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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#161

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

p2t2p wrote: post #154
jrockway wrote: post #27

I feel like a lot of the usability quirks that Linux has are trying to shoehorn a multi-user system into a single-user context. For example, there is so much work done (and even complaining in favor of doing that work in this article) to make it possible for multiple people to sit at the same computer. Nobody does that! Most people have more than one computer! Why do people spend their free time on that use case? Thi…

I dunno, I would like to be able to have a restricted account to give it to my daughter. Same for mobile device - she's too young to have her own but I would like to give her my iPad to run YT Kids for example and only that so some kind of multiuser-ness is needed but a different one. I'd say SE linux tries to achieve that but it is far from being usable.

In the 90s, when our desktops didn't have user accounts, we used third party software to lock people into restricted environments. It wasn't perfect, but neither are user accounts.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#162

Post by Animats »

He's right, of course. The Linux community has been in denial about this for years.

At the kernel level and close to it, the areas that consistently give trouble are video/GPU support and audio support. GPUs are hard, but there's no excuse for the mess in audio persisting for a decade. Video/GPU support is tough, but the current situation, where you have a choice of five different NVidia drivers for the same board, all with different bugs, is not good.

As the author points out, regression failures are a big problem. The sheer bloat of Linux has made it unmaintainable. And who wants that job? Big chunks of important code are abandonware.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#163

Post by philliphaydon »

darkpuma wrote: post #136
godelski wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK . I have NEVER had a plug and play solution for display from my laptop. I do expect to be able to plug in an HDMI cable and be able to give a presentation. And I expect to be able to do this with an nvidia card. But they have always failed me and I don't understand why this problem still exists (I would actually be interested if someone kn…

It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.

I was really hoping the Radeon 7 was going to be better than it was. Because I want to move to AMD to avoid the Nvidia driver issues on linux.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#164

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

sandov wrote: post #113
gerdesj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the base OS along with a very long list of apps with any distro. For example Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse etc - all will curate a lot of apps for me. If I want to go off piste I download the code and crack on. I have several compilers to choose from LLVM, gcc int al out of the box. tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations. You have to find the bloody things,…

>tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations. Except that they're hard to install for a novice user. >You have to find the bloody things, download them each time and hope you have found the right one and not a trojaned one. Each one needs its own update routine and will not be updated when the rest of the system is updated. None of those are problems for me, the actual problems are…

> You are not dependent on a single entity that supposedly knows what you need better than you.

This right here is what Linux Desktop doesn't seem to understand. The whole culture is ingrained with the attitude that they do, in fact, know what you need better than you.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#165

Post by godelski »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #142
darkpuma wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.

I was surprised when I saw the newest Vega firmwares show up in my /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with a kernel update only 6 days after the release of the last AMD GPU -- and on Manjaro, where updates are supposedly delayed a little. AMD touted "day one Linux support", which I don't know if they fulfilled, but they're certainly more committed to Linux than Nvidia. Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a pr…

> Nvidia's so dominant

And rightly so, like you said. That's why I can't take the other user's advice and just shell out money to AMD.

And while I do love Manjaro, I still have this problem. In fact I get no detection of my HDMI port. When I had Ubuntu I could (sometimes) get it to display if I restarted the computer with the HDMI plugged in.

I'm also not sure why the linux devs don't take this (or at least not that I've seen) as seriously. Linux is in such a good state now that it is easier to convert people. But this problem prevents A LOT of people from switching, and rightly so.

As for the NVIDIA sucks and doesn't play nice. There needs to be a better argument than that. Like why? There's so many people developing on linux with their cards. They are dominant. Most gpu programmers use cuda and a significant amount of ML researchers are using linux boxes. It doesn't make sense (to me) to just say f you to all those developers. Nvidia doesn't have a motive to push people to Windows.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#166

Post by jay_kyburz »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #142
darkpuma wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.

