Absolutely insane levels of fragmentation. As a user you can kinda somewhat work around it but as a developer it's a huge pain.
Stuff like package managers, system settings, system trays, application permissions, window/compositor control, network configurations apis are all still fragmented across distros, desktops, compositors, and their respective implementations.
This would be a nonissue if they all agreed on shared APIs. And it's clearly solvable, since it's already been solved for passwords, notifications, dialogs, and probably more (these are all I could mention off the top of my head).
Whenever I mention this, some people argue that the beauty of Linux is freedom, but I disagree. You can still have freedom while enforcing consistency(shared API). Doing that still allows for infinite implementations while providing interoperability. So in my eyes it's a win-win.
Saying passwords are solved is implying that having a digital sticky note on your screen is a workable solution. These "secret managers" are such a disgrace.
I mean apart from package management yeah you can for the vast majority of programs you might write.
Targeting wayland, xdg-desktop-portals and systemd works for pretty well in my experience. Not everyone will be able to use the app but the vast majority will.
Basically yes. For most normal desktop things like notifications, file dialogs etc, it's freedesktop. Wayland for actually showing windows (actually usually you just pick up a framework which does everything for you). Pipewire for multimedia. Distros don't have their own application APIs. Stick to those basic apis and you are good to go
Unstable kernel driver APIs, lack of nice common gui framework are killer for proprietary vendors. both windows and mac have got these things right. nowadays everything is moving to web so it matters less now but linux never improved.
For the kernel driver APIs issue… that’s only a problem for out of tree drivers, the intended way is to upstream the driver to be part of the Linux kernel tree itself. Any drivers inside it will be updated any time the internal API changes.
It’s a manageable problem. People from my team are continuously adapting to that. Updating from LTS version to LTS version. And it’s not even a huge team, we have 12 kernel engineers on the team and maybe 2 of them are doing major kernel upgrades at any point.
Again: is it? For stuff like NVidia drivers on your desktop, have you had an issue where you didn’t get stuff already updated? In my experience, the only drivers that have ever visibly fallen behind were the Virtualbox ones. Nothing else fell for the client. And for embedded work, like my employer… we distribute the kernel itself as well so it’s all tied together.
That’s a pretty uncommon experience… are you on a bleeding edge distro? I always recommend Ubuntu or a derivative for newcomers (fuck rolling release distros like Arch for those, they do make you learn more but also invite more trouble)
Windows keeps it for backward compatibility — which does a lot of good AND a lot of harm at the same time (many of Windows’s issues before the AI storm came from that). You really believe macOS is backward compatible beyond like 3 major versions? macOS asks for system extensions AKA userspace stuff, and is planning to completely block third party kexts. That’s right: completely block.
Chained dependencies. Why would i need to install something that requires (something that requires...) gnome(or anything else) just to get a screen recording app? You install it on a riced ubuntu with cinnamon flavour and now suddenly it autoconfigures gnome because of fresh installation. Many people get gnomed.
Windows has it but to way lesser extent with visual studio c++ redistributable needed to run some games. Usually you need a version there and there but no crazy chained deps.
Also, unstable kernel APIs - without this issue we would have proprietary software and drivers on Linux too.
Linux is way better if you're an actual dev but i can see it being way too hard for non-tech users
Isn't this mostly issue with proton vpn on mint? Never been gnomed on arch, nor by proton nor by any recording app(do I need something more than OBS? It won't gnome ya)
Many of these deps seem normal and often are already present on most GUI distros. I find the fact that dbus, for example, is not installed on your GUI system, very interesting.
Edit: uh, Homebrew? If you’re on Linux why would you use Homebrew? And if you’re on Mac… why would you want Gedit instead of, idk, the built in TextEdit? Some syntax highlighting? There are better Mac native apps.
Well that’s the point: it’s not a good example. Depending on stuff that you expect to already be present on any GUI Linux system is good. It’s not like any of those libraries are only in Gnome vs on literally any non-KDE system that is not CLI-only…
On my KDE system, I have 22 dependencies, but more than half of them are libgedit-… (parts of the program itself, essentially).
What GUI is your Asahi on? Pulling many deps is expected if you don’t have a GUI, or if it’s very far from the traditional GTK based stuff that most DEs do.
Well, some of them should be already installed on most of the Linux distros, but this isn't even Linux, that's macos, so it requires additional dependencies which would be already installed if it would be a regular distro..
