Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.
I’ve got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i’ve got multiple raspberry pi’s running, and a synology diskstation, and i’m no stranger to ssh’ing into them to manage some stuff)
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it’s still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.
First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i’d rather leave it disabled (although i assume that’s mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought “it’s probably some setting somewhere to change this”, but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares… Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i’d need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly… (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it’s not switching to the refreshrate of the video i’m playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn’t use a window manager that should solve it but doesn’t, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I’d give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you’ll find so little yet contradictory things…
Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought “i’ve got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let’s see if i can find something nice on ubuntu”, and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and … “no app installed for this file”… google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error
Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn’t replace it yet. Wouldn’t want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?
For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I’m missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or… right?
Yes, linux is terrible on the desktop.
I’ve worked in a Linux shop for the last 20 years, we provide a desktop-linux environment (latest debian) for thousands of users, and even with dedicated professionals managing it, the UX is just hilariously terrible by modern standards, right across the board.
My god that’s the perfect metaphor: it’s the desktop-experience version of PHP. No one thing is particularly broken in and of itself, but the set of all of them together… SMH.
I refuse to deal with it on a daily basis for file-print-web-email stuff; I use a Windows box as my desktop machine, and just SSH or VNC into the backend for the actual sysadmin part of my job. OSX is usable too, but I just don’t like it.
To be absolutely clear: Linux is the only sane choice for backend services or development; no normal person would willingly subject themselves to Windows for either of those purposes. But for the box you physically plug your mouse into, using linux is sheer masochism.
This isn’t even remotely true. Debian isn’t a desktop environment so anything you said after that is null and void.
oh ffs, don’t be pedantic. It provides a desktop environment, if you select one - we use xfce as best of the bunch.
My point isn’t the window manager, it’s the whole ecosystem. It’s the million little hidden folders clogging up your home directory, it’s the haphazard set of default graphical apps that get installed, it’s having to fuck around to get dbus running by default for the handful of applications that silently timeout and die without it, it’s having to delete lockfiles for users after a crash, it’s the general production values of a 90s shareware cdrom.
Just imagine trying to get general admin staff set up with that, and trying to support them - It’d be as horrible and painful as trying to set up developers or your network infrastructure under windows.
And at the end of the day, 90% of the things you need your desktop environment for are admin-staff kinds of tasks. Poking around on the web, mail, media, printing (and of course video games), which are just better and easier without the all propeller-hat shit.
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