The desktop UI has reached something of a local maximum which users are content with.
In the absence of justification for refining the desktop UI, UI vendors have developed another excuse to change shit on people: the mistaken impression that more tablety UIs are more progressive and easier to use on the desktop. Which is false on its face, given the different ergonomic constraints between a desktop PC and a tablet.
I really, really want to go to a full Linux desktop.
What keeps holding me back are dumb things like video driver support, peripheral support for things I use, and general awkwardness with the whole plug/unplug state of affairs that is de rigueur in the laptop space.
I'd be happy with GNOME in the 3.x incarnation, but the whole "turn your 7-hour Macbook Air into a 4-hour Linux machine" is just not okay. I need parity in battery life.
EXACTLY. We're constantly a step or two behind in terms of platform support.
Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
I am holding out hope that the Piston might get us there, but I'm not holding my breath.
I haven't used it or other laptops enough to say how good it really is (but hibernate etc. works, the screen and keyboard are nice compared to other ultrabooks I tried; it's light and clean). The trackpad is annoying though but I think I'll always prefer a mouse.
> Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
Providing you stick to Intel (eg no Nvidia graphics) then the Thinkpad T series (and probably most others) work very well under Linux. Occasionally there are issues but Lenovo do fix them (eg BIOS updates). Of course Lenovo won't sell you one without Windows!
The only thing that hasn't been supported in my last two Thinkpads (T430s and T61) has been the fingerprint reader. More accurately it is supported in dumb mode, but not in smart mode as it is under Windows. That is largely the fault of the company that makes the reader, although they have been bought by Apple so who knows what happens next.
> Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
How about a Chromebook? They run Linux, and pointedly don't run Windows, so you know the hardware will work under Linux.
System76 does this, my last few laptops have all been bought from them. They don't design their own hardware, but they only sell hardware that is well supported.
Battery life is good, the price is great, and the support has always been amazing.
Not much has changed: there are still a bunch of hurdles holding back the average user. Those issues are still around today, and especially for newer hardware.
The biggest problem IMO is the graphics. On my laptop (a Dell XPS I purchased in 2011) the OSs I installed (Fedora and Ubuntu) couldn't render anything serious. If I wanted to watch a TV-HD release, the screen would flicker; if I wanted to make a 3D plot in Mathematica, it wouldn't show; if I wanted to play a simple, lightweight game like Teeworlds, it wouldn't run. I had to use Bumblebee to get around it, but graphics still lagged.
Some of these problems are common enough that you can just google up a solution, but you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. I really like the idea of a Linux desktop, but it's just not going to happen anytime in the near future.
( after installing bumblebee and primus, please remember to add your user to 'bumblebee' and 'video' groups, before reboot)
KDE is still a messy shit but doesn't crash much any more ;). It can display a wicked Mandelbrot as background but can't auto add wallpapers in ~/Pictures. Reports about v4.10 desktop indexing being 'sane' and 'reasonable' are wholly untrue.
sound works over HDMI cable but occasionally goes quiet (relogin). flicker is an xorg feature which is not going away :( Sound is still subpar compared to maxx drivers under windows. So much for 'Open-source Desktop'
Somewhat improved, but especially in the notebook space it's still far from optimal. This is not necessarily fault of the commnunity - laptops often have custom hardware (e.g. NVIDIA Optimus) that simply doesn't have driver support because vendor doesn't care.
You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.
While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.
Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???
When apps are maximized in Gnome 3, the window title bar is supposed to hide/blend into the panel/menubar like in Unity. Lots of apps don't do it yet, though.
I wasn't a Unity fan but I have to agree with you, the screen space saving is amazing. Another thing that's cool about Unity is that the launcher is on the side which on the _modern_ screens which are vertically challenged for some odd reason, works really well.
Yes, that is actually the only feature I like about Unity. The rest bugs me too much though. That's why I love programs where I can hide the menu bar and toggle it via a shortcut (a lot of KDE programs can do this). This is especially useful in programs like image viewers and PDF readers (say Okular).
I'm in the same boat. While I've been using GNOME for the past few releases and really enjoying it, I switched to a Thinkpad X230 recently.
Unity really shines on the relatively low 1366x768 resolution and increases usability tremendously. Every vertical pixel counts, and it's surprisingly good at optimizing screen real estate. Now if they could only make it crash less... it's been abysmal in the stability department. GNOME has been pretty stable since about two releases ago.
Well, of course it's status quo bias. I think the deeper question is whether the bias is justified or not. In 1995 the desktop UI paradigm was still in flux. The paradigm that the world settled on in the mid-90's hasn't changed much in the last 18 years.
Except now it is, driven largely by innovation in device UIs that are not desktop PCs. I think there's a real and valid question as to whether trying to unify a desktop and "tablet" UI makes sense.
That said, I will say that of the recent attempts to come up with a new UI paradigm, I like Gnome 3 the best and it's what I use daily.
The desktop paradigm only has age and video games (via mouse and power) on its side. Once the touch-oriented interfaces become polished, so I don't have to continually swear at my phone when trying to select something or move a file from app to app, I don't really see myself ever using a desktop again (unless required by my job).
I suspect I couldn't use iOS in its current iteration, but a Google Chrome Pixel Book thing with android is pretty close to perfect for me.
It’s not clear what a polished phone interface looks like. For example, I could see such an interface lacking files entirely or giving priority access to communications technologies, wherein this might be wholly inappropriate for the desktop. Also the desktop has a keyboard on its side.
> I could see such an interface lacking files entirely
Now that's a great idea. If you think about it, current file systems are OLD. No transactions (I'm aware of the exceptions, but even those filesystems capable of transactions don't always expose that to the user), we rely on the file name to determine its type, no-or-severely-restricted access to metadata, possible infinite link loops.... I'm sure that the filesystems are implemented excellently, but I really hope we rethink the way we store data. I would much prefer a "flat" filesystem jailed by app and organizable by labels. Or whatever.
This is slightly hilarious because Gnome 3 (and Unity) has excellent keyboard support. You had to install a Quicksilver clone in Gnome 2 to get what Gnome 3 has baked in. And Gnome 3's keyboard search is better all around; faster, uses my whole screen, and it's simpler to switch between various types of entity that I'm searching for.
I use Gnome3 but with Cinnamon simply because its one of the few ways to be both using a newer desktop environment and have an experience (after a little bit of moving things around) that looks like what I am used to, like and want. I love tablet UIs... on my tablet. I realize designers/developers of UIs want the elegance of one UI paradigm to rule them all, but content production on a desktop and content consumption on a mobile devices are not at all alike.
I tried Cinnamon for a while and I was very happy with it... except for its performance; it is quite slow; I recently went back to Gnome Classic, and although it is not as nice as Cinnamon, it is much faster.
When I was using it I used to notice a slight delay on some actions (maximizing a window, doing alt-tab, opening the task bar, etc.), that I never had on Gnome Classic.
It must be said, however, Cinnamon is really nice.
At second thought, I noticed this until I disabled desktop effects, you might want to make sure that wasn't the delay you noticed as that delay is configurable and artificial.
I'm not convinced Lion (or Mountain Lion) is getting a 'huge' pushback from users. I heard isolated groanings on launch from people who didn't like adapting to natural scrolling or the new saving paradigm, but that all disappeared within a few weeks. My friends with Windows 8 on non-touch laptops have, after several weeks, continued to have the opinion that the touch-UI (née Metro) is 'stupid,' and they're not huge nerds either.
