I want to love Linux.
From the title, it may not sound like it, but this post is the positive side of my Linux experience thus far.
I've already rebutted amply that I don't believe Linux is truly ready for the mainstream. And, I in fact think it is still quite far off. And I'm not here to beat that dead horse.
This post is about how I feel about Linux for me. I'm not the typical computer user. I'm a software developer with a history of light Linux use, little to no Mac use and heaps of Windows use.
While I'm a software developer and have some experience with Linux, I'm not a Linux power user either. I'm not afraid of compiling a Linux kernel, but I certainly avoid it when I can. I'm not a master of GREP nor am I intimately familiar with Unix specific commands. But, I'm not afraid of any of these things.
The simplest way to put it would have to be that, what I want out of a Linux machine is something that works better for me on a daily basis than Windows. It doesn't have to beat Windows in every way. It just has to come out ahead overall. And, for a secondary PC it is delivering. It is losing in some areas, but I think it is winning in more ways than it is losing.
It would be really hard to capture everything in a single post. It is more of a warm fuzzy feeling. But I want to try and cover the big ticket items regarding what is and isn't working out for me.
Firstly, what isn't working out can largely be summed as, I can't get everything I want working the way I want it working in a single distribution in a reliable fashion. And the results are often comical. And secondarily, rendering. Those are the two biggest items against. And admittedly the first is a large umbrella. So I'll reduce it to a single example;
My laptop is a Yoga 11s which is a folding convertible. It has a touch screen and sensors to aid in rotating the screen. I also use touch intermittently, even when the keyboard and track pad are accessible. So, I wanted a touch friendly OS.
I searched for some suggestions and got Gnome 3, specifically Ubuntu or Fedora. Gnome 3 is touch friendly in the sense that there are ginormous icons. But the UI is a crap shoot for mouse and keyboard. Everything takes up way too much screen real estate. I hate the UI. But, I tried to get used to used it. Ubuntu, when I flipped the screen... would flip the screen accordingly, but would register the touch as though it were in the prior orientation. So, I'd touch the bottom of the screen, but it would register it at the top. It was downright idiotic.
Fedora on the other hand is also Gnome 3. But, it would freeze during installation.
So I went with Linux Mint. Cinnamon and KDE were considered the next runners up. But Cinnamon shipped with a browser that wouldn't scroll content with touch and the OS interfaces were 50/50 whether they would scroll or not. Another one that was impossible to work with.
So, I decided to try out Ubuntu Budgie. Amusingly, Budgie was touted as one of the LEAST touch friendly. But, guess what, screen rotation works. Touch works properly in the rotated screens. UI elements act as expected EVERYWHERE. Default browser works great with touch (though I switched to Chrome for Flash support which also works well with touch). I mean, I know the UI isn't built with touch in mind, but I can increase the size of the panels if I want and the touch experience and screen rotation ACTUALLY work. Budgie isn't the perfect UI for other reasons, but it is working out great.
The other big nit is rendering. Again, it wasn' until Ubuntu Budgie that I hit upon something which worked most of the time. My hardware acceleration supposedly worked on all OSes, but it didn't seem synced to the screen refresh rate in most distros resulting in an annoyingly large amount of screen tearing while scrolling or moving screen elements. It was terrible.
Aside from the rendering, everything else falls in the same category as my quest for a touch friendly OS. I can find a distro where X works, but then I'll eventually find a Y that works like crap compared to some other distro. For me Ubuntu Budgie gets enough right.
On the good side; The performance is better than it was on Windows. I'm not constantly worrying that a Windows update will nuke whatever is left on my 128GB drive. I have access to all of the tools I need for my secondary PC, and with minimal tinkering most things I care about work enough of the time.
If I could get a system with the reliability of Linux Mint or Gnome based Ubuntu with the looks, rendering and touch friendliness of Ubuntu Budgie and the panel features of KDE Plasma... I would love Linux. The point is simple... all of the things I need to love the OS are there. They just don't play well together. And yeah, I'm sure I could (with enough time) build an environment which delivers all of that. But, I'm not a veteran Linux guru and I'm not interested in becoming one. Especially not just for the sake of getting a secondary laptop up and running the way I want.
