- NTSync coming in Kernel 6.11 for better Wine/Proton game performance and porting.
- Wine-Wayland last 4/5 parts left to be merged before end of 2024
- Wayland HDR/Game color protocol will be finished before end of 2024
- Nvidia 555/560 will be out for a perfect no stutter Nvidia performance
- KDE/Gnome reaching stability and usability with NO FKN ADS
- VR being usable
- More Wine development and more Games being ported
- Better LibreOffice/Word compatibility
- Windows 10 coming to EOL
- Improved Linux simplicity and support
- Web-native apps (Including Msft Office and Adobe)
- .Net cross platform (in VSCode or Jetbrains Rider)
What else am I missing?
Here’s the hilarious reality:
I installed Fedora Workstation on a laptop yesterday, just to check out how that’s going.
I’m probably reverting it to Windows because there is no tool to adjust the scroll speed of the touchpad.
And that’s what that takes.
This is exactly the kind of issue that the average person might deal with, or it will be a deal breaker and they’ll never try again. Even if you can customize something via a config file, the average user will never do that. If there is no easy GUI in a normal location (like system settings) for something they want to adjust, it might as well not exist.
Average users either will accept all the inconveniences, or none. If it is more inconvenient than what they are used to right off the bat, they will go back and never try again.
To be clear, I’m far from the average user. I’ve installed Linux on my PCs many times over multiple decades. I’m looking at a RedHat installation CD that was printed in a different century right now. I’m way more tech-savvy and platform-agnostic than the average Windows user.
And even I went “wait, GNOME hasn’t figured out mousewheels and touchpads in 25 years? Yeah, nope, I’m out”.
Desktop Linux is a hobby for hobbyists. If you think troubleshooting that stuff, customizing your setup and distro-hopping for fun are engaging things to do on your PC it’s a good time. If in the process of doing that you set it up just like you want it the performance, stability and compatibility aren’t terrible. By the time I hit those annoyances I had a mostly working setup. Audio was fine, iGPU was fine, touchscreen was fine, performance and responsiveness were better than Windows, manufacturer software alternatives were installed and mostly working.
But if you just want a computer that works any one of these roadblocks is a dealbreaker. Going online and seeing the related drama (posts complaining that GNOME devs will close issues about this out of personal preference or spite, hacky half-solutions, arguments about whether this is a real issue or how much better/worse other platforms or distros are) the entire ecosystem seems less than serious and definitely not sustainable for any device you need for user-level, reliable use.
I’ve been a Gnome fanboy for years, after initially disliking the shift between 2 and 3.
I dipped into Plasma when 6.0 came out and I’m mad that I didn’t try sooner.
It’s the exact opposite of your experience, about Gnome not having scroll wheel speed adjustment. “Wait, other DEs had figured this out? For how long??”
There was so much I’d just put up with, thinking that if Gnome hadn’t figured it out, nobody had.
KDE is something I can set up on friends’ computers and walk away, confident that it wouldn’t give them any trouble.
that (and many other irritants) is why I switched to plasma. please try it before going back, it’s way better in every regard.
I may because I’m clearly an outlier and it’s a bit of an experiment now, but…
… you realize how just saying that is an absolute dealbreaker for Linux, right?
I mean, if you’re a base Windows user trying Linux for the first time, it is arcane gibberish. If you’re just trying to get a working computer it’s a major hassle. If you’re, like me, a grumpy old fart, you’re getting flashbacks of sitting in front of a Pentium-133 doing this exact exercise of flipping back and forth across environments and bumping against different frustrations on each and just can’t believe this is still the feedback you’re getting online this many decades later.
absolutely. I have a list as long as my arm of irritants that are 99% just the absence of sane defaults. I’m not saying that’s what’s deterring people from switching over, but it’s not helping either, is it?
every DE, distro, whatevs I install, I try to imagine what this looks like to a non-techie, how would a random grams deal with this… and it’s not looking good.
apple has a vertically integrated tech stack and are free to focus their sinister efforts elsewhere; they don’t have to dick around with 15 different DEs and 27 WMs, 50 teams pulling in 127 different directions, abandoned paths and duplicated efforts galore. just imagine where The Linux Desktop would be at if we had just one DE/WM and all devs would pull in the same direction…
I don’t have the answer. it’s chaos over here and out of that chaos eventually some order emerges. it’s unquestionable that shit’s way better than five years ago, let alone 10 or more… but it’s so slow and wasteful and it pains me that I see no other option.
meanwhile this (hey, try this shit out) is the best we as users can do; I know I regarded KDE/Plasma for the longest time as something clunky and un-serious and whatnot - I couldn’t have been more wrong. things that are outright deal-breakers (like the years-long refusal to implement scroll speed in Gnome) are handled beautifully over there, and then some.
