Henry Lootgraab's Blog

The Three Big Problems With Linux Desktop

INTRODUCTION

Before we get into this, I want to make something clear. I don't want to bash Linux on the desktop and discourage anyone from using it. I just want to tell how it really is, from the perspective of a potential switcher, because there are too many misconceptions, myths, half-truths about Linux on the desktop. Like "Linux runs most of the servers on the planet so it must be good".... oh please. First, it runs most of the web servers, not servers, and second, that success does not mean it offers the same quality as a desktop OS.

Imagine, someone told you there is an amazing walking path in a forest outside of town, all paved, water fountains, food vending machines, trash cans and shelters every 500 meters. You drive there for an hour only to find a wild forest dirt track and nothing else. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy a hike in the wilderness, quite the opposite, but you're now wishing that person didn't make shit up so you'd had a chance to prepare properly, wear hiking boots, bring water, snacks and a rain jacket along.

Perhaps they meant well: you don't get outside enough so they wanted to coerce you to get your lazy ass out. That's not the right way of doing it though.

OK maybe that's a bad analogy, but you get the point.

Linux as a desktop is not entirely bad but it's far cry from what diehard Linux fans are trying to tell you. A lot of that is FOSS ideology and blind hatred towards Microsoft and proprietary software. Never mind that Linux is backed by billion dollar corporations such as IBM and its subsidiary Red Hat that contribute significantly to the Linux kernel and make shitloads of money in the enterprise selling Linux software and support contracts. Maybe in their heads Linux is really that good because they used it for so long that they completely lost any perspective.

I can see how Linux may work for some people but it will not work for most, at least not without some effort and adjusted expectations. I could use it, if I had to. And before anyone starts calling people "normies", and insulting their intelligence, read this please.

Linux as a desktop OS has problems and denying them won't make these problems do away. This is what I want to do: "adjust expectations", because what you often hear from Linux fans is not entirely true. Maybe they mean it and maybe they're really believe what they say. There is a very outspoken and large chunk of Linux community that is actually massively clueless, like in any other community. Also, like in any other community, there are seriously knowledgeable and helpful people there too it's just too often very hard to find them in all the trolling and noise. More about the Linux community later.

For a more thorough coverage of Linux for Windows user read this please. I go over pros and cons of Linux and I explain all the things like distros and desktop environments.

So, let's now talk about the three biggest problems with Linux as a desktop OS.

PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: LACK OF QUALITY DESKTOP APPLICATIONS

Adobe, Microsoft Office, Affinity Photo, DxO Photo Lab, Photoscape X, MusicBee, Retrospect Backup, Backblaze Desktop Backup, even something like Zhorn Stickies have no adequate equivalents on Linux, other than some light use. Linux desktop apps are half baked, half functional, lack features and aesthetics, UI/UX is poor, compatibility is poor. And specific, professional applications for trades like medical, legal, engineering or architectural simply don't exists on Linux.

OK, so Libre Office is OK'ish, I even use it on Windows, but for heavy Office users who need to collaborate it's a no go. I tried to use Krita and it's OK, but is not good enough so I bought Affinity Photo. 

And no, GIMP is not "a Photoshop alternative" :)

This is the unfortunate aspect of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) since most of it is done by volunteers in their spare time who make no profit off of their time and effort and many are amateurs, inexperienced in UI/UX design or have really weird UI ideas.

Even large free software communities, such as KDE, are only semi-organized and lack clear vision and effective management. Though, at least their software won't just get abandoned overnight as it happens too often with apps from individual Linux developers. Software longevity and backwards compatibility are poor on Linux.

Don't believe me? Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME, said this 10 years ago in hist blog piece aptly titled What Killed the Linux Desktop (a good read despite being over 10 years old), and this has not changed much since then:

"Backwards compatibility, and compatibility across Linux distributions is not a sexy problem. It is not even remotely an interesting problem to solve. Nobody wants to do that work, everyone wants to innovate, and be responsible for the next big feature in Linux. So Linux was left with idealists that wanted to design the best possible system without having to worry about boring details like support and backwards compatibility"

And then:

What I mean with the title is that Linux on the Desktop lost the race for a consumer operating system. It will continue to be a great engineering workstation (that is why I am replacing the hard disk in my system at home) and yes, I am aware that many of my friends use Linux on the desktop and love it.

But we lost the chance of becoming a mainstream consumer OS. What this means is that nobody is recommending a non-technical person go get a computer with Linux on it for their desktop needs (unless you are doing it so for idelogical reasons).

Nailed it! While Linux Desktop Environments did improve a lot, KDE Plasma 6 is easily better than Windows 11 UX, the problem of lack of quality desktop applications didn't go away since then. Linux lost the race to become a consumer OS because people want applications not a platform for tinkering. They don't want to "have fun with their OS". Some Linux fans even like that, joke's on them.

