I understand you. I'm forced to be used by Windows at work. There are so many problems I already forgot most of it.
But still, every bluetooth connections hangs the mouse for 2 seconds, explorer worst program ever written ever in any operating system. Windows boots with 7GB of ram being used of the 8 the machine has. Every day I collect some goodies for a book or page to show how bad it is.
It is worst than the worst Linux you can find. And it should not be because the amount of money goes into it, it's absurd.
Then people go into Mac because while being bad for privacy and a lock environment, it is still best than Windows.
But Linux is not like any of those. Some companies that take care of a specific distro, make a good job, including Ubuntu, that I really don't like.
But you do have a stable RockyLinux or Manjaro, both with a few supported desktop environments that work.
I also don't like Kubuntu or anything from Ubuntu. Gnome works but I don't like it.
So all that is left if Plasma and XFCE. You do have many others that are nice, but it is better to test them out first, on real hardware.
There are a few things that only work on Windows, mostly software that checks if it is not Windows.
But you do have all on Linux. Desktop environments and windows managers, server software and games, email, graphics, you name it! You also have Windows software that runs better on Linux.
Updates? Lol! Windows updates? Yeah sure. And people say ArchLinux is too rolling! LOL!
Do you know how many updates Teams gets in the morning? Yes, wait for the afternoon.
Ok so what is my choice? ArchLinux with XFCE. I do like Manjaro on all flavours. Love RockyLinux also.
Interesting, I have the opposite opinion. I'm considering switching from Windows to the KDE Plasma desktop and so far I'm impressed with it. Plasma is the first Linux desktop I've used that feels polished and professional. It is more customizable than Windows is. I'm looking to avoid Win 11 with its telemetry, background downloads, advertisements, OneDrive problems, etc.
“Trash” is too harsh of a word, but I do feel that desktop Linux lacks the fit-and-finish of Windows and macOS. It boils down to development resources. The Mac ecosystem has a much smaller number of hardware configurations that macOS needs to be concerned about. Apple has the resources to test these configurations. Even in the PC ecosystem with its plethora of hardware configurations, Microsoft is also a well-resourced company and is thus capable of testing a wide range of configurations. The Linux ecosystem, on the other hand, is much more loosely coordinated among many different parties that may or may not be acting in accord with each other. There are no Apple- or Microsoft-level entities investing hundreds of millions of dollars into desktop Linux development.
In fact, given the circumstances, it’s quite impressive we have desktop Linux at all. Even with its Sisyphean setbacks, it’s come quite a long way compared to 20 years ago when I first started using Linux.
I don't think Windows 11 is as responsive as I wish it was. I don't have any complaints about my M4 Mini yet but if I used it to do tasks I didn't want to do that was late (psychology matters on how annoying unresponsiveness is) or had as much installed on it as I have on the Windows (e.g. things like Adobe Creative Cloud or the backup manager on my machine at work make full startup take 10+ minutes) or installed iOS 26 I might feel differently about it.
I thought mobile OS were a big advance in responsiveness circa 2012: today my feelings are mixed. Low end Android phones are so bad it's easy to say "why do people get so excited about apps when it takes five minutes to load one?", my iPhone is clearly fine tuned to deliver notifications instantly, but my iPad sometimes has that out-to-lunch daydreamy feeling that Windows gives.
Which desktop environment do you use? I guess it's too much to expect a fresh install of Ubuntu which has been out for forever to have actual smooth mouse usage.
>I no longer consider any of this to be valid, and consider this entire adventure so far to have been intellectually dishonest and filled with questionable assumptions about everything, so, please, if you're reading this and got linked here, stop reading this and tell whoever linked you here to shut the f*k up already.
Because it reached it's peak - when community interest was big, FOSS participation interest was big, even corporate interest was big, and desktop OS interest was also big - and didn't manage to fully catch up to the areas it was lacking.
It's still better in other areas, and of course, freedom and lack of surveillance, but regarding catching up to Windows and macOS in UI maturity and convenience, it's too late.
(And programmer/admin types, or people who "set it for their 70 year old parents and they use it just fine" are not a counter-argument).
Fortunately, macOS and Windows are going downhill UI wise too, so maybe they'll meet Linux further down, and Linux might even surpass them.
There is DHH Omarchy/Omakub attempt to create a Linux system of convention over configuration, this is making me give it one last shot.
But damn some aspects are really annoying. One other issue is one package installation at a time with a lock which you can't do from other terminal.
Here's what GPT says:
> The APT package manager uses a lock file (usually /var/lib/dpkg/lock or /var/lib/apt/lists/lock) to ensure that only one process (like apt-get, apt, or the GUI Software Center) is modifying packages at a time.
