One thing I hate about the Linux desktop is the sheer lack of interest for supporting new hardware until it’s too late.

Before you jump at me: I know it’s not really anybody’s fault. The contributors didn’t switch to new hardware yet, and someone has to do the work.

But that does not excuse the passive aggressiveness. GNOME’s stance on fractional scaling was, for years, “never happening - fractional pixels don’t exist, so we do integer scaling only”. A few years later, hidpi displays are becoming the standard and all premium laptops ship with them. Very few of them work fine at 200% scaling. One thing the Framework Laptop 13 reviews mention when testing it on Linux is that there is no optimal screen scaling available, just too small or too big - and that you can enable experimental support for fractional scaling, but it’s a buggy mess and it’s an option not exposed to the user for very good reason. Only now that it’s too late and Linux is already buggy and annoying to use on modern laptops because of this we are beginning to see some interest in actually resolving the problem, including GNOME rushing to work on implementing support for it in GTK and Mutter, after years of bikeshedding. Somehow, things that are impossible and never happening suddenly become possible and happening when the writing that had been on the wall became true, and the hardware that a minority of users had been calling attention to for years is now common place and oups! That gives the Linux desktop some very bad exposure and first impressions.

Touch screens were another problem area. Initially the common stance was that nobody really uses these, convertible laptops suck anyway, etc. fast forward to now, more and more premium laptops offer touch screens, and stuff like 360 degrees hinges and convertibles that are actually decent are starting to surface. And, of course, everyone on Linux desktop wakes up and starts admitting that touch screen support is actually in a problematic state when it’s already too late, and (prospective) owners of these devices have to pick between a very buggy experience that feels like Alpha state on Linux, and just using Windows.

It goes on. HDR support? Color correction support? FreeSync support being spotty and completely missing in GNOME Wayland?

I’m a heavy Linux user. I will nuke my dual boot when my next laptop ships so I’m going all-in after all these years. But I also own a 4k FreeSync monitor, a MX Master 3 mouse ane my next laptop (Framework Laptop 16") will require fractional scaling and VRR support to use comfortably. Having tried all these things side by side on my dual boot, I am somewhat jealous of how well Windows seems to handle these things compared to Linux. All this “nice stuff” has either taken a lot of time since my purchase to work nicely, or still doesn’t work nicely at all. Ignoring contribution / manpower issues, this constant critical attitude towards new hardware and the unwillingness to try and properly support it is actively keeping us in the “Eternal 90% there” stage. We will not get out of it, because customer tech will keep evolving, and we will keep accepting new trends only when it’s too late, and we’re 7 years behind Microsoft in implementing support. It’s not a secret that where Windows still obliterates Linux is niche use cases like HDR and colour accurate work, and support for new customer hardware, that usually lags 5-7 years behind on Linux.

Yup hard agree on this. Switched to gnome a little more than a year ago and not planning to switch back because the polish and stability is too good - but this is a major issue.

Have you tried GNOME Wayland? Your System76 laptop should support Fedora Workstation. As long as the hardware in your System76 laptop is capable, it can so pinch to zoom and 2-3 fingers scrolling for workspace switching, revealing the overview, etc. 1:1 gestures like a MacBook, too.

I know the switch from KDE is daunting. I’ve done it too. But GNOME Wayland is simply above everything else right now

I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don’t have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn’t done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn’t anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn’t support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn’t seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I’m going to buy a game and hope it’s going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it’s Steam from me.

I agree. I’m tired of always blaming the end users for everything

Yeah :( I love my 2017-2018 phone to death (it’s a Pixel 2 XL, and in the ~€400 phone market they are still trying to beat its camera quality 6 years later - and since it’s a Pixel it’s still more fluid than several phones I try in store, like €400-500 Samsungs, that display evident stutters that mine does not), but it has started with the random crashes and “dying” (boot loops followed by not turning on anymore) for a few minutes / hours before coming back to its senses occasionally

It was at 7/10 because the iPhone 14 introduced a repair-friendly design that made it, in theory, easier to repair than most competing high-end smartphones. However, the fact that there is a software DRM on the parts you install makes this repairable design completely useless for the end user, it just makes repairs cheaper for Apple themselves, thus adding insult to injury.

