Is 2023 finally the year of the Linux Desktop? Up to 1.4 BILLION new users linux users announced as China switches away from Windows

[maplepants]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Well if phone manufacturers doing silly stuff and deviate from the standard dont be surprised there are issues and spotty support by the driver written to support the vanilla standard.

 

Well i dont think its fair to blame linux for apples moronic decisions they made regarding not allowing you to drop any file youd like onto the phone you bought and own...

Blame doesn't matter to most people. Look at the posts in Linux support forms (like the example I linked) people aren't less sad about their problem because it's the phone manufacturers fault and not their distro. 

 

Same with me and getting stuff from my phone to my Ubuntu computer. I actually just use rsync and network shares to basically have iCloud Drive available to my Ubuntu computer. It works great, but I wouldn't say this is a fix for normal users. It's also not as easy as just installing iCloud Drive (like I did on my Windows computer).

 

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

It was just an example, plus blackmagic is not very clear about the fact that they only support a now defunct OS on their download page....  (as @J-from-Nucleonpointed it out) Debugging seems easier on linux (at least to me), its nice that you can start a gui program from terminal and see the error messages compared to having to dig through the nightmare windows event log is.....

This argument makes me think we're talking a little bit past each other. My point is that most people won't switch to desktop Linux because macOS and Windows are just significantly easier to use. The idea that you could or should use the terminal to do any debugging reinforces my argument that Linux debugging is too tricky / intimidating to people who aren't computer savvy. 

 

Average users do not like command line interfaces and consider having to use them at all to be a major failing of their OS/computer.

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

It can do versioned backups so id say its good for basic needs.

If you really think that it compares with Time Machine and File History, then I think you're just not familiar enough with those products. They are quite advanced and, most important for my argument here, extremely easy to use.

 

The whole point isn't that doing these tasks is impossible on Linux, the point is that it's so much easier for a normal person to get what they want out of Windows or macOS than desktop Linux. And that this ease of use hurdle is why "the year of the linux desktop" isn't happening this year or any year in the foreseeable future. 

[Ultraforce]

23 minutes ago, maplepants said:

If you really think that it compares with Time Machine and File History, then I think you're just not familiar enough with those products. They are quite advanced and, most important for my argument here, extremely easy to use.

Isn't Time Shift the Time Machine equivalent for Linux? It is something that needs to be downloaded from an app store but I feel like every youtube video I've seen that is like here are X things to do if you start using Linux is activate time shift

[maplepants]

1 hour ago, Ultraforce said:

Isn't Time Shift the Time Machine equivalent for Linux? It is something that needs to be downloaded from an app store but I feel like every youtube video I've seen that is like here are X things to do if you start using Linux is activate time shift

Here's a basic tutorial on TimeShift, here's a basic tutorial for File History and here's setup and restore for Time Machine.

 

These are not in the same league at all when it comes to ease of use. TimeShift is quite good, and it gives you the ability to enjoy the power and flexibility of snapshots on ext4, which is amazing. But I think the skill requirement needed to setup and use File History or Time Machine with confidence is much closer to average users than TimeShift's requirements. 

[rcmaehl]

16 hours ago, Kisai said:

I don't care if people think I'm the #1 chromebook hater on the forum. There's no actual market for the things, and businesses and schools are duped into buying them as a cost-saving, not realizing how much time and money is wasted in having to do workarounds for "things that just work" with Windows or even MacOS/iOS, or even just a second-hand laptop from anyone.

Okay let me tell you about these things called thin clients. Not only is the Chromebook better performing as a thin client, it's cheaper, and more portable for the modern hybrid WFH environment. For $380, I could get a R1305G equipped HP t540, then I still have to equip the end users with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. In the end, I'm spending about $540 per user. In the other corner, I can get an Intel N4120 equipped HP Chromebook 14 G6 for $380 and need to provide the end user with nothing else. The Chromebook is designed for streaming. For a modern "cloud" company, Chromebooks are a viable choice compared to the Wyse and HP terminals of old, ESPECIALLY compared to the Dell Wyse Laptops that are a PoS. 

