The current state of Linux desktop is spooky
 

Recently I decided to test some big distros to see what they're doing -- I'm currently developing Porteus distro. I thought they were very mature at this point, but they're so far from being usable by regular users, or even advanced ones.

This is my experience.

Xubuntu 21.10 x64
Some error messages during the boot process, but in the end the UI loaded. Well, kind of. Two thirds of the screen were horizontally black because nouveau drivers don't handle refresh rates higher than 120 Hz and it decided to set it to 144 Hz -- you wonder: if it doesn't handle it, why does it automatically set to anything higher than 120 Hz? But because I know Xfce I managed to change the refresh rate using shortcuts. However, I failed to install it -- it gets stuck in one of the installer screens (the one where you choose normal or minimal install). So I decided to try Lubuntu 21.04 x64.

Lubuntu 21.04 x64
The installer is a mess. Initially I provided to it a unit half FAT32 and half NTFS, but the installer doesn't know how to handle it. I tried many different combinations of partition strategies, including a manual process, just to see it saying that apart from the Ext4 I created I also need a FAT32 partition for booting, with very specific flags -- if it knows what to do, what doesn't it do that for me? It didn't work. Then I gave it permission to reallocate my NTFS to create space for an Ext4 partition, but after more than 1h:30m without any progress and this constant I/O access, I hit cancel and rebooted. It comes as no surprise that it corrupted my NTFS partition and I had to make some magic to save my files. So I backed up all my data and allowed the installer to do whatever it wanted with the whole storage unit, and it worked. After it reboots we see this odd message saying 'Failed to set MokListXRT: Out of Resources / Could not create MokListXRT: Out of Resources' -- it disappears after you update the whole system. The boot time is unbelievable -- just to see Lubuntu logo (before actually loading the desktop environment) it takes a long time.

There's no intuitive way to install Opera browser: if you type in the terminal 'sudo apt-get install opera' or 'sudo apt-get install opera-stable' it doesn't work and it doesn't even suggest the correct command -- why?!

If you type 'software' in the main menu there's this 'software sources' which doesn't seem to have anything useful to download applications, even on the suspicious 'Other Software' tab.

Back to the main menu, typing 'package' suggests 'Muon Package Manager' application. Looks promising. If you type 'opera' in the search field it filters to a list as long as you can imagine... Completely useless. Maybe 'opera-stable' or 'opera browser'? No, nothing. Ok, let's try just 'browser'. Oh, the results are not sorted alphabetically. Let's sort it and now try to find the results starting with 'o'. No, Opera is not there.

Let's try to download the .deb file from Opera website then. Believe me or not, when trying to open it I see this: 'Error: Cannot satisfy dependencies'. And there's no tip to what to do to fix it.

After a while I found this app called Discover and it seems it can download applications. Let's try it! Opera is there, nice! After 6 minutes (!) it gets stuck in 99%... Yep, I waited another 6 minutes but nothing happened so I gave up. Funny enough, by clicking on the 'Installing' blue UI element crashes the application. But wait, Opera is in the main menu. Let's open it! Not without this message first 'Profile error occurred'. After the browser finally opens, there's a popup saying some features on chrome extension might not work until I clear data that other sites have stored on my device -- I have never installed Opera or any other Chromium-based browser before and there is plenty of free space on my storage unit. That's a fresh Lubuntu install!

Let's try something simpler, like changing the theme to a dark one. First you need to open 'LXQt Appearance Configuration', then 'LXQt Theme' tab. Oh, when you select different themes you see messages all over the place saying that gtk-2.0 has been overwritten, but the themes get applied. Well, not exactly. Apart from the taskbar and main menu, none of the themes actually change the color of the applications, including native ones like the file manager (pcmanfm-qt) and very theme selector application I was using (!). Let's pretend we didn't see a theme called 'Dark'...

Clear Linux 35000 x64 -- live session
I couldn't find any shortcut to open file manager, there's no alt drag, but that's OK. Let's try to install an application.

Software app always says 'No Application Data Found'. In the 'Installed apps' tab you can't see Firefox but it's actually installed by default and you can use it normally. There's no visible search UI element, so you need to guess that just typing something it will appear. In the 'Updates' tab it says 'Software is up to date' when it's clear not the case.

Trying to open any multimedia file (mp3, mp4, flac, etc) shows a spinner for a few seconds and Videos app tries to run, but then it disappears and nothing loads. Trying with VLC and it has no AAC decoder.

