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Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#31
post #9

I develop applications in C++ on Linux and Windows. On windows I can enable heap tracing and have leak detection included in my test cases (Google mock/test). On Linux I need to run my app under Valgrind for leak checking as a separate process.

Clang has a leak detector: http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LeakSanitizer.html

It also has an address sanitizer that checks for out of bounds errors. I have found both to be enormously useful.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#32
What I think really lack in Linux is:

- Good hardware that is nice to use (look beautiful) and works well with Linux.

- A great IDE that doesn't look like shit right out of the box. I know many can be configured and tampered with, but I simply do not enjoy that enough to go through the pain.

Otherwise, my biggest pain and why I definately go back to Windows is that I can't play my games on my machine. Many games still only work on Windows or works much better on Windows due to bad graphics drivers.

I really like Linux, I always use it as a server or to host stuff. But in the later years of my life I simply get too frustrated (often with small stuff) to keep using Linux as my main desktop operating system.

At work I use a macbook because it has nice to use hardware with desktop software that is more polished than any linux distro but still keep the unix feel.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#33

* Having to make efforts to keep the system working smoothly after regular system updates * Hardware vendors not showing much love

I use server/workstation parts for systems (not a laptop guy), so that's not so much of a problem, but can still be an issue with e.g. having to use a newer kernel that's not getting security update love.

The update issue can be problematical with not all that many distros providing Long Term Support. systemd + Debian's short term support, one year after a new version plus a volunteer effort starting with squeeze is prompting me to abandon it and its famed stability between releases. I'm trying Alpine for Xen, with probably the current LTS Ubuntu without default systemd for development and who knows what else on VMs.

Ah, yeah, the chaos in GUIs is not good, e.g. Gnome going off in a bogus direction after version 2. I'm happy enough for now with Xfce, but its got less mindshare.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#34
post #20
post #8

[deleted]

I only tried working with one external monitor, but I had absolutely no problem with it what so ever. Audio is working great out of the box for me and I had no troubles with the trackpad neither, which I did have on my Windows system (basically, I couldn't disable some of its gestures and trackpad worked even when my fingers were slightly above it but weren't touching it, which was highly annoying to me).

I had no problems at all with one external monitor, aside from BIOS output only ever going through the internal Intel GPU, so I couldn't use the console.

To get a 3rd working, I had to buy a second GPU (since there seemed to be no way to use the internal Intel GPU for X at the same time). So: 2 monitors with my original graphics card, 1 monitor with my new one.

This was then somehow incompatible with XRandR, so I had to set it to use Xinerama. GNOME 3 is incompatible with Xinerama, so I had to switch to GNOME 2 - or, to be more accurate, GNOME started up in GNOME 2 mode without giving me any indication why.

GNOME 2 was incompatible with all of the GNOME addins I'd installed. Also, it had a completely different UI. Like... completely different. And every time I launched an X11 program, it moaned on its tty about XRandR being missing.

All in all the experience was far from slick.

What I did on Windows: plugged 3rd monitor into socket for internal Intel GPU. Ticked box to say I wanted desktop on 3rd monitor. It worked.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#35
post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

I'm using HP ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstations with ubuntu 14 LTS since last 3 months. The only thing i miss is SSD that i didn't choose in my customization. Has 16GB RAM, i7 . I switch between Win 8.1 and linux (something lxde instead of unity). The nice thing about this linux can run VMs and it is pretty fast and even containers work well. Also Win 8.1 ultimate has hyperv role so you can use that as a hypervisor as well.

Initially i had 64 bit 15.x but some unity programs used to crash when it released , so i installed something good.

I'm didn't find any problem with anything until now.

http://www8.hp.com/in/en/campaigns/workstations/zbook-15.htm...

http://www8.hp.com/in/en/products/laptops/product-detail.htm...

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#36
post #9

I develop applications in C++ on Linux and Windows. On windows I can enable heap tracing and have leak detection included in my test cases (Google mock/test). On Linux I need to run my app under Valgrind for leak checking as a separate process.

You want to make ASAN builds (simply build with clang or gcc > 4.8 with -fsanitize=address on the command line).

Then you can break in a debugger, and do some tricks, explained in this page: https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/wiki/AddressSani....

This will also detect any memory trashing or the like, while being quite fast (compared to valgrind, of course). Then if things are really weird, you can use valgrind.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#37

What I think really lack in Linux is: - Good hardware that is nice to use (look beautiful) and works well with Linux. - A great IDE that doesn't look like shit right out of the box. I know many can be configured and tampered with, but I simply do not enjoy that enough to go through the pain. Otherwise, my biggest pain and why I definately go back to Windows is that I can't play my games on my machine. Many games stil…

Have you given the JetBrains IDE's a shot? There's also Qt Creator for C / C++. Not sure what kind of development you do, but there are some nice IDE's that come pretty out of the box. The only friction is installing them, though in the case of JetBrain you just download it, unzip it, and run it, it adds its shortcuts where needed.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#38
post #10

I have to say I'm pretty satisfied, even more than I was before when I was using Windows. Everything seems easier to install and I don't need gigabytes of space to build my environment. (Visual Studio, I'm talking about you!) Working with Git and gcc was as easy as it can get right at the beginning of my switch. Back in Windows days, I was primarily using Dev-C++ and a GitHub desktop client (which I really don't like…

If you are willing to do Qt/C++, QtCreator can easily create forms, the same way as VS.

I have to mention it's not as straight forward last I tried it, but it's still usable. My lack of C++ understanding has kept me from really getting into Qt / C++ though.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#39
Unstable virtual box networking on my arch machine that requires occasional suspend and resume of a vm. No good looking and stable gui client for mysql.

I've been doing dev with linux for most of my carrier and I honestly don't know why would someone use another os. Windows dev looks very weird to me with trillions of popups, little windows and checkboxes. Mac looks like it's trying to replicate linux tooling and while it's pretty good you still need to jump some hoops

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#40
The debugging workflow is a mess.

The visual studio debugger is great. gdb and various front ends for it are all various levels of not so great. There is a better featureset in gdb for the very skilled users to do tricky things, but it's still a bear to learn and get conformable with.

Putting the .build-id directory on the network and getting subsitute-path pointing at the right location to debug a continuous integration build from 16 months ago? The hardest part is happening to learn those features exist, and the legwork to make it quick and easy to use is PITA too.

Some developers... they just want to open the visual studio debugger and smash "step over/into" until their code works. This isn't the best approach to development and they should probably do a bit more "sit and think about the code" in their development. But professionally I have to support this workflow, it's much smoother in VS than when targeting linux. And it's not an excuse for bad debugging tools either, sometimes you do need to spend a day in the debugger to solve things.

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