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Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

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Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#32
post #5

Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?

> Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? Pretty decent for anyone who can tolerate default Gnome and has the right hardware. So, no, still not ready to be a drop-in Windows replacement for casual users. > What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use? What's normal? Normal HN reader? Probably Debian-nonfree, which has all the good parts of Ubuntu and almost none of the bad. Soccer mom pinter…

> Soccer mom pinterest poster though? Windows or Mac.

Why? If she is going to use the browser almost exclusively, she wouldn't even notice what OS she is using.

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#33
post #5

Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?

Try Fedora. It comes with vanilla GNOME by default, and also has variants (they call them "spins") with KDE Plasma, XFCE, LXQT, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE and even SOAS Desktop. Most software have packages for Fedora, so for a normal person it should "just work".

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#35
I have found it especially worrying that IT giants increasingly encroach OSS instead of developing their own solutions. Devices remain closed while using 95% OSS code (yes, Android, the other 5% are hardware vendor firmware). It's not exclusively their fault, as Lunduke correctly points out. If the Linux Foundation is selling seats at the board of directors instead of granting them for outstanding support, well then Linux is the sucker here.

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#36
post #2

Reasons start ~ 30 min mark. Linux backward compatibility really sucks. I still don't understand why fedora binaries can't run that easily on debian.

I got that huge bundle of games the other day, many of which have native Linux binaries. Binaries that probably worked fine in lots of distributions when they were released.

Tried three games so far -- Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 (2017), Nuclear Throne (2013) and uh, another one (201x): all of them refused to start, lacking one shared library or another.

I got CSD2 to start by copying .so files around and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH but it still did not work properly. Whatever. Bizarrely, it may be easier to get the respective Windows binaries to start in Wine. But I'm really past "getting things to work", there's enough stuff out there that doesn't require those kind of summoning rituals.

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#37
post #2

Reasons start ~ 30 min mark. Linux backward compatibility really sucks. I still don't understand why fedora binaries can't run that easily on debian.

Huh? Running against a different set of shared libraries?

- it has nothing to do with "backward" compatibility

- it has nothing to do with Linux. If you change shared libraries with incompatible versions software will break on windows and bsd as well

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#38
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

glibc has really good backward compatibility. But, yeah, few other libraries even bother, let alone make a serious attempt at this. One of the major exceptions is libvirt, which promised 100% backward compatibility from day 1. Here's a great overview (2011) of how they accomplish that: https://www.berrange.com/posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-... Note that it wasn't until GCC 10 (2020) that you could implement ELF…

> glibc has really good backward compatibility. That has really not been my experience. I've consistently hit problem with older software not running because it detected an incompatible version of GLIBC.

Well, it's backward compatibility, not forward one, so you can't compile on Arch Linux and run on Red Hat 4. But you can other way round.

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#39
post #17

I watched this a couple weeks ago and it just seems to have so little information density - like this guy talks and talks and talks and the actual content is like 15 minutes of this.

Yep, that! Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEr6dT-4uQ Or Solaris/illumos (Bryan M. Cantrill): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

The Illumos talk is fantastic. I especially enjoy his take on Oracle, 36:30 through 39:00.

Re: Linux Sucks 2020 [video]

#40

Super happy finally to see someone call out backward compatibility (around 31:20) Linux is terrible on this axis, way worse than Windows. EDIT: and statically linking your app doesn't cut it. First, it's barely possible to do that with "modern" glibc. Second, glibc itself breaks old apps.

> Linux is terrible on this axis, way worse than Windows.

Maybe GNU/Linux, but I can run binaries cross-compiled with GCC 10 on Arch Linux on some weird MIPS PoS terminal that's running Linux 2.6.30 without issues, as long as I don't use then non-existent syscalls, so I'm quite happy how Linux kernel handles backwards compatibility.

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