The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop
Being one of the main VLC developers and the de-facto leader of the VideoLAN project, I hate to say it, but I am a bit in the same state of mind, lately (no, I haven't moved to Windows, though)... And yet, I am also a very strong open source advocate, and have been working on FLOSS on most Desktop Operating Systems (in my name and anonymously); and believing strongly in Computer freedom. I've been Linux users and sysadmin since 8 years now.<p>However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.<p>- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...<p>- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...<p>- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.<p>- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...<p>- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.<p>So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.<p>However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)