The current state of desktop Linux is spooky
by fulalas from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5SXRT)
Recently I decided to test some big distros to see what they're doing -- I'm currently developing Porteus distro. I thought they were very mature at this point, but they're so far from being usable by regular users, or even advanced ones.
This is my experience.
Xubuntu 21.10 x64
Some error messages during the boot process, but in the end the UI loaded. Well, kind of. Two thirds of the screen were horizontally black because nouveau drivers don't handle refresh rates higher than 120 Hz and it decided to set it to 144 Hz -- you wonder: if it doesn't handle it, why does it automatically set to anything higher than 120 Hz? But because I know Xfce I managed to change the refresh rate using shortcuts. However, I failed to install it -- it gets stuck in one of the installer screens (the one where you choose normal or minimal install). So I decided to try Lubuntu 21.04 x64.
Lubuntu 21.04 x64
The installer is a mess. Initially I provided to it a unit half FAT32 and half NTFS, but the installer doesn't know how to handle it. I tried many different combinations of partition strategies, including a manual process, just to see it saying that apart from the Ext4 I created I also need a FAT32 partition for booting, with very specific flags -- if it knows what to do, what doesn't it do that for me? It didn't work. Then I gave it permission to reallocate my NTFS to create space for an Ext4 partition, but after more than 1h:30m without any progress and this constant I/O access, I hit cancel and rebooted. It comes as no surprise that it corrupted my NTFS partition and I had to make some magic to save my files. So I backed up all my data and allowed the installer to do whatever it wanted with the whole storage unit, and it worked. After it reboots we see this odd message saying 'Failed to set MokListXRT: Out of Resources / Could not create MokListXRT: Out of Resources' -- it disappears after you update the whole system. The boot time is unbelievable -- just to see Lubuntu logo (before actually loading the desktop environment) it takes a long time.
There's no intuitive way to install Opera browser: if you type in the terminal 'sudo apt-get install opera' or 'sudo apt-get install opera-stable' it doesn't work and it doesn't even suggest the correct command -- why?!
If you type 'software' in the main menu there's this 'software sources' which doesn't seem to have anything useful to download applications, even on the suspicious 'Other Software' tab.
Back to the main menu, typing 'package' suggests 'Muon Package Manager' application. Looks promising. If you type 'opera' in the search field it filters to a list as long as you can imagine... Completely useless. Maybe 'opera-stable' or 'opera browser'? No, nothing. Ok, let's try just 'browser'. Oh, the results are not sorted alphabetically. Let's sort it and now try to find the results starting with 'o'. No, Opera is not there.
Let's try to download the .deb file from Opera website then. Believe me or not, when trying to open it I see this: 'Error: Cannot satisfy dependencies'. And there's no tip to what to do to fix it.
After a while I found this app called Discover and it seems it can download applications. Let's try it! Opera is there, nice! After 6 minutes (!) it gets stuck in 99%... Yep, I waited another 6 minutes but nothing happened so I gave up. Funny enough, by clicking on the 'Installing' blue UI element crashes the application. But wait, Opera is in the main menu. Let's open it! Not without this message first 'Profile error occurred'. After the browser finally opens, there's a popup saying some features on chrome extension might not work until I clear data that other sites have stored on my device -- I have never installed Opera or any other Chromium-based browser before and there is plenty of free space on my storage unit. That's a fresh Lubuntu install!
Let's try something simpler, like changing the theme to a dark one. First you need to open 'LXQt Appearance Configuration', then 'LXQt Theme' tab. Oh, when you select different themes you see messages all over the place saying that gtk-2.0 has been overwritten, but the themes get applied. Well, not exactly. Apart from the taskbar and main menu, none of the themes actually change the color of the applications, including native ones like the file manager (pcmanfm-qt) and very theme selector application I was using (!). Let's pretend we didn't see a theme called 'Dark'...
Clear Linux 35000 x64 -- live session
I couldn't find any shortcut to open file manager, there's no alt drag, but that's OK. Let's try to install an application.
Software app always says 'No Application Data Found'. In the 'Installed apps' tab you can't see Firefox but it's actually installed by default and you can use it normally. There's no visible search UI element, so you need to guess that just typing something it will appear. In the 'Updates' tab it says 'Software is up to date' when it's clear not the case.
Trying to open any multimedia file (mp3, mp4, flac, etc) shows a spinner for a few seconds and Videos app tries to run, but then it disappears and nothing loads. Trying with VLC and it has no AAC decoder.
