but their entire environment is build on a stack (JVM or Web) whose purpose is to make the fact that it's a Linux distro as irrelevant as possible.
When the most successful consumer Linux distros are the ones that try to be as not-Linux as humanely possible, maybe the problem lies somewhere that many do not want to admit?
Linux is a massive foot-gun in the hands of someone random, it is built with certain assumptions in mind that don't bode well with how companies want to ship you stuff, and how they envision to "keep you safe".
Of course if a company wants to ship you something linux-based is going to be brutally adultetred, or otherwise you might even be able to really own the thing and do whatever you want with it, which is very much the opposite companies want when they sell you something.
I've had a slowish laptop (intel gpu) with Manjaro (Arch derivative) and Steam for a few years now. It's not my main laptop but I fire it up once or twice a week for some light gaming (I have some indie games that I like). It works great for that despite Intel performance not being great, obviously. Every few weeks I use the Manjaro settings tool to update the kernel to the latest and greatest. And of course I update packages regularly with a command line tool called yay.
I can't say it has been completely without issues. But so far I've been able to solve these issues. And this doesn't happen a lot. But probably not a great distribution for beginners as you are expected to solve problems on the command line. But if you know what you are doing, this is pretty nice and stable. I like having rolling updates and not missing out on all the latest stuff.
Having Steam means that Windows is now optional for gaming. You don't need it for most games. They'll work fine on Linux. There are exceptions of course but mostly everything I have just works fine. And between Mac and Linux, I just have no patience for the dreary experience that is Windows.
Most other work stuff you can get via snap/flatpak (I use both). IMHO both need work but software availability is pretty good. But for things I care about, I tend to install them manually anyway so I don't have any middlemen to deal with between me and the software project. E.g. Firefox can update itself if you just install the tar ball from them. Works great.
With most linux distributions, the main differentiators seem to be the amount of effort they do to have users needing to use a terminal window with various degrees of success. With most Linux distributions, you'll find yourself needing a terminal window sooner or later.
IMHO having a good desktop linux distro (or a proper desktop linux experience) doesn't have to correlate to a gold mine, and I'm not sure why the author conflates the two.
If the linux desktop space is advancing so slowly is precisely and because of the opposite: because desktop linux is made and maintained by a bunch of people who do it for free.
Alas, valve has done a pretty good job with proton and steamdeck which is helping the ecosystem. here's to hoping wayland and nvidia drivers 555 with explicit sync[1] we might get something decent next few months.
https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync...
You answered your own question. I don't want my great-grand-children to be the first to have a great Linux Desktop. Ideally, I would like to have it now. Unfortunately, as things go in capitalism, the easiest way to accelerate development of something is with money.
Where's the incentive in any of that? Pour money in linux desktop development for what? (So we can have linux desktop... sooner?)
If there were any money to be made in linux desktop, it would have already happened imo, or otherwise the cost-opportunity is still to high.
If anything, more than a gold mine, looks like a gold sink to me
And don't get me wrong, been on arch for 7 years and i've long since ditched win. But I still don't think there's any meaningful incentives for companies to push for linux desktop.
I got a Windows computer for my six year old because we have to have Roblox and Roblox Studio.
I was stunned by how much clutter, hassle, and adware I had to fight through just to achieve a simplisticity I take for granted with a standard Linux install.
With the tsunami of AI clutter coming for Windows, I suspect desktop linux will finally, after all these decades, have its day.
I've been using GNU/Linux as my daily driver full time since 2012. It does everything I need: I can send and receive e-mails, LibreOffice works well enough for my needs, I can listen to music, watch videos, and play video games (I have an embarrassing total of over 1,000 hours in Fallout New Vegas and Dragon's Dogma combined).
But I recognise that my experience isn't universal and people who have specific needs should use the system that meets those needs.
Desktop operating systems take vast resource to be consistently behaved and presented.
And the strength of Linux is that it is the inverse of consistent…… it’s a bunch of stuff that works well together.
Function over form.
I’d never use a Google desktop os but I might use steam. Steam seems like the most likely desktop os contender, and they have the designers and the developers and the money to make it consistent. The problem is there’s no reason why they’d make a desktop Linux.
The thing about Linux is that it is such a delightful, vibrant and flourishing development environment. There are so many great ways to get an application built for that environment, packaged up, and in the hands of masses of users.
