![]() How do you convince business, governments and schools out there to replace their Windows desktops acting like that? You can’t. How do you explain to a common user that a basic functionality that was over there and working for him is now broken (not even gone, just broken)? That his distro upgrade was not really a upgrade giving him life quality improvements but a regression? And that was not even the single breaking “turn” of major desktop components back then. ![]() But how it was pushed really made Linux bleed users. They replaced stable and functional solutions for a experimental stuff with a “better architecture” instead of doing a conservative and incremental migration path for a critical component (as if it was just a technical decision to force “filthy developers resisting it” to migrate otherwise it would never be stable), and forced their users to endure FOR NEARLY A ENTIRE DECADE the plight of living with a sound server that crashed all the time.ĭon’t get me wrong, Pulseaudio was a major achievement, and going back to 2006, Linux audio had issues that descended as far as into the kernel (for example, ALSA mixer API was a mess, rtkit was still a dream, udev hot-plug notifications…). Both GNOME and KDE projects, along with major distributions, embraced it as a default way too fast while being fully aware that it was VERY unstable, borderline unusable, back then. It was boasted as the replacement of aRts and ESD. More specifically, the tendency of major desktop projects doing sharp turns that massively regress the desktop experience for years without regard for their own users, just to get back to the same place that they used to be, while there’s fundamental problems with core parts of what would constitute a desktop OS that just drags on.īut about specifically the PulseAudio: do you know when it was released? 2006. I was talking more about the general Linux desktop state as a whole, the audio server was just a example. Don’t even get me started on Wayland or these attempts to make “unified” software management with flatpak and snap… The fact that we are in the year 2022 still attempting to breed a decent sound server (basic functionality on a desktop OS since at least the year 1995) with another replacement in line (Pipewire) says a lot about the current state of affairs as far as Linux desktop experience is concerned. And that is all over the place with GNOME as well. The KDE project is a excellent example of that, archiving only 4 years ago roughly the same level of user experience that we could enjoy with KDE3 (abandoned in 2008). Worse, I saw a strange tendency of some major Linux desktop projects to make choices that actually makes their desktop experience to regress “in the name of a better architecture”, and engage in insane refactoring, spending 5… 10… 15 years as a utter mess, meanwhile sending their users thru a calvary, just to regain the same stability and feature parity that their former self once had. ![]() Haiku, as a desktop-only OS with no other ambitions, has the potential to offer a way more integrated and coherent desktop experience than Linux is capable of as it is today.Īs someone who uses desktop Linux for the past 20 years, and had used BeOS, the sad fact is: Linux is still far away from being a good desktop OS, and barely match today a 21 years old dead OS like BeOS in user experience.
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