Comment by pxc

Comment by pxc 6 days ago

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions.

Besides the many issues with the desktop itself, Windows offers piss poor filesystem performance for common developer tools, plus leaves users to contend with the complexity of a split world thanks to the (very slow) 9pfs shares used to present host filesystems to guest and vice-versa.

And then there's the many nasty and long-lived bugs, from showstopping memory leaks to data loss on the virtual disks of the guests to broken cursor tracking for GUI apps in WSLg...

SoothingSorbet 6 days ago

> It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system)

While I agree that Windows has long since abandoned UI/UX consistency, it's not like that is unique: On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs. I'm sure libcosmic/iced and others will be added eventually too.

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pxc 6 days ago

> On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs.
And you can choose to install GTK+, Qt, and Electron apps on Windows or macOS, too. That has no bearing on the consistency of the desktop environment itself (not on Linux or on macOSa or on Windows). That fact is simply not relevant here.
You could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle/preinstall incongruous software— those are operating systems that ship applications based on multiple, inconsistent UI toolkits. But that's neither universal to desktop Linux operating systems nor inherent in them. Many cases that do serve as examples by the definition above are still not comparable to the state of affairs on Windows— for instance, KDE distros that ship a well-integrated Firefox as their browser— are on the whole much more uniform than the Windows UI mess.

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- wqaatwt 5 days ago
  
  > could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle
  Why does that matter if that’s not how most users do it? There is no magical dividing lines between a distribution and the user choosing to install a random collection of apps on their own.
  
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  pxc 5 days ago
  
  'Desktop Linux' isn't an operating system but a family or class of operating systems. Linux distros are operating systems. If we are to make mewningful comparisons to macOS and Windows, then we must compare like to like.
  
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  wqaatwt 5 days ago
  
  But they are inherently different and not really comparable to macOS or Windows so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
  For instance where exactly do you draw a line between which app/package/component is part of a Linux distribution and which is third party? OTH it’s more than obvious for proprietary systems.
  
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wqaatwt 5 days ago

> has poorly organized system configuration app

To be fair almost all Linux distros are as bad if not worse in this regard.

Things like YAST which are supposed to fix that are unambiguously horrible in their own right (extremely slow, crappy UX etc)

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