Its not just about the Desktop. There are plenty of window managers with the requisite desktop functionality.
Its also about having the applications users need.
Personally, I'd love to spend the next 10 years building on Linux apps. Its an opportunity for some great advances to be made. I'd focus on multimedia and audio apps, personally. The environment is so conducive to creativity.
Canonical could literally have made it happen if they had kept their great product focus on desktop users..
Don't know how much of their failure to do so is the need for a business model, vs. just crap decisions.
Its not their fault.
They are competing against large roving armies of pure scum at Microsoft, who land up at the door of whichever large corp or govt org that decide to switch, with unmatchable discounts, freebies, bribes, lies and threats to ensure their rent collecting empire is defended at all cost.
The reason Microsoft wins much more than tech is related to tactics used in sales, financial engineering, demand engineering(PR/marketing/advertising) etc.
The EU looked like it was going to do something about the Desktop Market by targeting Microsoft Desktop domination specifically with the Digital Markets Act but what they ended up with some weakass shit about allowing people to uninstall some of the preinstalled apps Microsoft ships.
If Big Tech has to be disintermediated the first step is to understand there is lot more going on outside the realm of Tech that needs to be disintermediated. And a pure one dimensional technology based approach has no chance of making a dent.
>Microsoft, who land up at the door of whichever large corp or govt org that decide to switch, with unmatchable discounts, freebies, bribes, lies and threats to ensure their rent collecting empire is defended at all cost.
I'm relatively new to the industry, but we just saw the exact pattern in our switch from Splunk to Sentinel. A massive discount, and a severely inferior product.
I think Valve's combination of KDE, Flatpak and an immutable rootfs is the right combination (Kinoite also does this, but it plays second fiddle to the Silverblue which uses Gnome). ChromeOS has also been making moves towards becoming a proper Linux distro with their adoption of Wayland, separation of Chrome from the underlying OS, support for running native Linux applications and even Windows applications through Steam.
A lot of people scoff at getting Google involved, but if they put their weight behind Linux applications (or even Wine) then that could mean filling some of the gaps in software support. Adobe might not care about desktop Linux, but ChromeOS? It has widespread adoption in business and particularly education and given a native port, that means every Linux distribution could get access to it too.
Windows has stalled, they're throwing all their effort into AI features that customers don't want. It's a perfect time to make a move.
I’m a long-time advocate of using the best appliance (a Mac) to connect to a “real computer” (a linux-x86_64 build with an NVIDIA card in it).
But the times are changing and paradoxically I have almost the opposite view in 2024 vs 2021.
Desktop Linux can render fonts really well now, you can generally play audio now, ditto 802.11 and BlueTooth and damn the drivers are just good now.
Conversely Apple gear is becoming a pretty credible threat as an on-tile HBM accelerator platform, and while I’m sick unto the death of getting my damned window border radius to me by people other than Steve Jobs himself, I want a Studio on my desk or a Pro sled in the closet, the Sillicon is just too good to ignore now, and the MLX people aren’t sleeping.
I care a lot about darwin-aarch64 now, and could give a fuck less about a windowing system worse than Windows.
I agree with his description of the Arch forums, I've been using them for years as a source of info for solving problems along those provided by Gentoo, and never felt in the mood to write anything there because the community seems pretty hostile towards any kind of ignorance while asking for help or even worst, in the very strongly enforced forum rules. Pity because Arch is really a great distro and provides a solid base for other distros as well. Maybe is not always like that but... Arch forums feel to me like highly elitist and unwelcoming with newcomers. Not even bugzilla.kernel.org feels like that.
1. Dear author, I think Linux probably just isn't for you.
2. We probably don't want the author's concept of "Linux winning" to come true.
Sincerely,
The Gatekeeper.
It's one of a billion of "Here's my proposal for improving Linux: Make it like Windows!" articles that keep getting written, and have been written for 20+ years now.
I picture Mark Shuttleworth furiously writing notes after reading this article.
> All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win.
This is what you're against, right?
and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft
What's funny about this is that Google used to be supposedly the new, friendly company that wasn't as scummy as Microsoft and Apple, and look where we are now.
Do you believe this is "gate-keeping?" If so, is gate-keeping universally bad?
