Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#31

Post by zanny » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

bkor wrote: post #10

The website is hard to read on mobile because it is wider than my screen. Bit unfortunate. Regarding VA-API: Since gstreamer-vaapi 0.7.0, Totem finally works with VA-API. Before only MPV worked. IMO if you used mplayer you better just switch to mpv. It still doesn't work perfectly in VLC, though AFAIK VA-API should be built in. In my experience filing bugs was enough to get improvements. Once it works well enough dis…

Up until fairly recently I had a number of issues with VLC and vaapi / vdpau, but now it all seems to work well. I even have working accelerated video in Chromium by removing the GPU blacklist and it works fine. The only things missing now on the video front for Linux is good encoder support, but I can get that right now with ffmpeg - its just missing in a lot of capture software.

Though we really should all converge to openmax at some point. Like, all encode / decode with openmax in the future. It just makes bloody sense.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#32

Post by dman » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

evook wrote: post #27

wvenable wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not uncommon to have to wait minutes for things to settle down after booting and logging in This is no longer my experience with Windows on an SSD. I'm always a bit shocked when I reboot and I'm back at my desktop in under 30 seconds. On a machine without an SSD, I'm annoyed at how slow everything is -- not just booting.

That's actually the reason windows is and will stay my main desktop system. Former Windows 7, now an "unfucked" Windows 10 Enterprise. It's just smoother than OSX or Linux Desktop and I always test some linux distros if I get new Hardware. Last time in novembre I upgrade to i7-6700k, Titan X, Samsung 950Pro 1TB. Of course it's necessary to have always at least one linux based server vm running I use putty to connect…

I would settle for a high resolution tty that works without much fiddling.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#33

Post by kuschku » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:30 PM UTC

#25 is wrong:

> There are no antiviruses or similar software for Linux. Say, you want to install new software which is not included by your distro - currently there's no way to check if it's malicious or not.

http://www.eset.com/int/home/products/antivirus-linux/

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#34

Post by vetinari » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:30 PM UTC

lvs wrote: post #13

jjuhl wrote: post #6

To me this reads as "I can't use hardware xyz on linux". Well, that's no surprise. There's "wxy" hardware that you can't use with Windows or OS X as well. Today Linux supports the same amount (or more) hardware that Windows does. Hardware support is not a reason to use or not use Linux. The software ecosystem is much more important - not to mention the freedom aspect...

No, there's no consumer-level desktop hardware you can't use on either Windows or OS X or both. That's false. Hardware support is indeed a reason not to use Linux, but the question is who needs to pick up the slack. With other operating systems, manufacturers put (more or less) effort into writing device drivers that are functional. With Linux, they really do not. It's a large and moving target, and the market value…

> No, there's no consumer-level desktop hardware you can't use on either Windows or OS X or both. That's false.

Oh, I can show you multitude of printers, scanners, tv tuners that do not work with Windows or OSX. Or they work with exactly one Windows version and that's it.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#35

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

My usage patterns is close to "Chromebook + Android Studio" The rest is occasional use of Eclipse, Libre Office, a smattering of command line utilities, mainly for internet information (e.g. dig). I'm not a gamer. So Windows holds no attraction, and I dislike the effort needed to secure it against Microsoft and evildoers getting at my critical data. I bought a dead MBP on a lark and will get it fixed to see if I like MacOS X better. But despite ubuntu developing rather slowly, I'm not so discontented as to leave.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#36

Post by condescendence » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #28

condescendence wrote: post #20

I don't get articles like these. First of all this website is worse than any OS environment I've ever used. So right from that standpoint I sorta gulped a bit before reading on. Graphics driver issues in linux are nothing new, Nvidia a few years back started officially porting drivers to linux but that doesn't solve all the problems. There's also projects like Nouveau; so if you're complaining about linux desktop fro…

It's a single location summary of things that still have to be done / are lacking in the project. It's thus useful for contributors to see what needs work, since it's easy to get tunnel vision when working on a project. Don't you have such yearly reviews on your long-running projects?

Contributors of distributions already have their goals and and sights set. Everyone knows these issues of linux, they've been ongoing for years.

This list has been compiled many times, that's why I'm so harsh to it. It's literally as if someone just copied ans pasted.