That about wraps it up

Unity was “cancelled” the very second they introduced this fee. Nobody wants or will ever want to publish their game in Unity anymore. Studios planning to develop a game in Unity have already decided on moving to Unreal as we speak.

Unity is now irrelevant, and a product to recommend against. Unity is legacy software to abandon. If this doesn’t mean it’s cancelled I don’t know what does.

The new ones not so much. I’ve had a terrible Linux experience with the ThinkPad P16s AMD Gen 1 AMD

Here’s mine:

• AnkiDroid - mobile version of popular desktop flashcards software Anki
• Bitwarden (don’t remember if this needed a repo) - favourite password manager
• Catima - holds loyalty cards
• Fennec F-Droid - Build of Firefox without ads and that supports more extensions
• DiskUsage - see what’s taking up your disk
• GadgetBridge - FOSS app for smart watches, Mi bands etc.
• Lawnchair - Home screen replacement that’s visually identical to the default one but allows me to double tap to lock
• Material Files - file manager
• Loop - Habit tracker
• p!n - Pin reminders to notifications
• muPDF Reader - fast PDF reader that doesn’t crap out when I zoom in and out unlike Google Drive
• Simple Gallery - lightweight gallery app
• NextCloud and NextCloud Notes - Access NextCloud
• Scrambled EXIF - Share pictures without giving away EXIF data
• Tusky - nice Mastodon client
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon - a game way too addictive to be safe to install
• NewPipe - FOSS frontend with AdBlock and downloader for YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and others
• Librera - read EPUBs
• Lemoroid - Nice libretro client to play video games
• Infinity - Reddit client that still works. I believe they did something hacky with the API key to get around the block.
• Migraine Log - Nice app for migraine sufferers to log their attacks
• Scarlet - Beautiful notes app

I’m 24 and a lot of people in my friend circle are definitely using it. I’d say it started off niche but it’s becoming mainstream.

It’s the only social network I don’t hate right now

Is it? Don’t like to play devil’s advocate but I’m pretty sure my Instagram is pretty much alive and my BeReal feed is an at all all-time high, with several new joins lately too.

I agree that it’s much worse, that on anything that isn’t BeReal it’s harder to find your friends posts, that the ads got way too many - but at least here people are absolutely not stopping to create content for them.

False dychotomy. They’re not stating the rest of the industry is exempt from capitalism, but that they don’t have a loudly fascist-adjacent individual as a leading figure and, if I may add, they have better build quality and reliability than Tesla’s. At this point I have yet to meet in real life one single Tesla user who is happy with their purchase. Long before the Elon and Twitter drama, I recall one of my CS profs talking about their Tesla saying something like “The software and the self-driving features are what make this car valuable on the market, but, taken it as a car, it sucks compared to everything else”

Thunderbird.

Betterbird is a fork by a developer who was booted off the project. I’ve looked at the project and it’s literally built on top of drama. It’s not a good look, and it does not feel like it’s professionally developed.

Evolution is also really really good, but it’s a GNOME app. I currently use GNOME and I am not oblivious at how nice the experience of using native apps of it is, but I also know that they don’t follow you “well” if you migrate to something else. Make no mistake, Evolution will absolutely run on a KDE desktop, but it won’t feel as integrated.

Thunderbird is amazing. It’s in active development and it’s going through a major visual overhaul / update I really like. It’s cross-platform at heart and it looks and works the same on all platforms. It also has the nicest calendar on Linux. Overall, I pick Thunderbird as my client because it’s amazing, has a lot of development, has all the features I need and it’s made to be cross-platform, so it’s not “soft-tied” to any desktop enhancement or GUI toolkit.