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How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

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Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#31

Post by phkahler »

suby wrote: post #4

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome). It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

>> I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers.

You might try buying hardware that has proper Linux support. That would include graphics from AMD or Intel, and might even include Apple before nvidia gets it together.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#32

Post by AshamedCaptain »

boudin wrote: post #28
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even stuff such as OBS Studio was significantly slower on Wayland than on X11, at least until the efforts done _last year_ (e.g. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ ) . Single-Window support for screencast API is also only a couple years old! Before that it would just error out, even if the D-Bus interface was there ( https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5e... ). That's why I s…

We're not talking about supporting things years ago though, we're talking about supporting it now which is a few years after, when it's been stable and supported across the whole ecosystem for a quite a while. That's their job, providing multi-platform video-conferencing and screen sharing. If they can't do that they could chose to drop their app and try to build a decent web version instead because this thing is qui…

Less than a year ago is NOT "quite a while". A couple years ago is also not quite a while. The fast distributions have a 2 year release cycle for their LTS releases; even longer on the slower distributions. When you have an API that has been stable and working on these distributions for _at least_ 2 of these releases, maybe I will consider using it. I'm not going to rewrite my core business every other year just to use today's API for it to change again by the next release.

I blame the distributions that literally _break_ programs one release to the next without even bothering to ensure that the newer API is working.

I will bet that most of Zoom's Linux-using enterprise customer base is still on Redhat6-7 or similarly old releases, and that is where most of their money likely comes from. Note their support pages explicitly claims they still support them.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#33

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

I think a better title would be:

How Desktop GNU+Linux sucks for desktop developers: Zoom edition

Windows will happily run GUI apps written 20 years ago. GDI is still supported. MFC Apps still run. Likely VB6 apps still run.

Desktop GNU+Linux switches graphics engines, breaks backwards compatibility, ships something with performance and driver issues, and complains that user software doesn't work.

Frankly this post turns me off towards even thinking about developing any type of native Linux app and if I need one, just use the browser or Electron.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#34

Post by smcl »

suby wrote: post #4

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome). It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

I dunno. This isn't a person who's throwing a tantrum because something just didn't work perfectly. This is a pretty even-handed description of a problem whose solution was delivered to Zoom on a plate multiple times, which they repeatedly ignored before declaring that they personally discovered the cause and then blamed Gnome. I would have understood if this person got upset and wrote expletive-laden write-up because it's quite an irritating sequence of events, but that's not what this is.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#35

Post by 988747 »

kxra wrote: post #11
teilo wrote: post #2

How not to code an HTML page by hand.

The end of the URL got trimmed upon submition, so its pointing to the unrendered markdown URL for some reason. Here's the rendered page: https://write.as/n5r0vjolumdnuk2k.md#title

Why won't trimmed URL simply redirect to a proper one? Or throw 404 even? This seems like a webserver misconfiguration of sorts, kind of like being able to access raw PHP pages, instead of rendered ones.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#36

Post by bitwize »

onli wrote: post #23
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API" ? Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date. X11 is no longer maintained is also…

> Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API"? No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.

X11 is moribund. Part of why is because literally everyone who was working on it in a major way, possibly excepting Keith Packard, eventually considered it a dead end and jumped ship to Wayland.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#37

Post by computerfriend »

shadowgovt wrote: post #21
jatone wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its entirely zoom's fault. the apis they should be using have been well known and in use for years before they used the improper APIs. chrome's (and by extension every electron app) issues stem from the fact it had not updated to use the screencasting APIs. afaik they've been updated. abusing APIs isn't the right way to go here. and zoom is entirely at fault for it. they should have used the correct (and known) apis…

Zoom is not as big a company as people think... They're just hustling very hard relative to the sudden explosion of use of their tools. I'd be willing to wager money that their development process involved attempting to use the correct API, finding that it either failed on a key executive's machine or the developers' own machines (possibly because of one bad driver/hardware/os configuration) but because it didn't wor…

> In January 2020, Zoom had over 2,500 employees, with 1,396 in the United States and 1,136 in international locations. It is reported that 700 employees within a subsidiary work in China and develop Zoom software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications#Work...

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#39

Post by Operyl »

kxra wrote: post #11
teilo wrote: post #2

How not to code an HTML page by hand.

The end of the URL got trimmed upon submition, so its pointing to the unrendered markdown URL for some reason. Here's the rendered page: https://write.as/n5r0vjolumdnuk2k.md#title

Thank god, I was thinking it was some stylistic choice to have to read all those links inline in unrendered markdown.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#40

Post by eptcyka »

suby wrote: post #4

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome). It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

The vast majority definitely isn't running Linux with a 3080. I've been running Wayland for 5 years on Gnome on AMD and Intel GPUs without issues.
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