Yeah, honestly given the time this has been at play I’m surprised nobody has tried to do that type of full control integration besides Google. Given how well ChromeOS and especially Android worked as platforms why hasn’t… I don’t know, Valve? Adobe? Apple, even? tried to create a major desktop PC take on Linux that does have the type of support and sensible UX you want out of the box?
It’s probably too late now that MS is hell-bent into turning Windows into that sort of platform, but there was a period of time there, probably during the Win8 debacle or the early parts of Win10 where you could have come up with a “big boy ChromeOS” take that would have gotten this done. It’s nuts that Valve only got as far as doing the basics of SteamOS and then failed to deliver on their promises of wider support before the community basically turned installing that into the same kind of nightmare every other distro is.
This is something people fail to realize, and I think part of it is because Linux people tend to surround themselves with other Linux people.
I have been helping my friend get into Linux, we picked a sensible distro, fedora, with the default gnome spin. He loves the UI, great.
But there is a random problem with his microphone, everything is garbled, I can’t recreate it on my hardware and it’s unclear.
He reads guides and randomly inputs terminal commands, things get borked, he re installs, cycle continues.
He tries a different distro, microphone works, but world of Warcraft is funky with lutris, so no go.
The result is, all of this shit just works on windows, and it just doesn’t on Linux. Progress has been made in compatibility, but, for example, there was a whole day of learning just about x vs Wayland and not actually getting to use the computer. For someone who has never opened a terminal before, something as simple to you and I as adding a package repo is completely gibberish
Yes you can learn all of this, but to quote this friend who has been trying Linux for the past two weeks “I’m just gonna re install windows and go back to living my life after work”
When you have 20 years of understanding windows, you need to be nearly 1 to 1 with that platform to get people to switch.
It’s not about being 1:1. I have used Android, iOS, MacOS and a bunch of other systems. Most of those have been easy to adapt. In fact, like your friend, I prefer the GNOME look because the MacOS-ish UI feels fun and fresh after being on Windows for so long.
It’s the ratio of troubleshooting versus usage and the lack of definitive resolution for things.
FWIW, I just went back to Windows, not because I found the terminal commands hard to grasp (I started working with computers in the 80s, I’m not intimidated by a command line), but because they often didn’t match what tutorials said, or because something that didn’t work didn’t generate an error and simply did nothing, or because something just randomly stopped working for no reason and just dangled there, broken, indefinitely.
Say what you will about how haphazardly Windows is architected, but most of the time if something breaks it’s a matter of either installing the right thing, uninstalling the right thing, finding the right setting or reinstalling the OS. That sense of rebuilding your bike as you ride on it that Linux still forces upon you is just so friction-heavy, and the failstate of it is so frustrating. There’s a reason why a dedicated Android or ChromeOS for your hardware feels just fine but desktop Linux is untenable for 90% of users, and it’s not the 1:1 parity with Windows.
Fedora is considering switching to Plasma by default.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Change-KDE-Default-Prop
Many big maintainers are working hard to make the experience better for the average user. Things are getting better.
As a person that also went “screw it, I’m going back to Windows 95” for the exact same reasons in a previous millenium…
…no they aren’t.
This isn’t new, this has been the way this works for decades. Sure, there have been improvements, but also plenty of steps backwards. This run at it has been a noticeably worse experience than, say, being told about Ubuntu and being surprised at it having a smooth installer for the first time. Sure, gaming then was a no-go, but with PC hardware being a much narrower path then, it was so much easier to get the hardware itself running.
And yes, it was about to be the year of Linux desktop then, too.
Yep. To me it was the lack of a working fingerprint reader.
I run Fedora Kinoite on my work laptop and this is what the system settings look like. If GNOME can’t do that, then it indeed seems like a massive flaw.
It doesn’t, and it can’t. Also can’t do any UI scaling between 100 and 200% out of the box. There are some astounding gaps in it for how long it’s been around.
GNOME is bad. Abandon GNOME. If you like the UI of Windows, try KDE Plasma 6. It’s much more feature rich than GNOME and very customizable too. And touchpad speed can be adjusted in the System Settings application.
I mean, it is, but part of the appeal with the stock GNOME was how streamlined and un-Windows-like it was. I tried moving to KDE but, honestly, it does feel a bit worse to use.
Not that it matters, because eventually a bunch of other more fundamental unsupported features made me switch back instead. Couldn’t get the Nvidia dGPU to work and messed things up enough in the process that I’d have to start over, which is a dealbreaker. Plus it turns out that the suspend/restore functionality was completely broken and the hardware volume buttons were partially broken.
So yeah, no, I’m back to Windows now.