First, let’s define a NORMAL USER:
ie: a non-developer. a home or office user. a non-IT professional. a business employee or production worker. someone who just wants their technology to work without understanding the technical details.
It’s Simple
The whole Linux sucks debate from a NORMAL users standpoint is “everything revolves around how files are managed on beautiful but absolutely unusable Linux desktop space”. I wholeheartedly agree.
Normal users don’t care about Wayland, Plasma, Gnome, or whichever Glibc or library is broken this week. Those are Linux developer problems. Most users don’t even care if they use KDE or Gnome either. They just want to turn it on, do a job and occasionally print things.
More to the point, the development work on files managers since KDE 4 and Gnome 3.28+ has been horrible since 2016-17ish. It’s just a jarring experience coming from a Windows or macOS desktop. Linux developers decided that you could only put files and folders in the documents folder and not on the desktop. 50+ years of proven human usable desktop input functionality thrown out the window.
And thats it — That’s the whole Linux sucks debate in a nutshell.
That single difference from Windows and macOS makes NORMAL users think Linux suck. It just doesn’t work right. It feels like more steps (to open an app or file) that could just live on the desktop.
My theory about this (unproven) has always been the graphics stack had sucked for so long it was way easier to render the desktop without having to render extra folders and file previews too.
Ignoring that every office and home user in the world was (and still is) used to being able to use the desktop to quickly access and open files and folders, in roughly 2017 with no community input or real world testing, they decided to be different. No matter how far KDE and Gnome go to make a beautiful and functional workspace, the 99% will never use it because it doesn’t work for day to day office and production environment workflows.
Working in the IT, advertising & marketing, and large format printing space for years before getting into web development taught me that people use their desktop spaces. Not a buried folder on the sidebar of a file manager. Case in point is that Windows and MacOS have included a documents folder almost since the very beginning for their inception. And no one used them. Especially for people who use network drives to store files.
Example 1: Large images are dragged to the desktop, modified and corrected and are re-uploaded to a network share to be printed. The file is dragged to the trash. I have production designers that probably do that a hundred times a day. Visually dragging files from one side of the desktop to the other after they complete them. This would never work on linux. It doesn’t matter how great any image editing software that was written for Linux was, no one would use it.
Example 2: A CNC operator needs to cut a bunch of different files on a large machine every day. There are 6 files in the top right corner of the desktop that he drags to a print que 30 times a day. In the bottom right hand corner is a folder with new custom files, and in the top left are quick links to his email and CNC program. This guy needs to visually see these things, not go digging through a documents folder. They need to live on the desktop because “thats the real world”.
Linux devs just don’t live in the real working world apparently. Windows and macOS at least give us a choice to use the desktop in our workflow. Linux does not.
Just spitballing a few more:
- Folders for in-progress, proofing and to-backup files being sorted before being moved to a network share or backup drive
- Shortcuts to network drives and online shared documents
- Folders with A/B testing versions for print files
- Network shares for RIP Ques for print files or CNC files or large format printers
- Quick links to company documents
- Quick links to frequently used apps or pdf documents that need to be emailed frequently
- A easy to access trash bin icon
These are just a few examples, but this behavior of actually using (and expecting to use) the desktop will never change, no matter what Linux developers think. Users can do the same things on Windows as they can on macOS. ie: Arranging a their desktop spaces to suit their production needs. It’s just not possible on Linux at the moment without some janky advanced hacking.
In the 45 years Linux has been around, a less than 5% desktop market share kinda sucks. Almost 3% of that was in the last two years mainly because Valve decided to use Linux for the Steam Deck gaming console a few years ago. Valve will probably save Linux for gaming, but KDE and Gnome will kill the desktop for the mainstream. So it’ll still probably be a wash for a while.
Again, thats it. And Linux devs just can’t wrap their heads around being wrong, or believe that this is the issue for larger adoption. It sure is the reason I don’t use it on the daily, and I can’t be alone.
Joke: “Linux desktop computing. No, it’s document folder computing.”
Extra: If you’d like to get super pissed off, watch this video. This is why linux has no market share in a nutshell.
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