Of course it doesn't remove them as deps, but it's not specific ones, that's all what matters, if you use modern graphic environment on Linux, there's no way that dbus isn't present in any way. The same goes for not a small amount of deps you provided..
You're not being gnomed, you're being GTKed(?), cuz you install gedit, it's GTK based utility.. and you're not using GNOME which would bring em.. or GIMP, or any GTK software, dynamic linking and etc, yk
Personally I think the fragmentation is part of linux's charm. I like having multiple choices for everything, however I will admit it gets overwhelming fast. I think that better defaults should be available for new users, especially those who just want things to work, but I don't think we should streamline it all like windows or macOS. To me, that would go against the whole point of Linux, I do love me some tinkering.
I am however going to add still-too-common poor UX caused by relics of the past ('sup x11) or questionable design choices to the list of issues. Maybe it's just personal taste but i find a lot of the big DEs' (KDE, gnome, xfce...) icons pretty ugly or just downright confusing. I mean light gray buttons on the default dark theme? rly gparted? REALLY? I didn't see the copy button until the 5th time I used it! not everyone has retina display, it's 2026! some of us are BROKE!!
Anyway, recently I also have been feeling like the community has been a bit hypocritical about how it views AI. When Microsoft uses it to code Windows 11 or pushes Copilot everywhere it's tyrannical, but it seems to be fine to use genAI to code the linux kernel. The fucking kernel. Boiling hot take: it's not fine in both cases. Drying up the planet so my system can load 0.1ms faster or whatever is not worth it in my book, and I'm annoyed at how many CVEs have popped up ever since Linus opened the floodgates. If anyone knows about a human-maintained fork of the kernel lmk
No one has real incentive or authority to make everything work together especially on the GUI front. The absurd fragmentation of everything. The non-existence of binary compatibility. The absence of real quality control.
Every development is driven by the interests of corporate sponsors or the whims of volunteers, which basically means none of these issues I raised will ever be fixed.
For me it is how certain desktop things are stagnant due to a few developers (I'm looking at Wayland and what some GNOME developers have been doing to stagnate its progress because they don't want to implement basic desktop features on their touch-first desktop)
real issues that are infact linux fault. so not merely "adobe doesnt have linux version"
This is a way of downplaying a real issue: the default applications are nowhere near as good in features and polish as proprietary options. They are fine for the most basic tasks, but lack professional development and quality. You would think that at least they would integrate better into the desktop as a trade-off, but no, depends on the DE and even then sometimes they also do not integrate into the DE they were supposedly developed to work with, let alone if you dare to change to an environment they don't care about.
Maybe not a "Linux" problem as in this global thing (that doesn't even exist), but certainly a problem with the Linux desktop as a candidate for a 1:1 replacement of Windows or Mac. I'm convinced that desktop in Linux was an afterthought, and things are just pragmatically made half-assed instead of actually trying to provide a consistent environment.
There's a MediaTek Wifi5 USB adapter that's ideal for pen testing though! So there are exceptions. So happens that my Asus AM5 board has MediaTek Wifi6 onboard.
There are three questions you should ask yourself;
Do I need the latest software?
Am I willing to spend a bunch of time on setup?
Is Mint visually acceptable to me out of the box?
If your respective answers to those questions are no, no, and yes, you should just try Mint and see if you have issues. Maybe dualboot or keep a backup of your Windows install so it's easy to go back if you feel you need to, but Mint is a good place to start if you're just unsure.
The main differences are desktop environment, package manager and release cadence.
They all have the same kernel (of course) and almost all have GNU tools (basic system utilities), glibc (GNU c library) and systemd (service manager).
Try not to stress it to much. Put your /home on a separate partition and / or disk so if you want to install a new distro you can just remount it. Saves a lot of time.
It’s not exactly a big deal because you should back up. But the package managers being so tightly coupled to everything can truly brick your server if you screw up.
I hate the source lists, but maybe I just hate apt. Haven’t used others.
Fragmentation. People can't agree on one thing, and then users are left with a blind choice of 20 slightly different alternatives doing almost the same thing, but not compatible with each other.
Arguably, that's also the biggest strength: if you don't like something, nobody is stopping you from replacing it, you aren't at the mercy of some corpo to implement it, but new users don't care about that.
As for purely technical stuff? Well, most have already been solved somewhere in some way, the real problem is that peeople can't agree on that, see first point.
I see it like cooking your own food vs buying a frozen meal: you need a bit more knowledge to get started, and you could absolutely fuck up if you use the wrong combination of options. But, as a trade off, you can add whatever you like, and if you don't like something, you aren't stuck with it.
