"Why Linux Is Still Not Ready For The Desktop"

[bridgman]

CSMT show fps increase only if you are CPU bound in XYZ game... Well, CSMT just saves some CPU time because it move OpenGL calls into a separate thread

CSMT is also same thing what nvidia use in their drivers with __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS variabile. It just move OpenGL calls out of main thread and that is it some games on some hardware may like it again only if you are CPU bound, otherwise there is no difference

I thought Kano's post was about wine/cmst vs native (which I took to mean OpenGL), not wine w/o csmt vs wine with csmt.

[blackiwid]

For those saying OS X is a rip off of Gnome 3, you had it backwards.
I use Linux everyday, but everything I want it to do is done in Terminal. That's why now I only use Linux through SSH and haven't used its shitty Desktop interface for a year. And there's nothing I missed.

sry I am not that thrilled with text based browsers. with w3m you have to first scroll down 5 sites menu. I now web especialf forums should be accessable through newsreaders that would be way way better experince but its not here or did you found a nntp proxy of this forum?

but even then how do you watch videos? aalib?

I use stumpwm emacs for most stuff and konqueror as browser (keyboard driven) but I cannot not use desktops. multimonitor support on cli should be also difficult?

[dungeon]

I thought Kano's post was about wine/cmst vs native (which I took to mean OpenGL), not wine w/o csmt vs wine with csmt.

Yup other then possibility that it is not so polished renderer with native version in question... yes i to thought that too - windows DX game with wine+csmt vs native linux OpenGL game performance. If we have similar barely working variabile in mesa drivers like nvidia, and native linux game is also CPU bound i am not sure wine/csmt will be faster then under that env var on native.

It is not good comparison to me when for wine/csmt you have out of main thread OpenGL calls hack to save some CPU time and instead use more GPU time, and with native version (if it is also CPU bound) driver does not boost fps with similar fashioned hack

[chrisb]

My opinion has always been they try to do too much. OSS desktops are trying too hard in my opinion. There are only limited number of things a desktop needs to present to it's user. And them limited number of things need to be configurable. Gnome doesn't do a quarter of what a desktop needs to do and it doesn't let the user configure the little it can accomplish, and then it provides hundreds of "extensions" that only meet the needs of very few people. KDE does too much and is too configurable. Of the two, I think KDE is better.

With the exception of how bad xfce4 handles menu entries, I think it's the best one. It's simple and does all a desktop needs and little else. Though I'm not happy with its move to GTK3. I'm just not interested in all the intentional breakage the GTK devs are pushing on people. Personally I think they do it just for the laugh.

I agree and personally think that is one of the things that held back the Linux desktop. The problem was that developers seemed to want to recreate a "desktop environment" ie. desktop+all_the_apps instead of just focusing on doing one thing and doing it well. There was never a good reason for Gnome and KDE to have their own web browsers, email clients, office word processors, spreadsheets, terminals, IDEs, games etc. Why did Gnome and KDE both think it was necessary to develop all the apps? It makes no sense. It's a lot of effort wasted on duplicating software for the sake of being able to say "this is our X because it uses our UI toolkit" when in reality users don't care about the underlying toolkit.. Funny that Firefox became the most widely used web browser on Linux when it wasn't tied to Gnome or KDE or either toolkit. Same with OpenOffice. And probably Thunderbird and a bunch of other apps too.

[Kraut]

I agree and personally think that is one of the things that held back the Linux desktop. The problem was that developers seemed to want to recreate a "desktop environment" ie. desktop+all_the_apps instead of just focusing on doing one thing and doing it well. There was never a good reason for Gnome and KDE to have their own web browsers, email clients, office word processors, spreadsheets, terminals, IDEs, games etc. Why did Gnome and KDE both think it was necessary to develop all the apps? It makes no sense. It's a lot of effort wasted on duplicating software for the sake of being able to say "this is our X because it uses our UI toolkit" when in reality users don't care about the underlying toolkit.. Funny that Firefox became the most widely used web browser on Linux when it wasn't tied to Gnome or KDE or either toolkit. Same with OpenOffice. And probably Thunderbird and a bunch of other apps too.

Yes and xfce is kind of doing the same, just not that overblown.
Being a longtime icewm and then xfce user does not mean I have to stuck with there "branding" applications. I can cherry pick what ever I want. For example I use k3b(Well ok that is a long time ago), kwrite, kfind, ktorrent. This are really good applications even when they have to load all the heavy libs in the background... and there own sound server. -_-
But KDE or gnome itself... I really hate them. They put "features" so far ahead of usability and performance. I cant speak for there current status. But I remember them as heavy, buggy and crashy no matter what distribution I tried. Icewm at the time was the savior of my sanity.

