Episode: 2813
Title: HPR2813: Should we dump the linux Desktop.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2813/hpr2813.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:10:51

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This is HBR episode 2008-113 entitled, Should We Womp the Linux desktop?
It is hosted by ITWI's and is about 20 minutes long, and can remain an explicit flag.
The summary is, ITWI's wonders if we should let go of the Linux desktop environment and focus on pro platform.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
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Hey there! Hacker Republic Radio. This is Nightwise from the Nightwise.com podcast checking in.
Today I just wanted to do a little carcast on my way home about the relevance of the Linux desktop.
I'm a cross-platform geek that means I work on multiple operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac,
iOS, Android, and I switch around on a daily basis. My workflows are trimmed down to the fact
that I can pick whatever device up that I want, and I can do whatever I want to do.
Whether that be my iPad, my phone, my Mac, or my Windows machine.
Until a couple of months ago or a year ago, I also had a Linux laptop lying around which I use
well less and less frequently. And I say less and less frequently because since I've become an entrepreneur,
I'm an independent, I'm a freelancer. I have my own business. I was spending more and more time
doing stuff on the computer that related to my business as opposed to doing stuff on my computer
that's related to hobbies and geeking out stuff. And because of that, my Linux desktop was getting
less and less love. And one of the reasons why this was, well, sorry, GPS is bothering me,
one of the reasons that this was was that I was doing quite a bit of writing reports in my self-word
and getting reports from clients and having to do office work. And I had some, well, not so very
positive experiences with switching between open office and Microsoft office. And I know what
you're going to say, it's Microsoft's fault. And yes, it is. It is completely Microsoft's fault
that sometimes the formatting of a document goes completely haywire when you either open it in
open office or created an open office and then either open or created in Microsoft Word. I absolutely
understand. One of the second reasons is I'm a public speaker. So that means I do quite a few
presentations and talks. And whoever wants to tell me that open office presenter is a mature and
decent alternative to keynote or PowerPoint has never given an interesting presentation. Well,
that's kind of harsh. As never given a presentation with like a 120 slides, heavy graphics,
integrated videos, those are the kind of presentations that I give. I kind of give my presentations
are like cartoons where I do the talking, where I tell the story and my slides, which almost
hardly contain any text, mostly big images or integrated video or very simple graphs
need to be of a high quality and need to be very reliable. And trust me, I've been in
what goes for a presenting software in open office. And no, it's not there.
Long story short, that meant that I was going towards Mac and Windows for my daily drivers.
And one thing that I actually started to notice was that I don't really miss my Linux desktop.
And the reason for that was that, well, most of the things that I did on my Linux desktop, I could
actually do on my Windows desktop. You know, there were a lot of open source apps that I enjoy
using daily, being Thunderbird, Firefox, freemind, what else, you know, audacity, stuff like that,
that I used to use on my Linux machine that now, you know, because their cross-platform apps
work great on my Windows machine and my Mac. Add to that, the fact that a lot of the applications
that I run are in the cloud. So basically, as Daniel Messner of the cyberpunk librarian always says,
my OS is Firefox. And since also Firefox kind of travels with me everywhere, I'm logged in. I've
got all my bookmarks with me. I've got all my plugins with me. The fact which operating system I
was using became more and more transparent for me aside from the fact that Linux couldn't really
keep up with my workflow when it came down to two presentations. And we're documents. So,
I'm still using cross-platform open source apps every single day. They're basically my favorite
because I can, you know, run them anywhere. I started to think, you know, why do I really
need a Linux desktop? Is it for the terminal? Well, on my Mac, I have the terminal. Oh, I love
the terminal there. There's a great app called HomeBrew which lets me run and install all the Linux
command line tools on there. Windows has, you know, virtual Linux Ubuntu command line interface
slash virtual machine built into the darn thing. So, I've got my terminal there. So, I went like,
Jesus. I'm not using the Linux desktop anymore. And I don't even miss it. And, you know, that
happened to be worried because, you know, I love open source software and I love to geek out and I
love to use Linux. And, you know, it was kind of like, hmm. So, one of the, I say I use the three
operating systems every day. And actually, I do. That's because I have a Linux server at home
which runs my Calibre library, which runs my Plex server, which is an SSH endpoint for me.
