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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#361
post #104
post #16

> "most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10" Uhm, no. Not really. With hacks by the user (or OS) maybe, but if hacks are allowed then most of that list can be deleted.

Yes, really. Most games do not however. I don't have programs though for testing. Edit: http://www.ecsis.net/pub/netuser/ftp.html tried Rftp, worked with Windows 10. At least 22 years of compatibility.

Testing a single .exe as simple as Calculator doesn't show much. How about running StarOffice 4.0?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#362
post #16

> "most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10" Uhm, no. Not really. With hacks by the user (or OS) maybe, but if hacks are allowed then most of that list can be deleted.

The main issue you'll face on trying to run old 32bit Windows 95 applications on modern 64bit Windows 10 is that the installers often are 16bit and 64bit Windows do not support 16bit applications (which was actually technically possible, at least for protected mode 16bit applications which is the majority of them, as shown by Wine being able to run almost all 16bit programs under 64bit Linux). Once you go past that h…

Have you tried something like StarOffice 4.0?

Hacking around in the installer is using hacks.. which was my point.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#363
post #361
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, really. Most games do not however. I don't have programs though for testing. Edit: http://www.ecsis.net/pub/netuser/ftp.html tried Rftp, worked with Windows 10. At least 22 years of compatibility.

Testing a single .exe as simple as Calculator doesn't show much. How about running StarOffice 4.0?

It shows compatibility, which you doubted in the previous post ("no, not really"). Doesn't matter how simple you deem the program.

Where can I download it?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these have ever happened to me, and I started with slackware. (Maybe once around y2k a nic wasn’t supported but after waiting six months it was.)

Corrupted GRUB happened to me 7 times, so maybe we shouldn't throw around anecdotes?

Sounds like there’s more to the story.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#365

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.

>Never install anything that isn't in the package manager.

If I wanted to not get any work done I would be using Windows instead.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need the last version of Wireshark, it’s getting complicated. And when you have a setup with Wireshark that works why update it? I am dubious that Wireshark can be an attack vector so security updates won’t be useful. Installing last versions is very straight forward when you are on Osx or Windows. You just go to the website and download it. Plus you get the original binaries not a doctored version to fit what…

Going to dozens or even hundreds of different websites to download the latest versions of software and then manually installing them all isn’t fast at all. c.f. apt-get upgrade or similar, which takes a few seconds.

>c.f. apt-get upgrade or similar, which takes a few seconds.

Except when the package isn't included, or it isn't the version you needed, because then you have to spend 40 minutes trying to install all the dependencies and building the package from source, instead of the 3 minutes it would have taken to install an .exe on Windows.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows doesn't have that kind of unique standard either. Both KDE and GNOME have user interface guidelines. If Software doesn't follow it, well...

In recent years, Windows has become a mess in the UI space. Mac OS X has fared a little better, but it's also becoming a mess. It makes me sad. Years ago programs written for either operating system tended to follow the UI standards pretty well, with the main exception being games. Microsoft started to try new things with Office, so if you wanted to see where the standard was going you just had to look at where Offic…

I'd say this is a sign of more and more people developing software, and with ever more diverse motives.

If your motive is to sell lots of copies to lots of people and make lots of money to it, investing energy into UI refinement makes total sense.

If you just have to scratch an itch, maybe it doesn't.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is currently no kernel interface that I know of to do that, and I don't think it would be too hard to hook into an open() on an invalid path and try to do something (mount a network fs, call out to GVfs or KIO, etc), but I can tell you you will meet resistance if you try to because things like "//stuff" and "smb://stuff" are already valid local file paths in Linux. So I leave it up to you to figure out how to d…

Yeah, this is definitely not an easy problem to solve given the design of Linux. I don't know why I didn't remember this earlier, but I actually explored this a number of years ago and came up with two things that are close, but not quite there: First was to use a systemd automount unit[0], but I didn't really get anywhere with it. From the looks of it you have to know all the possible things you could want to automo…

> I also explored the good old automounter[1][2], but it has a lot of the limitations that systemd's does. It does have the advantage of supporting host maps, which gets me a bit closer to what I'm looking for. The unfortunate thing that remains is that this is NFS instead of a modern protocol.

What limitations affect you?

(At home, I have linux running on an HP MicroServer as my NAS, it exports filessytems via NFS. Other machines run autofs with the hosts map, so for example my wife's desktop - and mine for that matter - auto-mounts NFS shares on-demand and she can open any file directly in any application by accessing /net/$hostname/$path).

NFSv4 is pretty modern ...

I believe this should also work for CIFS, if the server-side supports unix extensions (to do user mapping on a single connection), but I haven't had time to try it in the past day in my limited time at home.

> Authentication becomes a problem since the automounter probably can't ask the user for a password, and may not even know which user is requesting the mount.

If you have Kerberos setup, NFSv4 does the right thing ...

If you don't have Kerberos setup, then you're probably ok with just normal NFS user mapping.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#370

I wish that there would be one unified API for creating desktop programs on Linux. Right now it's somewhat coalesced on GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, though there are a number of others out there. I use Linux in a VM for very hobbyist level embedded development (think Arduino and the like). Driver problems are non-existent, all of the technical problems are non-issues in this environment. The problems that I see are all to d…

> Network transparency is another thing that suffers from this. On Windows, you can basically use a UNC path (\\server\share\path\to\file.txt) almost anywhere because the entire system from the file picker all the way down to the file APIs knows about UNC paths. In Linux, KDE apps do this one way, GNOME apps do it a different way, and command line tools need you to somehow mount the target server before you can even think about it. I last seriously used Windows about 14 years ago and I still miss this greatly.

I just use NFS and autofs. Sure, it's a few seconds more effort to set it up, but it's a once-off cost.

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