Firefox internal updater fails sometimes (...), but when it works the browser crashes 100% of the times when it's about to open. I couldn't find any way to revert the update.

You can't open images because it says there's no application to open it, but Image Viewer is installed and if you manually open it you can indeed load images.

Can't extract rpm files -- fatal error.

Opening a terminal from the file manager context menu doesn't go to the current folder.

Sometimes you boot and your storage units are not correctly mounted so you can't access them.

Although it has a non-UEFI boot loader, the system hangs during one of the boot steps.

The default desktop environment is Gnome, which deserves a dedicated article, but let's point out just a few issues I faced when using it:

1. There's no network icon in the task bar until you are connected.
2. Sound and power look different things on the taskbar, but they're actually a one-button thing.
3. To connect to a wifi network you need to click 5 times (even when we reach the available wifi networks double click doesn't work!).
4. The whole UI responsiveness is just bad -- even dragging windows is laggy. Not having Nvidia proprietary drivers is not an excuse because nouveau is fast enough for it.
5. I couldn't find anything related to the compositor. I don't even know if there's any running.
6. ALT+F2 brings the runner app, but it has no auto complete, so if you try to open the terminal by typing... well, 'terminal' nothing happens, even if you hit Enter.
7. If you minimize an application it vanishes. You need to click on 'Activities' at the top left to see the wallpaper being shrank (...) and then your application appears at the bottom in this MacOS style.

Manjaro Sway 21.1.0 x64 -- live session via VirtualBox
Gets in loop in the terminal login screen while odd messages appear on the top of it. I found out that my VM was not configured to use a 3D video card. By adding a 3D video card, new issues appear. Initially it seems there's no live session since the installer runs automatically after boot -- you have to guess that by cancelling it you'll be able to enjoy the live session. But, well, not quite... I can't see the mouse cursor, so the system is barely usable.

Let's try a live session on my real machine.

First attempt: using 'proprietary drivers' option, which doesn't work. It gets in loop in the login screen, just like the VM without a 3D video card.

Rebooted and tried this 'open source drivers' option. Well, that 2/3 of screen in black issue is there and because I don't know Sway I have no idea how to change the refresh rate in this odd scenario. I had to give up.

---

These experiments were just a very simple attempt to use normal things on modern Linux distros, and most of the time they fail badly. I'm sure even experienced users will struggle to handle many of these issues.

At this point we are all aware of the journey of Linus Tech Tips and how bad this is going, not because he's stupid or he's trying to sabotage Linux, but simply because Linux is immature and we, Linux lovers, are just used to dodge these issues.

It seems Linux community should focus on simplicity, making basic things work first. This whole systemd, KDE, Gnome, wayland, countless package managers... this is just too much complexity. We need to step back, with a minimalist approach. :)

Sorry, but testing on Clear linux (NOT designed for desktop use, and NOT designed to be used if you have ANY hardware not made by Intel, it's specifically designed to be run on Intel Servers)is going to have issues. Manjaro is a very bipolar distro. Some people have used it for years with nary an issue, others (like myself) have found it to be miles less stable than Arch that it's based on and ostensibly tries to "soothe" out the rough spots on.

The *buntu's are a bit more surprising, but then, I've never thought that *buntu was all the impressive. I get far better stability and usability from base Debian installs. Not to mention if you're setting up a "newbie" type install you probably should be using LTS since that way they're not having to upgrade every 6 months to stay in support.

And complaining about not being able to install a browser that isn't included in nearly ANY repos because even for "small" browsers it has small market penetration is IMO cheating. Like saying you had issues getting Adobe Premier working in linux. Going to the opera site will initiate a download that's pretty good at detecting what base your OS uses and giving you the right download (assuming it's .deb or .rpm), and installing it via the command line apt simply works in Debian or *Buntu LTS.

I've set up several dozen installs for people with no linux experience but the desire to learn (or no experience at all and just the need to have a computer and play a few simple 2d games to kill time), and never had issues with any of them. Use a distro with >1 year supported installs and that's geared towards the DESKTOP (not Intel servers) and generally everything DOES simply "work". And avoid Nvidia. They're NOT open-source friendly. They're quite the exact opposite.

That's interesting. My experience has been vastly different (not spooky at all).