 

Chromebooks have their place. It's just very specific.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

 

Okay let me tell you about these things called thin clients.

A thin client does you no good where there is no internet, and had you read anything I said you'd notice I pointed that out.

 

Chromebooks have no target audience that makes sense. Everything is better served by either an iPad or a real computer.

 

[tim0901]

22 hours ago, Kisai said:

Now let's shift back to the topic. There will not be 1.4 billion new Linux users. China may say "nobody can buy Windows 11, all computers come installed with Kylin", but that doesn't mean people won't just pirate Windows, or even Microsoft making Windows (Home) Free just to keep that from happening. It's a "known thing" that it's generally impossible to get a legal copy of Windows in PRC, but the same is true in the DYI computer industry everywhere else. People will transfer the license from an older/broken OEM machine rather than pay for a new Retail license. If someone wanted to have a legal copy of Windows, unless PRC China blocks all Windows updates (at their own risk) they are going to keep using that legal copy.

Yeah it's not going to change much. For a start I've still seen nothing to suggest that this affects home users - every article I've read has been talking about these restrictions only affecting government offices etc. It's just an extension of what they've been talking about with hardware for the last few years - Intel and AMD are allowed to sell their processors to Chinese consumers, but they cannot be used in government offices after ~2024 in the name of national security. Same is now true with software - including the OS - from the end of 2022. So you're not talking 1.4 billion potential new users, but a few million.

 

Also China has historically stuck to older versions of Windows for longer than in eg. the US. Windows 7 still makes up 30% of the desktop OS market in China (vs 12.6% worldwide or 6.5% in the US) despite support ending over 2 years ago. Even if China were to block all Windows updates, people would probably just continue using it regardless. I imagine it would require a push with regards to software support - perhaps highly anticipated games that only work on Kylin - for consumers to switch away from Windows.

[jagdtigger]

14 hours ago, maplepants said:

Blame doesn't matter to most people.

Yeah ostrich policy sadly is a very common thing, but that doesnt mean i (or anyone else)  shouldnt point out things thats not the OS's fault.

 

 

14 hours ago, maplepants said:

My point is that most people won't switch to desktop Linux because macOS and Windows are just significantly easier to use. The idea that you could or should use the terminal to do any debugging reinforces my argument that Linux debugging is too tricky / intimidating to people who aren't computer savvy. 

You do realize thats "ease of use" is heavily dependent on use-case? As for terminal and non-savvy ppl, well thy dont really go into debugging because of what you said. They arent savvy enough for that.

 

14 hours ago, maplepants said:

If you really think that it compares with Time Machine and File History, then I think you're just not familiar enough with those products.

Compares? No. Does it satisfies most r=1 users needs? Yes. In fact most of said users doesnt even care about backups. My close family is a good example. They could store things on my NAS because every one of them has a user and associated share on it. The total size of those shares: 0.

[maplepants]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

You do realize thats "ease of use" is heavily dependent on use-case?

Ease of use is dependent on use case, that's true. But when it comes to desktop computing the difference between macOS or Windows and a Linux desktop is never *whether* it's easier, the difference is in how much easier it is to do.

 

Maybe backing up your computer is always "hard" for the average user, but it's much easier on macOS or Windows than on Linux. And maybe media creation is "easy", but it's even easier on macOS or Windows than it is on Linux.

 

 

This is why there'll never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". The number of people who will choose Linux over the much easier to use macOS or Windows will continue to be tiny.

 

[RejZoR]

44 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Ease of use is dependent on use case, that's true. But when it comes to desktop computing the difference between macOS or Windows and a Linux desktop is never *whether* it's easier, the difference is in how much easier it is to do.

 

Maybe backing up your computer is always "hard" for the average user, but it's much easier on macOS or Windows than on Linux. And maybe media creation is "easy", but it's even easier on macOS or Windows than it is on Linux.

 

 

This is why there'll never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". The number of people who will choose Linux over the much easier to use macOS or Windows will continue to be tiny.