There are actually several problems for desktop linux, or more exactly, for linux on the home computer.
Some are independent of linux itself: the lack of drivers, the lack of some very common software is external to whatever the linux devs (both linux the OS and linux the distributions). I would even say there are very good at compensating it, even if it is not sufficient.
Then there are the things that are linux dependant, such as the publication of software, the updates, the choice paralysis etc
lack of drivers, for what exactly? linux actually has tons of drivers for old like for new stuff.
on the other hand, i recently bought a new windows laptop and tried putting in a new bigger ssd and guess what; when trying to reinstall windows on that the setup program didn't even find that ssd. no, you had to get an extra driver from intel.com - embarrassing. linux comes with all drivers included.
Last time I installed linux on a personal PC was several years ago but it was a nightmare to install the wifi. I just checked a film scanner on my desk and it is impossible to be ran on linux without paying a 100€ third party software. On windows you may have to download the driver yourself, but at least you have one
This is all, and will forever be, a fantasy.
You cannot make a product without profit. Linux wins in the data centre because the corporations who make money off selling compute have commoditized their complement. "Linux" wins when it's Android because Google used Linux as a kernel for their offering - which IMHO is still worse than Apple but fine if you prefer Android. It's not open source, though, none of the apps people use on Android are open source, it's just a cheap software component. The Steam Deck, again, exists to sell closed source games.
I used Linux on the desktop for about 10 years. I left it and never looked back. I have a residual affection for the people who actually write open source. But the zealots, with their rants about evil corporations, their Boy Scout fantasies about running the digital economy on volunteer effort, their response to any criticism with "it works for me, you must be stupid/lying", their poor sod grandparents for whom they've kindly installed Arch ... those people are toxic and deserve to be laughed at.
Zealotry/enthusiasm tends to float to the top and is, perhaps, what you see on the surface when you look at any community.
However, I think that most users of open source software prefer it, not because of their political beliefs, but because of their curiosity. Open source software is made by the community for the community; not to entice outsiders or sell to any would-be customers. The main draw of open source software for a curious person is that they can look inside and tinker with it and they can modify it to conform to their needs.
Saying things like "I tried your software and it doesn't work for me" or "I left it and never looked back" (usually phrased in a less polite manner) doesn't really achieve anything constructive. An open source software developer isn't interested in that kind of "feedback". After all, they're not selling anything. They're just making software for their own needs and/or to satisfy their thirst for knowledge and understanding.
If you are not curious about the inner workings of software, then open source is not for you, and that's fine.
> I used Linux on the desktop for about 10 years. I left it and never looked back. I have a residual affection for the people who actually write open source. But the zealots, with their rants about evil corporations, their Boy Scout fantasies about running the digital economy on volunteer effort, their response to any criticism with "it works for me, you must be stupid/lying", their poor sod grandparents for whom they've kindly installed Arch ... those people are toxic and deserve to be laughed at.
Despite a lot of words written there, you don't mention which issues you had with Linux that made you switch away from it after 10 years.
I made the opposite route. Two years ago I switched to Linux (Linux Mint, to be more specific), and I couldn't be happier. Everything has been working like a charm, and I honestly have to do less tinkering around to keep things working than I used to on Windows (which I had basically to do a yearly fresh install).
Maybe it was your distro of choice?
Zealots aren't specific to one OS/community.
Linux desktop efforts need a BDFL.
Too many duplicated efforts, the wayland migration while needed was a complete mess, and actually the worst time I had using Linux since like 2005. This kind of complete breakage of user experience is unimaginable even in MacOS and it's hostile approach to power users.
I think otherwise it's going to continue being a frustrating two steps forward one step back.
2024 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
> "To fix this fragmentation of package formats, two new formats have been introduced...Snap and Flatpak"
The Nix package manager trounces these two options utterly and completely for anything that's not GUI-based, and even for desktop software if you're prepared to go all-in with NixOS.
Yeah and if you're prepared to spend a serious amount of time learning Nix. Which kind of counts it out from "the year of the Linux desktop".
>" I don’t want the future of the Linux desktop to be some locked down spyware-ridden bastardized version of Linux like Chrome OS."
Hear hear.
As a matter of fact, this is a pretty accurate description of every major OS in 2024 except Linux.
