Schaller On Why The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" Hasn't Happened

[WolfpackN64]

I will give you a real life example.

My brother is a student at another city and he is happy with his Minted laptop.

However , teachers of them are preparing Powerpoint slides with some formulations in them.

Did you try to open them with Libreoffice? It was a real mess. So he was happy with his laptop immune to usb viruses but he couldn't see the formulas with Libre.

I installed Win7 and Office 2016 on a VM so his laptop is fully ready for educational purposes.

I can do it but most people won't do it and say " Screw Linux , i 'm gonna put Windows on that computer "

Ms Office is the market standart so everybody uses it.

That was the part about how Linux is not user friendly yet. Also Wine is a good project but mostly it has too much hassle for a standart user.

I can understand MS being the current standard, but that's also whyI complain about it. I'm also a university student and when a certain course has only uploaded their files in pptx. I ask the professor or staff to upload in .pdf at the very least. So far I haven't been turned down once. .docx files isn't that much of a problem om LibreOffice anymore.

[WolfpackN64]

This wouldn't change much! Most people use what is the most convenient to use, and linux i use because it is for me at the moment still convenient for developing c++ projects. But as a dekstop alone i would not use it. I helps nothing to hide the real reasons. When you take a close look at many open source projects you have to notice a lot of crap! Real shit which really harms the open source resources. Because others waste a lot of time on building something on shit, and it takes a lot of effort to build on shit and to have a result that is not a complete shit. And i talk here for example about Wayland, Qt, GTK . I was also a fan of Wayland and Qt till i got my hands very dirty discovering a lot of shit under the hood.
If it continues like this, i dont see a good future for the linux desktop.

That's a perception issue then, because I would be really suprised if most components of Windows 10 have better code quality then most Minux components.

[WolfpackN64]

Calc is not Excel.

We're frankly better off making Wine stable enough for these applications that it's a no-brainer.

Frankly, I don't care. Excel is proprietary and we learned Calc in school anyway.

[Sonadow]

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers

Please drop the bull. The reality is USB 80211ac is support by Linux only one catch at this stage it has to Broadcom device support by brcmfmac and usb and that has been the case since 2012 in mainline Linux kernel 3.2 or basically 5 year ago or 4 years ago in major distributions. Linux is a lot like Apple this way you cannot plug random devices in and expect them to work..

No, you drop that bull. There are NO USB 80211ac adaptors in the market using the chipsets supported by that pathetic brcmfmac driver. Nobody cares what the kernel claims to support if there are NO products that use them.

I know what the hell I'm talking about because I buy large amounts WiFi adapters from all places including unbranded devices from TaoBao and AliExpress, and big-name products like ASUS, D-LINK, Buffalo and TP-LINK from the typical computer shops. Every single one of them that features 80211ac came with a Realtek, MediaTek or Broadcom chip, ALL of which are not mainlined, not even as staging drivers.

And for the record, all these chipsets that Linux don't support? Sorry, there's an OS X driver for them. So I can damn well buy any random hardware I want and stick them into OS X because OS X has a big enough market for the vendor to justify releasing a Mac driver for download

[oiaohm]

No, you drop that bull. There are NO USB 80211ac adaptors in the market using the chipsets supported by that pathetic brcmfmac driver. Nobody cares what the kernel claims to support if there are NO products that use them.

No you absolutely don't know what you are talking about. They are hard to get you have to go outside aliexpress they are made on demand I only got 5 last week..

Realtek for most of there stuff there is dkms drivers made for Linux. These are source code drivers

And for the record, all these chipsets that Linux don't support? Sorry, there's an OS X driver for them. So I can damn well buy any random hardware I want and stick them into OS X because OS X has a big enough market for the vendor to justify releasing a Mac driver for download

Funny what you said Mac Driver for download. So not a driver that is part of mainline OS X kernel.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/broadcom-sta-dkms

Every single one of them that features 80211ac came with a Realtek, MediaTek or Broadcom chip, ALL of which are not mainlined, not even as staging drivers.

Is there another option for Linux drivers yes DKMS drivers. This is why I said we need a nice tag to go on hardware when the drivers are mainlined. So we don't end up with a ever growing list of DKMS drivers to be added.

https://www.broadcom.com/support/download-search/?pf=Wireless+LAN+Infrastructure

Yes binary drivers done the way vendor want to for Linux.