So, Linux is here to stay for now on my laptop. And I'm honestly enjoying it. But, not enough to love it.
I've already rebutted amply that I don't believe Linux is truly ready for the mainstream. And, I in fact think it is still quite far off. And I'm not here to beat that dead horse.
This post is about how I feel about Linux for me. I'm not the typical computer user. I'm a software developer with a history of light Linux use, little to no Mac use and heaps of Windows use.
While I'm a software developer and have some experience with Linux, I'm not a Linux power user either. I'm not afraid of compiling a Linux kernel, but I certainly avoid it when I can. I'm not a master of GREP nor am I intimately familiar with Unix specific commands. But, I'm not afraid of any of these things.
The simplest way to put it would have to be that, what I want out of a Linux machine is something that works better for me on a daily basis than Windows. It doesn't have to beat Windows in every way. It just has to come out ahead overall. And, for a secondary PC it is delivering. It is losing in some areas, but I think it is winning in more ways than it is losing.
It would be really hard to capture everything in a single post. It is more of a warm fuzzy feeling. But I want to try and cover the big ticket items regarding what is and isn't working out for me.
Firstly, what isn't working out can largely be summed as, I can't get everything I want working the way I want it working in a single distribution in a reliable fashion. And the results are often comical. And secondarily, rendering. Those are the two biggest items against. And admittedly the first is a large umbrella. So I'll reduce it to a single example;
My laptop is a Yoga 11s which is a folding convertible. It has a touch screen and sensors to aid in rotating the screen. I also use touch intermittently, even when the keyboard and track pad are accessible. So, I wanted a touch friendly OS.
I searched for some suggestions and got Gnome 3, specifically Ubuntu or Fedora. Gnome 3 is touch friendly in the sense that there are ginormous icons. But the UI is a crap shoot for mouse and keyboard. Everything takes up way too much screen real estate. I hate the UI. But, I tried to get used to used it. Ubuntu, when I flipped the screen... would flip the screen accordingly, but would register the touch as though it were in the prior orientation. So, I'd touch the bottom of the screen, but it would register it at the top. It was downright idiotic.
Fedora on the other hand is also Gnome 3. But, it would freeze during installation.
So I went with Linux Mint. Cinnamon and KDE were considered the next runners up. But Cinnamon shipped with a browser that wouldn't scroll content with touch and the OS interfaces were 50/50 whether they would scroll or not. Another one that was impossible to work with.
So, I decided to try out Ubuntu Budgie. Amusingly, Budgie was touted as one of the LEAST touch friendly. But, guess what, screen rotation works. Touch works properly in the rotated screens. UI elements act as expected EVERYWHERE. Default browser works great with touch (though I switched to Chrome for Flash support which also works well with touch). I mean, I know the UI isn't built with touch in mind, but I can increase the size of the panels if I want and the touch experience and screen rotation ACTUALLY work. Budgie isn't the perfect UI for other reasons, but it is working out great.
The other big nit is rendering. Again, it wasn' until Ubuntu Budgie that I hit upon something which worked most of the time. My hardware acceleration supposedly worked on all OSes, but it didn't seem synced to the screen refresh rate in most distros resulting in an annoyingly large amount of screen tearing while scrolling or moving screen elements. It was terrible.
Aside from the rendering, everything else falls in the same category as my quest for a touch friendly OS. I can find a distro where X works, but then I'll eventually find a Y that works like crap compared to some other distro. For me Ubuntu Budgie gets enough right.
On the good side; The performance is better than it was on Windows. I'm not constantly worrying that a Windows update will nuke whatever is left on my 128GB drive. I have access to all of the tools I need for my secondary PC, and with minimal tinkering most things I care about work enough of the time.
If I could get a system with the reliability of Linux Mint or Gnome based Ubuntu with the looks, rendering and touch friendliness of Ubuntu Budgie and the panel features of KDE Plasma... I would love Linux. The point is simple... all of the things I need to love the OS are there. They just don't play well together. And yeah, I'm sure I could (with enough time) build an environment which delivers all of that. But, I'm not a veteran Linux guru and I'm not interested in becoming one. Especially not just for the sake of getting a secondary laptop up and running the way I want.
So, Linux is here to stay for now on my laptop. And I'm honestly enjoying it. But, not enough to love it.
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