Every post i read with the title "My first experience with Linux" starts with a breaking and an unpleasant experience. because nothing works/worked? I guess Linux distros should prove they work seamlessly. cause the Fedora i installed 1 year ago could not detect my monitor resolution. and i have to write a custom script to fix it. a very hard challenge event for me which is a programmer. i don't think normal users have the tolerance to bother stuff like this.
a lot of other stuff did not work too. and i don't think 1 year is enough time to fix them
My first experience with GNU/Linux was back in 2012. I had just accidentally borked my Windows 7 install on my desktop PC by mucking with the registry and needed to reinstall.
Of course I had data on the machine which I wanted to keep, so I needed a way to get it off my desktop PC and onto my laptop. A quick internet search pointed me to using a Ubuntu live USB. Using it my desktop booted fine and I was able to back my data up with no problems.
Afterwards I reinstalled Windows 7 and tried to go on the internet. Which failed because I hadn't installed the ethernet driver yet. Remembering that the internet worked just fine under that Ubuntu thing I decided to install that instead. It worked fine, and I've been using GNU/Linux ever since. I, however, haven't used Ubuntu since the whole fracas around the Amazon lenses got me distro hopping until I landed on my current mainstays of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch.
> Every post i read with the title "My first experience with Linux" starts with a breaking and an unpleasant experience.
That's just selection bias - the 99.9% of people without issues don't have any reason to publish a rant.
I have a Surface Pro that's just been telling me Win10 is soon coming to its end, and Win11 won't run on this device. I'm considering Linux Mint which is just fine for what I use that device for (mainly web browsing).
I guess part of the problem is if you commit to building a bazaar instead of a cathedral, there's some things (like majestic roofs that don't leak) which are harder to realize.
And then there's the bit where I'll be choosing Mint/MATE (if I don't go full XFCE) because something something GTK3 mumble Adwaita.
A few days ago I had a bad experience installing sshfs on MacOS. On desktop Linux, this was so simple. I really don't understand how people can think that Linux is somehow less user friendly.
Until you get some sort of grass roots movement or large shift from Windows or MacOS, Linux desktop shells will always be niche for the foreseeable future.
> Linux desktop shells will always be niche for the foreseeable future.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing: like every social escape hatch on the planet, the moment it becomes mainstream, it'll likely cease t be an escape hatch and start to become bastardized and unusable for users that don't fit the lowest common denominator profile.
I keep thinking the Windows 10 EOL in 2025 is it.
Some sort of large ad buy by IBM promoting Fedora as an alternative to your computer going to the garbage.
> Desktop Linux is an untapped gold mine! All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win.
Ah, yes. Everything must be monetized.
Very well then, let us ask what is the business model for this monetized desktop Linux?
* People who already use Linux won't suddenly decide to start paying money for support that they never relied on before.
* People who were never into Linux before aren't going to suddenly start jumping ship just because they can choose to pay for a supported distro. Let's face it, most people don't like spending their time thinking about what OS to run, and maybe that's even healthier, since the more I learn about computing, the more I realize it all kind of sucks in one way or another.
* If the idea is sell proprietary software to people on Linux desktops, it's not impossible (as shown by success stories like Steam and Matlab.) However, it also needs to compete with the ecosystem of free software, as well as web-based apps which are inherently OS-agnostic, along with the pre-existing markets like Steam.
* Before our glasses get too rose-tinted, let's remember that although Linux works fine on desktop, it's not easy. You either need to go the Ubuntu route of being opinionated and one-size-fits-all, or you need to accept that the flexibility of Linux makes support difficult. I've been using Linux exclusively for 15 years, so I'm used to fiddling with all the knobs required to keep it ticking over smoothly. I would thoroughly resent any pressure anyone would put on me to change the way I do things. On the other hand, I would never suggest to a newbie that they should try doing things the same way as me. In fact, I advise against it. "Kids, just try ubuntu first. If you like it, great. Come and talk to me again when you're sure you really want to be a weirdo."
Agreed. One of the reasons I use Linux and other open source software, is not to be dependent or beholden to a single company. I can't count the amount of times I experienced or read about others experiencing a company doing a rug pull on users of their software by either changing direction, abandoning the product, or changing licensing terms.
