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"Goodbye" Linux Desktop

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⚠️ This post is over one year old. It may no longer be up to date or relevant. Opinions may have changed.

OK. It’s time to move on. Life changes. Fast. Very rapidly.

During two years, I have been exploring the world of the Linux Desktop. This became my hobbie, my ‘what will I explore next night?’ kind of thing. Well, now I guess I have exhausted the most attractive possibilities of what I could potentially discover.

This post marks my transition between Linux and my next topic of study in my free time. Which will be…well, we’ll see.

Here is a list of my conclusions about Linux. I’m dividing it in two categories: the good things and the bad (A.K.A. not-good-yet) things.

Good things #

  1. Tiling/dynamic window managers are awesome. Once you get used to one of them, you’ll just love the workspaces/tags workflow, and will never ever ever care anymore about maximize minimize buttons, or window decorations, or even the positioning of your windows.
  2. Package managers are legen… , wait for it… …dary! Legendary!. No comments.
  3. Kernel modules.
  4. Open sourceness. Some will disagree and say that freedom is better. Anyways, here they are!
  5. Communities. Who still uses IRC if not us?
  6. Plenty of distros.
  7. The best integrated environment to program out-of-the-box, without the need to configure PATHs and such things. Of course, not every language falls into this category, but the most of them do.
  8. Powerful editors! That’s you, emacs/vim.
  9. bash/zsh + scripts. The flexibility of the command line is amazing.
  10. cron.
  11. systemd (?) and good bootloaders (e.g. grub).
  12. Security by design (yeah, executable bit). Do not abuse of sudo.
  13. Documentation.
  14. Maturity of the user. I guess many newbie users see this differently: “linux is hard, bad designed” and such.

Bad things #

  1. [Linux sucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p Oxlaz S3zs).
  2. Xorg. It works, but it is not perfect. And it breaks sometimes…mainly with proprietary (binary) drivers.
  3. Duplication of effort / reinventing the wheel. Multiple software with the same function, forks, multiple redundant packaging.
  4. Lack of standards. There is freedesktop, but it does not cover everything. Even if it covered, not every developer cares about their standards.

This list might be edited later, because I cannot remember everything at once. Feel free to add your own items to it.