Currently I have KUbuntu 20.04 LTS currently installed on 3 laptops, one server, and two desktops. Then Linux Lite on a little net book and all of my RPIs have a version of PI OS installed. All installed without a hitch and have been very stable over the past few years. Now, I would agree that 10-15 years ago, I would see install 'glitches' but not now. That said, I do 'NOT' fool around with NTFS/FAT/FAT32 or dual booting. Windows is just a memory (at home). Sure some portable drives still have FAT32 on them but most I just format to ext4 for backup purposes. Every piece of software I've loaded works as well. But then I stick to Firefox for my browser, Thunderbird for my email client, KConsole for command line, and LibreOffice for my office needs. Nothing out of the ordinary. FreeCad, KiCad, InkScape, VLC, Lazarus, Arduino IDE, gcc, etc. just work.

Now VMs I have add issues when working with videos inside them. I've had lockups in the past. Same with getting a decent screen size for the VM. But I just figure it is part of getting a VM up and running and work through those issues.

I recently installed KUbuntu on my dads laptop (replaced Windows 7) and all went well. Updated with similar apps he was using and he (at 81 years old) was happily working with Linux. I also recently upgraded to a Ryzen 5900X processor (all other components stayed as it was) in my workstation and Ubuntu never hiccuped. Booted right up.

Point is, I found Ubuntu a very stable distro. YMMV of course... But for me, I can't say enough good things about it. Every piece of software I wanted or needed to run ... ran.

I wouldn't even claim that "we" are all aware of Linus Sebastian (the person behind the YouTube channel "Linus Tech Tips", which I believe focuses on high-end gaming machines).

Certainly I know that I've heard nothing about a "journey" (presumably trying to use a Linux-based OS for gaming?) nor of how well/badly it may have been going.

I hold no opinion regarding his abilities, stupidity, or any potential malice, but one person having problems (no matter how many fans they may have) is not a representative sample.

(If it's interesting/educational, maybe you could share a non-video summary of what he's been trying and how things have been going? Also, has he consulted any experienced Linux users regarding whatever issues he's been having?)


There is no "Linux community" - there are numerous Linux communities, and some of those communities are centered around a particular product/philosophy.

There are some that might agree with you on taking a minimalist approach (though that term means different things to different people).

Some will say Alpine/Arch/Gentoo/Slackware are simple and minimalist distros, but based on your post I'm not convinced any of them will satisfy/suit you.

So to sum up your issues:

• You used Linux distros that aren't suited to desktop use, or are known to have issues (like Manjaro).
• You used desktop environments that aren't easy to customize because they're 'lite', and meant for older/underpowered machines.
• You tried to install software that wasn't in a repository.
• You tried to play media without having the codecs installed.

...and you're somehow surprised you had issues?? I've used Linux only (except for PC gaming) for YEARS, and have had zero issues with UEFI installs, higher-end video and video cards, multiple monitors and other esoteric hardware, like support for Razer peripherals. I have openSUSE Tumbleweed running on a laptop, my desktop (with a fairly-recent nVidia card and big curved display), and even on a Surface tablet. No a single issue installing, and except for one hardware snag with the Surface (which took all of a minute to resolve), everything was supported just fine. I play media, and can switch themes in seconds by going into KDE system settings. Don't like Gnome? Rather than complain about what you don't like, choose one of these options:

• Get on the Gnome development team, submit code, and change what you don't like
• Use a different desktop GUI

Sorry, but this sounds like a troll/flame post.
No, he even states in his videos that things are simple, *WHEN YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THEM*. He's brand new to Linux, and if you're used to Windows (or Mac) and you go from one to the other, yes...things are hard. I find it incredibly difficult to use Windows for anything more advanced than gaming. Should I post some screed about how 'immature' Windows is??
If you want to be spoon-fed, and don't want choices, then use Windows or Mac.

The Linux desktop is/comes in a variety of guises, find the one that suits you, or else install from a primary distro such as Debian/Devuan, RedHat, SuSE; or even, Slackware. ( ;) )

I imagine he's referring to an episode of his show where he installed popos then tried to install steam, but their steam package was messed up (bad dependencies, such that installing them would uninstall popos desktop). The GUI installer told him that and wouldn't let him proceed. So he decided to try it command line. Which also told him that and wouldn't proceed either automatically, not only listing what it would remove but saying you dont want to do it, etc, but allowing . But he decided to proceed anyway by typing whatever it said "yes i really want to" or whatever. And then, sure enough, it removed his desktop. So Popos not only fixed their steam package, they also patched their version of apt wouldn't let a user override it by typing that you want to.