I do donate monthly to a number of open source projects because I like their work, and want them to stick around. But even if they don't, as long as the software is there and the user base is there, someone will pick up the baton and move it forward, even if it is at a slow pace.
I used Linux on personal machines for decades but recently switched to Mac because I no longer have the patience to deal with the constant jank (and these M1/2/3 macbooks are so good).
I would pay for nice vertically integrated Linux laptop where everything works well and I don't have to deal with numerous small problems that amount to a suboptimal experience.
You forgot about people who used Linux and were put off by all that maintenance work required to have updated and stable environment. I would gladly pay subscription for a stable Linux desktop experience.
I am currently using Windows, hate it, but I know that I can update it and be almost certain that it will work tomorrow.
I understand what you're saying, although my experience with Windows was the opposite.
I would have had much less motivation to switch from Windows to Linux all those years ago if I could rely on Windows to just work. Except for some brief optimism surrounding Windows 7, nothing I've heard in the intervening 15 years makes me think that Windows is more stable than it used to be.
I'm not sure what Linux you tried before, but your mention of requiring an updated and stable environment without much work makes me suspect that you never tried a rolling-release distro. Or maybe you did, but didn't update often enough? I've tried a few different rolling release distros, and invariably find that they remain both stable and bleeding-edge so long as you remember to regularly give them a quick update. That way, if there is something wrong with one package, it's easy to identify what changed and roll it back for a bit, and it won't affect everything else in a systemic way.
It just seems we have much different experiences.
In the last 5 years I used Windows on 3 different computers with different configuration (during the same time: 1 for work, 2 at home). I have never had any significant problems with updates nor with stability.
When I used Linux (it was quite a long time ago, but checking comments about desktop on Linux makes me think that not much has changed since then) usually it took less than one year before reinstall or lengthy system repair was needed. I used "versioned" distributions (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora) and rolling releases (Gentoo and Sabayon).
Ironically, I had to do more tinkering to keep Windows running smoothly over the years than I had to do on Linux in the two years since I switched over.
Same here. I am so glad my parents and aunt decided to switch to GNU/Linux. I live quite far away from them and with Windows had to travel a lot for constant problems with Windows (about each month). Since they switched to GNU/Linux, it is mostly just set and forget and now it happens less than once a year that they need my help with their computer. And even if they do it is so much easier to do it remotely.
Nobody prevents you to use RHEL and/or paying someone to remotely manage your personnal computer.
Windows or MacOS aren't any more managed/stable.
> Ah, yes. Everything must be monetized. > Very well then, let us ask what is the business model for this monetized desktop Linux?
On point. Not every (sound) technical decision is monetizable.
The article completely handwaves that "gold mine" statement.
The one set of people that have made monetized desktop Linux work are Valve. And that's because, like Apple, they provide a vertically integrated solution. They sell the hardware and the software that people want to run, with Linux on Steam Deck sitting as a little slice in the middle that isn't directly monetized.
I think this line is really compelling:
> Chrome OS is Linux based. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux said that Chromebooks might be the way Linux finally wins on Desktop.
I'd love it, but I don't see most non-techie people consciously adopting free software out principle. On the other hand, I reallh can't see how new platform developers like the people behind Android, Chrome OS and the Steam Deck wouldn't choose linux. It's there, customizable and works great.
From that angle, it seems like unless Windows or Apple continue to be the desktop platform of choice indefinitely, (i.e. there won't be any new desktop platforms) something linux based taking market share of the desktop at some point becomes inevitable.
Running Linux on my main productivity PC since 2003
Mainly laptops, but also a couple of desktops.
It's not always been easy, especially before 2015-2016.
I tried Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Ubuntu and, finally, Arch Linux.
It is still not easy, but at least quite well documented.
To me everything works pretty well. Everything but a single thing.
Hw-accelerated WebRTC.
Almost all browsers are chromium-based. And Google supports hw-accelerated WebRTC only on Android and ChromeOS. I can imagine the latter (which is a browser centric OS), but why Android?
Firefox hw-accelerated seems not to work too.
My Linux box gets on its knees when doing Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack with video on.
I think this is either intentional or simply stupid.
I do a couple of hours in video conferencing a day on Linux and don't consider it particularly resource intensive. It's another service than those you mention plus one way video on Teams because they don't allow video in Firefox because they hate us all, but still, I think it's a WebRTC thing.
