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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#191

Post by Animats »

ilovecaching wrote: post #107
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.

Yep. Exactly this. If you get a laptop that a GNOME developer uses, chances are you’ll run into maybe two issues a year. But try to get GNOME to run on two 4K displays and an RTX. But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. The DE has gotten much better transitively from all the work that’s…

Desktop is a dying market.

Actually, tablets are a dying market.[1] Laptops are a declining market. Fewer desktops are being sold, but they're lasting longer because there's no reason to replace them.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#192

Post by deafcalculus »

PS4 is basically a modified Free BSD. So, "fixing" Linux desktop is probably doable, but extremely difficult to profitably do. Valve seemed interested when Windows introduced the App store and seemed to be going App store / Play store way, but now that Microsoft is losing interest in Windows, they don't have as much incentive to pursue Linux.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#193

Post by sp0rk »

smlacy wrote: post #9

How about a list of all the things that really work great? I've been using Linux on the desktop for nearly 20 years and I'll have to say it's fantastic, despite the occasional headache, which seems to be at a far less frequency than other major desktop operating systems.

Who would want to read a list of things that are already working well, except maybe somebody already considering switching to Linux?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#194

Post by peller »

pjmlp wrote: post #190
peller wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your expansion upon it :) I definitely do agree that "onboarding" could be improved. How I dunno. To me at least, it seems like I hear a lot of success stories from the tails of the spectrum - power users and developers on one side / the complete opposite on the other. And then for everybody in the middle, there's no other way to put it than it's almost a shit show: On the software side there a million and a h…

Still waiting for that improved AMD experience to give me back the hardware video acceleration on my Brazos APU.

Aye that sucks. Regressions are the worst, knowing it used to work. I had to look up that platform, knew it was getting old... and primarily for netbooks... I don't think I'd hold my breath for it getting fixed by AMD at least :(

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#195

Post by nitrogen »

zaphirplane wrote: post #179
Animats wrote: post #162

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, a…

The nature of open source development is there are duplicates. The distribution usually takes chooses from the alternatives the better option and makes it the default. In the GPU driver issue you are raising what is the problem. Fedora comes with nouveau out of the box and you can install an alternative very easily. You may have a gripe but proliferation of alternatives is an unusual gripe, there are multiple browser…

I've been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake was a thing; if there's one thing I'm tired of it's having the "choice" of five broken implementations of an app rather than just one that works (the reverse is also annoying, when one broken monolith crowds out five working predecessors).

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#196

Post by robocat »

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…

I have an XPS15 (9570 i9 with Ubuntu 18.04.01) and I have hardly run into issues and certainly not serious ones.

I am swearing much less now I don't use Windows so much (even though Windows was in a VM).

If your problem is dual-booting Windows, then why would you dual boot? For games, get a gamer PC. For work, use a VM.

It seems a little harsh to blame Linux for Windows killing your boot ;-)

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#197

Post by cageface »

pjmlp wrote: post #177
ilovecaching wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this stage, I’d say I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t doubt that Google has the capacity, but replacing a kernel that works is fraught with peril, and it could very well be that Fuschia remains yet another Google research project.

Then check Android repo, they are actively adding Fuchsia support.

What does it mean to add Fuschia support to the Android repo?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#198

Post by frankling_ »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #116
maxerickson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not necessarily walls in the package manager model, in most cases it's possible to install binaries outside of the package manager. It's just less convenient.

The same is true of the other walled gardens.

I fail to see how the package management in a Linux distribution could be considered a walled garden. Commonly it's cited as the exact opposite of that (see the table here: [1]). What type of freedom are you missing in something like Debian, where you can edit and recompile the core components of your system at a whim, the system even supporting you through source packages, and where anything outside the package management is just a "git clone" and a compilation away? I really don't know what more anyone could ask for. Certainly we don't want to go back to the 90s way of downloading unsigned .exe files from some random guy's web site and then going hunting for matching DLLs?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_platform

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#199

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #162

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, a…

[deleted]

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#200

Post by pjmlp »

peller wrote: post #194
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for that improved AMD experience to give me back the hardware video acceleration on my Brazos APU.

Aye that sucks. Regressions are the worst, knowing it used to work. I had to look up that platform, knew it was getting old... and primarily for netbooks... I don't think I'd hold my breath for it getting fixed by AMD at least :(

Which means that installing Windows 10 with the DirectX 11 drivers from Asus, is the only way to get it back, ergo "Linux Problems on the Desktop".
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