End of an Era: No Linux Desktop at Home (after 17 years)

Interestingly enough, for me 2010 was the first time in 10 years that I actually stuck with Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu really does Just Work for me, on every machine I own.<p>You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's just vanity :)

I find this to be strange timing. For the most part stuff just works on Linux these days. I've had more trouble trying to get old printers working on Windows machines than I have had on Linux boxes. I've also had more trouble with buggy graphics drivers on Windows in the last 3 years than I've had on Linux. (Civ 5 still doesn't display right after 4 driver updates). Linux also seems to be the only place where innovation is happening on the desktop. We get small refreshes every 6 months, whereas the last time Mac users got a significant desktop refresh was for 10.5 in 2007, and Windows users get updates even less frequently. We've had KDE4 in the meantime, and Gnome3 is coming soon.<p>His real complaint seems to be that OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft Office. There are several different good ways of running Microsoft Office on Linux (I recommend CrossOver).

For me, it's continuation of an era: Still Linux Desktop at Home (for 17 years--thanks Slackware 2.0!)<p>The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life would not be nearly as easy.<p>At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.

As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu.<p>But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).

Short version: Individual posts a story about how he personally doesn't use linux as a desktop anymore, then the inclusive title is copied from a personal blog to a news aggregator in a way that constitutes flamebait.

cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&#38;q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.herlein.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fend-of-an-era-no-linux-desktop-at-home%2F" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&#38;q=...</a>

I have a 15" MacBook Pro at home, and I tried very hard to use it as my primary Python/C++ development environment, but, it just felt completely awkward and kludgy.<p>Ubuntu is the distro I use and it mostly Just Works.<p>1. Window management for Linux is much more mature than MacOSX's -- XMonad, dwm, Compiz' grid plugin, etc.<p>2. emacs keybindings for everything in Linux actually works. kill-yank rings work as expected. I've had serious setbacks when using MacOS's emacs keybindings.<p>3. apt for Debian based distros. (just phenomenal)<p>Sure, my sound may not work 1/2 of the time, flash applications may use all 4 cores of my crappy laptop, and wireless N is initially disabled by default, but, I'm willing to put up with all of this so the operating system doesn't get in my way when I am coding.<p>MacOS is there, but it's just not quite there, yet. Linux is making great strides as well, so we'll see how it plays out.

There is a problem with Macintosh-es too, you know, it's too damn expensive in Europe, for no apparent reason, that's why I'm still using Linux. The price difference is so huge that you might as well fly over to the US and buy one there.<p>I will buy one later on, though.<p>But back to the critism: - I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux, for your setup maybe(good for you), but generally most stuff simply just work with Linux, I plug in my mouse, and it loads even faster than on Windows 7<p>- You still(to my knowledge) can't tweak a Mac. Desktop the way you can tweak KDE, GNOME and many others.<p>In the end my advice is load up an Ubuntu CD and be amazed that Linux is not what you described.

Was the database instance on that box?

I dunno. I agree with some of the other posters here. I've been using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively for 2.5 years, and it's been great. I just research the hardware I buy to ensure that everything works out of the box. There are a few glitches, but nothing that really gets in my way. I keep Windows around for the games that don't work well with Wine, but other than that, Ubuntu works great.

IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely sucks. I recently wrote my first large gtk app and was appalled at how painful it was. Gtk has been around for like 15 years and half of it's widgets are unuseable and the api is clunky.<p>I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better. Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at least more designers working on pretty themes.<p>There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"

The big bottleneck for mass Linux adoption is that most of the mavens (tech nerds and early adopters) are Mac users. And since Mac is BSD-based, a lot of the draw of Linux (customizations, scripts, programming, etc.) is gone.<p>I find almost no reason to switch from a Mac to Linux. It's actually a lot easier to use Mac to develop for work (Rails) because I know every Mac has the same standard configurations and I do not need to make a configuration script to give to all the new kids.

Same here... all Mac and Solaris here for the last few years, with VM's for the rest.<p>Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my routers and other embedded devices run Linux.