I know the usual comments will crop up but, now if ever is the best chance to give it a try, at least as a semi daily driver if you still want to play games or such.
I switched to Linux a couple years ago and overall am glad I did, but it's only a partial solution.
As I see it, one way to phrase the problem is that Linux (along with its ecosystem) isn't really user-focused either. It's developer-focused. Tons of weird decisions get made that are grounded in developer desires quite removed from any user concerns. There are a lot of developers out there that do care about users, so often you get something decent, but it's still a bit off-center.
> As I see it, one way to phrase the problem is that Linux (along with its ecosystem) isn't really user-focused either.
Maybe because I am tech-literate, but I find Linux so much more user friendly than OSX.
Linux Mint is what I have running in my personal computer, and I can't remember the last time it got in my way of doing anything I wanted. Amazing OS, that has no right of being that good and stable while also being free - reason why I make a yearly 20 bucks donation out of gratitude.
Meanwhile there's not a single day that I don't curse at the MacBook I am forced to use for work. I have no idea how Apple has so many fanboys with that shit OS. Maybe people really like to have a slick looking toy, no matter if actually using it is an awful experience.
A great example is Firefox, which decided to break all extensions for developer-focused reasons (i.e., "too hard to maintain") and continues to make baffling UI changes that no one asked for. Another obvious example is the mere existence of various open-source software that is only distributed in source form, making it totally inaccessible to users who just want to click and install.
But mostly you just see it when you file a Github issue and a contributor/developer responds with something like "Sorry, that's not my priority right now". You see it when people reply with "PRs welcome". There is still a widespread mentality in the FOSS world that people who want features should be willing to somehow do at least part of the work themselves to make it happen. That's not user-focused.
Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of great open-source software out there and overall I think I'm happier with it than I would be with modern Windows (let alone MacOS; whether I'm happier than I was with Windows pre-10 is a tougher question). But basically what I mean is there are developers out there writing proprietary software who will implement features they actively dislike because they are told that users want them; that mindset is not so prevalent in the open source world.
> A great example is Firefox, which decided to break all extensions for developer-focused reasons (i.e., "too hard to maintain")
That was only a problem for extension developers. Users weren't really impacted as developers built new versions of popular extensions.
> and continues to make baffling UI changes that no one asked for.
No one ever asked for the iphone/smartphones, yet people buy them instead of dumb phones. My firefox has evolved a bit over the year if I look at former screenshots, but everything happened so gradually it has never been a problem for users.
And all kind of software do, not only FOSS.
> Another obvious example is the mere existence of various open-source software that is only distributed in source form, making it totally inaccessible to users who just want to click and install.
There are so many apps available through the software repos and flatpak packages that users who aren't into building a software from source shouldn't even feel concerned.
> But mostly you just see it when you file a Github issue and a contributor/developer responds with something like "Sorry, that's not my priority right now". You see it when people reply with "PRs welcome". There is still a widespread mentality in the FOSS world that people who want features should be willing to somehow do at least part of the work themselves to make it happen. That's not user-focused.
Prioritization is happening everywhere, in proprietary software too. Dev teams work with finite time and resource constraints.
PRs welcome is a bonus, not a con.
> But basically what I mean is there are developers out there writing proprietary software who will implement features they actively dislike because they are told that users want them; that mindset is not so prevalent in the open source world.
Mostly only when they are paid for it. And some proprietary dev also don't implement stuff they don't like. I don't think you can generalize, this behavior is not based on the choice of license.
Some FOSS projects also do work on some features if users raise a bounty for it.
Sure, I agree. That's basically all I'm saying. FOSS gets rid of the tracking and dark patterns but it's still not what I'd call user-focused. It's like in proprietary software the decisions are made based on what the developer wants, and in FOSS it's made based on what the developer wants. But in theory with FOSS there could be people out there who are taking the opportunity of freedom from profit-driven orientation to actually figure out what users want and do that with the same level of drive that proprietary companies apply to seek profit. But it doesn't happen. It's not terrible, it's not even bad, but it's not what I'd call truly user-focused.
I know what you're saying; sometimes open source is presented as the answer to all the user-hostile decay that the platform owners introduce, but you must prove yourself worthy through study and sacrifice. If you want to build your own system, great, but if you want to share the joys with others you cannot attract them with an austere religion.