I mean its nice to have like konqueror when you find a website that manages to break/crash firefox. But I don't think that is what they had in mind when they made it.

[Azrael5]

just to understand: chormium based browsers and firefox use angle wrapper d3d11/opengl so to provide hardware acceleration.Browser in linux systems should lack of angle right?

[nslay]

sry I am not that thrilled with text based browsers. with w3m you have to first scroll down 5 sites menu. I now web especialf forums should be accessable through newsreaders that would be way way better experince but its not here or did you found a nntp proxy of this forum?

but even then how do you watch videos? aalib?

I use stumpwm emacs for most stuff and konqueror as browser (keyboard driven) but I cannot not use desktops. multimonitor support on cli should be also difficult?

Right, this is why I said that the Unix desktop is mostly used to draw a web browser and a terminal. This is how a lot of experienced Unix users use a GUI-based Unix-like desktop.

And why is that? For a lot of system administration and miscellaneous things, the command line just beats everything else. GUI tools are secondary. CLI tools are king (especially on a system designed for terminals!).

I said it already, I'll say it again:
Linux is one of the easiest Unix-like systems to use.
Linux is one of the worst/hardest Windows-like systems to use.

And why do you suppose? Because it's a completely different concept to Windows! It's like skiis vs bicycles. They work differently!

[bwat47]

I tried using linux for years and eventually ended up switching to a mac/osx for my laptop, it just works better. I wanted so much to love using linux but I found that I ended spending way more time reporting bugs, working around bugs, and distro hopping than actually doing anything productive on my computer. I still mess around with it on a spare laptop sometimes but I am no longer very interested in trying to get it working as a daily driver, at least for now.

[blackiwid]

Right, this is why I said that the Unix desktop is mostly used to draw a web browser and a terminal. This is how a lot of experienced Unix users use a GUI-based Unix-like desktop.

And why is that? For a lot of system administration and miscellaneous things, the command line just beats everything else. GUI tools are secondary. CLI tools are king (especially on a system designed for terminals!).

I said it already, I'll say it again:
Linux is one of the easiest Unix-like systems to use.
Linux is one of the worst/hardest Windows-like systems to use.

And why do you suppose? Because it's a completely different concept to Windows! It's like skiis vs bicycles. They work differently!

my operation systems name is emacs

so I dont now what you are talking about for some tasks emacs has also terminals but if possible I have function for everything on my emacs command searchfield, just wrote a few kodi control commands for emacs (over the json interface)

the emacs operation system allows to not use terminals for nearly every task maybe even the new emacs browser (eww) gives a good alternatives with good page modes and something like tapatalk build in.

the funny part I am not really are thrilled about wayland because for tiling wms and emacs operation system it brings not really much except maybe faster boot time what does not matter much.

[computerquip]

Right, this is why I said that the Unix desktop is mostly used to draw a web browser and a terminal. This is how a lot of experienced Unix users use a GUI-based Unix-like desktop.

And why is that? For a lot of system administration and miscellaneous things, the command line just beats everything else. GUI tools are secondary. CLI tools are king (especially on a system designed for terminals!).

I said it already, I'll say it again:
Linux is one of the easiest Unix-like systems to use.
Linux is one of the worst/hardest Windows-like systems to use.

And why do you suppose? Because it's a completely different concept to Windows! It's like skiis vs bicycles. They work differently!

So the entire market share that we're lacking is just a hoax? Nothing needs to change in the desktop environment, it's perfect?
One reason why we have so many distributions is the difference in out of the box experiences in the desktop. We can just as easily have one specifically for the sake of adhering to what people like in Windows and MacOSX... which just so happens to be more user friendly and something people tend to like. There's no one specific way for a Linux environment to work.

I don't think Ubuntu should be considered the ideal for this situation at all for what it's worth. Ubuntu/Unity feels like Windows 95 in stability terms compared to Windows 8.1 or MacOSX. It's also just an odd interface that not many from MacOSX or Windows can relate to or like at all. I can't stand Unity... I find it convoluted and messy. I can only imagine how someone from a clean MacOSX environment would feel.

I understand that there are DEs other than Unity but presentation is part of the key to any product. If you're selling gold but presenting shit, people are gonna think your gold is shit. In this case, the gold really is shit in some cases...