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Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

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Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#141

Post by BenGosub »

nicolaslem wrote: post #124
BenGosub wrote: post #121

Realtime audio. Audio interface makers don't even release Linux drivers. I wish the situation could improve so that I can use Linux for both work and music production.

Are drivers from the manufacturer even necessary? My understanding is that most audio interfaces are plug and play. As an example, the popular Focusrite Scarlett 3rd gen works on Linux with the only missing feature being toggling the physical buttons via software. Audio interface drivers aside, the adoption of Pipewire seems to have made Linux a decent platform for audio production.

yes, plug and play, but if you want the top performance from a top manufacturer (Universal Audio or RME), as well as a ton of utility software written by the vendors you need the official drivers and support. And I do need top performance, the community drivers are unsatisfactory. BTW I agree that there's some progress, albeit still years behind Windows and Mac.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#143

Post by 3np »

pdimitar wrote: post #138
intothemild wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would 100% agree with this list. Linux as a desktop has come so far, KDE is great for people who prefer the windows-like workflow, and Gnome for people who prefer a mac-like workflow. (Keyword there is like, for everyone who is about to nitpick) The dumbest thing is as you said the infighting over the same things.. that and the "This is better because it's harder, and thus I'm better than you because I'm using the…

I have the same problem with Arch so I gave up and started using Manjaro. It's a much better experience for my burned out brain.

I'd encourage you to check out EndeavorOS. While they did have a breaking update of their own, I have much higher confidence in them delivering a consistent experience than Manjaro.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#144

Post by Shorel »

SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #67
deeter72 wrote: post #24

How Linux freezes under high memory usage, Mac OS and Windows both handle such situations well without requiring a hard reboot.

Windows freezes, too and if you are a heavy multitasker with a program that hogs memory and you are not carefully it can happen wow frequently

It's not even close. Linux overcommits memory by design.

If you disable memory overcommit, Chrome based browsers won't even start.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#146

Post by pdimitar »

traverseda wrote: post #50
pramsky wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For example, want to list services? Just use `ls /etc/init.d/` You can do systemctl list-unit-files If you want to see the enabled services, then add --state=enabled , for disable --state=disabled. You can grep for those words as well. >> Want to monitor a log file? Use something like `tail -f /var/log/whatever` You can still do that. With systemd, You can use journalctl to tail the log file by journalctl -u -f ,…

>>You can do systemctl list-unit-files Sure, but how is that an improvement over locality-of-behavior and having unit files in easily known locations? Here's a rough list of places you can find unit files: #Places you can find systemd unit files /etc/systemd/system/* /run/systemd/system/* /lib/systemd/system/* ... $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/systemd/user/* $HOME/.config/systemd/user/* /etc/systemd/user/* $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/system…

I don't care where the files are. You're fixating on an implementation detail.

I want commands that achieve my goals. Where they get their info from I couldn't care less.

It seems you're more interested in reverse-engineering your system than actually doing something with it. Which is your right of course, but surely you can see how that can't be the priority of everyone.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#147

Post by greenstatic »

foepys wrote: post #98
SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows freezes, too and if you are a heavy multitasker with a program that hogs memory and you are not carefully it can happen wow frequently

The old Windows Task Manager has code in it that killed other programs to be able to start so the user could kill more programs. I don't know if this feature still exists in modern versions since memory has increased so much but I always found it to be neat that some developers thought about this.

David Plummer wrote the Windows Task Manager, he made a 3 part series on his YouTube channel [1]. It's a fascinating couple of videos, highly recommend to watch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8VBOiPV-_M

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#148

Post by pdimitar »

traverseda wrote: post #51
10000truths wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you knew the standard unix-ey tools you could get by And if you know the standard systemd tools, you can get by with systemd. It's far from enigmatic, the docs are freely available. Yes, systemd does things differently from what you might be used to, but I don't see how that's an issue beyond having to surf the usual learning curve of a new tool. > how do I see what services are available under systemd? systemct…

> but I don't see how that's an issue beyond having to surf the usual learning curve of a new tool. I responded to that in another post, but basically unix is a programming environment and when you start composing tools together you get a powerful solution for quickly throwing things together.

I pipe the output of various systemd subcommands to other UNIX tools regularly. I genuinely can't see what your problem with it is.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#149

Post by bjourne »

Linux' memory model is overengineered and confusing. If I were to design a new kernel neither overcommitting nor virtual memory would be enabled by default. That would make it much easier for userland processes to manage their memory.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#150

Post by mid-kid »

sandreas wrote: post #90

Most of the things that go wrong, don't happen in the kernel. Kernel development is pretty awesome and although there is always room for improvement I can't see something revolutionizing the work done there. You might say: Let's rewrite it in Rust to ensure memory safety - well, rust support is on the way and while I think it is a good thing, it will not fix everything. In my opinion writing a completely new kernel w…

Libinput has genuinely been such a subpar experience for me that I'm currently still running the synaptics driver. One thing that bothers me is that not all applications support kinetic scrolling with libinput, but they do with synaptics. Configuration is fairly limited with the new driver, and I've never got it to feel right. It's been a few years since I last tried however, so I don't know if things have changed, but from what I gather it's not changed a lot over the last decade.
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