111–120 of 384 posts
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. :-(
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
This "Android is not Linux" meme is pretty silly. "Android contains the only Linux component - the kernel" can also describe any distribution/OS using Linux.
Technically correct. But no Linux distro has so radically altered the userland as Android: One runtime and one UI stack for all apps. That might not be the only way to make Linux into a widely used consumer OS, but it is, by several orders of magnitude, the most successful approach so far.
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/best-linux-distro-this-year.html
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html
I say this as someone who booted and ran some software on desktop fedora machine from 3 years ago this year (long story, but that machine has working custom software, not rewriting this year...).
Despite all the complaints, Desktop linux still remarkably better than it was just 3 years ago. That machine was almost unusable. Setting up the network on that machine was a couple hour ordeal. All the little fiddly parts that kinda work most of the time don't make for a great desktop experience. The server experience is exceptional however (I spent enough time on Solaris and HPUX to not miss those two at all)
It's not like this guy is biased. He's just thorough and I appreciate that. See more: http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/best-linux-distro-this-year.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-iphones-and-ipads-suck.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-android-sucks.html
Just skimming, I found this bit on-point and amusing:
> It's worth noting that the most vocal participants of the Open Source community are extremely bitchy and overly idealistic people peremptorily requiring everything to be open source and free or it has no right to exist at all in Linux.
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…
The Linux kernel is about 20MSLOC. The Windows kernel is about 50MSLOC. IIRC, OS X used to be ~80KSLOC.
Problems with debugging are endemic to any monolithic kernel. Neither Windows nor OS X is easier to debug technologically, but Microsoft and Apple both have many employees and lots of money invested compared to Linux.
(Also, Apple solved the problem by making their OS specific to their computers, so they had the whole thing under their control.)
In the past (5 or more years ago) there have been problems, and I had to tweak things a lot, compile projects myself, etc. With every release I had to do less of that, and the past years or two everything just works.
Seems the article is outdated.
Video: Just works. No tearing at all, automatically uses H/W decoding. External monitors just work. Resolution is automatically adjusted.
3D/GL: just works. Both Intel and NVIDIA (use Intel most of the time and simply start games with "optirun") I do not play the latest games. For that I use a Playstation/XBox.
Sound: just works. Local speaker, bluetooth external speakers, all just works.
GUI: Despite X11 being old it works remarkably well. I use GL compositions for desktop effects. KDE works flawlessly.
Printing: Just works. When I got a new network printer KDE found it, asked me whether I wanted to use it, then downloaded the driver and asked to print a test page. That's it.
And on top of this Linux enables me to always know what's going on when needed. I can drop back to a shell at any time and everything is accessible that way.
I also have a MacBook Pro from work. I have _way_ more problems with that one. Random hangs with the (admittedly pretty) spinning color wheel. It did not recognize my network printer. I had to tell it the IP address, find a driver myself, install that, and then play around for a bit until it finally worked.
Now I do a fair bit of software engineering on my machines, and so I might not notice the non-obvious things I do anymore. I also have the full development chain easily at my fingertips completely for free.
And I might very well be biased, since Linux is what I am used to.
Edit: Spelling
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 testame…
Your single laptop datapoint sure makes this article invalid :)