You can disable network manager and use /etc/network/interfaces to manage your connections directly - this has the nice side effect of having internet connectivity even before you login.
I dont understand the thrust of this article - most people running servers are running linux without a GUI and are doing so without any loss of productivity.
The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#42It's 2012. Who cares? I think Linux on the desktop hit its peak in the early 2000s, when 'Windows, Mac and Linux' was in people's minds, we had Linux companies like Loki and Transgaming etc, commercial games from Epic and ID, proper UX-focused companies like Eazel and Ximian, etc. I think most people have given up, but that's OK: Linux on the desktop, back then, still made a huge difference to today. GNOME had GTKHTM…
I would like to differ on this - I just dont get the recent consensus on linux UI's being broken. What is so bad about gnome / kde / xfce / xmonad ?
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#43I've never done any systems programming on Linux (or any other OS for that matter) so I can't comment on most of the article but I HAVE configured a network on a Fedora box on many occasions and it's simpler than the author's making it out to be. On my fedora computer, I can just run system-config-network from the terminal and have a GUI pop up where I can configure network devices and DNS addresses with no need for…
I suspect that the author is used to the old interface, involving manually writing shell scripts that call ifconfig and friends. And now he's pissed off because he can't do that anymore and concludes that the system must suck, or that his "freedom" is in jeopardy because his old way is no longer supported. Well I see things differently. Users should be free from interference from ancient and non-user-friendly cruft.…
You can still do all of that. NetworkManager is far from the only way to get your box to connect to the internet.
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#44This article is not well-informed. I worked on or sat next to people who worked on a lot of the stuff mentioned. So you can take me as biased or as having a clue or both as you wish. A general point, the changes described here have been over the course of something like 15 years. So the article seems to be making a "stuff keeps changing!" point... but we are talking about over 15 years. Think about changes to hardwar…
Totally agree; other inaccuracies are:
"However, the Linux incarnation of OSS was a particularly simplicistic one which only supported one sound channel at the same time and only very rudimentary mixing."
That's incorrect. The sound channel limitation depended on the hardware you had installed. So did the mixing capabilities. If the hardware supported it, OSS exposed the additional capabilities.
Those of us with SoundBlaster cards remember very well why we looked using them on Linux (because, unlike most cards, they supported multiple applications outputting audio simultaneously).
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#45It's 2012. Who cares? I think Linux on the desktop hit its peak in the early 2000s, when 'Windows, Mac and Linux' was in people's minds, we had Linux companies like Loki and Transgaming etc, commercial games from Epic and ID, proper UX-focused companies like Eazel and Ximian, etc. I think most people have given up, but that's OK: Linux on the desktop, back then, still made a huge difference to today. GNOME had GTKHTM…
"Who cares?" The guy who wrote it clearly does. Please do not assume that your personal opinion is shared by everyone.
> Please do not assume that your personal opinion is shared by everyone
Sorry if you thought I was doing that.
Maybe I should explain things better: the guy who wrote the post is indeed concerned with Linux on the desktop. I'm just suggesting that, whether the Linux desktop is good or bad, the desktop OS itself isn't particularly relevant to the state of computing right now and isn't worth being concerned with.
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#46It's 2012. Who cares? I think Linux on the desktop hit its peak in the early 2000s, when 'Windows, Mac and Linux' was in people's minds, we had Linux companies like Loki and Transgaming etc, commercial games from Epic and ID, proper UX-focused companies like Eazel and Ximian, etc. I think most people have given up, but that's OK: Linux on the desktop, back then, still made a huge difference to today. GNOME had GTKHTM…
I would like to differ on this - I just dont get the recent consensus on linux UI's being broken. What is so bad about gnome / kde / xfce / xmonad ?
In the Linux world more so than anywhere else, you have an odd and "at-odds" mix of users. There exists the "1993 was a great year for Linux" crowd, and the "Linux on the desktop" crowd. And somehow, you have major overlap between the two. While there are distros and packages contributing to both mindsets (meaning the two can coexist just fine), the biggest problem I see in the Linux world is the users who outright reject experimentation and change.
Personally I love where Gnome and KDE (and even Unity) are going. I might not use them daily, I might not find all their features helpful or productive, and I sure as hell am not using them on my server, but there is nothing preventing any Linux user from simply not using the new software. It's easy to find a distro that uses Gnome 2 or KDE 3 or doesn't have PulseAudio. But it's hard to use modern day software without modern day packages or backends. Without this rote experimentation that is at the heart of open source, I wouldn't be using Linux on my desktop. There are a lot of very controversial ideas put forth in the mainstream distros over the years which have contributed more to the adoption of Linux than they've taken away from the traditional users.
If someone doesn't like Unity, doesn't like Gnome 3, doesn't like KDE Plasma, doesn't like bleeding-edge distributions... there is a choice. Debian, Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, the list goes on. I don't much like the interface of OSX, but I don't create mailing lists to pooh-pooh it, I simply don't use it. If you have a point, make it. If you just want to complain, get a cat.