 

That won't change if people keep perpetuating myths about Linux tho... The fact I could finally use Kubuntu and Manjaro without ever touching Terminal for anything is telling me that someone did something right. Finally. Especially Manjaro, despite being based on Arch which is considered more advanced distro. They bolted just the right things on top, making it really nice OS to use out of the box.

 

I just wish they'd standardize handling of binaries a bit more across distros. I remember how idiotic experience was in many Linux distros where you downloaded some app's binary, tried to run it and OS was like "what are you crazy, trying to run things!?". Coming from Windows where EXE is universally either a portable app or an installer, this was something most idiotic. Manjaro solved that with AppImage that comes with it by default, double clicking binary simply asks you if you want to just run it as portable or install it. And then does accordingly. Without any stupid use of Terminal. It's such fundamental things that made Linux totally unfriendly to use. That has changed a bit though because I've not seen such idiocy for a while. I do swear by Debian distros becase it's most widely used and thus most stuff comes packaged or prepared for it accordingly. And it also heavily depends on developer providing it. For example pCloud client is superb across all OS and is just a seamless experience even though it runs virtual local drive for a cloud storage. It's just a single portable binary that runs from where you droppe dit and even has built in "Run on startup" checkbox that does just that. ProtonVPN on the other hand was an absolute nightmare to install on Linux. I had to use Terminal because that's the only thing they even provide. For some reason. Whole thing should be designed to avoid Terminal as much as possible if they want wide adoption. Because I'm advanced user and the moment I see the need to use Terminal I puke in my mouth a bit. Just no. It's 2022, design shit accordingly.

[maplepants]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

That won't change if people keep perpetuating myths about Linux tho...

Sorry, but these aren't myths. Here's an incomplete list of things that a regular person can do much more easily on macOS or Windows that they could on desktop Linux.

 

* Using Google Drive

* Using iCloud Drive

* working with Word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations

* getting data to / from a phone (either Android on iOS)

* local backups

* online backups

* media creation

* gaming

* media consumption

* screen sharing in an electron app like Teams / Discord / Slack / etc

* WhatsApp desktop app

* photo editing

* photo library management

* and much much more

 

The reason why I, and others, say that it's macOS and Windows are easier to use than Linux is that they simply are. 

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The fact I could finally use Kubuntu and Manjaro without ever touching Terminal for anything is telling me that someone did something right.

It's true that for regular users, having to open the terminal is basically a no go. But just because you didn't need to open the terminal, doesn't mean some task was easy to accomplish.

 

In another comment, I linked to a tutorial on how to use TimeShift. You don't need the terminal at all to use TimeShift, but it's still much more complex than File History or Time Machine.

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I just wish they'd standardize handling of binaries a bit more across distros. I remember how idiotic experience was in many Linux distros where you downloaded some app's binary, tried to run it and OS was like "what are you crazy, trying to run things!?". Coming from Windows where EXE is universally either a portable app or an installer, this was something most idiotic. Manjaro solved that with AppImage that comes with it by default, double clicking binary simply asks you if you want to just run it as portable or install it. And then does accordingly. Without any stupid use of Terminal. It's such fundamental things that made Linux totally unfriendly to use. That has changed a bit though because I've not seen such idiocy for a while. I do swear by Debian distros becase it's most widely used and thus most stuff comes packaged or prepared for it accordingly. And it also heavily depends on developer providing it. For example pCloud client is superb across all OS and is just a seamless experience even though it runs virtual local drive for a cloud storage. It's just a single portable binary that runs from where you droppe dit and even has built in "Run on startup" checkbox that does just that. ProtonVPN on the other hand was an absolute nightmare to install on Linux. I had to use Terminal because that's the only thing they even provide. For some reason. Whole thing should be designed to avoid Terminal as much as possible if they want wide adoption. Because I'm advanced user and the moment I see the need to use Terminal I puke in my mouth a bit. Just no. It's 2022, design shit accordingly.

I think here you're basically agreeing with me. It's easier for a user on Windows or macOS to install and use some application that it is for someone running desktop Linux.