Firefox internal updater fails sometimes (...), but when it works the browser crashes 100% of the times when it's about to open. I couldn't find any way to revert the update.
You can't open images because it says there's no application to open it, but Image Viewer is installed and if you manually open it you can indeed load images.
Can't extract rpm files -- fatal error.
Opening a terminal from the file manager context menu doesn't go to the current folder.
Sometimes you boot and your storage units are not correctly mounted so you can't access them.
Although it has a non-UEFI boot loader, the system hangs during one of the boot steps.
The default desktop environment is Gnome, which deserves a dedicated article, but let's point out just a few issues I faced when using it:
Gets in loop in the terminal login screen while odd messages appear on the top of it. I found out that my VM was not configured to use a 3D video card. By adding a 3D video card, new issues appear. Initially it seems there's no live session since the installer runs automatically after boot -- you have to guess that by cancelling it you'll be able to enjoy the live session. But, well, not quite... I can't see the mouse cursor, so the system is barely usable.
Let's try a live session on my real machine.
First attempt: using 'proprietary drivers' option, which doesn't work. It gets in loop in the login screen, just like the VM without a 3D video card.
Rebooted and tried this 'open source drivers' option. Well, that 2/3 of screen in black issue is there and because I don't know Sway I have no idea how to change the refresh rate in this odd scenario. I had to give up.
---
These experiments were just a very simple attempt to use normal things on modern Linux distros, and most of the time they fail badly. I'm sure even experienced users will struggle to handle many of these issues.
At this point we are all aware of the journey of Linus Tech Tips and how bad this is going, not because he's stupid or he's trying to sabotage Linux, but simply because Linux is immature and we, Linux lovers, are just used to dodge these issues.
It seems Linux community should focus on simplicity, making basic things work first. This whole systemd, KDE, Gnome, wayland, countless package managers... this is just too much complexity. We need to step back, with a minimalist approach. :)
This is my experience.
Xubuntu 21.10 x64
Some error messages during the boot process, but in the end the UI loaded. Well, kind of. Two thirds of the screen were horizontally black because nouveau drivers don't handle refresh rates higher than 120 Hz and it decided to set it to 144 Hz -- you wonder: if it doesn't handle it, why does it automatically set to anything higher than 120 Hz? But because I know Xfce I managed to change the refresh rate using shortcuts. However, I failed to install it -- it gets stuck in one of the installer screens (the one where you choose normal or minimal install). So I decided to try Lubuntu 21.04 x64.
Lubuntu 21.04 x64
The installer is a mess. Initially I provided to it a unit half FAT32 and half NTFS, but the installer doesn't know how to handle it. I tried many different combinations of partition strategies, including a manual process, just to see it saying that apart from the Ext4 I created I also need a FAT32 partition for booting, with very specific flags -- if it knows what to do, what doesn't it do that for me? It didn't work. Then I gave it permission to reallocate my NTFS to create space for an Ext4 partition, but after more than 1h:30m without any progress and this constant I/O access, I hit cancel and rebooted. It comes as no surprise that it corrupted my NTFS partition and I had to make some magic to save my files. So I backed up all my data and allowed the installer to do whatever it wanted with the whole storage unit, and it worked. After it reboots we see this odd message saying 'Failed to set MokListXRT: Out of Resources / Could not create MokListXRT: Out of Resources' -- it disappears after you update the whole system. The boot time is unbelievable -- just to see Lubuntu logo (before actually loading the desktop environment) it takes a long time.
There's no intuitive way to install Opera browser: if you type in the terminal 'sudo apt-get install opera' or 'sudo apt-get install opera-stable' it doesn't work and it doesn't even suggest the correct command -- why?!
If you type 'software' in the main menu there's this 'software sources' which doesn't seem to have anything useful to download applications, even on the suspicious 'Other Software' tab.
Back to the main menu, typing 'package' suggests 'Muon Package Manager' application. Looks promising. If you type 'opera' in the search field it filters to a list as long as you can imagine... Completely useless. Maybe 'opera-stable' or 'opera browser'? No, nothing. Ok, let's try just 'browser'. Oh, the results are not sorted alphabetically. Let's sort it and now try to find the results starting with 'o'. No, Opera is not there.
Let's try to download the .deb file from Opera website then. Believe me or not, when trying to open it I see this: 'Error: Cannot satisfy dependencies'. And there's no tip to what to do to fix it.