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
honestly i didn't get the NetworkManager thing either. since my Arch Linux days i remember that it's manageable from cli. although i never used that cli. but the thing that touched me is that there are standards like POSIX for the cli world and there are standards like DBus for the gui world and lack of any sane standards for both of them. POSIX-based software and DBus-based software took quite different paths in the…
Wait a moment. DBus is not a 'gui thing'. It is a protocol for inter-process communication. I'm not in bed with it in any way, but it seems to do a good job. You can use it from ~every~ language of your choice. Its adoption cannot (just?) be blamed on politics, it's just dead easy to use for a programmer. Lately (and that seems to be something the author of the blog post resents) it pushed further into the system lay…
> Wait a moment. DBus is not a 'gui thing'.
yeah, you are right. i just meant to say that it's deeply connected with gui stuff and not that much with cli. the only thing i desperately needed DBus for was hardware management. i don't mind at all having dbus daemon running in background for that very purpose. when it gets to managing system daemons DBus makes me a little bit nervous - compared to dead simple bash scripts used in Arch DBus is a quite complex beast. mostly when it comes to debugging. but i can eat that.
what i can't stand is when an app that's only supposed to display image files depends on a whole lot of other completely unrelated components exposed via DBus and buried into some desktop so deeply that you need to install a huge part of that desktop just in order to make that little app happy.
what the hell is wrong with 'do one thing and do it well'? i don't need 'less integration points' - i need integration implemented on a higher, not lower level of abstraction. let me clarify this. let's suppose you want your image viewer to add paths to recently viewed pics to some database and also let you post them to your twitter account. you can write a viewer that depends on zeitgeist for storing paths and on some other funky DBus interface to work with twitter. you'll probably end up with a program that works in Ubuntu but not in another environment that doesn't provide zeitgeist or that funky twitter interface or DBus. but you could go another way:
1. write a program that only displays images passed to it as command-line arguments 2. write a wrapper that passes paths to zeitgeist 3. write a twitter app that handles posting
now your viewer works on systems with no DBus - good. the wrapper can be extended to handle any program - when the user selects a file it passes the path to that file to zeitgeist and invokes the program registered to handle files of that type. to post your pics to twitter you could write a program that displays a form for posting and uses your viewer (or any other program registered for image/png|jpg|etc) to display a preview on it. anyway just viewing and just posting are different actions and you don't need those mixed up. if while viewing an image you suddenly decide to post it you could close the viewer and open the app for posting - the path to the image file (recent file) can be read from zeitgeist. you can even integrate the 'recent documents' thing into the zeitgeist wrapper. or use some other approach to streamline things.
that's the unix way and that's how DEs could implement their reach interfaces. this would make it easy to integrate programs into desktops and preserve their 'freedom'. but DEs guys decided it's much better to trap apps into their DEs. i see it as a failure to introduce proper abstractions.
> I've no love for Ubuntu, but claiming that you cannot easily (okay - define that) learn its ways and how to fix or customize it yourself? I think you should reconsider that part..
man, just stick with Arch for a while:) you'll know what i'm talking about. system configuration via simple plain text files, simple daemon management, nothing is forced on you, if you edit some configuration file there's little chance that some gui (or non-gui) tool will mess with that file without warning you... well, let's just leave it at that. now i'll go get some sleep. no, wait! one more thing:
i gave up trying to manage any system-level stuff the way i want. i don't care anymore how things are managed underthehood in Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc. i just stick with my development tools that work everywhere and try not to write programs that depend on DBus interfaces (except hardware-related ones). for all the rest i just use what's provided by the distro.
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#48While I don't quite understand the specifics the author describes, I can relate very well to the general problem: Open Source software often depends on packages that are common on the Linux Desktop. This quickly gets you into dependency hell if you try to compile the program/library on a different platform. An example I was recently confronted with was libmdb, a library that reads Microsoft Access databases. For some…
How is modularization and code reuse a bad thing? Fortunately, both source and binary distributions are great when it comes to dealing with dependencies.
>How is modularization and code reuse a bad thing?
The problem he is complaining about sounds like a lack of modularity to me: being forced to pull in dependencies that he won't be using at all.
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#49This is factually wrong: Then you try to figure out how to configure NetworkManager from the command line. There's no tool in the entire distribution which lets you do that nmcli lets you configure network manager through command line http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/nmcli.1.ht...
Not on any current Ubuntu LTS (we are talking primarily about servers here).
Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?
#50tl;dr - Author tries to patch together his/her own distribution; and fails. To provide a good user experience you need to know if the network is up or down; and when it changes. UNIX does not provide this. This is why NetworkManger is now part of the "Linux Platform". The biggest myth in open source: "Linux is about choice".
if I could downvote. Linux is always about choice. If you have enough information and time you can choose what ever software stack you want with it. You can even change any configuration software that comes with your distribution with any tool you want. Also author does not rant about building a self owned distribution. The rant can even be considered good if you do think Linux is only about graphical desktop applica…
OP is referring to this: https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/...