Hobbyist developers develop software because it solves a need they have first, and they have fun doing that. If they don't have any fun or interest to do it, they lose motivation. Hobbyist developers are the primary users of the app they develop usually.
Commercial FOSS developers do have to take users into account and I think they do but they also have to seek profit.
I don't think there is another way unless government starts employing developers to develop FOSS software based on tax payers wishes.
I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's all just another way of saying "Yes, FOSS is also not user-focused." I'm not saying FOSS is "supposed" to be anything else, I'm just saying that if you want user-focused software, you won't really get it by switching from profit-driven software to FOSS. You might get closer in some ways and further in others.
Government employing developers would be just another form of doing it for pay. There is another way, which is the same way that various other kinds of charitable things happen: through a desire to meet the needs of others rather than having "fun" or "interest" for the person doing the action. There are people who donate their time and energy to do things like give food to the homeless, clean up trash, or whatever. Obviously they derive some kind of satisfaction from it but I think many people who do these kinds of things wouldn't say they do it because it's "fun"; they do it because they think it meets a need that other people have. There could be software like that, but there isn't much of it.
The same way there isn't much people giving food to the homeless or clean up trash compared to the general population size.
You are looking for a unicorn imho. Having said that hobbyist developers, regardless if they do FOSS or freeware, are likely to make stuff that is in line with your particular needs because more often than not people have common needs. They may not agree or have time to implement every single feature you want but in a sense this is use-focused if not user-focused.
I used KDE (24.04) for a while now. Also used Linux 2000-2008-ish. Have read APUE.
When I win-left/right a window and then resize it, then close it, now win-left/right always resizes it as previous one. There’s no way to reset it to 50:50 (unless logout).
Notification center is obnoxious. Regular “Program stopped working” with zero details. Why do I need this information. Copying a folder in dolphin pops up a progress notification that doesn’t go away when finished. You did something, expect a notification to pop up. You did nothing, still expect it.
Windows either steal focus or fail to steal it when needed, depending on your settings and astrology. Software update nags you to click update, then you click it, then it downloads something for a few minutes (you go doing your things), then a sudo password popup fails to get focus, and it all crashes after a timeout. Or things will pop up right in your face. VNC connection closed? Yes, bring that white empty window to front asap and tell “Connection closed” with an OK button.
Start menu was designed by an idiot, a wrong mousemove and you are in a wrong section. Sections reside exactly on the 80% of bezier paths from start menu to the section content and have zero activation timeout. So you have to maze your mouse around to avoid surprises. Logout, restart, shutdown, sleep buttons in the start menu all show the same fullscreen “dialog” that requires you to choose an action again. What’s the point of separate buttons even.
I could go on about non-working automatic vpn connections, mangled fonts/dpi/geometry if you vnc into a turned off physical display, console that loves printing ~[[A half of the times when you press an arrow. And so on and so forth, the list is so big I just can’t remember it.
Idk how Linux users are using Linux so that they do not meet any issues.
> When I win-left/right a window and then resize it, then close it, now win-left/right always resizes it as previous one. There’s no way to reset it to 50:50 (unless logout).
When you've win-left-ed a window, you've put it into a "zone", so what you're resizing is that zone not just the window. This is helpful when you've both win-left-ed and win-right-ed something so resizing via the split between them resizes both windows. (There's actually four of these zones with an up/down split too). You can reset it to 50:50 by resizing a zone-ed window again and your ratio with stay that way.
Notably, it’s not how it always worked, it just broke with an update last summer (also affecting virtual screens etc) and no one seems to bother that much, as if it was some fringe “feature”.
gnome fedora has been revelation, I love how the task switcher is a combination of Spotlight and Mission Control (to put it in macOS terms) and dragging windows to the edge works well out of the box. When I mouse over the volume slide and scroll, it works. I have it installed on an Intel Mac mini and an m1 MacBook Pro, suspend works.
I’ve given up on Debian a dozen times but feel I might actually have a future with Fedora.
