Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.
I've got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i've got multiple raspberry pi's running, and a synology diskstation, and i'm no stranger to ssh'ing into them to manage some stuff)
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it's still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.
First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i'd rather leave it disabled (although i assume that's mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought "it's probably some setting somewhere to change this", but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares.... Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i'd need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly... (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it's not switching to the refreshrate of the video i'm playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn't use a window manager that should solve it but doesn't, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I'd give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you'll find so little yet contradictory things...
Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought "i've got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let's see if i can find something nice on ubuntu", and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and ... "no app installed for this file"... google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error
Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn't replace it yet. Wouldn't want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?
For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I'm missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or... right?
I guess it kind of helps, but that means that the linux desktop will always be a shit experience, and i should just stick to my headless linux servers and find something else if i want a GUI... which is kind of sad...
And the strength you see in linux... ok, WSL in windows is probably a bit less efficient, but for most usages all those windows downsides are now moot with WSL & docker. if i want to install a web server and wordpress, it's just as easy as any linux server. And installing programs like image editors, can't say i've ever encountered issues doing that on windows.
Of course i know the main advantage of linux is no spyware crap, but it's kind of sad if after all these years that's pretty much still the only advantage. And i do use many open source apps in spite of free(mium) or cheap commercial/cloud alternatives existing that are more user friendly, if it gets the stuff i want done done, it's good enough. But it seems i'm still not ready for the linux desktop experience, no matter how often it's repeated on the fediverse here how good it is now...
I mean, I don't think it's a shit experience at all. It's different. If you're not aware of the strengths, then weaknesses like this are going to turn you off a lot. For me, I would never try to run Windows as my main desktop unless some weird situation came up that really required it, but some of the stuff you're picking out as issues are real issues, yes.
I'm such a dickhead that I literally just spun up a totally fresh Debian server just so I could type
time apt install apache2 wordpressand can report that it took 46.314 seconds including me starting blankly at package lists for a little bit before hitting enter. Go install a web server and Wordpress on a fresh-installed Windows machine and come back and tell me how long it took and how many steps. The point is not that one literal example -- it's that once you learn how to use it, you'll be able to work faster and more happily on it than you will on a Windows machine. If you need something in the domain where Linux shines, networking or development, it'll be as far ahead of Windows as Windows is on things like consumer-hardware support and end-user experience. If you don't need that, then it's not relevant to you and its weaknesses will piss you off and of course you won't like it.This is a very strange statement.
I mean... maybe those are the same people telling you to download Google Chrome .debs so I'm not sure I would put much stock in their statements. I've been hearing for over 20 years that Linux is obviously ready for the desktop, and I'm honestly not really convinced (with experiences like yours as pretty good examples of why).