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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#281

Post by bluedino »

darkpuma wrote: post #130
ilovecaching wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone What makes this such a victory? The fact that Android uses a Linux kernel is totally meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Android users. The bootloaders on their phones are almost always locked down and even if that weren't the case, if their kernels were swapped out with something BSD derived how many people would actually notice? What is the object…

People saying "Linux won" because of Android would never say "Java won" which is every bit as true.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#282

Post by deafcalculus »

ddebernardy wrote: post #262
deafcalculus wrote: post #192

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.

PS4 is not really comparable. (Nor is macOS, for that matter.) It's one thing to get some *nix flavor to work on standardized hardware. It's another to make it work on the wide variety of computing devices where you could install Windows.

True, but hardware compatibility isn't the only thing wrong with Linux desktop. There's a lot of broken stuff on the software side too (ex: X windows as the article points out). In fact, hardware compatibility hasn't been that much of an issue on desktops in recent times. We have a couple hundred Linux desktops (not laptops) at my university, and what I find is that if you're using last-gen Intel CPU with iGPU on a desktop with Ethernet, hardware compat isn't much of an issue at all.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#283

Post by jim-jim-jim »

sametmax wrote: post #274
rbanffy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Linux community has been in denial about this for years. That's not right. We all know support for some hardware is spotty and we all have learned to avoid that. My laptops tend to use Intel GPUs, for instance, because I want to work on them, not fix them. I'm eyeing that new Lenovo thingie with an epaper keyboard, but I know it'll run Windows and probably never be upgraded because nobody will write the drivers…

> Nope. It's still moving forward and it's still quite reliable. All my workloads run on it (except my pets that run on FreeBSD and OpenIndiana because I get a kick out of managing different OSs). That's the denial there. I'm a Linux guy. I post this from a linux distrib. But realistically, we do have a huge amount of technical debt, and less and less incentive to work on them. Case in point: every time we touch some…

If complexity's got you down, you might have better luck with OpenBSD. Coming from Linux, you'll be amazed by how simple it can be and how much of it just works.

Though non-intel graphics are still shit on it afaik.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#284

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ams6110 wrote: post #102
hartator wrote: post #21

The only thing about Linux I never really like is the package system. Like if you want to install a new software, you usually don’t get .exe or .dmg. If you are lucky, the developer or some fans took the time to package it. Then you can do ‘apt-get’ ‘yum’ or ‘pacman’. However, packages got stalled and sometimes don’t match the original author intent. You can also build from sources, but it takes time and you have to…

Here is what makes Linux work well for me: only run LTS versions. Never build your own kernel. Never install anything that isn't in the package manager.

IS good soviet citizen, never uses software not approved by party.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#285

Post by AsyncAwait »

breakingcups wrote: post #279
AsyncAwait wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> across a very wide cross section of available hardware This is a sticking point I just cannot get behind. When you're purchasing a computer running Windows, it is optimized for Windows. When you're purchasing a Mac, it is optimized to run macOS. So it should logically follow that if you want hardware optimized to run Linux, you should purchase that specifically. Expecting Linux to work flawlessly on any random junk…

What? When I'm purchasing a computer, any computer, I know with (near) 100% certainty it will run Windows flawlessly. I definitely expect Windows to run on any random junk.

> What? When I'm purchasing a computer, any computer, I know with (near) 100% certainty it will run Windows flawlessly. I definitely expect Windows to run on any random junk.

So do you expect Windows to run flawlessly on a Chromebook? I'd guess not. When you're purchasing random hardware in a store it most likely comes per-installed with Windows and has been made for and tuned for Windows.

It's just that Windows has such marketshare that the vast majority of computers are per-installed with Windows and have drivers primarily for Windows.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#286

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Meing4im wrote: post #250
sprash wrote: post #241

Wayland was supposed to be the rescue from the arcane outdated X11 and it is severely disappointing. The reason is that it does not offer enough features. It should have font rendering, it should have window decorations by default it should have native UI widgets and much more. None of it is offered and the responsibility is pushed away to others like Gnome, KDE and believe it or not, X11. IMHO the monolithic kitchen…

I would argue that wayland is still in beta. They are still designing extensions to reimplement X11 desktop features. But with wlroots things have picked up pace.

Beta for over a decade. That's Google levels of beta. When can we expect a real wayland release then? 2035? When it will still be 10 years behind DWM?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#287

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jon-wood wrote: post #254
rawmodz wrote: post #253

Linux "sucks". True. For last two weeks I was trying to install a distro, that will work wirh my Broadcom internet adapter, but no success. Also BT did not work well. Of course I could get Wifi to work after a heavy and bloody battle, and only at 2.4 Ghz, but then BT stopped working. The point is, that all those are working fine under Windows 10. No hassle. My question is, why there is no Linux distro, that can work…

Broadcom chipsets are notorious under Linux, because its had to be reverse engineered without support from Broadcom. The reason it works out of the box on Windows 10 is because the drivers are fully supported, with Broadcom engineers providing a full implementation of everything - if they did the same for Linux then it would work perfectly there as well.

Linux isn't blameless for this problem, because they religiously enforce that drivers must be open source.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#288

Post by fooblat »

I have been a daily linux desktop user since 1997 and I will freely admit that part of the enjoyment for me was getting everything working and setting up my perfect desktop environment.

These days, as many others have pointed out, choose the right hardware and everything just works.

At my company, we are currently in the middle of upgrading aging Windows 10 desktops in the Customer Service department to Ubuntu LTS. So far the feedback is universally positive from the CS agents. Ubuntu runs faster on the existing hardware and that's about all they notice. Chrome is still chrome and that's what they use for all the CS apps, including voip calling.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#289

Post by temporary_ »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #273
frankling_ wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mana…

The freedom to not have to jump through ridiculous hoops like compiling from source just to use an application the distro didn't deem worthy of inclusion in their repo.

So .exe files it is? You can do that on Linux as well, by the way, it's just a horribly insecure way to distribute software.
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