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

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#381

Post by anthony_barker » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #43

melted wrote: post #40

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 :)

Thinkpad 750 ('95), dell something(until 2000) and then thinkpad x24, x31, t42, x200 tablet, x230 (not good), x220

Basically with various forms of linux - Mandrake, Redhat and then Ubuntu for the past decade. Rule of thumb is to pick thinkpads (or business class laptops) and pick Intel hardware where possible.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#382

Post by colin_mccabe » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 3:13 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #363

colin_mccabe wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop computer market is a pretty small part of the overall kernel developer market. Embedded systems is by far the biggest employer. There are just many more phones and other devices out there than PCs-- a trend that seems set to continue. Linux dominates embedded systems and the server market, so I would expect it to dominate the overall mindshare numbers as well. I would expect OS X to have the least number…

I wasn't sure OS X would be ahead of Linux, that's why I hedged my statement. Also, while the embedded Linux ecosystem is rather large, what fraction is kernel code that gets upstreamed/mainlined? As an outsider, my guess that it's a minority (some work with is on non-kernel code, and not all through embedded kernel code changes are/will be in the mainline kernel, so I would not count those as actual contributions).…

There are a large number of people who do kernel-level integration work-- configuring things, downloading drivers, setting things up, and otherwise dealing with the hardware. This kind of work isn't the most glamorous, but it definitely counts as "actual contribution" to the community. Integrators find bugs, make suggestions on mailing lists, and help develop products that make investing in Linux worthwhile for everyone involved. Most integrators that I've known like to submit patches every now and then, just for fun.

I would guess that there are more people whose primary job is integration than people whose primary job is kernel development. I don't really have any concrete numbers, though. On the driver development side, companies are starting to get smarter about getting their code upstream first-- look at NVidia and Intel's recent efforts in that area, for example.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#383

Post by gmb2k1 » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 1:01 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #217

zanny wrote: post #63

When you think Gnome, you probably think Fedora. Fedora and Gnome are buddy-buddy, and being basically the upstream of RHEL makes it the place to be if you are big on Gnome. KDE has Kubuntu, kind of, since its sponsored by Blue Systems, but there is a huge issue with how KDE is presented to users in that the Ubuntu release cycle has no correlation to the KDE one, and since Plasma 5 has started shipping in Kubuntu tha…

I found that using Eclipse on KDE lately was very problematic. Something about SWT requiring Gnome themes, that had been recently unilaterally converted to use CSS for styling, or something... Gah! It took lots of fiddling to be able to open dialogs on Eclipse without crashing the whole application, and even after all that fiddling it never worked right. Had to switch to Gnome to get it to work right, on linux, but h…

Add the following to your eclipse.ini:

--launcher.GTK_version 2

Alternatively set the environment variable SWT_GTK3 to zero to launch eclipse:

export SWT_GTK3=0; /path_to_your_eclipse/eclipse

As a side benefit: GTK2 with a compact theme will also make a much better use of your screen real estate. Especially important, if you want to work on laptop with a small screen diagonal. GTK3 as it comes out of the box is just ridiculous in this regard. Eclipse is completely unusable with GTK3 on my 1200x800 12" machine because of that.

Re: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

#384

Post by hollerith » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

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.

>I think with GNOME you only get integer scale factors: way too tiny or way too big on most HiDPI screens.

OS X has the same property (of giving only integral scale factors).