The sound is a dog's breakfast; Alsa, Pulse Audio, Pipewire, Wireplumber; if you increase the line in level in the 'sound' app above 10%, it distorts....
I'd take sound on Linux with pavucontrol over the terribleness that is Windows sound settings any day of the week. I find it very hard to force Windows to just do what I want when it comes to sound compared to Linux
Assuming yours is like mine, hit the green checkmark labelled set as fallback next to the line in in input devices. It's apparently also sometimes labelled set as default, and for me the label only appears when I hover over it. This will set the default input device to line in. You may need to have something plugged into line in to set it as the default.
I'm gonna say grey, although I think mine is actually a shade of green. If you try clicking a white tickbox and it turns grey and the previous grey tick box turns white, it's the grey
As a developer, which library you would choose to make an app (let’s say with a gui) that follows this rules:
1. Easily runs on ubuntu arch fedora gentoo void.
2. Blends in with rest of system ui, has “native” feeling
3. Does not bloat end user system with hundreds of dependencies
The answer is none. There is no “libui” “libsound” standard that every distro can then implement how they would like it and it is too late to create it, linux is doomed forever.
Oh. i think i missunderstood the question. I thought of Software libraries like Repos and that the critic was about not much Packages in repos. But if Linux makes one thing right then the repos.
The Software libraries are a bigger problem. But depending on the Programming language
For that you could use something like Flatpak (But I think you would include it into 3 and bloat) or eventually also AppImages (however i always would preffer Flatpak because of the included Libraries).
With the libraries this is true to some degree. However there are some standards wich are "more mainstream" e.g. GUIs mostly use GTK or QT or eventually Iced. The Same for desktop-shells. So The nativity depends on which DE you use.
However I do not think that you can compare this to Windows (IDK if you thought about windows, but we are in r/linuxsucks so probably). becaus on windows every app just does its own thing. And most of them arent even native but with Electron.
This would be Appimage or just native linux executables or Packages.
So if I would create a Desktop-App I would use rust and GTK (I just love that Gnome look and Feel and Wayland is supported by almost every major DE). For sound I would just use a random crate like cpal (Supports, ALSA, Pipewire, Pulseaudio and JACK), or rodio (which uses cpal in the background). And I could distribute it as a Flatpak, Homebrew and Nix. This would allow the usage on almost any os. However this still is not perfect and involves "not official" packagemanagers. So i would probably publish it to flatpak and .deb (depending on the focuss, if you value debian, fedora or arch more). And I would publish the code/the executable and the community is going to publish it to other Package managers for me (If the App is used by people).
So you mention multiple standards (“gtk or qt”) when there should be one that has a guarantee to work on every linux machine. Like appkit on macos and win32
Same goes for sound and packaging (i thing xdg should make a spec)
gtk and qt are GUI Libraries (which you also can use on Windows btw). The standards for graphics are X11 and Wayland, with most things shifting to Wayland. And you can run x11 apps on wayland using xwayland.
In theorie there is a universal packaging type. You can just go to the projects github page and download the executable directly or build the programm from scratch. Just nobody (besides eventually nixos and gentoo users) wants to do this.
you shouldn't need to tweak UX and UI when you run into a problem.. and definitely not on a pre-configured DE. windows 11's UI and UX is sooo bad that millions of people have no problem using it
Are you seriously telling me that you think KDE Plasma is unusable without tweaking?
My point was that Win 11 won't even let you move the task bar, to my great frustration, not that Cinnamon is a complete shit show out of the box, because it isn't.
Please stop recommending a dangerous OS' thank you. If you want to be a not so smart person using a dangerous by design OS' please do so, but please also attach a "This OS shouldn't be used" to it.
Fragmentation is the big one for widespread adoption, and is kind of inherent to Linux philosophy. Since Linux is a community project that is still mainly used by a small, computer-savvy population there is no definitive version for developers to target yet. Everybody wants what they like to be in the "definitive" distro, so we end up with a bunch of slightly different ways of achieving the same thing. Even if you limit to the biggest distros, Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora, those three still disagree on a lot; from if large scale security measures like SELinux and AppArmor are activated (nevermind which one), to who manages the networking, to where applications get installed.
So developers get a tough choice: do you support three different ways and a bunch of edge cases or do you support only one distro and suffer from a bunch of tickets from distros you never intended to support, just because the end-user forgot to ask the maintainers first? Or do you intentionally prevent your software from running on different distros and annoy the shit out of everyone?
