81–89 of 89 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate ?
Both OS X and modern Windows desktops have process sandboxing that is actually used. Perhaps Linux will catch up, but it's not looking very good right now. Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only programs that are written by your friends.
I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released Windows XP. I've been running Linux ever since. Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years. When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed…
As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub main branches.
You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date, and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.
Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared with tracking Debian stable.
Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with your own needs.
That said, while Linux on the Laptop keeps getting better, so also does OS X. Ignoring complaints about privacy for a minute, Windows 10 is also very nice to use.
I am resigned to mostly just using Linux just on my servers.
Edit: that is, my Linux experience is now SSH shells on remote servers, which is still good.
- NetworkManager has to be restarted regularly because it breaks after too many suspend cycles - and I have an intel wlan card. The last bug I've seen is NetworkManager killing my ipv4 routes without reason - ipv6 keeps working correctly. Wat?
- The more we go forward, the more things get convoluted. Features get removed because "streamlining" an so on, but at the same time the entire system gets more opaque, layer upon layer upon layer.
- Third party app support is still pretty bad. See spotify for a shining example.
- the 3D graphic stack is pretty horrible. No, absolutely horrible. There was a MESA "revision" going on to fix some of the issues, but it's been a long time since I've seen anything.
.. and I can go forward. I'm sorry, but Linux has not matured on the desktop. It's usable, with a lot of warts all around, but is not "mature". And the costant focus on building new shiny thingies instead of improving internals is a problem. All in all, I've been using linux on my desktop/laptops for years, and the older I get the less time I have to report bugs and find workaround or write patches, maybe to be told by some nice welcoming community that since I'm not a developer I'm not an user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both OS X and modern Windows desktops have process sandboxing that is actually used. Perhaps Linux will catch up, but it's not looking very good right now. Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only programs that are written by your friends.
SELinux has means to handle desktop security, but yes, it is rather PITA. Could you tell more about OS X process sandboxing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Printing is so much easier to do on Linux than on Windows now. I think at some point a group of people must have decided that they weren't going to be the butt of any more jokes about printing, and decided to completely fix it. Setting up my home printer under Windows takes me the best part of 30 minutes every single time I need to do it. Under Linux its detected automatically, and works first time.
That group of people was Apple. They threw their weight behind the CUPS project in the early 2000s, hired the main developer, and continued to finance its development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
Hah, I bet you do love it! That is the use case I suspect is more common for Xeon - a server doing something like running multiple VMs.
I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released Windows XP. I've been running Linux ever since. Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years. When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed…
This depends entirely on the distribution you choose, not in any way on Linux. As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with…
I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it, nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely close to what it will eventually look like in the future.