Games run mostly well, but not as well as on Windows. Some Linux fans perpetuate falsehoods and myths that games run better on Linux which is just not true. They're usable, but many don't work well, work "just good enough" or don't work at all, many game technologies and features don't work well or at all in many games under Linux (DLSS, FSR, Frame Generation, GSYNC, Freesync) and many games just look worse. Modding on Linux is a pain too. But most people do more than games and web browsing on their PCs.

I go into more details on Linux gaming here.

Software development on Linux is developer-centric and there is no concept of user satisfaction and customer support. Most software outside of the big ones like Mozilla and KDE are pet projects written by hobbyists coders with little or no proper UI/UX training and background who are driven by their own preferences and experience. The general attitude is: "if you don't like this app then write your own". So, naturally, the interfaces can be very off-putting for a desktop user who is not a coder. As long as the devs are happy, that's all you'll get. 

"Every GNU/Linux distribution at the moment (including Ubuntu) confuses system software with end user software, whereas they are two very different beasts which should be treated very, very differently."

-- Tony Mobily, editor of Free Software Magazine

Incidentally, Mac OS X (now macOS) was one very likely reason why Linux desktop ecosystem never evolved. Back in the early days UNIX was very big in the academia. I remember those blue SGI boxes running Irix, sitting in every scientist's and engineer's office next to their Macs running Mac OS 7.

Mac OS and Windows were quite primitive back then and UNIX had a huge edge for lots of scientific uses and SGI was the king of advanced graphics. But then Mac OS X happened and all the blue SGI boxes disappeared overnight. Mac OS X was UNIX based on FreeBSD (macOS still is). A Mac could now run their scientific UNIX software but it could also run Photoshop, Word and PowerPoint, same box, same Desktop! Sure, there was some Linux uptake too, but Apple now ruled the academia and SGI was history (Jurrasic Park anyone?) If Mac OS X never came along who knows where Linux would be now.

PROBLEM NUMBER TWO: HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY

Another big one is poor hardware support. Linux has a huge problem, which is by design, and the community pretends it does not. They'll deny anything. The problem is that hardware drivers are baked into the kernel. What does this mean? This means you can't simply buy a piece of hardware and simply install new drivers for it like you do on Windows. Your new hardware must have compatible drivers in your Linux kernel already. This is particularly problematic for stable distros like Debian that come with kernels that could be couple of years old. 

There are ways around it: install a newer, unsupported kernel, switch to a rolling distro or actually install newer drivers if they're available. The first option, installing newer, unsupported kernel, means tinkering that most people don't want to do. It also comes with the risk of breaking something or even rendering your system unbootable. The second option, distro switch, may simply not be an option for many users. The third option, installing third party drivers, is only possible if the driver is available, like NVIDIA's, and it's a risky process on Linux because it involves rebuilding of the kernel during installation. The installer does this but it may fail for mysterious reasons and if you reboot too early, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the process has completed, your Linux computer will no longer boot and you're in for lots of pain.

Another problem with drivers being baked into the kernel is that a faulting driver will bring your entire system down. A game that crashes the GPU driver will either lock up your system or give you a nice BSOD (Black Screen Of Death) and hope you have a reset button on your PC, like in the Windows XP days. The Linux kernel maintainers have been adding mitigations for this but they usually don't work.

Graphics drivers are the type of drivers that are most susceptible to crashes for some reason, on all OSs, maybe because they're very complex, I have no idea, I don't care, which makes Linux graphics subsystem annoyingly fragile. Installing or updating NVIDIA drivers, or pretty much any new drivers, requires a reboot, sometimes two, sometimes ends in a BSOD if the process fails or if you reboot too early. Do not try to complain about this on the Linux forums because they will blame you for being a noob. 

Windows had the same problem... 20 years go and Microsoft got around the fragile graphics drivers problem by making them a user process. This means drivers in Windows, including graphics drivers, run like any other process invoked by the user, not as part of the kernel, but like a web browser, a word processor or a calculator app. If graphics driver crashes on Windows it will simply get restarted and everything will go back to normal without restarting your PC, you will get few seconds of black screen and even most of your application will be still opened. I don't remember the last time I had to press the Reset button on any of my PCs. When running Fedora for four months it happened almost every day. It was bizarre.

This is why NVIDIA GPUs are a problem on Linux: NVIDIA does not contribute their drivers to the Linux kernel, AMD does. But the problem is not NVIDIA here, the problem is Linux faulty design. Even with an AMD GPUs, your kernel may be too old when you buy a newer GPU and you will have to upgrade your kernel or switch distros.