I keep away from GUI package managers as much as I can. I can tell somebody to
$ sudo apt-get install X
and they can cut and paste and it's done. To do the same with a GUI package manager I'd have to spell out 10 or so steps. I've had enough times where the spinner started spinning and never stopped spinning and the lock file never got unlocked or the package database got corrupted that I won't even try using one.
That's by design. Wouldn't want two of these to stomp on each other. It would be an interesting question to build something that can support some concurrency, for instance most of these times two projects are going to install different files and the only conflict might be in managing the actual package database.
It would be like the time they took the giant lock out of the kernel, but that kind of thing is fraught. I remember a few years in the 2 series where we were getting crashes all the times under heavy load from concurrency bugs after they took out that lock.
The easy way to solve concurrency problems is just put a lock on the whole thing. It is trivial to get that right. And if the actual demand for concurrency is low this is fine. A two processor machine doesn’t spend much time running the OS kernel so circa 2000 Linux had a giant kernel lock on the whole kernel.
If you increase the number of CPUs though this became an increasing bottleneck and IBM did some really amazing work to make Linux scalable. Trouble is you now have to lock on smaller resources and the various combinations of things that could get locked increases the complexity exponentially. From the viewpoint of a user space developer the locking facilities under POSIX aren’t that good and move the tradeoff between “sometimes waiting for a lock” vs “dealing with data corruption” towards the former.
Not every package in modern computing can be parallelized. In a perfect world, building a Docker container or Python package takes a single step and happens entirely concurrently. But that's obviously unrealistic, every program has some order-of-operations even if it's as simple as creating some volumes or setting environment variables. If you try to run them out-of-order or simultaneously, the root is polluted and you have to start over again from scratch. All software packages are staged by-design.
Linux does have solutions to this - Flatpak implements the macOS strategy of redundant static-linking, and Nix has an isolated dynamically-linked package manager that allows you to build and install packages concurrently. But both use a lot of disk space and aren't super intuitive to users that just want native versions of the programs they use.
I understand you. I'm forced to be used by Windows at work. There are so many problems I already forgot most of it. But still, every bluetooth connections hangs the mouse for 2 seconds, explorer worst program ever written ever in any operating system. Windows boots with 7GB of ram being used of the 8 the machine has. Every day I collect some goodies for a book or page to show how bad it is. It is worst than the worst Linux you can find. And it should not be because the amount of money goes into it, it's absurd. Then people go into Mac because while being bad for privacy and a lock environment, it is still best than Windows. But Linux is not like any of those. Some companies that take care of a specific distro, make a good job, including Ubuntu, that I really don't like. But you do have a stable RockyLinux or Manjaro, both with a few supported desktop environments that work. I also don't like Kubuntu or anything from Ubuntu. Gnome works but I don't like it. So all that is left if Plasma and XFCE. You do have many others that are nice, but it is better to test them out first, on real hardware. There are a few things that only work on Windows, mostly software that checks if it is not Windows. But you do have all on Linux. Desktop environments and windows managers, server software and games, email, graphics, you name it! You also have Windows software that runs better on Linux. Updates? Lol! Windows updates? Yeah sure. And people say ArchLinux is too rolling! LOL! Do you know how many updates Teams gets in the morning? Yes, wait for the afternoon. Ok so what is my choice? ArchLinux with XFCE. I do like Manjaro on all flavours. Love RockyLinux also.
Interesting, I have the opposite opinion. I'm considering switching from Windows to the KDE Plasma desktop and so far I'm impressed with it. Plasma is the first Linux desktop I've used that feels polished and professional. It is more customizable than Windows is. I'm looking to avoid Win 11 with its telemetry, background downloads, advertisements, OneDrive problems, etc.
“Trash” is too harsh of a word, but I do feel that desktop Linux lacks the fit-and-finish of Windows and macOS. It boils down to development resources. The Mac ecosystem has a much smaller number of hardware configurations that macOS needs to be concerned about. Apple has the resources to test these configurations. Even in the PC ecosystem with its plethora of hardware configurations, Microsoft is also a well-resourced company and is thus capable of testing a wide range of configurations. The Linux ecosystem, on the other hand, is much more loosely coordinated among many different parties that may or may not be acting in accord with each other. There are no Apple- or Microsoft-level entities investing hundreds of millions of dollars into desktop Linux development.
In fact, given the circumstances, it’s quite impressive we have desktop Linux at all. Even with its Sisyphean setbacks, it’s come quite a long way compared to 20 years ago when I first started using Linux.
I don't think Windows 11 is as responsive as I wish it was. I don't have any complaints about my M4 Mini yet but if I used it to do tasks I didn't want to do that was late (psychology matters on how annoying unresponsiveness is) or had as much installed on it as I have on the Windows (e.g. things like Adobe Creative Cloud or the backup manager on my machine at work make full startup take 10+ minutes) or installed iOS 26 I might feel differently about it.