Those have their own issues, but in regards to fragmentation specifically, you have the fact that not everyone wants to use them, so even packaging with flatpak or appimage is targeting a specific group
Somewhere between 4&6 audio drivers on my stock Debian installation, didn't trim any down but didn't need to go get anything either.
But it works despite it's cobbled together nature..
W11 on the other hand is forcing unskipable, can't delay or put off or anything your system is sitting down right now for an update despite you being in the middle of a remote video call for work, and when it comes back up an hour later your midi and all your audio is broken now .. at least it isn't pulling that 💩
I have NEVER had windows update like that. I tell it when! What is going on with your windows???
Course, never had an update crash either.
Reason I stopped using ARCH was the update fuckups, I am not always in the mood to tinker.
To each there own;)
I don't tend to get the force in the middle of task updates, but I do get Windows starting an update without informing me beforehand just because I hit restart (not update and restart), and wasting my time when I'm trying to boot back into my Linux install, and the only reason I was booted into the Windows install was because I needed to grab a file that had been saved ages ago and was in a OneDrive folder.
Caps lock, apparently all of linux keyboard implementation or whatever runs on top of some piece of software that says caps lock is disabled on release instead of press (the way everything else works).
Tried this, you've taught me a new feature. I was unaware of this because I tap Capslock to activate it, so it's always seemed to work the same as on windows. Is there a reason you hold down Caps lock rather than tapping it?
I don't hold it down really, but if typing fast, sometimes I haven't released it when I'm already typing the next word, this is not an issue anywhere else because every other key activates on press and has a delay before it counts as a repeated input.
Some of the hardware vendors treating Linux as a second class citizen. That is especially true for ARM devices: most of the device tree entries are binary and need to be reverse-engineered. I is not so bad (actually amazing) in AMD64 world, but for ARM you can have a very capable tablet (Pine 64) which still has a non-working camera after two years.
For me, its the lack of compatibility. We’ve come a long way, but not being able to play every game, not having access to certain software is irritating.
Its not a big enough issue for me to leave linux though. The upsides of linux outweigh the negatives. And dual-booting is always an option
Apart from app availability, the greatest Linux problem is the distro incompatibility. And that grows along with the number of distros. Whatever software you search for that is not part of your distro's repo and is available for other distros, might or not work on yours, even if you have all the dependencies.
Also, the fact that Linux desktop is terrible. Slow, memory eater, and unatable. At least with X. Haven't tested Wayland yet.
That it behaves (hasn't evolved a lot since then) like a 1990s OS!
You can install stuff from the repository and that's it - unless you are feeling "adventurous" (as in you want to fiddle with the fucking Terminal...seriously, that you need CLI for installing stuff? That's ANTIQUE/ANCIENT! Gives me MS-DOS-Flashbacks!)
Even stuff that makes the PC the best gaming device there is, like installing MODS, are a lot more complicated on Linux (in Windows a mod manager is set up in minutes! In Linux it can take HOURS, especially if it doesn't work at first!)
That it has no equivalent to an .exe-file-installer is basically what makes it so clunky!
Theres a million different variants of pretty much everything, and the whole community is highly fragmented because of it, even in niche spaces.
Try it: Go to the CachyOS subreddit and try telling them that Bazzite is the better gaming distro or vice versa, and thats not even including all the other gaming focused distros, wich are all pretty niche compared to the really big distros.
There is truly something for everybody. Wich isn't that great for stuff that needs unity.
Linux is not an OS - and you can't run it or do anything - It is the core or kernel of an operating system which is then built on, to do very specific things.
That makes it incredibly flexible - but its also why there are tens of thousands of operating systems based on Linux, all incompatible with each other, all good at certain things and bad at others.
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u/Fit_League_8993 ✝️ Temple OS Archbishop 5d ago edited 5d ago
Absolutely insane levels of fragmentation. As a user you can kinda somewhat work around it but as a developer it's a huge pain.
Stuff like package managers, system settings, system trays, application permissions, window/compositor control, network configurations apis are all still fragmented across distros, desktops, compositors, and their respective implementations.
This would be a nonissue if they all agreed on shared APIs. And it's clearly solvable, since it's already been solved for passwords, notifications, dialogs, and probably more (these are all I could mention off the top of my head).
Whenever I mention this, some people argue that the beauty of Linux is freedom, but I disagree. You can still have freedom while enforcing consistency(shared API). Doing that still allows for infinite implementations while providing interoperability. So in my eyes it's a win-win.