> I am not sure I follow. You mentioned somewhere else that Lubuntu was the one that gave you the least problems and that you are now using windows. Coincidentally, Lubuntu is the flavor that looks like the most with older versions of Windows.
> To me it looks like your assumption is that anything that does not look like Windows 2000/XP is "worse"
That's a very condescending conclusion to draw. I found LXDE less complicated and significantly snappier than alternatives that had their own Ubuntu derivative. I chose an Ubuntu derivative because Ubuntu has the widest range of supported software.
But hey, it all has to do with how it looks right? Thinking like that by the Linux Desktop community is why you guys still aren't taken seriously.
> What the big companies are doing are related to the infrastructure side of things and have nothing to do with the desktop
The desktop experience is not wholly separated from the infrastructure beneath it. The init system, the event subsystem, hardware management, network management, sound system, display server etc. are only abstracted in the leakiest of ways.
> Anyway, perhaps the issue is that you are conflating "Linux" with "Open Source Desktop" and expecting a central place to solve all solutions?
Unfortunately it pretty much is the only option that is even remotely viable. But mostly I focus on problems with Linux because it has by far the most evangelical community.
I am not going to be debating what exact problems you had, but I must be extremely lucky if all those years I never had any kind of showstopper critical issue that made me think "Ok, I can't deal with this and I have to go back to a proprietary desktop".
It's been at least since 2012 that I had installed Linux and couldn't connect a printer or scanner. Meanwhile my wife's laptop on windows asked to reinstall drivers every time she wanted to print something. Webcams? No problem. Wi-fi? No problem as long as I didn't try to use a chipset that was either too obscure or too new and unsupported.
The one thing that I gave up on having on my laptop is low-latency audio to connect a guitar and use software audio effect processors. But the way I solved this was by using a separate old laptop with a custom kernel dedicated to be my "guitar effect box". I still didn't have to give up my freedoms and I did not have to give up any functionality/comfort.
> But hey, it all has to do with how it looks right?
I believe you when you say that LXDE was snappier than the other Ubuntu alternatives, but were the alternatives slower than whatever version of Windows you have now? That will be very hard to believe.
So forgive me for sounding condescending, but you went with probably the most obscure and least popular Ubuntu flavor - the one that has probably almost to no funding from Canonical and maybe a handful of developers interested on it. What were you expecting, exactly?
If Ubuntu was bad for you, maybe try Fedora? If you wanted a more knowledgeable community, maybe try Arch? Why instead of sticking with your preconceptions of how things should work, you ask what are the others doing that let them be productive on a FOSS Desktop? Why is it that upon hitting difficulties your reaction is to go back to the comfort zone of a proprietary and familiar system?
"Is FreeBSD ready for the desktop? Yes and no. Yes, in that I have a very nice FreeBSD laptop where everything works the way I want. But no, in that it took me two months worth of fiddling with this in my spare time to fix some of the "glitches" which arose; while there wasn't anything particularly challenging, I expect that most people would give up long before they fixed all of the issues I ran into.
On the other hand, can FreeBSD be ready for the desktop? Absolutely. I've fixed the issues I ran into — and once we have FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE with packages built for that release the process of bringing up a GUI will be much easier, as well. The biggest thing FreeBSD needs is to have developers acquiring laptops and carefully working their way through the issues which arise; the FreeBSD Foundation has already started doing this, and I hope in the months to come they — and other FreeBSD users — will publish reports telling us which laptops work and what configuration they need."
> I am not going to be debating what exact problems you had, but I must be extremely lucky if all those years I never had any kind of showstopper critical issue that made me think "Ok, I can't deal with this and I have to go back to a proprietary desktop".
Ugh. Thing is, it isn't about luck. It's about use cases and yours must just match how Linux works better. I'm going to take a wild guess that most of what you use a computer for is browsing the internet and either web or unix development.
> So forgive me for sounding condescending, but you went with probably the most obscure and least popular Ubuntu flavor - the one that has probably almost to no funding from Canonical and maybe a handful of developers interested on it. What were you expecting, exactly? If Ubuntu was bad for you, maybe try Fedora? If you wanted a more knowledgeable community, maybe try Arch?
If you had been paying attention instead of being a typically dismissive Linux evangelist, you'd have noted that the vast majority of my problems had to do with the Ubuntu part of Lubuntu. You know, the part that's common to all Ubuntu derivatives? Not to mention, as I said, I've tried many distros, popular distros, unpopular distros, wildly divergent distros, etc, they all have pretty much the same problems because the problems are inherent to how Linux userspace is constructed!