I was surprised when I saw the newest Vega firmwares show up in my /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with a kernel update only 6 days after the release of the last AMD GPU -- and on Manjaro, where updates are supposedly delayed a little. AMD touted "day one Linux support", which I don't know if they fulfilled, but they're certainly more committed to Linux than Nvidia. Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a pr…

>Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint).

I'm not sure about the price-per-performance. I just bought a new system with a Vega 64, and if you take into consideration I could use FreeSync instead of paying an extra $200 for GSync in a monitor, it works out better.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#167

Post by boomboomsubban »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #80
baroffoos wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found its super dependent on what hardware you get, Especially on laptops. I always pick hardware that works perfectly with linux and I am left with a very premium experience but when using linux on bad hardware like macbooks and broadcom wifi everything just doesn't work right.

I have a MacBook that is malfunctioning under MacOS (it's running at 60-80% CPU usage when idle, known problem, no fix available). I tried installing Linux on it, couldn't get it working at all. I have a Dell XPS15, specifically chosen because the XPS line is supposed to work well with Linux. Numerous problems, all related to drivers. But the main problem is that every time Windows updates it wipes out GRUB. I figure…

>But the main problem is that every time Windows updates it wipes out GRUB.

From my experience, this issue is from trying to use an MBR on Linux while Windows uses an EFI. I've never seen Windows mess with another EFI on the ESP. This issue is made worse by programs like unetbootin being terrible at using EFI.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#168

Post by misterdoubt »

magicalhippo wrote: post #35

I've been running KDE Neon on NUC for a while, and Kubuntu before that since KDE 3.5 days. But still it's not ready to become my primary desktop. The main issue for me is RDP-like (not VNC-like) remote desktop experience. Without that I'm not even gonna try. I mean the kind where I check my desktop before I leave for work, resume the session remotely from work (when compiling or whatever), and pick up when I get home…

xfreerdp Just Works for me.

Though I'll confess that I created the rdp file on a Windows machine, all I do is xfreerdp foo.rdp.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#169

Post by asark »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #12
wwarner wrote: post #3

All this is true, but not really fair. Count up the issue raised by the OP, and Nvidia really has the most power to stabilize the linux desktop. I read that gamers who want peak performance on Linux can get the proprietary Nvidia drivers running well. So it's possible, but it will never be without the friction of open source running along side signed proprietary binaries. What I would love to know is why linux isn't…

Linux seems equal in power management to Apple. On my ThinkPad X1 Carbon with the 57 W-h battery I get a good solid 8 hours of work and often the system consumes as little as 4W. My MacBook Pro with a 54.5 W-h battery runs for at most 4 hours. Now, it's true that I had to edit dozens of little configs to get the ThinkPad with Linux up to where a ThinkPad with Windows is right out of the box, such as enabling PCIe ASP…

The biggest power efficiency hack for macOS is to avoid running JS anywhere other than in Safari, and there as little as possible. Chrome and Firefox both eat battery like crazy. Firefox worse than Chrome, but either will take a couple hours off your battery life versus Safari. And running lots of heavy JS tabs or "apps" will do even worse.

Not that that necessarily has anything to do with the differences you're seeing in particular, just worth noting. Wrong browser, 20-30% worse battery life. Wrong site open in some tab in the background, 30-60% worse battery life. The overwhelming majority of what takes my Mac battery life from 8+ hours to 4 or less is Javascript or some heavy Java IDE or something. User software that gives a damn about how much power it uses makes a huge difference, well outside of just "don't run video games on battery power" and other obvious stuff.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#170

Post by sgc »

fatboy93 wrote: post #121
sgc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue of Windows update and other lock in trends is 80% of the reason I just (in the last month) switched to a Linux desktop. The other 20% is that the ui on Linux has finally progressed enough that I could consider it the least worst option. That is a first since I tried many times and wound up reverting to Windows. So far the only thing that really bugs me is that I have to apply fixes in the terminal. Like in…

Did you try notepadqq, late or kwrite? Notepadqq is notepad++!

It's not in the way I use it. I found the plugins for notepadqq seriously lacking. I haven't used kwrite in years, I guess I should give it another try.
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