I thought mobile OS were a big advance in responsiveness circa 2012: today my feelings are mixed. Low end Android phones are so bad it's easy to say "why do people get so excited about apps when it takes five minutes to load one?", my iPhone is clearly fine tuned to deliver notifications instantly, but my iPad sometimes has that out-to-lunch daydreamy feeling that Windows gives.
Perhaps you should pick a different desktop environment
Which desktop environment do you use? I guess it's too much to expect a fresh install of Ubuntu which has been out for forever to have actual smooth mouse usage.
I'm a Kubuntu fan. Never seen a mouse problem, even when run virtually, but that's just me.
Unlike with Windows, and to a similar degree macOS, where vendors create all the drivers themselves, Linux driver support isn't there for everything.
Your mouse would work fine if you got a compatible mice for which good drivers exist. Same for other parts of your setup. But this requires research.
This is a known issue with wayland: https://gist.github.com/generic-internet-user/e8eec46ce15957....
The incompetence is showing, just write code and ship it without a single care about the most basic bug there is. Let the users figure it out.
The page you link to starts,
>I no longer consider any of this to be valid, and consider this entire adventure so far to have been intellectually dishonest and filled with questionable assumptions about everything, so, please, if you're reading this and got linked here, stop reading this and tell whoever linked you here to shut the f*k up already.
In XKCD vernacular, today you are one of the lucky 10,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_human_interface_device_cla...
Because it reached it's peak - when community interest was big, FOSS participation interest was big, even corporate interest was big, and desktop OS interest was also big - and didn't manage to fully catch up to the areas it was lacking.
It's still better in other areas, and of course, freedom and lack of surveillance, but regarding catching up to Windows and macOS in UI maturity and convenience, it's too late.
(And programmer/admin types, or people who "set it for their 70 year old parents and they use it just fine" are not a counter-argument).
Fortunately, macOS and Windows are going downhill UI wise too, so maybe they'll meet Linux further down, and Linux might even surpass them.
There is DHH Omarchy/Omakub attempt to create a Linux system of convention over configuration, this is making me give it one last shot.
But damn some aspects are really annoying. One other issue is one package installation at a time with a lock which you can't do from other terminal.
Here's what GPT says:
> The APT package manager uses a lock file (usually /var/lib/dpkg/lock or /var/lib/apt/lists/lock) to ensure that only one process (like apt-get, apt, or the GUI Software Center) is modifying packages at a time.
To me this seems like a serious limitation
I keep away from GUI package managers as much as I can. I can tell somebody to
and they can cut and paste and it's done. To do the same with a GUI package manager I'd have to spell out 10 or so steps. I've had enough times where the spinner started spinning and never stopped spinning and the lock file never got unlocked or the package database got corrupted that I won't even try using one.I was talking about apt-get, try to do multiple installation from different terminal instances. Pretty sure it runs into a lock.
That's by design. Wouldn't want two of these to stomp on each other. It would be an interesting question to build something that can support some concurrency, for instance most of these times two projects are going to install different files and the only conflict might be in managing the actual package database.
It would be like the time they took the giant lock out of the kernel, but that kind of thing is fraught. I remember a few years in the 2 series where we were getting crashes all the times under heavy load from concurrency bugs after they took out that lock.
Why is it by design? Concurrency is the bread and butter of modern computing.
The easy way to solve concurrency problems is just put a lock on the whole thing. It is trivial to get that right. And if the actual demand for concurrency is low this is fine. A two processor machine doesn’t spend much time running the OS kernel so circa 2000 Linux had a giant kernel lock on the whole kernel.
If you increase the number of CPUs though this became an increasing bottleneck and IBM did some really amazing work to make Linux scalable. Trouble is you now have to lock on smaller resources and the various combinations of things that could get locked increases the complexity exponentially. From the viewpoint of a user space developer the locking facilities under POSIX aren’t that good and move the tradeoff between “sometimes waiting for a lock” vs “dealing with data corruption” towards the former.
Not every package in modern computing can be parallelized. In a perfect world, building a Docker container or Python package takes a single step and happens entirely concurrently. But that's obviously unrealistic, every program has some order-of-operations even if it's as simple as creating some volumes or setting environment variables. If you try to run them out-of-order or simultaneously, the root is polluted and you have to start over again from scratch. All software packages are staged by-design.
Linux does have solutions to this - Flatpak implements the macOS strategy of redundant static-linking, and Nix has an isolated dynamically-linked package manager that allows you to build and install packages concurrently. But both use a lot of disk space and aren't super intuitive to users that just want native versions of the programs they use.
Probably Gnome software center is trash, try Debian with `apt instal X` 20y never disappointed
Update: I switched from Wayland to X11 and the stutter has disappeared.