Sounds like OP your main problem is fancy new nvidia gpu. Try a non nvidia gpu at least a year or two old, you'll have way less issues.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. :)

Just to be clear: I'm not looking for a distro. I develop Porteus distro and that's my daily distro -- which has flaws, no doubt, and I'm open to be criticized. The initial post is not about me or the distro I use or even distro X vs distro Y. I'm just trying to understand why Linux desktop is so immature even though there are big companies behind some of these distros, like Intel and Canonical.

The argument 'it works for me' doesn't seem empathetic, in my opinion. I could say the same because I'm a developer, and then Linux would never progress as a popular OS -- and that's the goal of *buntu. The point here is to analyse the common user's perspective and also why some things that are supposed to just work are so difficult or even broken.

Another example that bugs me is the fact that installing applications on Linux implies that non-advanced users won't be able to choose in which unit/folder they will be installed. What if my system unit/partition doesn't have much free space or if I just want to organize my applications differently? I know now we have AppImage, FlatPak, Snap, etc packaging, but that's a different idea and they have their flaws.

It's already hard for the regular user to migrate to Linux, and then they have to choose a distro among hundreds, and then a desktop environment among dozens. And then come these terms like 'LTS', which will sound vague even if you say it states for Long-Term Support. BTW, I only used LTS versions of *buntu in my tests.

Could you guys point out where in Clear Linux webpage it says it's not designed for desktop use? I thought because it has a popular desktop environment it should just work. And although it's optimized for Intel hardware, it's known for running faster on AMD hardware than other distros -- Phoronix has countless benchmarks showing this.

Most of the issues I reported here we found casually and they have nothing to do with hardware compatibility. Most of them would be easily fixed if the company behind these distros simply cared. I know because I'm a developer, not because I wish it to be true. The question is: why they do that?

When I was looking for a small 32bit live distro for working on... something a few months back, Porteus was an awesome choice. Loved it.

The Buntus, 20.04 and 21.10 Gnome, been working up some complex scripts on this... and I hate them, mostly because some browser pops up full screen with a pure white error page blinding me every 10-15 minutes. Every time I delete something in the file browser, a pop down appears saying the file was deleted and hangs there covering the other files I want to access but if I click there the garbage can file browser opens, got to sit there shaking my fist waiting for this pop down to disappear. Some fine work taking place there, is it really necessary to stop production to tell me I just deleted something??

The newer Gnome on Fedora or Gentoo don't have me swearing.

Plasma, nice for so many years, now so complex there's always a bug at minimum as it takes a month or so to pinpoint them and attempt to address it.

Haven't played too much with the lightweight desktops enough to complain yet but I certainly feel the same way regarding shaky desktops on the heavyweight side, compared to some years back where these DEs flowed rather nicely. But again, Buntu Gnome is more likely to have me buying new monitors for having smashed them compared to Gnome in Fedora or Gentoo.

Hmm, so OP's last thread wasn't ragebaiting enough, they had to raise the stakes.

What I generally don't understand with statements like OP's: it's as if some people started using Linux, but constantly feel insecure about it, constantly comparing it to itself/other_OS. Why? I made my choice almost 10 years ago, it's not like I'm going to give up because a beta version of a mainstream distro has a bug! Instead I try to do something about it.

I also suspect that some people have a harder time giving up customer status a.k.a. helpdesk mentality. See chapter #3a of this article.

Of course things sometimes give trouble in Linux. Do you think that they never give trouble in Windows — look on the web to see some of the problems!

Is it "hard for the regular user to migrate"? I migrated from QDOS 20 years ago (I've never used) and had no problems, and I'm sure things are simpler now. But I probably wouldn't count as a regular user, being intelligent, well-educated, and using my computer for things other than social networking and entertainment. If Joe Sixpack has trouble, why should I care?
If Linux works for business, government, and academia, not to mention in schools in many countries, that's good enough.

Quite! ;)

People had to 'learn' how to a use a computer - it just happened that it came with a different O/S - they only have to 'think' to use Linux instead. :)

Would I ever use MS or Apple O/S? No, because I can be in control with Linux or BSD.

