Is the Linux desktop experience really this bad?

Audigex said:
Reasons Linux isn't taking over the world

1) Things don't "just work" - why can't I get HDMI audio passthrough on my HD6450? Windows can do it, why can't Linux? I know, proprietary drivers.... but I'm the end user, that's not my problem: I just want to plug HDMI into things and have them work.

2) WiFi. Seriously, this isn't new, and there aren't that many chips out there. I should not still be having issues with a commonplace WiFi dongle. I know this is sort of related to the above, but it's a much bigger single issue: HDMI passthrough affects a handful of people. HDMI affects nearly all.

3) The command line. I'm pretty technical, I don't mind having a go in the command line... but there's a reason GUIs were invented and are so popular. Stop making me input commands to a black and white terminal. Webmin goes a long way to fixing this, and there are various other GUI's and tools for this sort of thing... but I still end up in Terminal far too often. I can handle it, my mum can't.

Plus points since I first dabbled with Linux probably 10 years ago:
+ Installation is easy. Put the ISO on a disk, plug it in, follow an installer which isn't much (/any) more technical than the Windows one
+ App stores. I always loved apt, yum etc on Linux, for grabbing tools it was great. Having package managers over the top of this works perfectly. Nearly. And is the basis of the App Stores on everything these days
+ Less interaction needed, it does a lot more than it used to, automatically
Click to expand...

1 and 2 are both entirely the fault of the hardware vendors. The linux support is god-awful. Imagine windows drivers being built by people in their spare time with no access to the inner workings of the hardware. How well would wi-fi or HDMI audio work then?

What does your mum use that needs the terminal? You can install the OS, web browser, chat client email client all without the terminal and she never need see it.
 
AMD released radeon open source power management code yesterday.
open source UVD (hardware video decoding) is coming along nicely.

could be a better choice than fglrx in future.
 
deadite66 said:
AMD released radeon open source power management code yesterday.
open source UVD (hardware video decoding) is coming along nicely.

could be a better choice than fglrx in future.
Click to expand...

Yeah this is great news.

By the time we have wayland distros the linux desktop experience will probably be as good as windows/mac for AMD/Intel hardware, better even because you won't need to go to any effort to get your graphics working.

Nvidia needs to be left out in the cold, people need to stop buying their hardware if they're planning to run on linux and I suspect in about a years time, nobody will do that anymore unless they change tact.

SDL 2 is also in beta and is being used by valve afaik. They're solving issues with linux gaming pretty fast, valves games even have raw input now which great. The desktop is in a lot better shape than a year ago.

The final issue for me is still workflow, it's nuts how the big 3 choices are KDE, Gnome and Unity. Hopefully one of the smaller Qt projects will gain traction but for now XFCE doesn't totally suck.
 
Linux could be a good choice for gamers if all the pieces slot into place. I often wonder what value people are getting out of their Windows license if all they're doing is booting to games.

It's a massive IF, though.
 
Audigex said:
Reasons Linux isn't taking over the world

1) Things don't "just work" - why can't I get HDMI audio passthrough on my HD6450? Windows can do it, why can't Linux? I know, proprietary drivers.... but I'm the end user, that's not my problem: I just want to plug HDMI into things and have them work.

2) WiFi. Seriously, this isn't new, and there aren't that many chips out there. I should not still be having issues with a commonplace WiFi dongle. I know this is sort of related to the above, but it's a much bigger single issue: HDMI passthrough affects a handful of people. HDMI affects nearly all.

3) The command line. I'm pretty technical, I don't mind having a go in the command line... but there's a reason GUIs were invented and are so popular. Stop making me input commands to a black and white terminal. Webmin goes a long way to fixing this, and there are various other GUI's and tools for this sort of thing... but I still end up in Terminal far too often. I can handle it, my mum can't.

Plus points since I first dabbled with Linux probably 10 years ago:
+ Installation is easy. Put the ISO on a disk, plug it in, follow an installer which isn't much (/any) more technical than the Windows one
+ App stores. I always loved apt, yum etc on Linux, for grabbing tools it was great. Having package managers over the top of this works perfectly. Nearly. And is the basis of the App Stores on everything these days
+ Less interaction needed, it does a lot more than it used to, automatically
Click to expand...

This absolutely sums up my experience of using Ubuntu a few months ago. Some parts excellent, some parts appalling. So I'm back on Windows. Life's just not worth the hassle of mucking around in the terminal to do fairly basic things. I can see the point if you're a web developer though... all the guys at work use Linux of some flavour and it's much much more flexible than Windows.
 
I think it's unfortunately not always a good idea to go for the LTS release, unless you're running hardware that's at least a year or so old. Ubuntu 13.04 doesn't really add much from 12.04 LTS, but all the software updates help with newer systems. The terrible decision Canonical has made to limit support to 6 months makes Ubuntu less attractive.
 
Im running ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my pc's. It works very well this is not a high end computer, would only cost around 100-150. Im not having any problem just been using it for word prosessing and web surfing :)
 
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