But whatever, you are just like the rest of the Linux Destkop community. You have made using Linux a part of your identity and cannot stand criticism, so you just become insulting, condescending, and generally dismissive of any issues anyone is experiencing.
> Why instead of sticking with your preconceptions of how things should work, you ask what are the others doing that let them be productive on a FOSS Desktop?
Because they are doing different things than I do! And when you want to do something different than what the Linux Desktop community does, their only advice is to not want to do that.
> We must have very different thresholds for defining "remotely viable".
Clearly. Which is pretty much exactly my point: Linux works for you because it fits your needs well, and it doesn't work for a lot of others, like myself, because it doesn't fit those needs well. If you're going to run around telling everyone how great your desktop is and that they should all use it, but refuse to recognize where it falls short, then you shouldn't be surprised when people don't want anything to do with your community.
Frankly, you are some of the most frustrating assholes I've ever had to deal with in computing.
> everyone how great your desktop is and that they should all use it
I don't know which part I am telling you to use what I am using it. The point I tried to make the whole time is (a) there are so many different alternatives that are free and open source that it is increasingly hard to believe that going to a proprietary OS is the only viable solution and (b) those people that are still not being fulfilled by free alternatives should contribute to the development of a free alternative, or they will be SOL when the company screws them over or denies them freedoms.
> it doesn't work for a lot of others, like myself, because it doesn't fit those needs well.
You try to justify your avoidance of Linux by complaining of extremely low-level stuff (init stuff, networking, event notification systems, etc) and now you are talking about higher level "user needs". I link to an article about how people using FreeBSD are also successfully using it as a daily desktop and how the shortcomings are known-yet-solvable. Your answer then is that "you do things that others don't do" (yet, people using Windows do it?)
So what is it? What is your use case that requires you to be nit-picky about the low-level and at the same frustrates you at the high-level? What are the "different things that you do" that can only work on a proprietary OS? In a world with so many different-yet-imperfect ecosystem of different desktop systems, what is it with Windows (aside from convenience and familiarity) that "works with you, instead of against you"?
> most frustrating assholes I've ever had to deal with in computing.
All of my frustrating asshole preaching boils down to convenience and familiarity should never be an excuse to accept giving away your freedoms.
I put the FreeBSD link as way of saying "Ok, if you really don't like the Linux userland and if you still want to support Free alternatives go take a look at FreeBSD". Your reaction is to double down on the idea that I am here to defend "the Linux community" or that this is "my identity".
If me saying convenience and familiarity should never be an excuse to accept giving away your freedoms while refusing to accept your justifications and rationalizations to keep using a proprietary OS makes me a frustrating asshole, then tough luck.
However, if I were you I'd also consider the possibility this frustration you are feeling is due to the sad realization that you are trading away your freedoms for convenience and familiarity and that some dude on the internet is making you face that.
> You try to justify your avoidance of Linux by complaining of extremely low-level stuff (init stuff, networking, event notification systems, etc) and now you are talking about higher level "user needs".
...? What is so difficult to understand about this? Try to pay attention: the way the computer works is fundamental to how user interaction works. That you can't seem to grasp this is mind boggling.
> I link to an article about how people using FreeBSD are also successfully using it as a daily desktop and how the shortcomings are known-yet-solvable. Your answer then is that "you do things that others don't do" (yet, people using Windows do it?)
Yes. Every day. All the time. Why do you think the vast majority of the desktop market is dominated by Windows? There are thousands of workflows, often with specialty applications, that are best served by Windows and largely ignored by everyone else. Hell, even something as simple as file sharing is a pain in the ass outside of Windows. Linux gave up and just implements SMB and pretends to be Windows for that task.
> So what is it? What is your use case that requires you to be nit-picky about the low-level and at the same frustrates you at the high-level? What are the "different things that you do" that can only work on a proprietary OS? In a world with so many different-yet-imperfect ecosystem of different desktop systems, what is it with Windows (aside from convenience and familiarity) that "works with you, instead of against you"?
So many ways, lets pick an easy one: It allows me to run multiple versions of the same software, on the same system, often at the same time, without any VM or container nonsense and without having to compile anything myself. It lets me put applications wherever I want, including removable media and network shares, without trick-fucking the filesystem to make it work. It lets me use software delivered directly from the developer without having to wait for middle men to package it, which includes alpha and hotfixed versions.
What is all this useful for? A bunch of shit, but lets go with the easy stuff: I can test software very very easily and ditch it very very easily if it doesn't work for me. I can get specialized builds from the developer or even just some hobbiest who happened to have the same needs as me without having to reconstruct a build environment. I can similarly run really old software that suits my needs and who's only modern equivalents don't work as well.
> All of my frustrating asshole preaching boils down to convenience and familiarity should never be an excuse to accept giving away your freedoms.
And mine stems from believing that I am the best one to decide what tradeoffs I want to make, not some holier-than-thou computer nerd on the internet.
> However, if I were you I'd also consider the possibility this frustration you are feeling is due to the sad realization that you are trading away your freedoms for convenience and familiarity and that some dude on the internet is making you face that.
Laughable. The fact is that a lot of my frustration is from having watched the open source community continue to make things more complicated and fragile while continuing to alienate themselves from everyone else and being evangelistic, condescending assholes for about 20 motherfucking years now.
Did you know that at one time I was president of a LUG? That I've contributed to open source projects? Built my own distribution from scratch? Used Linux on many different computers over the course of the past 20 years?
Yet you assume that because I don't like your waifu-OS that I must be some kind of scared newb, comforted by the existence of the start menu and double-click installers (note: I don't even like packages of any kind, including executable installers).
> I am the best one to decide what tradeoffs I want to make, not some holier-than-thou computer nerd on the internet.
Yeah, you are. But let's not forget the original topic and why the conversation started in the first place: Apple is charging developers $99/year to be able to have software running on their platform and making it increasingly harder for those that do not. Then someone posts something along the lines of but the alternative is also privacy invading and provided by hypercapitalistic (sic) companies. There is nothing we can do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is what I was calling out for BS. This is a trade-off on moral principles that I am saying people should not accept.
Your complaints about Linux are technical trade-offs, and it just happens that you don't want to deal with the choices made by the most common systems. Totally fine. The point that I am arguing with you is that you are giving in the moral principle based on the refusal to (or being tired of to) work on technical things.
This is the part that I don't get: there are tons of other systems there work only with statically linked files. There are two OSes (NixOS and Guix) that basically allow you to run anything you want, however you want. There are Linux systems that make a point of not using systemd.
You certainly know all that. But you prefer to say "screw it, people are not doing things the way I want and I am tired of dealing with this shit. I am going to go use Windows".
Again, fine. But at least accept that you are giving in on a moral principle. No amount of technical discussion or accusations on my "identity" or trying to put this on "people from this community" is going to change that. You can call me all the cute names you want, but in the end of day you are trading your freedoms for convenience and familiarity.
> Yet you assume that because I don't like your waifu-OS that I must be some kind of scared newb.
No. The opposite. I assume that you are a very smart person! I just think you are just willing to compromise on a moral principle that I would not expect from smart and capable people and I think "others do not want the same thing that I do" is a feeble attempt at rationalization.
> There are two OSes (NixOS and Guix) that basically allow you to run anything you want, however you want
I just want to point out that these are able to cover only a small fraction of the things I listed, and you are required to learn a completely new language (each!) in order to use them.
> You can call me all the cute names you want, but in the end of day you are trading your freedoms for convenience and familiarity.
I don't deny it, that's the world we live in. At the end of the day I have to get things done. My frustration is because I wish OSS was better at supporting me in that, but 20 years of waiting for that to happen, and watching good ideas manifest only to die out practically unnoticed, have lead me to conclude it never will be.
> To me it looks like your assumption is that anything that does not look like Windows 2000/XP is "worse"
That's a very condescending conclusion to draw. I found LXDE less complicated and significantly snappier than alternatives that had their own Ubuntu derivative. I chose an Ubuntu derivative because Ubuntu has the widest range of supported software.
But hey, it all has to do with how it looks right? Thinking like that by the Linux Desktop community is why you guys still aren't taken seriously.
> What the big companies are doing are related to the infrastructure side of things and have nothing to do with the desktop
The desktop experience is not wholly separated from the infrastructure beneath it. The init system, the event subsystem, hardware management, network management, sound system, display server etc. are only abstracted in the leakiest of ways.
> Anyway, perhaps the issue is that you are conflating "Linux" with "Open Source Desktop" and expecting a central place to solve all solutions?
Unfortunately it pretty much is the only option that is even remotely viable. But mostly I focus on problems with Linux because it has by far the most evangelical community.