Remember does Apple provide support on those OS X drivers the answer is no. If vendor wants to provide binary blob drivers that what you get even with Linux and the same support problem as OS X of being only supported by the vendor.

So yes you find Realtek, MediaTek and Broadcom releasing drivers for Linux. Some they mainline. Some they do a good job of making them decent dkms drivers. Some are huge stacks of binary blob and some are the worst design of kernel patch possible. So Linux has enough market share for the vendors to release drivers the problem is will they do a quality job on the drivers.

The reality is OS X with a wifi card can end without working drivers when you do a OS X version update. The reality here there is not much difference. Linux dkms design does not prevent vendors from doing binary blob drivers just as stable as OS X full binary drivers.

There is a difference between usable under Linux and supported by Linux. Please remember Linux is the Linux kernel project. Now badly made dkms hard to install that is vendor problem and you should be up their ribs.

[Dukenukemx]

The reason the Year Of Linux hasn't happened is the same reason why I haven't switched my gaming PC to Linux, and that's because not every application I want to use will run on Linux. It's just that simple. Not even Mac with the resources of Apple has seen the year of the Macintosh for the same reason. There are apps that I need to run but only run on Windows. This is a big problem. No amount of effort to port or make alternatives will fix this. As a gamer this is a bigger problem.

If Wine wasn't a total pile of trash, we would have had our Year of Linux. But the Wine devs are too busy with Android and aren't focusing on compatibility. We need Wine to work in order to have our Year of Linux because people aren't going to dump Windows for an OS that doesn't have Microsoft Office and OverWatch natively working. Which yes I know they work in Wine but Wine is so flinky that one update later and these things can be broken. Focus on Wine, and the people will come.

[coder111]

Just curious, which ones? On which Wine? 64 or 32 bit? Because I've had quite good success rate in running games over Wine.

...I'm still waiting for my old games from 1995-1998 to work...

[Sonadow]

The reason the Year Of Linux hasn't happened is the same reason why I haven't switched my gaming PC to Linux, and that's because not every application I want to use will run on Linux. It's just that simple. Not even Mac with the resources of Apple has seen the year of the Macintosh for the same reason. There are apps that I need to run but only run on Windows. This is a big problem. No amount of effort to port or make alternatives will fix this. As a gamer this is a bigger problem.

If Wine wasn't a total pile of trash, we would have had our Year of Linux. But the Wine devs are too busy with Android and aren't focusing on compatibility. We need Wine to work in order to have our Year of Linux because people aren't going to dump Windows for an OS that doesn't have Microsoft Office and OverWatch natively working. Which yes I know they work in Wine but Wine is so flinky that one update later and these things can be broken. Focus on Wine, and the people will come.

A majority is never needed. You say that Apple never saw a Year of the Mac, but OS X has access to Mac versions of just about every single indispensable software used in the industry today. In fact, in Apple's case there are even certain indispensable industry software that are exclusive to Macs.

All that is needed is enough mass and visibility, and hardware / software vendors will take notice. And Apple is definitely very visible with its 10% market share.

[JPFSanders]

In all my years using Linux, both as a hobbyist and professional, in my opinion nothing has caused more damage than the whole Gnome 3/Unity/KDE 4 fiasco.

Fragmentation, lack of drivers, lack of stable APIs aside;

Not only one, not only two but the three flagship desktops absolutely suck orders of magnitude and are way, way worse than the previous versions, and then take years to mature and still suck balls it is not hard to see why the Linux desktop is a miserable failure.

If it wasn't for XFCE/Mate in my case I would be using windows, plain and simple. (And this is with Thunar freaking out just copying and moving files around for more than a year.)

To be a Linux Desktop user is to be a masochist.

Having said that I think the future is bright, because MATE & XFCE keep getting better and better, at some point they're going to reach a decent level of maturity.

I hope RH and the Gnome guys see the light at some point, I lost all hope on KDE a long time ago, I do not even bother anymore.

The Linux Desktop needs what it has on Linux Server:

D E P E N D A B I L I T Y

[molecule-eye]

The main problem is no availability direct from the computer oem. Do you think the average computer user is going to buy a computer, download a linux iso, install it over windows, troubleshoot it, find alternatives to the programs they're used to on windows/mac, troubleshoot some more...Keep dreaming!