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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

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Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#281

Post by zobzu »

bla bla bla.. bunch of lines and lists all of which are refutable easily. sure linux is far from perfect (and far from bad, too) and thus there are a lot of potential valid criticism, none of which this article mention.

Therefore, the author just spent time typing down a load of BS/FUD probably intended for people who don't seriously run Linux on the desktop nowadays. wow:

So many items are misleading. Some of the links even lead to resolved bugs, did the author click them? Or the "no alternative to SMB". well duh... linux users... use SMB. simple as that.

Or another funny point - I'd like to see the author play with a windows laptop using optimus (its a POS), or seriously gaming on macosx with all AAA titles (oh, they dont exist, too bad, yet people still love it as desktop...)

Then there's list that "affect every linux user".. none of them affect me, I'm such a special snowflake! Not even one. Not even the video acceleration one that seem to be his "biggest point". Firefox uses gstreamer with hw acceleration support and h264 on youtube. In fact, my laptop uses much less power playing youtube videos on linux that on windows (turns out I do have a watt meter and I did use it when I got the laptop).

So yeah.. maybe the author should inform himself a bit before typing random things.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#282

Post by zobzu »

ris wrote: post #134

As a full-time "linux desktop" (whatever that is) user, all of these problems pain me. But of course the truth is that no other system "just works" either, so it's not as though it's unique. (We have an office full of Macintoshes which cause people endless trouble, so don't go there...) I do feel that the "linux desktop" has regressed slightly in the last few years however. My transition from a debian wheezy to debia…

Use Plasma 5 (which is "KDE5" if you will). KDE4 is not even supported anymore on some distros.

It fixes most remaining annoyances of KDE4 and has been really stable for me. Even kmail 5.5 is a huge step forward compared to the buggy kmail 4.x

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#283

Post by zobzu »

gkop wrote: post #241
zurn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a minority of the problems in the list are laptop-specific. The hybrid graphics mess is an unfortunate one, though most people are well served by laptops with integrated-only video. People who want to play 3D games on laptops get the short stick.

> though most people are well served by laptops with integrated-only video You're right and it's amazing. I use Linux exclusively on my laptops and had stuck with dedicated GPUs running Nvidia binary drivers since 2009. But this summer I bit the bullet and got a new Broadwell laptop, and I honestly do not miss a single thing about the Nvidia graphics. My Intel 5500 can push well over 10 million pixels across three di…

intel drivers are awesome (and made by intel, mind you)

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#284

Post by zobzu »

veddox wrote: post #235
Mikeb85 wrote: post #153

Linux users often take the idea of 'self-examination' way too far and it turns into 'self-disparagement'. The fact is, if you vet your hardware and use a major distro (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora) you'll wind up with a perfectly functioning Linux desktop or laptop. You think about it, OSX only runs on a few laptops. Linux runs perfectly on more laptops than exist for OSX. Windows run on many laptops, more often than not…

I don't think this is about self-disparagement, but about holding ourselves to a high standard. I love Linux, and have been using it without major problems for some time now (mainly Ubuntu-based distros). Especially if you are into programming, I'd say it beats MS hands down. However, I do acknowledge that there are still many problems that bar Linux from being an operating system "for the masses" (i.e. all those peo…

its nice to hold oneself to a high standard, but this is not what the article is about. most issues cited are non-issues/have been fixed over the past year. seems just like a random rant.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#285

Post by zobzu »

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…

we're soon in 2016, 4 years later. you might want to try again (with arch in particular).

I've zero issue with Plasma 5. I plug my laptop into the projector and it just works ;-) I used to have that problem as well, like everyone else. But honestly its been a thing of the past since 2 years or so.

Also, using Plasma ensure I don't have to fiddle with configuration. It's not as leet as stumpwm or many others, but its certainly more customizable and more easily than OSX - while still working out of the box, just like OSX.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#286

Post by zobzu »

spilk wrote: post #243

The HiDPI point is pretty critical - many higher end laptops these days have HiDPI screens, and HiDPI desktop monitors are getting affordable. I think with GNOME you only get integer scale factors: way too tiny or way too big on most HiDPI screens.

No such problem with plasma/kde. I use it on a 1080p 13' screen and a 4k 13' screen. its in fact much better than windows 10 in that area...

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#287

Post by xorblurb »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #153

Linux users often take the idea of 'self-examination' way too far and it turns into 'self-disparagement'. The fact is, if you vet your hardware and use a major distro (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora) you'll wind up with a perfectly functioning Linux desktop or laptop. You think about it, OSX only runs on a few laptops. Linux runs perfectly on more laptops than exist for OSX. Windows run on many laptops, more often than not…

Exactly. A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the point? Today, if you want to game just use Windows, if you want a fine Linux laptop get one with something like an Haswell with integrated graphics (or maybe Broadwell, still wait a little for Skylakes)

And anyway if you look at what the "competition" sells while being this much critical, you can probably write something at least as long. Even last MS flagship devices running last Windows 10 versions are full of bugs now -- and likewise for major PC vendors like Dell -- so GNU/Linux distributions might as well become attractive just because Windows devices are of terrible quality today :p

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#288

Post by zobzu »

shmerl wrote: post #145

> Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent. That's interesting, I didn't know that. Is that going to be a huge mess after Wayland transition (which is likely to ha…

its not really true. for ex i use Xorg dpi settings and xorg provided font rendering and driven antialiasing.

gui toolkits can override this (and usually propose to), specially for older versions of Xorg that did not support native dpi scaling, antialising, etc.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#289

Post by tadfisher »

shmerl wrote: post #145

> Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent. That's interesting, I didn't know that. Is that going to be a huge mess after Wayland transition (which is likely to ha…

In both Windows and OSX there are multiple choices for included font rendering libraries, so I'm not sure what the author is on about. There is no "system-level" font renderer on any of the three major OSes, and frankly such a thing doesn't make sense from an engineering standpoint.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#290

Post by xorblurb »

lvs wrote: post #138
xioxox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether there's continuing support for a product is a very different issue. At some point, all consumer hardware was functional in a version of Windows or OS X, since it was released precisely with support for one or both of those OSs. Yes, updates break things, but that is a very different problem than the one facing Linux. The problem facing Linux is that manufacturers are not supporting (or not seeking with much v…

It is a very different issue but can be very much in favor of GNU/Linux distribution when they work on a given piece of hardware: they are far more likely to be able to get version N+1 of said distribution than Windows N+1. Now Windows 10 might bring the best of both worlds for the Windows world, but for now it does not work well that much.
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