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

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#91

Post by audeyisaacs » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #61

I don't understand - I never see a mention of the biggest annoyance to developers on linux : consistent copy paste. It is a cognitive exercise to copy from the terminal or paste to the browser...or (the horror) copy from the terminal and paste on vim. It does not help that this works beautifully on the Mac. Is this not an annoyance to anyone else...and more importantly, considering all distros are now using libinput,…

Highlight to copy, middle-click to paste. Works every time for me.

Obviously, if you want to paste into vim you have to be in insert mode.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#92

Post by jkbyc » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #72

Animats wrote: post #62

He's right. Many of the driver problems come from the fact that Linux finally worked on the desktop about the time desktop machines were replaced by laptops. Desktops with slots tended to have relatively well-defined hardware, and plugging in third party hardware was normal. This is much less true for laptops. OS development for laptops requires that laptop. It needs a Q/A organization which has one of everything you…

Seems like a good way to cope with this, from a market standpoint, would be for Linux development to focus on specific laptop. If say, Dell, were to pay Ubuntu to test and verify for some of their specific laptops and then Ubuntu subsequently was able to list "100% Certified" laptops for purchase it could create an opening. Same thing with developing to put it on Apple laptops with that very specific hardware set, et…

Isn't this already happening? http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#93

Post by pcwalton » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

> X.org 2D acceleration technologies and APIs aren't as mature and fast as Direct2D and DirectWrite in Windows.

This complaint is confused. X is the wrong place for that stuff (the failure of XRender to live up to expectations being a testament to this). The windowing server should be multiplexing GPU buffers and that's it.

Direct2D and DirectWrite are user mode, client side libraries on Windows. (Maybe the author has them confused with the legacy GDI, which lives in the kernel?)

What this should say is that Skia-GL/Ganesh and Cairo-GL, which are the open source Direct2D competitors, are not at performance parity with Direct2D. I've heard this in the past, though I don't know how accurate it is anymore. Thanks to the work of Google, which depends on Skia-GL for Chrome and Android, it's made rapid progress lately. In fact, in my experience, Skia-GL is basically at performance parity with CG::OGL (i.e. the Mac/iOS 2D rendering backend)—so if the Mac is your benchmark, Linux has caught up there, if you use the latest Skia and configure it properly. Very few Linux desktop apps use Skia-GL in practice, though, which is a separate, and unfortunate, issue.

(Finally, I should mention that Direct2D and its competitors constitute a really low bar if you compare to the actual state of the art in GPU vector graphics, which is stuff like Scaleform.)

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#94

Post by hollerith » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

geggam wrote: post #17

eropple wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW -- I have my own complaints about OS X (a lot of them), but I can't remember the last time I got beachballed, certainly not something like typing a URL.

The entry level mac mini is terrible and beach balls surfing. I am surprised they sell it. ( cant upgrade the memory either )

Sounds like your hard drive is faulty: I recommend you hold down the D key or the Command and D keys while the Mac mini is booting to run the Apple Hardware Test. (One can replace the hard drive on that mini.)

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#95

Post by pera » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #84

I stopped using Linux as my primary desktop OS around 2012. Until then I was an Arch user with my own desktop environment built on StumpWM and a hodge-podge of hand-selected tools. There was no Gnome or KDE in my setup. I liked it quite a bit. I used Ubuntu on my laptops since I wanted to spend less time administering drivers and arcane configuration formats. This is a good list. I just got tired of the configuration…

from StumpWM to OSX? ouch

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#96

Post by icebraining » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #83

aerique wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, this was an annoyance until I installed a clipboard manager (parcellite in my case) which automatically syncs the different clipboards.

But how do you paste? I mean I have all sort of keymaps to enable paste in vim using CUA (shift-insert), but try explaining that to a first time user. Its the small things that OSX does right.

Why would you need keymaps? As far as I know, the terminal emulator (urxvt in my case) takes care of pasting the text into Vim. I never had to configure anything to use shift-insert or the wheel button to paste.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#97

Post by icebraining » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

audeyisaacs wrote: post #91

sandGorgon wrote: post #61

I don't understand - I never see a mention of the biggest annoyance to developers on linux : consistent copy paste. It is a cognitive exercise to copy from the terminal or paste to the browser...or (the horror) copy from the terminal and paste on vim. It does not help that this works beautifully on the Mac. Is this not an annoyance to anyone else...and more importantly, considering all distros are now using libinput,…

Highlight to copy, middle-click to paste. Works every time for me. Obviously, if you want to paste into vim you have to be in insert mode.

Pretty much, never had a problem with it.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#98

Post by aeturnum » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

xioxox wrote: post #21

lvs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really? There's plenty of old hardware which no longer works in recent Windows versions. It's not in a manufacture's interest to update a driver to recent OS versions. In Linux drivers usually remain for a long time.

Sure, there's lots of old hardware that the manufacturer no longer supports. That, to me, seems like a very different problem, as the older hardware /was/ supported by an older version of windows. It's true that this traps you in an un-patched OS, but (as pointed out many other times in this thread) patching Linux components also risks creating hardware incompatibilities.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#99

Post by wvenable » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #39

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.

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.

As others have pointed out, that's not normal. I have a huge number of services, not only Windows development related services but also MySQL and multiple instances of Apache and it literally has no noticeable impact.

It might be worth turning off any applications that launch on login that you don't need. This now easily accessible from the task manager. It even tells you how much startup impact each app has so you can find out which ones might be causing you issues.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#100

Post by PeCaN » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #67

Animats wrote: post #62

He's right. Many of the driver problems come from the fact that Linux finally worked on the desktop about the time desktop machines were replaced by laptops. Desktops with slots tended to have relatively well-defined hardware, and plugging in third party hardware was normal. This is much less true for laptops. OS development for laptops requires that laptop. It needs a Q/A organization which has one of everything you…

Is Tanenbaum going to have the last laugh?

Marginally off-topic, but Minix 3.3 runs the (almost) complete NetBSD userland now. To use X11 you have to compile the development branch, however.

It's a real, POSIX-compliant, reliable microkernel that can run useful things now.