People on Windows seems to have more issues with performance than me.
The two are in conflict:
> This one really annoyed me. I mean. Canonical knows for a fact that everyone is going to install these codecs anyway. Why not include them to save the end user some trouble ?
> not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft
People want the easiest possible thing, but Evil Corp wants the easiest possible thing to be the thing that screws you. The reason those codecs aren't installed by default is because of legal restrictions. "Just STFU and make it work" often involves requiring the user to agree to something which is bad for them, and putting at least a minimum amount of friction in the way of that is a good thing.
And it also puts the friction on other people. If the codec isn't installed by default and then someone else is using it, you will notice this instead of seamlessly using the proprietary one, and possibly complain to them and try to get them to use a free codec like AV1.
The cost, of course, is that it's a minor deterrent to adoption. But the endgame of valuing market share over principles is Microsoft.
This minor deterrant to adoption scales up with lots of other minor deterrents. Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
Desktop Linux must match or exceed that base level of experience if it wants to drive meaningful adoption.
Let's be practical: give users a brief explanation of the downsides before they make choices like installing proprietary codecs. Treat them like adults. Let them have an easier life in favor of getting them on board.
> Users want "it just works" and that's the experience they get with Microsoft and Apple (however bad it is in other ways).
It isn't. With Apple they get "it works or it doesn't" which is crap when it doesn't, because you can't fix it and Apple won't. With Microsoft things are commonly broken, often by accident, and no easier to fix than installing codecs on Linux. But worse, with both of them, is when things are broken on purpose. Almost like Linux. Only not for your benefit, but for theirs, at your expense.
Which puts some lie to the notion that easier always wins. It isn't easier to use Windows, it's a mess of bad code and half of it is out to get you. People use Windows because they have to, or because it came on their computer when they bought it. If you want adoption you need to address that -- do something about the Windows-only apps. Get more Linux PCs into the stores.
Which are the things that are happening. Things that used to need Windows are now websites or mobile apps. Google's money got Chromebooks onto the store shelves. And if you include ChromeOS, Linux has gone from <1% market share in 2010 to now having as much desktop market share as Mac did back then. All of which at the expense of Microsoft, because now Mac has twice that much.
Being opinionated isn't the problem, it's a feature. The competition is opinionated too, but its opinion is that you're cattle to be milked.
The author declares that...
"All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win."
... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop. Snaps, which the author lauds, are their thing! The author laments that Ubuntu didn't install the media codecs, but they have a panel during install asking if you want to install commercial stuff including such things. That could be more prominent, admittedly.
The real problem is that there's just so much commercial software out there and most of it runs on Windows or (often rather grudgingly) on Mac. It's been an issue for decades.
Back in the mid 90s I was working with "Windows for Workgroups" at the same time as messing with Linux. Linux was enormously superior at that point; pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protection, high quality scheduling, and an excellent networking stack versus a very clunky OS balanced precariously on top of DOS.
But Linux didn't have Microsoft Word, it didn't have Excel, it didn't come pre-installed if you bought a PC, and it couldn't run MS DOS software. Windows won, and once Windows NT was out it was a much more even race even on the technical qualities.
The best thing that ever happened to desktop Linux was the commercialisation of the web, because it effectively made a huge swathe of important software usable on Linux. This is sufficiently the case that I've been able to use Linux (usually Ubuntu) at work for several of my recent gigs, but I still can't use it at my current day job (for example) because the miscellany of Data Loss Prevention software doesn't run on it but does run on Windows or MacOS.
I'm not sure Linux will ever "win" the desktop, though the share of desktop might increase in proportion to the dwindling of that market versus mobile devices.
Yup. I recently read a fascinating article about Apple selling a Mac emulator (similar in usage to the open source Basilisk and SheepShaver emulators) for Solaris back in the mid-1990s. There actually was a market for Unix workstation users who needed access to proprietary software packages that only ran on Windows or Mac OS. Even though Unix ran circles around DOS-based Windows and the classic Mac in terms of stability and power, Unix users still needed to be able to collaborate with their Windows- and Mac-using colleagues.