Linux fans will literally bent backwards trying to prove why drivers in the kernel are awesome and why NVIDIA is bad. Some of the mental gymnastics can be amusing, but in the end you will be the one banned from the forum for complaining about Linux sucking. I don't know, maybe there is some advantage to having drivers in the kernel where Linux matters most: the server space. But from a desktop OS user perspective this is utterly inconvenient and annoying.

I can't find anything at the time of this writing, but a while ago I came across someone saying that that there are voices inside the Linux community that are pushing to change that, and move some drivers to the user's space. That would significantly improve Linux's appeal as a desktop OS. But, if Wayland is any indication, this will likely take decades, so don't hold your breath as Linux development moves at glacial pace.

Realtek is a similar story. Last time I checked they did not contribute to the Linux kernel. They offer some Linux drivers for download but they're buggy and hard to install, and so most of their drivers have to be reverse engineered by the FOSS community. This is clearly not a Linux fault, but most people do not care what's inside their computer and why it does not work. On my three PCs only two audio jacks out of four or six work and on one mobo SPDIF is not recognized at all. Two of my Realtek on-board 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet chips auto-negotiate 100 Mbps instead of 2.5 Gbps and they reset spontaneously if I set them manually. This is huge problem since pretty much any motherboard made in the last decade will have some Realtek devices. The problem is worse with newer motherboards or laptops.

Again, another general attitude in the Linux community is that "fixing things is integral to The Linux Experience". Except there are many that can't be fixed at all or are just too time consuming and too impractical.

I normally insist that car analogies don't work for computers but I can't hep myself here.Who would want a car that you have to regularly take apart just to fill it up with gas or add windshield washer fluid? Even just opening the hood is too much for majority of car owners. Where nothing fits in place, because someone decided that square cap holders are better than round ones, and where you have to jerry rig the simplest things to make the fit?

People want cars to take them from here to there with no fuss and no effort. It's unreasonable to expect anything different from computer users. Computers are tools, devices, not lifestyle, for most people. People do not define themselves by the Operating System they use or the brand of their microwave oven. Sure, people may prefer one brand of car over another, by why? Because it works better for them, it's more comfortable and reliable.

PROBLEM NUMBER THREE: THE LINUX COMMUNITY

"The biggest killer of putting penguin software on the desktop is the Linux community. If you think the Apple fanboys are completely barking, they are role models of sanity to the loudmouthed Open Sauce religious loonies who are out there. Like many fundamentalists they are totally inflexible — waving a GNU as if it were handed down by God to Richard Stallman".

-- Nick Farrell @TechEye

Ouch... ouch... ouch!

Though I was unable to find and cite a concrete source of the above quote, it is hurtful, but true.

The community is still elitist, combative, often outright disingenuous and delusional, overrun by clueless but aggressive trolls. They'll ridicule you and blame you or your hardware for all your Linux problems. It's like their purpose in life is to torment people because it makes them feel superior. You see the same people in all forum threads talking people down, never actually helping anyone. It's all they do, all day long. 

Then they go on to Steam and other forums, butt in into unrelated topics, where Windows users are simply trying to solve a problem and screech "Windows is garbage, switch to Linux!". Look at their post history and that's all they post. This is so irritating.

The nonsense they regurgitate about Windows would be funny if it wasn't tragic. They bring up non-issues, things that haven't been true for 10+ years. Most of them have no clue what they're talking about they just, well... regurgitate. Certainly Windows has problems, but they talk about some random nonsense like they never even used Windows. Their obsession with Windows bashing is irrational and irritating.

Then they go on Reddit asking why so many people hate Linux... Really?

You may get several different answers to your problem, eventually, and some may even work, after three pages of irrational arguments and how this is all your fault because you're stupid or a normie.

They even fight tooth and nail among themselves, Arch users being the worst, they look down on people using Mint or Ubuntu like they were idiots.

Torvalds himself said few times that Linux has many problems that prevent if from being a viable desktop alternative for normal people, that went unaddressed for decades, because the community, the devs in particular, is basically too full of itself, but the faithful deny it all.

CONCLUSION

Problem number one is insurmountable at this time. Without it, problem number two could be worked around in various ways and problem number three could just be ignored if problems number one and number two didn't exist. If software and hardware worked as expected, there would be no need for the Linux community.

This is how many average computer users feel about their Linux experience:

"I am amazed that literally, if the past 7 horrible days and nights of trying to get Linux working are any indication, literally every single piece of Linux advice on the internet leads not to the promised solution but to errors that are never explained, and when you google them, the solutions, rather than working, lead to errors which are never explained, so you google them, and try the fix, but instead of working, it leads to errors that are never explained, so you take a sledgehammer, bring it down on your laptop as hard as you possibly can, and get on with your life much happier for never having to try to troubleshoot Linux again."

-- Some internet user on Reddit

For more on criticism of Linux check out this Wikipedia article.

-- Henry Lootgraab