And on which I have quite a few scripts and command line apps run. So, whenever I'm out and about,
and I need to access my data at home or you need to do stuff, I basically SSH into my Linux
machine at home and run the apps from there or via X Forwarding run the apps on my Linux machine,
which are, for example, not cross-platform compatible, over SSH via X Forwarding on my Mac or on
my Windows machine. One of the great apps on Windows to do that is called MOBA X-Term. I would
highly recommend that app. Very, very good. Does X Forwarding great? Let's me run X Chat on my
Surface Go app work. Completely encrypted. Just saying, I mean, having the ability to SSH into
my Linux machine, do stuff via the command line and having the ability to X Forward
applications to the operating systems that I was using, kind of got me the best of both worlds
and for less and less and less, I started to start to need the Linux desktop and, you know,
I was kind of thinking like, damn, do we still need the Linux desktop? I mean, do we really still
need the Linux desktop? And I think that the answer is yes, especially if you want to have
choices, because right now you don't have a lot of choices if when it comes to operating systems,
OSX, which is great, but starts to get, I don't know, dumber and dumber every year, every
iteration, you know, they got rid of Save As, which I hated, and they're hiding power user
functionalities further and further away, which I hate. But for the rest, it's great,
and the task command line interface, it runs Unix underneath or BSD, whatever you want,
but I have a command line interface, so I like it, it's stable. And then you have Windows,
and okay, yeah, we're bashing on Windows here and in Hacker Public Radio, which I don't think is
always true, because what frankly Windows 10 has come a long way, it's a very, very, very decent
operating system, it's fast, it's performance, and it is stable. Now, you know, all the
whole blue screen of desk jokes kind of hard back to the Windows XP days. I mean, Windows 7,
yeah, probably not its success story, but you know, Windows 10, the last iterations are pretty
darn good. I mean, there's a, this is a light versatile stable and a pretty decent operating system.
That is, yes, getting a lot of, it's Mojo from Linux, you know, stuff like virtual desktops,
have come to Windows 10, dark mode, stuff like that, this all comes from Linux desktop, I know,
but you know, it doesn't, you know, we shouldn't deny it, it has it, Windows 10 has come a long
way, it's a great OS, but of course, it's Microsoft, so they can do with your data whatever they want,
and when you activate your Windows 10 copy, there are a lot of boxes that you want to untick,
as to what they want to gather about you, so I kind of understand that.
So yeah, then there's of course open source, yeah, open source, because you know,
you didn't use the Linux desktop, privacy and blah, blah, blah, and you can look at the source code,
and you know, if they're, you know, doing something behind your back, and that might be true,
but the question that I ask myself always is, who does that? Who does that? I mean, you download
some kind of Horky Dorky niche distro from distro watch, which is basically the groundwork
is devian, it's open source, it's been checked, it's been vetted, it's been done, somebody gives a
spin to it, and releases it as a distro, this person can do anything, they won't with this distro,
and I know, yes, the source code is available, you can take a look at it, you can completely
fet it to see if it's doing anything with your privacy, who does that? You know, take some obscure
distro watch that has like, you know, I don't know, 10 downloads a month, who vetted that?
Who checked that that is all right, that that is in order. I mean, the fact that, you know,
it's private, and it's free, the fact that it might not snoop on you behind your back like the
other closed operating systems do, doesn't always hold up unless we vet every single distro and every
single OS before it's released, but turns out, unless you do so, you can if you want to,
but if you don't, there is no guarantee that it's not in there, just saying, and then there's,
of course, the political debate, you know, you have, yeah, you all know my position on the
Stolmanites, Stolmanites, that's a nice word, you know, if you're a sandal wearing beard,
horking open source advocate that insists on calling Linux GNU Linux and putting GNU in front
of everything, fine, I mean, that's just great. I applaud you, but to what ends? Having completely
open source, non-closed source software is good. I applaud it, but it's not always practical,
and here I have kind of my prime directive that gets it away. You know, my prime directive is
technology should work for you instead of the other way around. So if I have to go out of my way
and spend hours and hours on technology to get it to work for me using only open source software
and no binary blobs and blah, blah, blah, then that is against my prime directive because
technology has to work for me and not the other way around. I want stuff that works. I would like to
have stuff that's open source. I would like to have stuff that's free, but I don't want to have
extra time and effort invested in a political viewpoint, or not political ideological viewpoint,
because the whole, holier-than-down open source all the way,
rants that I hear from time to time, they kind of take me off because there they go, they go like,
yeah, you should only use open source and you know, close source is bad and binary blobs are bad,
and yeah sure, sure, sure, sure. And then you ask them, you know, what phone do you have?
