I tried setting up some text to speech stuff years ago, and I ended just giving up. Everything kind of worked, except when it didn't.
Linux generally works fine for everything else for me, but this is definitely not its strongest point. My general impression was that many tools were very much developed by people in their spare time, and just not having enough of it. In theory it could all work because all the bits are there, but there's no "chief of accessibility" that can patch things over in the various projects.
The flexibility and decentralisation of the Linux ecosystem is great for some less common use cases; I wrote my own WM and some other X11 tools that work a bit quirky, but works really well for me. This would be very hard to do on Windows or macOS. But for some other less common use cases ... yeah, not so great.
washadjeffmad · 1h ago
In the 2000s, a video of Nelson Mandela explaining "Ubuntu" was included in every iso[1]:
"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."
Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.
Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.
Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?
The big commercial distros hit a common failure mode for open source projects. There's a lot of money in cloud, which means there are a lot of vendors that want to extend things in ways that make the vendors' products relevant. Those vendors end up being the ones that fund future devlopment work, so they control the direction of the ecosystem for the projects they rely on (instead of users / hobbyists / hardware vendors / etc).
So, we get stuff like Ubuntu's fleet management service and flatpak/snap instead of things that actually improve the user experience.
The whole ecosystem is this way. Look at the stuff RedHat has been shovelling. The article mentions gtk3/4, wayland and pulseaudio. I'd add systemd to the list. All of those introduced multi-decade regressions into the desktop experience. The only reason they were funded was because they force churn in smaller open source projects, killing competition from lower-resource developers, and consolidating the ecosystem in the big shops.
Heck, RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant GPL violation, but IBM throws a lot of money around, so most people just look the other way:
RedHat ships source code of GPL binaries for RHEL, but only if you pay them. The source code comes with the following restriction: If you redistribute it, they'll refuse to renew your support contract. This clearly violates the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.
chronid · 3h ago
As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better.
From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security.
I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.
hedora · 55m ago
I noticed the one bright spot in the article is debian, though even that's broken for me thanks to systemd.
I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.
Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.
(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
I agree, all the modern technical additions over the years to operating systems have entirely been 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.
It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.
Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all <port>!" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.
hedora · 17m ago
Under Linux, you can still use the -dpi setting in xrandr (or in your x.conf). It sets the font bigger without blurring all the icons.
I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.
There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.
tomjuggler · 3h ago
Yeah have to agree with everything in this article, the state of audio on Linux! And Wayland also, "not there yet" for so many years.
As a sighted person I can only imagine the frustration, I too find myself writing scripts to keep things working the way I want.
knighthack · 43m ago
I find it ridiculous how "writing scripts to keep things working the way I want" can be a source of frustration.
To me, that's a source of pleasure.
I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/
The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.
prmoustache · 1h ago
As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place.
Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability.
Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen aren't accessible enough?
idw · 1h ago
It might help to know that blindness takes many forms. Having no sight at all is what many people assume but is not what many blind people experience. So some blind people can use accessibility tools together with the sight they do have which may for example only be in a small part of the area most people can see, or may be blurry, or otherwise impaired.
prmoustache · 31m ago
I didn't consider that indeed, thanks.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
You'd be cut off from nearly the entire CSS and JavaScript-using World Wide Web, for one.
hedora · 34m ago
Put another way, as a user that prefers CLI + text mode (and stuck with DOS whenever possible for many years after installing Windows 3.0), I'd rather not start a desktop environment.
These days, there's basically no choice. Most software (even the text editor at work: VS Code) has abandoned text mode.
prmoustache · 30m ago
There are many days I would say it isn't a bad thing, until I'd realize I can't fill some important form online so that I don't have to queue during office hours at a desk.
andrewmcwatters · 3h ago
To be fair, I've never once read or heard someone describe the Linux ecosystem as "it just works." The entire time I've grown up with computing, Linux was something you tinkered with as a nerd.
Debian and Ubuntu were like the distros you used if you wanted a semblance of a life as a GNU/Linux user.
prmoustache · 1h ago
For a non blind user and on a machine that is well supported (rule of thumb: a thinkpad of at 3years ago or more), it does just work. At least as well as on win/mac where frustrations and issues also do exist.
benoau · 3h ago
I don't think "tinkered with" is the right description for using Linux as a daily driver.
It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown.
Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.
justinrubek · 2h ago
I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.
hedora · 32m ago
I've found this is distro dependent. I'm happily using devuan, an even-more-conservative variant of debian, and it's rock solid.
I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.
I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.
benoau · 2h ago
Do you use it on a laptop?
Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.
marssaxman · 1h ago
I haven't used anything but Linux on a laptop in over a decade, and for me it really does "just work" (unless you're including one-and-done BIOS setup issues and the like).
prmoustache · 1h ago
It really depends the kind of laptops. Gaming laptops with nvidua gpus and exotic stuff? maybe. Business laptops with intel everything from integrated graphics to lan/wifi are usually painless. That has been my experience on Fedora in the last 15 years.
Caveat being to do some research before purchase about support of third party devices like printers or scanner.
notnullorvoid · 2h ago
I've daily drove Linux on various laptops and haven't had much issues in the last decade. Most of these laptops have been Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
It's definitely been really, really bad in the past even with major distributions. So, the comical description is not far off.
joemazerino · 3h ago
Considering the amount of issues I've had over the years with audio in Linux, I completely empathize. I wonder what the author's experience with Windows / Mac is?
MrVandemar · 3h ago
The pain and despair of using Linux as a person who is blind or visually impaired. It's almost a poem.
Linux generally works fine for everything else for me, but this is definitely not its strongest point. My general impression was that many tools were very much developed by people in their spare time, and just not having enough of it. In theory it could all work because all the bits are there, but there's no "chief of accessibility" that can patch things over in the various projects.
The flexibility and decentralisation of the Linux ecosystem is great for some less common use cases; I wrote my own WM and some other X11 tools that work a bit quirky, but works really well for me. This would be very hard to do on Windows or macOS. But for some other less common use cases ... yeah, not so great.
"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."
Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.
Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.
Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HED4h00xPPA
So, we get stuff like Ubuntu's fleet management service and flatpak/snap instead of things that actually improve the user experience.
The whole ecosystem is this way. Look at the stuff RedHat has been shovelling. The article mentions gtk3/4, wayland and pulseaudio. I'd add systemd to the list. All of those introduced multi-decade regressions into the desktop experience. The only reason they were funded was because they force churn in smaller open source projects, killing competition from lower-resource developers, and consolidating the ecosystem in the big shops.
Heck, RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant GPL violation, but IBM throws a lot of money around, so most people just look the other way:
RedHat ships source code of GPL binaries for RHEL, but only if you pay them. The source code comes with the following restriction: If you redistribute it, they'll refuse to renew your support contract. This clearly violates the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.
From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security.
I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.
I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.
Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.
(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)
It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.
Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all <port>!" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.
I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.
There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.
As a sighted person I can only imagine the frustration, I too find myself writing scripts to keep things working the way I want.
To me, that's a source of pleasure.
I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/
The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.
Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability.
Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen aren't accessible enough?
These days, there's basically no choice. Most software (even the text editor at work: VS Code) has abandoned text mode.
Debian and Ubuntu were like the distros you used if you wanted a semblance of a life as a GNU/Linux user.
It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown.
Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.
I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.
I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.
Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.
Caveat being to do some research before purchase about support of third party devices like printers or scanner.