"Goodbye" Linux Desktop
• 355 words • 2 min • updated
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 #
- 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.
- Package managers are legen… , wait for it… …dary! Legendary!. No comments.
- Kernel modules.
- Open sourceness. Some will disagree and say that freedom is better. Anyways, here they are!
- Communities. Who still uses IRC if not us?
- Plenty of distros.
- 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.
- Powerful editors! That’s you, emacs/vim.
- bash/zsh + scripts. The flexibility of the command line is amazing.
- cron.
- systemd (?) and good bootloaders (e.g. grub).
- Security by design (yeah, executable bit). Do not abuse of sudo.
- Documentation.
- Maturity of the user. I guess many newbie users see this differently: “linux is hard, bad designed” and such.
Bad things #
- [Linux sucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p Oxlaz S3zs).
- Xorg. It works, but it is not perfect. And it breaks sometimes…mainly with proprietary (binary) drivers.
- Duplication of effort / reinventing the wheel. Multiple software with the same function, forks, multiple redundant packaging.
- 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.
Backlinks
- Hello, *nix server world! (May 15, 2014)