Linux desktop will, most likely, fail for: Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.
Linux desktop is great, I love it but I don’t sugar coat it nor I’m delusional like most posting about it.
It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
Guess what happens whenever people popularize immutable distros as the next hype in tech that will make everything better? You get yourself into a totally unreasonable and avoidable ecosystem just because those systems won’t cut it for most use cases… same that happened with Docker/Kubernetes.
I’ve been saying it for year and nobody cares: nowadays those companies are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer. We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
The latest endeavor in making everyone’s hostage is the new Linux immutable distribution trend. Immutable distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property solution.
We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.
“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.
As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
Those popularizing immutable distributions clearly haven’t had any experience with it before the current hype. Let me tell you something, immutable systems aren’t a new thing we already had it with MIPS devices (mostly routers and IOTs) and people have been moving to ARM and mutable solutions because it’s better, easier and more reliable.
Just because “it makes sense”, you’re required to use an hidden menu to enable formatting tools in every single message you want to type, no global toggle available in settings:
And obviously that Nextcloud wouldn’t do it like any sane WYSIWYG since Office was announced in 1988. You to select text to get into the formatting tools, no way to have a permanent toolbar at the top:
That said, the webUI doesn’t lag at all for me and I have no errors or warnings in the console.
Maybe its just because you’re not using the webmail, that thing is just poor taste.
Are you sure you set everything up properly?
Yes, I tried the full manual installation, docker images and whatnot, all about the same. About the lag… most time it’s not the UI lagging but every action is slow, takes time to load even on high end hardware. AMD Ryzen 7 5700X + 32 GB of RAM + NVMe Samsung 980 Pro 2TB.
I can say I get your point however 30 users isn’t “scalability”, it is just a normal family. I usually try to test random versions of Nextcloud from time to time to see it they’ve improved however I can’t even make it work properly for myself let alone 30 people.
I’m not sure what you consider “great experience” but a lagging webUI that spits dozens of warning and errors into the console doesn’t cut it for me. Let alone a piece of shit webmail that isn’t even capable of making a bullet list display properly or compose messages in a textarea larger than 200x200.
That’s gonna be a good day. I’m sure they’ll have the common sense to include systemd-desktopd-iconsd and systemd-desktopd-slow-transition-animationsd will be optional. :P
Question is: why can’t the GNOME people that are so eager to reinvent everything dedicate a few bucks out of their new 1M€ funding and integrate it with systemd-networkd and ditch the old NetworkManager for good. That thing is inconsistent and to make things worse now we’ve the “new network settings” with some settings and then the NetworkManager window/GUI with more settings and things are as coherent as Windows 10’s new Settings vs Control Panel… Fucks sake GNOME.
For what’s worth in Windows I can pull the old Control Panel Network Connections settings go into properties and manage everything network adapters have to over with a simple tab based navigation. In GNOME right now it is a shit show of jumping around between the GNOME Settings and the older NetworkManager GUI to end up not being able to easily get a VLAN tag on some connection.
NextCloud is a shame, they should be ashamed of calling themselves an alternative to Office365 / Teams / OneDrive. They’re pretty much like Tesla, if they didn’t spend most of their time over-promising + under-delivering people would be surprised with the progress they’ve done instead of going for scrutiny.
Here is the thing, I would love to have NC working decently but I’ve test almost all of their releases on the past year and the issues are always the same. Here is my main complaints:
Syncthing sync is robust, it doesn’t fail and handles tons of files with little resources, NC uses a lot more RAM and once you get to around 1 TB of small files it will stop working randomly;
NC Webmail UI is poorly designed: compose window is just a small box on the center of the screen, there’s no way to have the markup tools permanently show up;
NC Webmail UI is broken: if you select a bunch of text and turn it into a bullet list, the bullets won’t even show up on NC, other e-mail clients will see them tho;
Integration/SSO with IMAP is cumbersome: not well documented, default configuration doesn’t even handle a simple “login with the email email and password as the IMAP account” type of setup that is commonly expected;
WebUI is slow and fails often: if you open the browser console you’ll find lots of warnings and errors.
I do have a lot of complaints related to mail but if NC is any kind of useful replacement for MS365 / Google Workplace a decently working webmail is the bare minimum. RoundCube is WAY better than what NC is currently offering.
I spent weeks researching and trying to tweak things and at the end of the day NC always performs poorly. Most of the issues seem to be related to the poorly implemented WebUI but the desktop app also has issues with large folders. Also tried the docker version, the “all in one” similar results it simply doesn’t cut it.
With that said, for around 30 users I’m not way better with this setup:
Dovecot+Postfix working as mail server / “identity provider” for my users;
Syncthing to sync desktop machines with the server (not across each other);
FileBrowser for web access;
WebDAV access for iOS/Android clients;
Baikal as CardDAV/CalDAV server;
RoundCube for a decent webmail experience with a lot of Kolab plugins (Contacts, Calendars, Tasks from CardDAV/CalDAV);
Both FileBrowser and Baikal were modified to authenticate against the IMAP server and create accounts automatically if the username/password check out. I’m deploying this to the user’s machines via Ansible and/or iOS/macOS profiles so most things are automated by now. To onboard a new user I simply have to create the email account and then run the playbooks.
My future investments will be:
ejabberd with the IMAP integration and setup plugins for audio/video chat, push notifications, presence indication;
Integrate converse.js or Jitsi (jabber web client) into the RoundCube webmail (simply add a tab with an iframe + pass the webmail auth);
Explore a better multi-user Syncthing setup - possible create a small app that uses the Syncthing tech but does authentication against IMAP as well. Custom backend to automatically manage the creation of user folders and managed shares;
Microsoft Exchange / ActiveSync: while it might be possible most of my users are either on macOS or they don’t care about Outlook / use Thunderbird or the Webmail.
Although this setup still misses some important stuff (aka replace Zoom) and I’ve been working on it for a while it outperforms NC in all ways so far. The investment was totally worth it.
I really hoped that NC would do all those things properly and I still try new releases but it doesn’t seem to get any better.
And here I was thinking people were about to move to systemd-networkd so network would actually work decently on the Linux desktop and then I remembered that GNOME comes with the bs called network-manager.
But there is no easy way to detect all extensions, instead most popular ones
It doesn’t really matter if its easy or hard, I’m sure Google already has automated processes in-place to detect all extensions published to the store and fingerprint browsers. They might even have the same for Firefox extensions, who knows.
This is the definition of clickbait, bullshit articles… they didn’t even bother to take their own screenshots of the suggested alternatives. I also don’t really know what’s the point of this article, Linux users know what’s out there and although I dislike LibreOffice and have strong thoughts about it it is vastly superior to the other alternatives suggested to the point said alternatives aren’t really alternatives.
Bruh, you’re literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos.