We've recently had a discussion over here https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-1364-c506-bca9-8ba414333506 about how Thunderbirdßs update is in fact not that "cool", but less functional, and how the theming and window managing is starting to become more broken on Linux because many developers seem to not think of their apps in terms of usability and respecting the user's choices and their system.

Garuda looks really great out of the box, but when you start using it you realize how inconsistent and unpolished it becomes. There is some work to do to make it stable, in my view. The theming is quite a disaster when you want to use other themes than Garuda's official one, and the out-of-the-box access to software via their software center, is very limited.

What if we test TROMjaro, our linux distribution? Well, perhaps it is a bit biased but there are objective things to learn from this test. See how TROMjaro manages to deal with these basic tasks.

Pop OS looks polished and definitely does better in terms of usability compared to Ubuntu for example, but it is half-baked.

Linux Mint is doing ok. Better than the rest for sure. But there are some things that still make this distro less user friendly. And these things can be fixed.

Fedora Silverblue is a big failure based on my usability tests. So bad that I wonder if I did not make any mistake and this distro is not even meant for desktop use. I hope I did not.

Another distro that I have tested. MX Linux. File support - great! Apps support - bad! The rest you can see in the video.

Testing Manjaro Plasma was a mess...quite inconsistent and difficult to test overall. Better than Ubuntu tho. Plasma wants to do a lot, but by doing so it messes things up. This video may seem all over the place, I am sorry, but it was because of the nature of this distro.

Linux Usability Test

Today we test Ubuntu 22.04 to see how usable it is. And it seems not very...

EDIT: A correction - The spreadsheet formula calcualtort was not picking up the RARE apps column for the APPS counting of points. That was 5 points more. So 47 in total for Ubuntu. Also, there are 50 points for that category, not 40.