 

You can also have surprising incompatibility issues across otherwise similar Linux distros. There are no shortage of askubuntu posts where somebody's got a non GTK DE like KDE or LXQt and they're wondering why some app they've downloaded is having weird scaling issues, crashes, or has some other problem that's related to their system missing a GTK or Gnome library that the app developer expected them to have.

 

Something like that can never happen on macOS or Windows. Even now, during Apple's chip transition, you can still run x86 software on M1 Macs. I can run the x86 version of Teams on my Mac Studio more easily and than I can run the Ubuntu version on 22.04 because 22.04 uses Wayland and that breaks screen sharing. 

[igormp]

12 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Using Google Drive

* Using iCloud Drive

* working with Word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations

* local backups

* online backups

* media creation

* gaming

* photo editing

* photo library management

* and much much more

Can agree on those

 

13 minutes ago, maplepants said:

* getting data to / from a phone (either Android on iOS)

* media consumption

* screen sharing in an electron app like Teams / Discord / Slack / etc

* WhatsApp desktop app

But not on those, how are they any hard?

Apart from iOS, android just opens up a folder like it does on windows.

Media consumption is just a double click, with vlc or anything else just like on windows too.

Screenshare works fine (I was going so 5 minutes ago on Zoom), unless you go out of your way with wayland, then yeah it sucks.

WhatsApp desktop app is just an electron wrapper for the regular whatsapp web, you can easily download it too (although it's not official, gotta give you that).

[RejZoR]

17 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Sorry, but these aren't myths. Here's an incomplete list of things that a regular person can do much more easily on macOS or Windows that they could on desktop Linux.

 

* Using Google Drive

* Using iCloud Drive

* working with Word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations

* getting data to / from a phone (either Android on iOS)

* local backups

* online backups

* media creation

* gaming

* media consumption

* screen sharing in an electron app like Teams / Discord / Slack / etc

* WhatsApp desktop app

* photo editing

* photo library management

* and much much more

 

The reason why I, and others, say that it's macOS and Windows are easier to use than Linux is that they simply are. 

It's true that for regular users, having to open the terminal is basically a no go. But just because you didn't need to open the terminal, doesn't mean some task was easy to accomplish.

 

In another comment, I linked to a tutorial on how to use TimeShift. You don't need the terminal at all to use TimeShift, but it's still much more complex than File History or Time Machine.

I think here you're basically agreeing with me. It's easier for a user on Windows or macOS to install and use some application that it is for someone running desktop Linux.

 

You can also have surprising incompatibility issues across otherwise similar Linux distros. There are no shortage of askubuntu posts where somebody's got a non GTK DE like KDE or LXQt and they're wondering why some app they've downloaded is having weird scaling issues, crashes, or has some other problem that's related to their system missing a GTK or Gnome library that the app developer expected them to have.

 

Something like that can never happen on macOS or Windows. Even now, during Apple's chip transition, you can still run x86 software on M1 Macs. I can run the x86 version of Teams on my Mac Studio more easily and than I can run the Ubuntu version on 22.04 because 22.04 uses Wayland and that breaks screen sharing. 

3/4 of "Linux sucks" list is just big corporations being lazy dicks who can't (can't as in "can't be bothered") develop software for Linux. It has nothing to do with Linux being bad and everything with those companies being bad and lazy. All the proprietary Google's junk with garbage APi support is all Google's fault. If some small company like pCloud AG can make proper cloud drive client for all the major OS in the world, including Linux, surely Google could also do for their stupid Google Drive. Same goes for super specific functions in MS Office that are not supported by alternative office suites, WhatsApp desktop client from lame ass Fecesbook and so on and on.

 

I also don't understand all the whining over TimeShift. It's the same frigging thing as System Restore in Windows.

[Ultraforce]

41 minutes ago, maplepants said:

You can also have surprising incompatibility issues across otherwise similar Linux distros. There are no shortage of askubuntu posts where somebody's got a non GTK DE like KDE or LXQt and they're wondering why some app they've downloaded is having weird scaling issues, crashes, or has some other problem that's related to their system missing a GTK or Gnome library that the app developer expected them to have.

 

Something like that can never happen on macOS or Windows. Even now, during Apple's chip transition, you can still run x86 software on M1 Macs. I can run the x86 version of Teams on my Mac Studio more easily and than I can run the Ubuntu version on 22.04 because 22.04 uses Wayland and that breaks screen sharing. 

That's actually false, I've had Windows stuff crash or just not work on Windows because CD video games from the 90s can sometimes just not work.

[maplepants]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

But not on those, how are they any hard?

It's not about being hard, it's that they're harder than on Windows or macOS.

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Apart from iOS, android just opens up a folder like it does on windows.

Android doesn't just open a folder, there are plenty of phone + distro combinations which do not work. Early I linked to a few of the countless posts on Linux forums where people learn the sadness of MTP, and other weirdness that happens when plugging certain phones into certain distros. And not weird distros, popular ones like Mint, Manjero, Ubuntu, Pop, all of their forums are full of people who dual boot that distro + Windows and while they can plug their phone into Windows no problem their Linux install can't seem to see it.

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Media consumption is just a double click, with vlc or anything else just like on windows too.

Offline media consumption, sure. But try to watch Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming services in better than 480p on Linux and you've got your work cut out for you.

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Screenshare works fine (I was going so 5 minutes ago on Zoom), unless you go out of your way with wayland, then yeah it sucks.

Using wayland isn't going out of your way at this point. I always run the current Ubuntu LTS, and it uses wayland. 

1 hour ago, igormp said:

WhatsApp desktop app is just an electron wrapper for the regular whatsapp web, you can easily download it too (although it's not official, gotta give you that).

Most regular users are not brave enough to use something like Nativefier to make their own WhatsApp desktop app, so if there isn't one available on the official website they'll just use the web version and be sad. 

[igormp]

34 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Offline media consumption, sure. But try to watch Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming services in better than 480p on Linux and you've got your work cut out for you.

Yeah, that's sad and not really a linux issue, but rather DRM within those companies. Google has managed to get it working on chrome for ChromeOS, but there are no builds with the proper widevine stuff for linux

Not much devs can do here, sadly, and users do need to go through workarounds to get that working.

 

36 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Using wayland isn't going out of your way at this point. I always run the current Ubuntu LTS, and it uses wayland. 

TIL that wayland is now the default on ubuntu, bad move IMO and I see your point now.

 

36 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Most regular users are not brave enough to use something like Nativefier to make their own WhatsApp desktop app, so if there isn't one available on the official website they'll just use the web version and be sad. 

They don't even need to do that since there are many packaged instances of whatsapp desktop for linux, but as a counterpoint, I've only seen 1 or 2 people using whatsapp desktop, most of them use the web version with their browser.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

3/4 of "Linux sucks" list is just big corporations being lazy dicks who can't (can't as in "can't be bothered") develop software for Linux.

Sorry no. An individual user can change their software ecosystem relatively easily if they are willing to, most aren't. A corporation will not change their software ecosystem because some nerd in engineering says Linux is better, but can't prove it. 

 

To pull a real world example. I have a client who still uses DOS in their production pipeline, I think it's for printing labels, I'm not privy to the product name, but the tool I wrote I wound up writing in Python to translate the data from the website to their label format. Why python? Because I could write it once, and if it's Windows, MacOS or Linux I can make it work on those. However packaging it? The MacOS people expect a GUI, which I'm not willing to spend time on if the tool is only going to be used by one person. I can package it for Windows, assuming pyinstaller won't get flagged as malware by Microsoft (which is what happened the first time.) Telling someone they have to install python to run this 40KB script is not happening. Rather I used my existing python installation I use for ML projects (Python 3.7) and just packaged the pieces needed to run the program, which produces a larger binary on Windows than MacOS. Now if they had a Linux requirement, I'd have to just give them the script itself, there's no way to package something for Linux that is guaranteed to run on all distros.

 

The client, of the client, isn't willing to change their pipeline to accommodate us. Why would they? They're the largest company in their market, they make the rules. We have to change our production pipeline to accommodate them.

 

It's not "can't be bothered", it's almost always a mixture of "we are a Windows shop" or "We are a MacOS shop", and switching is not an option, hell upgrading Windows or OS X is usually not an option either. You use what the machine came with until it's time for a new machine, or Apple/Microsoft end support for that version. 

 

In an ideal world, there wouldn't be more than one OS to "choose", there would simply be an agreement on a standard cpu-neutral ABI, which in Linux-Land, doesn't exist, and to date has had to be done at source-code level with massive build scripts to take into account every potential library dependency.

 

Believe it or not there has been a stable ABI for Intel x86 since 1988 for Unix. However the different CPU types that Linux (and MacOS and Windows) can run prevents this from being possible. 

 

In an ideal situation, there would be a standard that both a CLI and a GUI application could be compiled and packaged into, that will run everywhere (no Java is not that, neither are "webapp's") without any installed dependencies, and without needing administrative privileges. So far we only have the following solutions:

- Write a webapp, at 7% of the performance of the native CPU speed (Javascript is single-threaded on all browsers.)

- Fat Binaries (MacOS solution) , where you compile the binary for all target CPU's for the OS, works together with how OSX binaries are packaged so that an entire program is self-contained.

- Dynamic Recompilation (MacOS CPU migration solution Rosetta2, Also game console emulators)

- FatELF (Linux Solution), an idea similar to OSX's solution, but only for the binary. Does not solve dependency's like OSX

- PE(Fatpack, Windows solution) Basically wrapping multiple compilations into one PE.

- .NET (Managed, interpreted code), in a sense, programs are compiled from intermediate code on demand.

- Java (interpreted code) programs are compiled on demand

- Other scripting languages that an interpreter exists for

 

Part of the reason why a lot of things are written using scripting languages (eg Javascript, Perl, Python, Ruby) right now is because of this lack of binary compatibility. If it was simply possible to write-once,works-everywhere, everyone would use it right?

 

Java - Oracle, an evil(tm) company basically destroyed adoption of Java in it's tracks when they went after Google.

Flash - Adobe, abandoned it, instead of turning it into something more akin to Unity

Silverlight - Microsoft, abandoned. 

Unity - currently the go-to replacement for Flash. Has all the versioning problems (no backwards compatibility) of existing ABI-breaking changes.

 

In an ideal situation, everyone's userland would work without needing any OS dependencies. There would be a standard GUI, Threading, Network, FileSystem, Sound API/ABI that works everywhere. We have never, ever, been close to this. Fix that, and then "just change the OS" starts to become viable.

 

 

[williamcll]

This thread got a bit derailed. Chromebooks aren't even popular in the mainland. Student-use LInux would be running software like WPS office instead.

[RejZoR]

43 minutes ago, williamcll said:

This thread got a bit derailed. Chromebooks aren't even popular in the mainland. Student-use LInux would be running software like WPS office instead.

Apparently 99% of casual users are students who totally absolutely unconditionally need to run latest MS Office suite...

[mr moose]

21 hours ago, Ultraforce said:

That's actually false, I've had Windows stuff crash or just not work on Windows because CD video games from the 90s can sometimes just not work.

A faulty CD doesn't make OS stability arguments false.   

[Ultraforce]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

A faulty CD doesn't make OS stability arguments false.   

The point was Windows can have the same problem where translating Games made for Windows on DOS crash on Windows unless you specifically are using an emulator.

[mr moose]

19 minutes ago, Ultraforce said:

The point was Windows can have the same problem where translating Games made for Windows on DOS crash on Windows unless you specifically are using an emulator.

That's hardly and equal comparison,  comparing not being able to get old software working on a much newer operating system is not the same as getting current software to work across current OS's.   The point was you would and do experience more issues with incompatibility across Linux distributions than you do across windows versions.

 

No one is saying windows is flawless, but for all intents and purposes the reason many businesses will not move away from it, even when decent options exist, is purely because it is more stable across known environments (versions of windows and servers etc).