Since I have to deal with it (work related activity), I'd like to know how much of the above "things" I can change in the system settings. My experience is this:
win-left/right: an unresolved issue in KDE tracker that seems to remain so.
notifications: enter every program in a long list and change settings (most realistic to change).
focus issues: tried all levels (named "low" to "extreme" without any explanation, none work as intended.
start menu vs launchers: I don't find creating a launcher for every app I have reasonable. Fix the menu then call it "a daily driver".
vpn autoconnect: is on, doesn't work.
mangled fonts/dpi/geometry: I'm all ears how to fix that.
I want to click an icon, not type "like everyone else". All this customizability goes out of the window when it becomes emotionally inconvenient, eh? I also don't want to remap win-left to:
And a similar abomination for win-right, which I would have to maintain somewhere. And in wayland, what are even the options?
Use a better font
I think you misunderstood this. While the physical display is "on", it all looks correct. When you turn it off and vnc into the main X display, it's all mangled, regardless of the font. The order of turn off / vnc into doesn't matter either.
Also, I don't want to globally disable notifications. Maybe I just have to globally disable graphics? That would indeed solve many issues with linux desktops.
Cause Linux Desktop is very far from being ready to use, complete or bug/stupidity-free. Cause you didn’t address even a half of the issues here and was only picking on trivial functions that you understand and found coping workarounds for. “Reject any solution”, lol, I have yet to see any solution apart from “turn it off completely” or “don’t use”. I did all
my due diligence, my complaints are not even remotely lazy.
And I want other people to know that, before they buy into fanboy advices from people who seem to either barely use anything in the OS beyond a browser, or are just lying to themselves. Answers like these speak even better than any of my complaints here could. Feel free to advise next time, I’ll be there as well.
Every discussion like this works the same. You mention a set of real use case issues and ask what to do, and all the advisors suddenly appear too busy to answer, with a rare exception of the most defensive deniers.
Solution I use (works with _most_ apps -- GTK/Qt/WxWidgets/Electron, custom opengl/sdl apps are the main problem)
Go to window scaling and set it to 2x, this will cause the compositor to zoom in to each window 2x. Now everything will look obnoxiously big.
Then, go to the display settings, and set the display scaling to 1.5x or 1.7 or whatever it is that works for your DPI. (confusingly, this means zoom out)
So the zoom in/zoom out "cancel out" and you get a good balance.
Of course, it is rendering to a larger zoomed out canvas uselessly, but in modern CPU/GPU this doesn't cause too much of an extra hit on battery life.
This solution also has the benefit that if you use multiple different displays, you can as needed set different display "zoom out" levels for each one, and have it look good on both.
Where this falls over:
- OpenGL/custom SDL apps like I said before that don't respect your scale factor.
- Non Hi-DPI GTK themes (there are many hidpi ones available though)
You set the QT_SCALE_FACTOR env var for QT apps to also follow this, btw.
Linux definitely exists.... except that it isn't free from this philosophy either. From the "don't theme my apps" movement, to Wayland's "security above usability" philosophy... I recently even read about some kallsyms functions being unexported from an 5.x release because it could be used to lookup symbols and it shouldn't be that easy to access internal kernel symbols or something.
Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions. Linux isn't much better than Windows for the semi-casual tinkerer either - at least on Windows you don't get told to just fork the project and implement it yourself.
I'm a bit hesitant to call this corporate greed as it's literally happening in the OSS ecosystem too. Sadly I don't have answers why, only more questions. No idea what happened.
> Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions. Linux isn't much better than Windows for the semi-casual tinkerer either - at least on Windows you don't get told to just fork the project and implement it yourself.
The obvious difference being that in Windows you can't even do that or (easily) apply a patch. Isn't this very ability to patch (or create a fork of) the kernel the opposite of being tinkerer-hostile?
> Linux definitely exists.... except that it isn't free from this philosophy either.
Yes it is, through the power of choice.
>From the "don't theme my apps" movement,
Which anyone is free to ignore and actively do.
> to Wayland's "security above usability" philosophy...
1. wayland is super usable right now and has been for at least a number of years so your statement is mostly a lie. Only thing missing right now are color management and HDR. This impact a small portion of the users who can still fallback to xorg.
2. we are free not to use it. Distributions made it a default choice only recently and you can still install and run xorg, and will so for pretty much as long as you want, especially as some distros are targeted at people not liking the mainstream choices.
> Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
So you are saying having opinions is bad?
You are still free to use whatever desktop you want or patch your kernel. You have the source and the rights to do whatever you want with it.
> Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
I don't think putting safeguards in a GPU driver to make sure users don't fry their expensive GPU inadvertently is an attempt against your freedom. The kernel and gpu driver are still under an open source license that expressly permit you to do the modifications you want.
> Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions.
What is more tinkerable than having the source available and the right to modify them and do whatever you want with it?
I think you are mistaking user and tinkerer-hostile decisions with your and users excessive entitlement mentality. Developers have finite resources and can't possibly agree and accept all users suggestions and desires, and have to put limits on the scope of their projects so they can maintain it, support it and not be overwhelmed by bugs/issues. This is not about freedom.
I should probably have a pre-defined disclaimer "signature" whenever I write about Mac OS, since I always get this response.
I know Linux exists. In fact, I've been using it as my primary OS roughly from 1994 to 2006, and since then intermittently for some tasks, or as a main development machine for a couple of years. I wrote device drivers for Linux and helped with testing the early suspend/hibernate implementations. I'm all in support of Linux.
But when I need to get work done, I do it on MacOS, because it mostly works and I don't have to spend time on dealing with font size issues, window placement annoyances, GPU driver bugs, and the like. And I get drag&drop that works anywhere. All this makes me more efficient.
But I don't want to turn this discussion into a Linux vs MacOS advocacy thread: that's not what it's about. In fact, if we were to turn back to the main topic (ensh*ttification of everything around us), Linux would be there, too: my Ubuntu already displays ads in apt, as well as pesters me with FUD about security updates that I could get if I only subscribed. This problem is not magically cured by switching to any Linux, it's endemic in the world we live in today.
No, it really is cured by switching to Linux, or more precisely to free/libre software. Ubuntu introduced ads, so I switched to Mint. I could do that because the code is all GPL and the ecosystem is large enough that there were sufficient other people with beefs about Ubuntu to do something. The license and the ability of the community to fork are the keys.
Consumer software has gone straight downhill for the last 20 years and while the FOSS alternatives have some rough edges I always at least try them first. The outcome has been that I am shielded from most of the industry's worst excesses. Bad things happen, the world gets worse, and I just read about it, it doesn't affect me. I am more of a radical than the post author, I say in your personal life, roll it all back 100%, return to history, modernity is garbage, computing has taken a wrong turn because we have allowed it to be owned by illegal monopolies and cartels. I do make compromises in the software stack we use for business simply because my employees are not as radical as I am and I need to be able to work with normal humans.
> I do make compromises in the software stack we use for business simply because my employees are not as radical as I am and I need to be able to work with normal humans.
That becomes the problem. Not just in the business world either. Like if all your friends are communicating on platforms that are locked down and harvesting your data, how do you arrange to get together for a burger? If all the stores closed down and you can only buy things on Amazon, how do you clothe yourself? Obviously I'm exaggerating but the big problems of this situation arise precisely because most people don't realize it is a problem, and thus working "outside the system" requires an increasing amount of effort.
Your explanation why Linux isn't the solution is actually a massive pro in favor of Linux. There's nothing special about Ubuntu that's holding you hostage and if you wanted to switch distros, you could do it in an afternoon. Unlike switching from Mac or Windows which would take much longer and would probably never be a 100% migration.
It would be nice if we could trust corporations to stay some kind of course and have our best interests at heart, but they don't, and at some point it starts being our own fault if we keep enduring it. It then follows though that once you have full control over your tools, it's our own fault if we choose not to go solve the issues, but that doesn't feel entirely fair.
We can't personally be responsible for everything. So to bring it back home to enshitification, a free market, free from monopolies or duopolies, should be the solution. As one product gets shit, a hole in the market opens up and could be filled. That's not happening though, so what's going wrong? If it could happen anywhere it's Sillicon Valley, so much money and the culture of disruption and innovation, all the right skills are floating in the employment pool. But software keeps getting more and more shit.
I know the usual comments will crop up but, now if ever is the best chance to give it a try, at least as a semi daily driver if you still want to play games or such.