Debian and Ubuntu were like the distros you used if you wanted a semblance of a life as a GNU/Linux user.
It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown.
Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.
Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.
Caveat being to do some research before purchase about support of third party devices like printers or scanner.
I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.
I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.
As a sighted person I can only imagine the frustration, I too find myself writing scripts to keep things working the way I want.
To me, that's a source of pleasure.
I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/
The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.
From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security.
I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.
It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.
Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all <port>!" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.
I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.
There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.
I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.
Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.
(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)
https://news.itsfoss.com/gtk-drops-x11/ https://arcan-fe.com/
"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."
Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.
Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.
Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?
So, we get stuff like Ubuntu's fleet management service and flatpak/snap instead of things that actually improve the user experience.
The whole ecosystem is this way. Look at the stuff RedHat has been shovelling. The article mentions gtk3/4, wayland and pulseaudio. I'd add systemd to the list. All of those introduced multi-decade regressions into the desktop experience. The only reason they were funded was because they force churn in smaller open source projects, killing competition from lower-resource developers, and consolidating the ecosystem in the big shops.
Heck, RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant GPL violation, but IBM throws a lot of money around, so most people just look the other way:
RedHat ships source code of GPL binaries for RHEL, but only if you pay them. The source code comes with the following restriction: If you redistribute it, they'll refuse to renew your support contract. This clearly violates the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
I think RedHat's theory is that the GPL doesn't entitle you to updates or support, so restricting them can't be considered an additional GPL restriction.
You could say that without the updates, RHEL is not fit for purpose, and therefore you should be entitled to them. Sounds like a complicated legal argument to have though.
I agree that RedHat are certainly not ethical actors in the FOSS community though.
Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability.
Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen aren't accessible enough?
These days, there's basically no choice. Most software (even the text editor at work: VS Code) has abandoned text mode.
Linux generally works fine for everything else for me, but this is definitely not its strongest point. My general impression was that many tools were very much developed by people in their spare time, and just not having enough of it. In theory it could all work because all the bits are there, but there's no "chief of accessibility" that can patch things over in the various projects.
The flexibility and decentralisation of the Linux ecosystem is great for some less common use cases; I wrote my own WM and some other X11 tools that work a bit quirky, but works really well for me. This would be very hard to do on Windows or macOS. But for some other less common use cases ... yeah, not so great.
I wonder what the author's take is on these. Presumably they'll have those pain points fixed out of the box?
Accessible Coconut, MATE based: https://zendalona.com/accessible-coconut/
Vojtux, Fedora based (you'll have to make your own image, don't see a prebuilt ISO): https://github.com/vojtapolasek/vojtux
Emmabuntus, Debian based and education-focused. Might be suitable for new Linux users: https://emmabuntus.org/
> Not with fragile scripts or one-person distros
As a long-term strategy, such focused distros aren't the best idea. Derivative distros often have single developers, or smaller teams, making them vulnerable to disappearing. Its usually better to get all the changes needed into upstream projects, so that all desktops/distros are more accessible by default, and then contribute to testing/fixing accessibility in independent/major distros, so that all the downstream ones are more accessible by default.
The author prefers NixOS as a solution though, so each individual controls exactly what is on their system so they can roll back if something breaks and add their own tweaks. Eventually that just results in the one-person distro scenario though.
But the "Linux desktop ecosystem" is a too fluffy thing to even be able to discuss in any coherent way.
Man, what a preamble! What does this have to do with Linux? I first got into Linux when I was using OS/2 as my main OS. A good friend of mine (who got me into OS/2) also got me into Linux, specifically Slackware, in the early 1990s. He was 10 or so years older than me and worked at a computer store and taught me everything about computing that I had not learned myself.
Linux back then was HARD. The prerequisite being you had to be a massive computer nerd to even read the documentation! Linux was really not user friendly at all. The process of "installing" Linux wasn't done in an hour, an afternoon, or even a day. It was a continual process over weeks really. Editing this config file here, compiling this program there (we had no package management and fat binaries were rare). Once all that was done, you had all your hardware working, and the programs you wanted running and life was good. Until the install got borked by the result of a power outage in your apartment building. Fun times. It was a massive undertaking and you learned while you installed it. Your only support was, in many cases, confusing and poorly written documentation. You could go to the Newsgroup or mailing list and get some suggestions though. Many of the people offering "support" were very rude and unsocial neck beards who loved to gate keep and were very good at discouraging people from joining the Linux community. Luckily I had my ThinkPad running OS/2 Warp 3 (later 4) to email, use FTP, surf the web and read my Usenet newsgroups while I was learning how to use Slackware.
Linux wasn't about it being easy, it was about it NOT being a Microsoft Product. Microsoft's predatory, unethical and flat out illegal business practices (in some cases) was consuming the entire computing world and stifling innovation: Linux was the answer, it was simply NOT MICROSOFT.
Now here we are in 2025. Last night I installed Debian 12 on a recently acquired ThinkPad Yoga S1. It is a 2-in-1 Laptop/Tablet hybrid with touch and pen screen. Everything worked out-of-the-box. No issues. The tablet features, everything works. The entire process took about 15 minutes.
There are more Linux distributions out there than we have teeth in our heads. If you need support there are variety of options out there for you, but you probably won't need it if all you want to do is word processing or watching YouTube.
If you don't like one distro, try another until you find one you like, or change up from the default software in the chosen distro and pick different software to install. Linux is incredibly user friendly now. You're not dropped at bash prompt and told "good luck" anymore.
A good video here on how it used to be: https://youtu.be/8tHBZkYzM4k?si=RKEFQ6lLb9Xyqlgt
Now it is time for my nap. I hear we are getting tapioca pudding for desert!
https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm
And my laptop here is a very old Dell-Vostro 3500 running a Intel Pentium CPU...
MrVandemar•1mo ago