Good bye Linux on the Desktop
Today I switched my work boxes and my Linux box is not any longer the main work PC I use. I switched it with my Mac.
The reason for this are manyfold, but first lets look back and see how Linux evolved in the last 10 years. Yes, I use Linux as my main workstation for 10 years. Well, it didn’t evolve at all. It might got prettier, needed more CPU and memory, but at the basics, it stayed the same glued together software conglomerate it was 10 years ago.
For example, the sound system didn’t really much evolve. Yes there was the switch from OSS to ALSA, but still you had your own sound daemon running from whatever GUI you uses. As I am a KDE guy, there was kmixer. So my permanent questions was, why do I need two sound environments to get sound. And why does it still fail. How many times did the sound in Firefox fail, because the sound device was in use and failed to software mix.
I remember back in the old days, where you really had only two sound device interfaces (or even one) and if you didn’t get software mixing working, there was always problems.
Although hardware sound mixing is mostly default, it still faled in Linux to work properly.
And than we have the X (window) interface. Wheres on a server I really do not care if there is a GUI or not (or rather don’t want one) on a desktop machine this is just impossible to work without one. As I said before I am a KDE guy and I used KDE since their first release back in old old days. I went from 1.x, 2.x, 3.x to 4.x. Where until 3.x it was a constant improovement and speed up, 4.x, even in their latest release, looks more like a failure. A lot of the Software still doesn’t work properly. For example kate, the big text editor, still fails to save and remember property settings, for example the plugins that are enabled. Why? I did work in the older versions … Then the quick launcher just started to work again in their latest release, that means for more than a year this piece of software was borken.
The task monitor is still broken and I still can’t do the same settings like in 3.x, for example have monitors in my taskbar.
But the most horrible thing is the composite part. Although I have a quite decent NVidia card, that should seriously handle this kind of thing without any problem, it never worked for me. With composite enabled I had permanently 20% cpu usage from X for no real reason. And later it went even worse and made every slower and I had suddenly 30~40% cpu usage. So I tried to turn off all composite and effects and everything. Well, nothing changed.
I never had this kind of issue with any other OS (windows or OS X). Having a broken GUI, in this case so slow that it is impossible to work, it just a disgrace.
But not only this, with some of the newer versions of the NVidia binary driver, OpenOffice just crashed with horrible GUI problems, actually it crashed the whole X window interface.
I could just go on and on. But to keep it short, in the last months I was more and more pissed of with the Linux box I had. It is my work box, I want to work and not reasearch in google and try to fix it every day and hope it will work now.
The reason why I always used Linux was the Terminal, in this case Konsole, which was a perfect working environment. The other reason was the focus follows mouse, which made my work much easier. You could quickly change focus to a terminal without clicking into it. But what use does it have, if the delay is so slow you have to wait longer than if you would just have clicked lik ein eg OS X
Another reason for using Linux was the virtual desktops and the ability to pin a single window to all desktops.
The last reason was the easy way to start Firefox multiple times with different profiles.
So in the last weeks I started to use OS X as my main os and tried to find out how I can cope with the OS X interface compared to the my usual X window interface.
Most were not a problem. OS X now has virtual desktops, called screens, the Terminal is not that bad and you can pin an application to all screens.
My main problems were, that you are unable to set the colors in the Terminal. The dark blue, often used in comments, is often almost unreadable. The other problem is that you cannot pin a single window, but only a complete application. This is a bit annoying, as I often just want one Firefox window on all screens, but not all. I solved this, by using Chrome for my pinned window and firefox for the rest.
Starting multiple firefox is also not that easy in OS X, but doable with a apple script. I wished that would be easier to do, but this solution is fine for me.
Most of the other things in OS X are anyway suprier. Exposee really works here and does not slow everything down like it often happend to me in X. The Terminal can be set to be focus follow, which is quite useful. With iTerm I found another terminal which I use for certain things were I need to set a different color scheme.
X forwarding also works with the built in X window server.
So after three weeks of testing, I just moved the displays around and I am now primary working on an OS X box. Good by, and thanks for all the fish Linux. Linux on the desktop is dead. Anyone trying to convince me otherwise will fail. Simply because I used it for 10 years as my primary working desktop. I work with Linux for even longer, have almost explicite only Linux servers, for innter office and web services.
Linux on the desktop just doesn’t work to me. Too many things are “broken”. For example the GUI which is never and never will be consitence. There are KDE apps, GTK apps, other applications based on other frameworks. It is a mess. You have Firefox which is GTK based, so the file dialog is GTK. Therefore you do not see the favorites you stored in the KDE dialog. OpenOffice has at least an interface library, so it can use the KDE open dialog.
But at the end, I rather give up the little freedom I had there, like playing whatever soundfile in Amarok, compared to the gazillions of problems I had while I actually tried to use it for work.
I will keep a Linux box around, because there are still some things which are way easier to do there. For example writing perl code for scripts, or installing special applications, but I won’t use it as my main work box anymore.
