Nothing is āfreeā that is also in scarce supply. Developer labor time is in scarce supply. There is a price being paid in quality for the āfreeā price tag. There is a price being paid for the distributed nature of the development. I donāt mind paying for a product that adds value to my life. My best Linux experience was a for-profit distro that had a relentless focus on the user experience.
Iāll give you a small example. The desktop behavior does not stay consistent. Between upgrades the default behavior changes. Gimp defaults to the upper left corner of display 0, even after I have started working in display 1. Before 18.04 the optimization dialog used to open in that corner, but now it shows in the middle of display 0 even if the image is being edited in display 1. When I close an image off the main window again jumps to the corner. If I open multiple files from a file manager they will open on display 0 or display 1 or both with no discernible logic. If I finish with one image, and then open another one, before closing the image window, then it opens in the display being currently used. None of this behavior stays consistent across upgrades, therefore I am unable to settle into a workflow and speed it up through habit. In 18.04 I have to click in a window to bring it into focus, ctrl click will not workāhence, I often end up opening and closing files just to reactivate an open file manager window. Or, I click on the title bar if it is not covered by the active window.
Another small example. The read/write operations to a mounted Samba drive are very, very slow. In 18.04 it has become even slower than before. The relevant computers are connected by cat 6 wire, and actual file transfers happen very fast. The progress box hangs on 0 for close to 30 seconds, then dashes across to 100, pauses for a few seconds and then closes off. If I open a file from a Samba drive it is sometimes quick, and sometimes very slow. If I am moving a large file it will hang after reaching 100% for about 15 seconds. These are all minor annoyances but they eat up time which is valuable. If there are 1000s of items in a directory Caja will take forever to display them, even in list modeāI never ask Caja to display thumbnails because that will take forever and use the CPU heavily, each and every time I visit the directory. Windows Explorer is quite sucky but it is now better and quicker than either Caja or PCManFM, which is hard to believe but this is my experience. The search tool in Caja never works, but the search tool in PCManFM works.
Let me not start on Firefox which is now a POS, sorry. In 18.04 it takes up enormous amounts of CPU. Ordinary page loads take very long and max out the CPU. If a Youtube video is playing it becomes very sluggish, and the CPU usage is so high it actually slows the desktop down! This is a 4th gen. i7 with 12Gb of RAM and SSD. It even has a 16Gb embedded SSD which is swap space.
This is not intended as a critique of the Mate team. Iām pretty sure most of these thingsāI did not recount all issues, only someāare beyond the Mate teamās domain. This is only to show why āfreeā is not always the highest value proposition. Linux will never be able to compete effectively with Mac or Windows unless a distro decides to do it for profit, which is unlikely to happen now. It needs a unified strategy and a laser focus on the end user experience. My 16.04 experience was very good, once I had finished tinkering with it and customizing it. (I made a huge blunder in not keeping a drive image backupānever again.) I am still hoping to get that level of workflow back with 18.04.1.
