Comment by chronid - Hacker Neue

chronid May 21, 2025 parent

I have plenty of hard disagreements on the "user experience improvements" in Linux. "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard (GNOME is sort of successful at an extreme cost and plenty of limitations, KDE is still an incoherent mess with plenty of bad defaults starting from the base CDDM skin). It's full of things like the missing icon view in the GNOME/GTK file chooser [1] and while it's true that Windows11 is atrocious, all those little things add up.

I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...

I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)

I've been reading about the "year of linux" for years now, it's a meme for a reason. People that are not "prosumer" will keep using the preinstalled OS even if it's garbage - assuming they buy a laptop or desktop at all - and the prosumer will probably keep an OSX or a Windows machine close by anyway. Linux is usable as a browser kiosk sure but there is still plenty of friction on everything else. Enshittification will continue, and possibly infect also linux.

[1] https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-thumbnails-file-picker/

[2] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=43945373

godelski May 21, 2025

  > "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard

I don't mean to imply this is easy. But I also do know that these efforts have been in the works for quite some time. They can get more dedication if that's the direction we need to go.

Quick Google

  - 3 free Linux distros that look and feel like Windows: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2532994/3-free-linux-distros-that-look-and-feel-like-windows.html

  - 5 Linux Distributions That are Inspired by the Look and Feel of macOS: https://itsfoss.com/macos-like-linux-distros/

  > soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line

IDK how to tell you this, but for 90% of people this is "throw the machine out, buy a new one." I'm really not sure what the critique is here. Even if running with more problems seems unsurprising given what you described. And you're talking about the kernel.

I don't deny that there are problems with Linux, nor that things need to improve to get better mass appeal. But I do think you should look at your own words. They're highly technical. And we should not forget how this would compare when discussing Windows or OSX. That's the choice! It's that these conversations of "Linux sucks" are not just complaints about Linux, they are also suggestions of using Windows or OSX. The context of our conversation is about choosing between these systems, not the existence of problems.

I want to be very clear

  Linux is a dumpster fire.
  This does not mean Windows isn't!
  This does not mean OSX isn't!

The argument I'm making is that this doesn't matter for the general user. Fuck, it generally doesn't matter for the technical user. But there is a good reason why technical/power users have a strong bias towards using Linux. Because at least it is a dumpster fire they can fix. It is absurd to have the framing that we should not encourage people to use Linux in favor of them using systems that are user hostile and destroying all sense of personal privacy!

These arguments become equivalent to: "You don't want to eat that, the chef sneezed in it. Here, eat this cake instead. The chef only took a shit in it."

Idk about you, but give the choice, I'd rather take the sneeze than the shit. I'd (strongly) prefer neither, but frankly that isn't an option now, is it?

And let's be honest, if you want to get more resources to put out more fires, the only way that's going to happen is if there are more users.

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