This is a direct copy from wikipedia:

__________________________________________

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux

Critics of Linux on the desktop have frequently argued that a lack of top-selling video games on the platform holds adoption back. As of September 2015, the Steam gaming service has 1,500 games available on Linux, compared to 2,323 games for Mac and 6,500 Windows games.[14][15][16]

As a desktop operating system, Linux has been criticized on a number of fronts, including:

A confusing number of choices of distributions, and desktop environments. Audio handling, particularly before PulseAudio became stable and widely supported. Poor open source support for some hardware, in particular drivers for 3D graphics chips, where manufacturers were unwilling to provide full specifications.[17] As a result, many video drivers have both open and closed source versions. Lack of widely used commercial applications (such as Adobe Photoshop[18] and Microsoft Word).[19][20] Lack of standardization regarding GUI API.[19]

_________________________________________

Notice the things he complained about, and the things that have been edited in there for years are the exact same.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#37

Post by jupiter90000 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

crgabrieljr wrote: post #8

Tried double-tapping in the article text to get it to reflow, and got one of those bogus popups claiming my phone is infected with a virus. Thanks for trying to make my new year interesting. :-(

This happens to me as soon as I enter the website on my mobile. Get forwarded to one of those websites. Although I'm not sure why I want to read yet another person complain about Linux anyway, when I find it is excellent for certain purposes.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#38

Post by zanny » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

jjuhl wrote: post #6

To me this reads as "I can't use hardware xyz on linux". Well, that's no surprise. There's "wxy" hardware that you can't use with Windows or OS X as well. Today Linux supports the same amount (or more) hardware that Windows does. Hardware support is not a reason to use or not use Linux. The software ecosystem is much more important - not to mention the freedom aspect...

I often see people proposing others install Linux without actually considering hardware, and that easily and quickly loses potential adopters.

No, Linux does not support every piece of computer hardware ever made. You cannot blame Linux for that, if in the case of - ex - Broadcom, the company does not want to provide any documentation, support, drivers, or anything whatsoever, there is nothing you can practically expect this community to do about it. It is insane to think that if a hardware vendor won't support their own products its my job by telling you you should use Linux to then reverse engineer drivers for everything, and somehow magically break the signed firmware bullshit on a lot of modern hardware. In the same way your 1998 Lexmark printer probably doesn't work at all with Windows 8+, won't get support in Linux if it isn't already there.

But I also blame the advocates who sell false promises about supreme compatibility - its an operating system. It supports a lot of hardware. A lot of companies support it. That does not mean all companies support it, or that all computers can work with it. But there is a difference between not supporting any hardware in a product class (ex: I have great experience with Epson xp-XXX printers and always buy them for Linux clients because they work out of the box with gutenprint in scan, print, and ink levels on Cups and do rotation / double sided properly no problem / I use Atheros ar9462 Wifi cards everywhere because they have great bluetooth + wifi that are stable as hell out of the box without configuration) and supporting enough to be functional, and Linux is absolutely functional.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#39

Post by thescriptkiddie » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #19

edtechdev wrote: post #9

I've been using Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS since 2006, and I can't disagree with many of the annoyances. Especially with regards to graphics drivers and the switch to the Unity desktop. I tried Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop and it is nicer, but couldn't commit to it I guess. But everytime I use Windows and Macs again, I get even more annoyed. Mainly with how slow things are. Even on a new Windows 10 desktop…

> it's not uncommon to have to wait minutes for things to settle down after booting and logging in This is no longer my experience with Windows on an SSD. I'm always a bit shocked when I reboot and I'm back at my desktop in under 30 seconds. On a machine without an SSD, I'm annoyed at how slow everything is -- not just booting.

I've got a windows 10 machine with a pretty fast NVMe SSD. It takes 10 seconds to get to the login screen, and another three minutes to load up all of the services that are set to run on login. I'm convinced that the NTFS driver must be a nightmare of blocking I/O.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#40

Post by melted » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

I don't know about this article. I bough a 3rd gen Thinkpad Carbon earlier this year and Ubuntu runs better than Windows 10 on it. Not a single crash. The only thing that doesn't work out of the box is the fingerprint reader. Not that it doesn't have some rough edges, but this is enormous progress compared to just a few years ago, and the fact that it runs better than the OS _the laptop was designed for_ is a testament to that.