One Android phone. It's the best that I have around. Is that open source? No, it's not. Do you
care? No, it's a great phone. So you see, I mean, there's this double standard that a lot of people
have, you know, when it comes to a desktop, suddenly it has to be holier-than-down and completely
transparent open source and GNU Linux, but you know, they're phone? Well, no, the Google's just fine.
I'll just use a phone with Android and operating system powered by the biggest ad agency on the planet.
It's, you know, duplicate. It's a double standard. It's strange. So I have no idea what I'm
going with this, but what I do want to say is either, you know, do we still need, the question that
I come back to is do we still need to do the next desktop? If it's not for Froodome and it's not for
transparency, well, do we still need it? Then it's for Geekery. That's okay. And it's for Geekery to
think around with, customize, and it's all great and fine. And then you can spend hours and hours and
hours and hours of digital hopping and talking about desktop interfaces and colors and launchers and
start menus. That's just fine. But at the end of the day, I want to do stuff with my computer.
And if I do stuff with my computer, that means that I go online and I type stuff and I make stuff
or that open up Audacity and I record a podcast and I send it to you. And whether I do that,
Windows on a Mac or on a desktop or Linux desktop that either runs KDE or NUM or Montaille,
I don't care. The goal of my computer is to, you know, do stuff. Be creative. That's what I
love to use machine for. Be creative. That computer that's giving me access to this. Look at this
recording a podcast using technology. And I'm not going to, you know, get into extreme arguments
about, you know, the KDE is better than NUM and that Montaille is better than, I don't know,
LXDE and that this distro is better than that distro and that Linux is better than Windows.
At the end of the day, I just want to get stuff done. And it's the applications that matter to me.
So, and here's my final point. Do we still need the Linux desktop? Shouldn't we
pour more energy? And I'm not talking about developing energy, the development energy and stuff.
But about these endless, endless, endless discussions that, you know, Linux is better than Windows and
I don't know, Ubuntu is better than Debian and Reddad is better than Suce.
Should we, you know, stop pouring energy in that and start pouring energy in the applications?
Shouldn't we start talking not about distros but about applications that we use and that might
be available across all platforms. Shouldn't the big push not be the year of the Linux desktop but
the year of the cross-platform open source application? I'm going to close down with my devil's
advocate view. I'm a cross-platform geek so I look at this from all three sides.
And if I take a look at the success that Microsoft has had over the last couple of years,
that very success can be largely distributed, contributed to the fact that they have let's go
of their empire, of their world garden, of their own ecosystem and that they said, you know,
Microsoft products don't have to run on Windows. They can run on anything. Case in point,
the best Gmail client on OS X is Microsoft Outlook. I mean, sorry, the best email client on iOS is Microsoft
Outlook. How bizarre is that? That is so bizarre but that is actually so brilliant. Microsoft has
let go of their world garden. I said, you know, here's our OS. You can use it. It's fine.
But if you want to run Microsoft Office on Mac, you can. If you want to run Microsoft Office
in the cloud on Linux, you can. If you want to run Linux on Windows, you can. They opened it up
and it is because that they opened it up, that their applications got so much more reach because
I still have a Linux desktop at home. It's a server-ized installation too but it's also the
desktop that I work behind. And because of the fact that Office 365 has
gone to the cloud and has a very, very, very good web interface, I just do my Windows apps on Linux.
You know, my word documents on Linux in the browser using Firefox and it all works. You know,
that's the whole point what I'm trying to make. Shouldn't the power, the energy and the effort
of the open source community be geared more and more towards cross-platform applications
instead of pouring time and effort into 50,000 variations of a desktop. And everybody who makes a
distro, I love you from the geeky ones to the mainstream ones. I applaud the energy that you put
into this. But I do ask myself the question, what if we pushed this energy towards
a cross, towards cross-platform applications that could then spread to all the platforms,
to Microsoft, Windows, to Apple, OSX, wouldn't we have an even bigger impact on the market than
and wouldn't, shouldn't we stop waiting for the year of the Linux desktop and start working
on the year of the cross-platform applications. Surely that's something for you guys to think about.
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