Well fuck me for enjoying the hell out of desktop linux.
I do too, clearly as does Linus. He’s just talking about some of the issues that prevent it from getting adopted by the normies.
This was the most confusing thing to me when getting started with linux It was baffling to me that jumping from different distros would completely change how i had to install packages or push me to use flatpak. I genuinely could not wrap my head around how there were no universally accepted binaries between distros. And hes talking about this years ago before recent mass adoption…
I landed on an arch based distro because it seems like they have the most universal solution after jumping around. Curious to know, what distro In your opinion the closest to “getting it right”? Open to all not just @PhilipTheBucket
Steam I think is probably the closest thing to “right” for the problem he was describing. You pick your app, it downloads and then it works. There’s some behind-the-scenes nonsense involved, but it is in actuality hidden from the end-user, in a way that it is not in any of the “we fixed the Linux desktop!” solutions I have seen that are in actuality just another instance of XKCD 927. I was actually really pleased that he brought up Valve since that was the example that came to mind when he was laying out the problem.
I think it is okay if Linux is bad on “the desktop,” honestly. The world needs tractors and consumer-grade cars. They both have use cases. If what you need is a tractor, and you’re comfortable with the fact that it’s not going to work like a car, then a tractor will do things that are totally impossible with a Hyundai Elantra. That doesn’t mean we need to make tractors just as user-friendly as cars are, so that people can have one vehicle that does both. It is okay for some things to have a learning curve. But I think the example of the difficulties they had with subsurface are really significant things, it’s not just a question of “oh yeah it works different,” there are things that are just worse.
I think something like Arch or NixOS is probably the closest to “right” at this point. There is still a learning curve, so maybe not for everyone, but it’s manageable and things aren’t set up in gratuitously difficult ways. Maybe Bazzite, based on what I’ve heard, but I have not tried it so IDK.
IMO Linux’s biggest problem is choices. Normal people don’t really want choices, they just want the one, and it needs to work. The second you tell them there’s 17 different options, and each one has 9 sub options, and each sub option has 4 more sub sub options they just tune out. Got a problem? Google “Linux fix XYZ” and there’s 300 different fixes and maybe one of them works. Or maybe it doesn’t.
With windows there’s 1 or 2 windows. You get what Microsoft thinks is best. Don’t like it? Maybe someone’s made a tweak. But odds are too bad, suck it up. And then they move on with their life.
Well you’re right on, because that’s exactly the reason i haven’t tried linux yet, i have very little time for entertainment and i need to allocate my time to the thing i felt needed at the moment, between “trying to research and install linux and try out a few and troubleshoot when stuff came out” and “play game”, i always pick the latter.
Relevant thread:
This is much older than the posted date, so the terrain was way different, and the ecosystem was way different.
Caveat: I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.
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His whole thing was wanting to package things much more like MacOS at the time. It was pretty foolproof from a user’s perspective, but terrible for developers.
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AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.
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Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk…in theory. He hated it.
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Once the rise of containers came along, and everyone was (still is) generally using them wrong, he had a fucking meltdown and tried to revive another packaging project which he quickly gave up on.
I mention all of this to say: don’t just listen to what he’s saying and take it at face value. Sure, he’s a legend, but he’s just a developer. He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer. There is no ONE right answer here, and things now are way better than when this was recorded maybe 10 years ago. WAY better.
terrible for developers
He brought up specific things from the POV of working on subsurface where Linux made things a lot more difficult for them than every “consumer” operating system.
I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.
Which packaging projects? I don’t even remember him talking about particular projects (aside from Debian itself), just about the general landscape of the problem and the attitudes of distro makers that have created it.
AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.
Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk…in theory. He hated it.
I notice neither of these has made all that much of an impact. I have never in my life used either one of them or been encouraged to by anyone else, it has always been package management, or Docker, or pick your binary tarball, or
curl | sudo shand cross fingers.He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer.
He attained two totally separate attainable technical solutions which solved massive problems in the tech ecosystem and shape the landscape of computing today (one-and-a-half, GNU deserves quite a bit of credit.) I happen to agree mostly with his judgement on this particular problem, so it’s easier for me to see it that way, but I definitely would not dismiss out-of-hand his judgement on the right way to approach significant problems.
It’s called OnePackage
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