Depends on your definition of "user"… and evidently your definition of "never".
Microsoft did make great strides in the earlier part of this century, before they decided to take a wrecking ball with the combined efforts of the "Metro^WModern" UI, their "cloud first" push and most recently, their fascination with AI.
Apple's platform is good, but it requires buying their hardware (and its limited range of form-factors): go have a look at how Amazon do MacOS X instances to see where that's a problem. (spoiler: they've hacked off-the-shelf Mac Minis into 2U racks.)
You needed some functional knowledge of BASIC to do anything with an Apple computer years ago. Today, Microsoft and the KDE project are riffing off each-other UI-wise.
As for Linux audio… when I started out, OSS was the standard. Most applications dealt with audio directly, there was this new fangled daemon called the e-Sound-Daemon (esd) which came from the Enlightenment desktop (and often ran along side Gnome v1).
KDE had their own called aRTS. Basically only KDE applications supported it.
ALSA got merged into the kernel with Linux 2.6. It solved a lot of problems with OSS, but still it was one application at a time. (Unless you set up dmix/dsnoop plug-ins.)
Proprietary OSS-only applications like Skype needed all sorts of unholy hacks to make it work back in the day. Everyone celebrated when they implemented ALSA support.
JACK popped up, and did allow multi-application sound-card use and flow-graph processing… but it was finicky, and better suited to advanced users.
PulseAudio is the present day, and aimed at replacing esd (and aRTS). BlueZ started working their audio infrastructure to link into that instead of ALSA.
That said, architectural issues were hit with PA, and there were ideas in JACK that were useful for solving problems, so PipeWire does a bit of both. It has support for the newer BT CODECs, and as I say, I think will ultimately replace PulseAudio.
This is almost entirely volunteers. If it took 30 years for Microsoft to get where they are today with full-time employees, it does not surprise me that the Linux community is taking a little longer. You're comparing one group who are paid a typical 40-hour week to work on their thing, to another where volunteers might only spare 10 hours a week.
I've seen printer handbooks which described the format of the commands sent down the parallel port to make a printer change fonts, colours or print graphics… but that was many moons ago! We have to reverse-engineer this in many cases today.
The only thing in favour of OSS is shear numbers: there's no recruitment process to write patches or submit bug reports -- anyone can pitch in and help. (And yes, I have written a patch or two for ALSA! Probably nothing that matters in your bug.)
Sitting here moaning though isn't going to get the problem fixed. In the discussion so far, there's been no mention of distribution, kernel versions, BlueZ versions, what audio subsystem is being used (PulseAudio, PipeWire, pure ALSA, sndio…), what hardware is being used.
That doesn't give us a lot to go on. I'm not saying your problems are unimportant or non-existent… I also don't think they're unsolvable. But, we'll need detail to get to the bottom of it. 🙂
@stuartl @qqmrichter the current experience is just the price paid by dev mindshare going to development of a server platform - I wonder who benefited from that :-(
Devs focusing on a desktop OS of similar vintage (Haiku OS ?) ought to have helped. The Linux desktop experience suggests it isn't too late to pivot ;-)
There are so many user-oriented software artifacts insufficiently explored. Plan 9 home network? Smalltalk desktop (Squeak adopted by app devs)?
Yeah, the vast majority of Linux's history was as it being on someone's kick-around computer or as a server… HaikuOS is indeed an interesting project, been watching it from a distance for some years now.
I think the CK-sources maintainer got fed up and stopped development precisely because of the focus on server-oriented development.
Not everybody runs a server cluster in a corner of the laundry.
That said, things are changing.
Sony PS2 Linux was a flop because Sony just took their dev environment with its ancient components, and dumped the whole mess on the community.
Android has made big improvements kernel-side, but because they implement their own userland, the higher layers miss out. Hence this thread.
Recently, Valve has picked up Linux for their SteamDeck. Unlike Android, this uses freedesktop.org standards to operate. Over time, I think projects like this will help push the case for desktop Linux forward.
Windows NT 4.0 was rubbish for gaming (I know, I've been there)… Windows 2000 wasn't too bad, but things got really pushed forward when Microsoft abandoned the old DOS-based platform that was Windows 95/98/ME and made Windows XP based on NT. Now you can't play contemporary games on Windows 95/98/ME, it has to be one of the NT-based releases of Windows (unless they also support MacOS X, Linux or other OSes).
There are vendors now that will sell desktop computers and laptops running Linux today. (I'm typing this post on a StarBook VI, which came with Ubuntu originally, since loaded with Gentoo.) That wasn't a thing 15 years ago. The best we had years ago was a few obscure netbooks.
Things will change… not overnight, but they already have changed a great deal, and things are moving forward.
> typing this post on a Starbook VI
How are Starlabs as a company? They recently became available in my region, but I am balking at paying a regionally-unknown entity upfront.
@tetrislife
They seem pretty reasonable so far… this was my first purchase from them. The machine I ordered was shipped within days, and was here the same week.
They're based on the UK, the actual product is assembled in China. Their technical support seem pretty knowledgeable, while they don't necessarily know how every distribution will run on their hardware, they are able to point out the possible trouble-spots to look out for.
As always, you often don't find out something is awry until much later.
The unit I had was ordered with Coreboot firmware, but arrived with AMI UEFI firmware -- apparently they haven't quite finished porting it over to AMD-chipset laptops yet, but allegedly will publish a guide on how to load Coreboot when the port is finished.