TCB13

TCB13, 2 months ago

I’ve said it countless times, and I’ll say it again:

Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;

Things on the Linux GUI land are so messed up that we even got this. Well, at least with Swift and Adwaita for Swift we may get to something closer to stable, long term APIs and useful documentation…

TCB13, 2 months ago

I never said it was fragmentation, I simply implied that the fact that someone is writing bindings for a language that while open is mostly apple centered says a lot about the lack of a decent development framework.

TCB13, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

You’re going into the small annoyances that make Linux unproductive and not suitable for desktop - at least when you want to get some job done. People will proceed to downvote you and tell you to try 1000x different distros and the end result will be essentially the same…

Because I’m no exception to this rule, I will advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system.

Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:

1. The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
2. I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization and wine may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
3. Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
4. Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
5. Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
6. The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
7. Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.

(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow with performance. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.

It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

TCB13, 2 months ago

When you don’t have to spend weeks tweaking a system to have something that works… that’s considered cheap. Money doesn’t exist by itself, if you need a machine to work today, Windows is cheap. Even if you make 20€/hour in a day of work your Windows license will be payed of… the other alternative is spending weeks not being able to work because you’ve to configure things :)

TCB13, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Go ahead, enjoy your two minutes of fame.

Wine provides an API that is compatible with the ones found on Windows. Loosely speaking that’s an emulator, not the kind of emulation you’re thinking about but it is still trying to re-create an environment where applications written for Windows can run.

TCB13, 2 months ago

What you said isn’t the truth, is just your own and personal perspective

What I said is the perspective of any other professional out there (with lots of examples) besides web developers. By the same logic what you said isn’t also true - it is just your own perspective as a developer.

Developers are just a percentage of potential Linux users, and some of them can’t even use it because of the tools they require. Regular people have other needs and don’t want to spend a week fixing something when they can get it out of the box somewhere else.

Eg. for a manager or some other office worker the slight incompatibly between MS Office and Libre Office isn’t tolerable because it has a negative impact on their productivity in the same way that KDE feature xyz delivers a better experience for programming. See? Just because it isn’t your perspective doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

TCB13, 2 months ago

Obviously :P

TCB13, 2 months ago

MS not being able to run on Linux is a problem with Microsoft, not Linux

No, it isn’t a problem of MS nor of Linux. It a problem for people who’ve to be productive on those solutions and that’s why Linux isn’t a good fit for them.

I know posts of people saying they prefer Linux, and they aren’t into tech or programming, just are used to it already

Yes, normally people that use that machine for light web surfing on the weekends and dealing with a few personal things that require a document and a bullet list once every year.

You can’t expect to waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format and/or the subsequent productivity losses - it just takes you making a few slides for your boss while using LibreOffice and once he opens the document you’ve misaligned items, game over. :)

Also, iptables rocks.

No, it doesn’t. nftables is the only sane and sensible thing that was built considering modern networking and scalability concerns not hacked and dragged along for decades.

TCB13, 2 months ago

did Debian really got better for newbie desktop users?

I mean, I just want shit to work and I don’t have any complaints, unlike I had with other distros. HP EliteBook 840 G5 (i7 model) running since Debian 11, then upgraded to 12. Debian 12 fresh install on a HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini as well everything working right after installation (including the special keyboard keys). My main desktop i7-6800K / Asus X99-M WS/SE also had it for a while and it worked fine but due to work and small compatibility annoyances I moved to Windows. At some point I was running it on an old MacBook, the setup was harder and I had to fix a couple of thing but it worked better than macOS - at least it had a recent browser :P

The rest of the machines where I run Debian are Supermicro servers (or AMD boxes running headless) so they aren’t useful for this conversation.

Use case for those machines is web, email, VSCode for embedded development, SSH into other machines, networking related jobs and typing stuff sometimes.

I see people from time to time complaining about Debian, but frankly I don’t get it. Unlike Arch it has an installer, even a GUI, comes with sensible defaults. Installation can be done by pressing next at every step (without changing anything) and as long as you aren’t running on AliExpress hardware or some shady brand from 10 years ago things usually work fine.

TCB13, 2 months ago

Yes, I mean those formats.

It doesn’t really matter if the specs says one thing and the “indie MS dev” does another. Since MS Office was the first and most common and adopted solution it kinda sets what is the standard. When LibreOffice refuses to copy the way Word displays a simple bullet list because Word isn’t following the spec then the problem isn’t with Word, the problem is in Writer.

This is like those bugs that people rely on. Even if you can argue there’s a few lines of code that aren’t doing what was technically correct as soon as you’ve people depending on that “wrong” behavior for some task it suddenly became a feature and the right way to do things.

TCB13, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Because it’s pointless.

• There’s no real need / use case for a new OS. Existing ones cover about everything;
• Operating systems nowadays are way more complex than they were, you can’t just pick and write a successful one in a few months, you’ve to support very complex protocols, hardware and lots of different architectures - even for Linux it’s hard to keep up with all the ARM CPUs;
• Contrary to popular belief (what the Linux people on Lemmy think) the success of an OS nowadays is tied to ecosystems and applications. Building the OS doesn’t lead to anything if you can’t get companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Google etc. to write the software that people use for it.

TCB13, 2 months ago

Web is nice and welcomed yes, but it isn’t native performance nor a native Adobe application.

TCB13, 2 months ago

I think Adobe is looking at a web based Photoshop aren’t they?

Browsers have limitations and PS is a complex product. Consider this, Adobe made a native iOS version of Photoshop for the iPad and it has just a few select features that the desktop version offers, the performance isn’t that great as well… So, if Adobe can’t even create a native Photoshop clone for another OS (that centrally shares core code with the desktop version) what makes you think they would be able to deliver anything on a browser that would come even close?

TCB13, 2 months ago

There’s a big difference thought: consistency.

When a MacBook fails it fails for everyone in the same way and if it’s software fixable then it’s a simple fix. With AliExpress boards you get boards that are perfect, others fail after a while, others never work unless they do updates.

TCB13, 2 months ago

Just need to give great alternatives.

Alternatives, are, well, alternatives. I’m all for alternatives but they are NOT the actual thing.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow with performance. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users of a specific industry is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

You can’t expect to waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format and/or the subsequent productivity losses - it just takes you making a few slides for your boss while using LibreOffice and once he opens the document you’ve misaligned items, game over. :)

It also comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.