Come to think of it, this also reminds me of why certain Lisp machine vendors such as Texas Instruments and Symbolics made Lisp machine expansion cards for Macs: this provided Lisp machine users the opportunity to use desktop software tools without having to buy two physically separate computers, a very expensive purchase in the early 1990s. (While I’m on the topic, even Apple shipped some Mac models with expansion cards that had x86 chips for the purpose of running DOS and Windows).
> ... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop
So far I see Redhat owns GNOME and all the base systems, and they already do own the linux desktop. Good so.
I'm building a desktop app for mac/win/nix in tauri. Its pretty sweet although I'm not a big fan of rust so far. It's just weird.
The hardest thing to solve here is standardizing the ecosystem of freedom. What's "lovely" about this ecosystem is that nobody cares and nobody tells you how to run your desktops. Want something lightweight? Go with TinyCore or Puppy. Into gaming? Check out SteamOS. Home theater? Use Kodi. Focused on security? Kali is the way to go.
I even built my own distros for my product to automate endoscopy machine interfaces. You can build whatever you want to solve whatever problems you have.
Trying to solve this problem is like merging all the transcontinental countries into one union called USSR.
I really admire any billionaire or community that continues Mark Shuttleworth's effort to raise awareness about Linux desktops.
I really love Linux Mint. I actually loved it so much that I kept using it for years.
Yeah, me too. I discovered recently that I had been using Linux Mint for 10-12 years. In 99.99* percent of cases, it just works out of the box. And it has all those proprietary codecs and other things that are a pain to add with many other distros.
As far as I'm concerned, Mint just works so don't try to fix it.
* I neglected to add a WiFi card to my desktop when I was customising the order from the Lenovo factory. I just threw a USB WiFi dongle into it without investigating what sort of weird chip it used. That means I just run a script to install a driver for it during installation of a fresh system. No biggie.
Good article. To the author, why don't you do this yourself, I think it is a brilliant idea?
The problem is not only to make a desktop, nobody would implement it (NIH-Syndrom, thats why we have 12 karillion Linux Distributions), you have to ship your own distro.
Desktop Linux can not be a goldmine from its nature and its userbase. People using Linux does not want to pay for anything and first thing which they will do is to fork your code and "release it" for free because of GPL.
When you have no chance to monetize it, how it can turn into a goldmine?
Fun fact, I spent more money on GNU/Linux and donations to FOSS projects then I ever have for Windows and its software. Why because it is just better more user respecting and is constantly improving, and the opposite is true for Microsoft and their malicious business practices and bad products that are getting worse by each release.
Google made money on Android. As long as you're not making direct changes to Kernel code, you're free to close source anything you add. The existence of AOSP didn't prevent the Playstore or google play service from making Google the sole controller of Android. That's how it turns into a goldmine.
Android is kind of pointless without phones it is running on, so having a code does not mean you have any use for it. Same for routers using Linux. Kind of pointless to have source code when you don't have the hardware.
I use popos based on Ubuntu.
Pros: - tiling support - workspaces - all Ubuntu apps
elementaryOS seems to fit the feature description. Can anyone share their experience with it?
It's ok if you don't know how to install debian and pick a desktop environment or can't install mint mate for some reason.
I daily drove it. Mint + Cinnamon is more stable.
I think the quote from Linus is spot on.
"Linux fanboys have ruined it’s (Linux's) image. Most of them take pride in doing simple things in an over complicated manner and wonder why people won’t switch."
(Couldn't find the source, Linus might not have said this)
Pretty sure it's fake.
I really wish there was a filter for HN articles. These threads are so useless, boring, and stupid. I feel like I could recite all the fanboy cliche from every major OS by heart at this point.
I have never used ChromeOS but isn't it basically a remote desktop?
Originally you say it was a kind of kiosk operating system that ran a Web browser with Google apps deeply integrated to enable things like a little local file storage.
Some years ago, they enabled you to access a real local Linux operating system, and install and run arbitrary things.
I think but don't know that local Linux gives me a container or windows subsystem for Linux vibe.
It's sufficient to use a chrome book as a local dev machine, and I think googlers do that daily.
It was a weird kinda locked down linux with some google proprietary stuff last time I touched it, about 3 years ago.
tl;dr: Linux on Desktop could happen but isn't currently happening. The author recommends that you work to make it happen.