> Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have. Pretty much everything just works,
Sorry, No. I installed Ubuntu for many of my friends and none of them had it after 2 months. My mistake, I fell for the propaganda that it would be somehow better and easier. But I installed ArchLinux for them with KDE and many of them still have it years later, and actually use it. The only problem is they dont upgrade any of their packages except firefox and chromium. It just works. Everything, digikam, gimp, clementine, firefox, kids games etc...
I guess the explanation is that people dont care really whats under the hood as long as it works, and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Yes there are people out there who are not programmers or hackers who use ArchLinux for their day to day computing needs. You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs. Why? Just because Canonical doesnt want to play nice with everybody else. Thats the reason. Its not technical.
> So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
> And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
Yet despite your experience, Ubuntu has grown to be by far the most widespread Linux desktop, despite tiny resources compared to several of their competitors. Clearly someone likes it, despite your attempt to imply it's all just marketing, which is frankly insulting. Canonical does not have even a tiny fraction of the money they'd have needed to win the kind of userbase they have just off of marketing.
> and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Maybe. But for my part I'd been using Redhat and Fedora for a decade and managed to avoid noticing any marketing for Ubuntu - I ended up trying it because I use Debian for a lot of server at work, but the Debian desktop experience is horrific. I fully expected wiping it, or at least getting rid of Unity in favour of a tiling WM or something. Instead it took about an hour of use to decide to make it my new main distro.
> You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Nothing amazing about it, and I don't see who you'd think there's nothing special about that, and this is one of the reasons why I expect the Mir vs Wayland debate to mean nothing: Ordinary users don't care. The people who complain about Canonical are a tiny subset of users for whom it violates some kind of philosophical purity.
> Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
These mythical users are very interesting, given that they must be incredibly inexperienced with computers - any user that have used any reasonable number of Windows apps, for example, or used Windows over more than 2-3 years will be used with apps that vary wildly in UI style. Personally, I've never met a user that notices stuff like that. I have met plenty of users that can't tell the difference between IE and Firefox without help to identify which one they're using, or who happily insist they're using MS Word while they're using OO/LibreOffice, without noticing, though.
Users who get distracted by minor details like that will be distracted regardless of environment, and indulging their fantasy of consistency does nothing good for them.
> Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs.
Yet somehow users have managed just fine with the proliferation of dozens of window managers and other tools. To me this diversity is the strength of open source. Sometimes it causes pain here and there, but it also lets the best win.
> And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
If you don't like diversity, don't use open source. It's that simple. Nobody has any obligation to try to please you. If it's just Mir you don't like, don't use Ubuntu, or apps written specifically for Mir. It's that simple.
Sorry, No. I installed Ubuntu for many of my friends and none of them had it after 2 months. My mistake, I fell for the propaganda that it would be somehow better and easier. But I installed ArchLinux for them with KDE and many of them still have it years later, and actually use it. The only problem is they dont upgrade any of their packages except firefox and chromium. It just works. Everything, digikam, gimp, clementine, firefox, kids games etc...
I guess the explanation is that people dont care really whats under the hood as long as it works, and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Yes there are people out there who are not programmers or hackers who use ArchLinux for their day to day computing needs. You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs. Why? Just because Canonical doesnt want to play nice with everybody else. Thats the reason. Its not technical.
> So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.