If computers didn't come pre installed with 'an' O/S, 'for convenience', life would have been so much simpler to choose Linux or BSD as their O/S. :D

Full disclosure: I've had little to no interest in any of the 'Buntus after an early release (back from the days when they sent out physical CDs for free) was unable to recognize any storage on a system containing a generic Gigabyte PIII motherboard with an Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller (a combination that several other Linuxen were able to work with without any problems). Lately, though, I have had no trouble when running Ubuntu images in VirtualBox (under CentOS). I'm surprised you had problems with either of the Ubuntu offshoots that you tested those you tried but, admittedly, I've had no direct experience them. I suspect the level of support and maturity is somewhat less than the mainline Ubuntu.

Never heard of it but that's probably not surprising as DistroWatch lists a couple of hundred Linux distributions.

Is it an RPM-based distribution? If not, this wouldn't surprise me although there are likely add-on RPM management utilities that may have been missing when you experienced that error message. Note: I'm more of a "try RPM first and compile from source if one's not available" kind of Linux user so YMMV.

My impression of the Arch-based distributions is that, if you are not comfortable doing a lot of work under the hood, it may be best to avoid them. Manjaro is supposed to be pretty nice and the Arch wiki is a pretty good resource.

Countless package managers? You could just use the one that's included by your favored distribution's maintainers. (I did, though, resort to using one of the newer package managers in order to get LetsEncrypt installed and running on a proxy server. Probably the only thing I'll ever use that package manager for, though.)

Simplicity depends on your needs. I use Slackware for a firewall because getting it to run my firewall setup script was simplicity. (I never could get it to run on a Systemd-based system at the point in the boot sequence that I wanted it run despite 25 years of Linux experience.)

I do (really!) share some of your concerns about the Linux desktop. For some things, I find it too laptop-centric. The networking tools for wireless networking are great when using a laptop wirelessly but I find that they don't work very smoothly when you find yourself switching back and forth between a wired/wireless environments. There are some (IMHO) questionable utilities that a certain desktop environment team wants to run in the background by default that I need to disable in order to improve desktop performance. Even given those nits, none of these are enough to make me want to run back to Windows.

Keep looking, reading reviews, etc. ... There's a distribution out there that'll work for you.

In the last two years I have installed three different released of Sparky Linux, two of MintDE and one of Mint, Q4OS, Elementary, Debian - two different versions, Manjaro, VSIDO, as well as one FreeBSD and some ReactOS, TinyCore, and Puppy. Every single one of them has loaded correctly and acted exactly as I expected. Everything I tried that they supported was EASY!

That said, my hardware is all old with the exception of a couple of SSD drives, keyboard, and mouse which are VERY vanilla standard. I am going to guess it is the hardware involved, or the meatware involved, that generated any issues mentioned here.

Incorrect. If 1,000 people say something is working, and 1 says it's broken...there's a high probability that the one person is using it wrong, or lacks the understanding of HOW to use it. There is zero 'immature' about an OS that can be installed to SAN's, on blade servers, laptops, and desktops, and has extensive software libraries. What your whole issue seems to be, is that you don't like a few things and haven't bothered to think about the "why" behind them.

• Why can't codecs be installed by default? Legal issues, which are widely known and disclosed.
• Why did you have trouble customizing your desktop? Because you used one that is FOR ADVANCED USERS, and that is hard to customize. Don't blame the GUI for working how it was written.
• Why was it hard to install software? Because you picked package(s) that weren't in repositories. And when you tried to install it, complained about it instead of using any of the other options that you had.

Seems like you created your own issues just to complain about them. And go on to complain about Gnome, and ignore the fact you could have used another GUI that WAS easier to customize.
Great; so why don't you point out something that DOESN'T have flaws, then. You're complaining on one hand that there are 'countless' package managers (which can install things with a simple command/mouse click), yet are now complaining that they aren't good enough for a non-advanced user, who NEEDS a one-click install. Which is it?? A non-advanced user isn't going to CARE where the apps are installed...just that they work. Same as with a non-advanced user on Mac or Windows, right???
Again, if you want to be spoon-fed, use Windows or Mac. For a regular user, they either use Gnome or KDE. During an openSUSE install, it asks you which of the two you want, or if you want a server-console. Click one with a mouse...how much simpler would you make it???
Their website should pose no problems for you to find this for yourself.
The better question is (since you're a developer), why are you whining about other distros, instead of focusing on yours??

Most folks don't migrate for the simple reason they don't HAVE TO. They get Windows preloaded...that's it. Many people migrate and have no problems at all...Mint is a clear indication of this.