After a while I found this app called Discover and it seems it can download applications. Let's try it! Opera is there, nice! After 6 minutes (!) it gets stuck in 99%... Yep, I waited another 6 minutes but nothing happened so I gave up. Funny enough, by clicking on the 'Installing' blue UI element crashes the application. But wait, Opera is in the main menu. Let's open it! Not without this message first 'Profile error occurred'. After the browser finally opens, there's a popup saying some features on chrome extension might not work until I clear data that other sites have stored on my device -- I have never installed Opera or any other Chromium-based browser before and there is plenty of free space on my storage unit. That's a fresh Lubuntu install!
Let's try something simpler, like changing the theme to a dark one. First you need to open 'LXQt Appearance Configuration', then 'LXQt Theme' tab. Oh, when you select different themes you see messages all over the place saying that gtk-2.0 has been overwritten, but the themes get applied. Well, not exactly. Apart from the taskbar and main menu, none of the themes actually change the color of the applications, including native ones like the file manager (pcmanfm-qt) and very theme selector application I was using (!). Let's pretend we didn't see a theme called 'Dark'...
Clear Linux 35000 x64 -- live session
I couldn't find any shortcut to open file manager, there's no alt drag, but that's OK. Let's try to install an application.
Software app always says 'No Application Data Found'. In the 'Installed apps' tab you can't see Firefox but it's actually installed by default and you can use it normally. There's no visible search UI element, so you need to guess that just typing something it will appear. In the 'Updates' tab it says 'Software is up to date' when it's clear not the case.
Trying to open any multimedia file (mp3, mp4, flac, etc) shows a spinner for a few seconds and Videos app tries to run, but then it disappears and nothing loads. Trying with VLC and it has no AAC decoder.
Firefox internal updater fails sometimes (...), but when it works the browser crashes 100% of the times when it's about to open. I couldn't find any way to revert the update.
You can't open images because it says there's no application to open it, but Image Viewer is installed and if you manually open it you can indeed load images.
Can't extract rpm files -- fatal error.
Opening a terminal from the file manager context menu doesn't go to the current folder.
Sometimes you boot and your storage units are not correctly mounted so you can't access them.
Although it has a non-UEFI boot loader, the system hangs during one of the boot steps.
The default desktop environment is Gnome, which deserves a dedicated article, but let's point out just a few issues I faced when using it:
- There's no network icon in the task bar until you are connected.
- Sound and power look different things on the taskbar, but they're actually a one-button thing.
- To connect to a wifi network you need to click 5 times (even when we reach the available wifi networks double click doesn't work!).
- The whole UI responsiveness is just bad -- even dragging windows is laggy. Not having Nvidia proprietary drivers is not an excuse because nouveau is fast enough for it.
- I couldn't find anything related to the compositor. I don't even know if there's any running.
- ALT+F2 brings the runner app, but it has no auto complete, so if you try to open the terminal by typing... well, 'terminal' nothing happens, even if you hit Enter.
- If you minimize an application it vanishes. You need to click on 'Activities' at the top left to see the wallpaper being shrank (...) and then your application appears at the bottom in this MacOS style.
Gets in loop in the terminal login screen while odd messages appear on the top of it. I found out that my VM was not configured to use a 3D video card. By adding a 3D video card, new issues appear. Initially it seems there's no live session since the installer runs automatically after boot -- you have to guess that by cancelling it you'll be able to enjoy the live session. But, well, not quite... I can't see the mouse cursor, so the system is barely usable.
Let's try a live session on my real machine.
First attempt: using 'proprietary drivers' option, which doesn't work. It gets in loop in the login screen, just like the VM without a 3D video card.
Rebooted and tried this 'open source drivers' option. Well, that 2/3 of screen in black issue is there and because I don't know Sway I have no idea how to change the refresh rate in this odd scenario. I had to give up.
---
These experiments were just a very simple attempt to use normal things on modern Linux distros, and most of the time they fail badly. I'm sure even experienced users will struggle to handle many of these issues.
At this point we are all aware of the journey of Linus Tech Tips and how bad this is going, not because he's stupid or he's trying to sabotage Linux, but simply because Linux is immature and we, Linux lovers, are just used to dodge these issues.
It seems Linux community should focus on simplicity, making basic things work first. This whole systemd, KDE, Gnome, wayland, countless package managers... this is just too much complexity. We need to step back, with a minimalist approach. :)