3. Define "Year of Desktop Linux"

Define "Year of Desktop Linux"

It is unlikely to happen. I recently, after having not run Linux on the desktop (have several machines here running Linux always, just not desktops) for years, bought a new SSD and installed it to dual boot with Windows 10.

  • First I installed Debian, which is what I run on my file server and router. Could not get the fonts working right. After installing non-free patches (forget which) I was able to get things to a reasonable state...on Qt apps. Nothing I did could make GTK apps look presentable. The fonts were always huge or tiny or unreadable. Googled, tried all sorts of solutions, got angry, and gave up. Don't have time for this crap anymore. Not for a basic working desktop.

  • Tried SuSE. For no particular reason other than it's been around awhile and I really wanted to run Plasma. Had similar stupid font problems. Got angry and frustrated, gave up.

  • Tried Fedora. All sorts of minor issue with Fedora, no one being a showstopper but enough in aggregate that I have up.

  • Installed Kubuntu. Now Kubuntu just worked. The desktop looked great, except...I had all sorts of stupid crashes, none of which even with debugging symbols installed would provide enough data to let me submit a bug report. Konsole would crash regularly, which I just cannot have. I also had to turn off most of the compositor effects to get reasonable performance. I don't have this issue in Windows.

Windows 10 runs fine on this system, a desktop with standard off-the-shelf parts.

I'm typing this in Windows 10 because I'm annoyed and disappointed at so much basic functionality being broken -- in particular the font situation, which is unforgivable.

As a desktop I can't recommend it at all. I remember a sweet spot a few years back around KDE 3.5.9 when everything was rock solid. Uncrashable. I had Gentoo running that and it was everything I ever wanted in a desktop.

Then KDE 4 came out, people moved to it, and everything got unstable again.

As for Gnome, that is not want I want in Linux. I want to be able to tweak every aspect of how my desktop works and do so easily.

Right now where I am sitting, I have one Windows 10 desktop, 3 Debian machines without X, several Chrome devices, and an iPhone.

I am waiting for bash to be released for Windows this summer. When that happens, there is very little incentive for me to run Linux on the desktop.

Incidentally, it wasn't even KDE 4 that made me ditch Linux back in about 2010 or whenever it was. What made me ditch it was the lack of a decent video editor.

I have tried several of these (I still have Kubuntu on that SSD, but I rarely boot into it) - Openshot, KDEnlive, and they are still underfeatured and in some cases almost comically unstable.

It is interesting to me that the most commercial Linux distribution for the desktop - Canonical's Ubuntu, is the most usable and polished.

If Google were to push its own OS onto the desktop based on Linux, I bet a lot of things would change.

For a desktop, Linux offers me very little. I've offloaded almost all scheduled jobs onto my servers anyway, which I can connect to using PuTTY. I feel like I have the best of all worlds here.

My current situation is I am stuck with Windows 10 which "just works fine out of the box" when I install it, and these various Linux distros which do not. At one time I had the time, patience, and drive to spend a lot of time getting things working just right. Time havs passed and I do not have the patience or time for this anymore.

Only a massive corporate push is likely to unseat Windows, and Microsoft's recent strategy where they want to accommodate people running Linux in their cloud (and to that end as well providing bash and openSSH and who knows what else in the future) is likely to discourage expansion of Linux on the desktop any further. You can have pretty much the best of all worlds on Windows going forward...

..except, of course, for all that free software ethos. And all that telemetry they refuse to show you. Unfortunately, those are things most people will live with, however much it upsets the GNU crowd.

I had genuinely hoped when I installed this SSD to see things had improved dramatically since 2009.

They haven't, not by my measure.

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