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Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

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Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#41

Post by dktbs »

sz4kerto wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example). > Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux. No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstec…

You address every issue I have with desktop linux at the moment.

The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#42

Post by fernandotakai »

murbard2 wrote: post #7

And yet as of 2015, getting sound to work properly is still a crapshoot. Artsd was a major pain 13 years ago, I'm sure pulseaudio has more features today, but it's still an intractable mess.

my sound worked out of the box with pulseaudio -- installed the package, added start-pulseaudio-x11 to my ~/.xprofile (arch doesn't have anything by default), and it worked.

even skype (!) worked out of the box (both speakers and microphones).

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#43

Post by Slump »

asdfghjklop wrote: post #15

- Linux is as far from a gaming platform as ever. - Hardware issues are major PITA, touchpads never work, when you have a convertible laptop, keyboard doesn't disable when turning it into a tablet mode and so on. Not to mention audio. - No distro has nice fonts. - In my case, Ubuntu took exactly an hour before throwing an error at me. I use Linux every day and I prefer it to Windows or Mac OS X, but take your pink gl…

Eh, I agree with you for the most part minus the fonts. I happen to like Ubuntu's font face and fonts are a rather subjective thing. Otherwise, yeah, I run Linux in a VM for a reason.

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#44

Post by fernandotakai »

branchless wrote: post #22
jarcane wrote: post #11

My lily-white ass it has. If anything, my experience with the Linux distro ecosystem in the last year is worse than I have ever had with Linux going back some 20 years. I would frankly trade any of the dozens of broken "robust desktop distros" for just Red Hat 7 or Mandrake or early 2000's Debian. I have gone through any of nearly a dozen different distros in the last year, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, more I'm prob…

I don't get this. I use debian and I use a lightweight window manager. I have a ~/.xsession that starts up things I need (chrome/skype/emacs). This works.

same. i use arch with awesomewm and everything works quite fine. i only had one kernel panic and that was due to the freaking wifi drivers (macbooks have broadcom wifi and their linux support is just horrible).

other than that, everything is basically perfect.

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#46

Post by bananaoomarang »

sz4kerto wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example). > Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux. No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstec…

Ditto this. I have used desktop Linux for about eight years now and graphics have consistently been the largest problem. If you can get them to work at all expect abysmal performance (excepting nVidia's proprietary drivers).

Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken.

I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#47

Post by _yy »

sz4kerto wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example). > Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux. No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstec…

> it sucks for everything else

What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming".

> there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time

Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day.

> No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review

It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others.

But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.

Re: Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

#48

Post by FatalBaboon »

sz4kerto wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example). > Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux. No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstec…

The last few times I installed Linux on a machine went fine for 95%+ of what I expected.

First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working). I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily.

Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing). And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam.

Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway.

So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.

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