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The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

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Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#61

Post by jiggy2011 »

nailer wrote: post #45
Moschops wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I think to a large extent "the desktop OS itself isn't particularly relevant to the state of computing right now" is because of Linux (and OSS in general).

We now have a commodity OS and toolset that can be adapted to a huge number of devices from smartphones to servers and thus used for a huge variety of purposes.

Imagine if we had a world where MS (or some other proprietary vendor) was the only game in town on desktop and server, would we have the same number of startups creating MVP webapps? In fact would the web even exist as it does today?

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#62

Post by lmm »

binarycrusader wrote: post #44
hp wrote: post #39

This 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 Soun…

That's a nitpick really. Every major OS from windows 95 onwards (BSD included) could/can do software mixing on cards that didn't have hardware mixing, except for linux/OSS.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#63

Post by lmm »

sciurus wrote: post #53
tankenmate wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on any current Ubuntu LTS (we are talking primarily about servers here).

You still don't need to configure NetworkManager to get a network connection. You can use the old methods (/etc/network/interfaces or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts) instead.

Those are not the old methods - were they ever portable beyond debian? The old method is ifconfig. I don't care about linux any more, but on FreeBSD ifconfig still works, as it has for at least 20 years. If it becomes impossible to use KDE programs without using networkmanager, that will be a real irritation for me.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#64

Post by lmm »

dman wrote: post #42
nailer wrote: post #27

It'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 ?

Personal experience only:

KDE - mostly fine, I use it, but it still won't let me set a default transparency the way I could in v3.5. If I could find a supported way to run 3.5 I would.

Gnome/xfce - gtk-based so backwards button order, requires magic typing to let you enter a file path in an open dialog, probably other things that would annoy me if I put up with those any longer. Gnome also has registry-based configuration, and neither has a decent well-integrated browser or email client; firefox/thunderbird/evolution work as standalone apps but e.g. drag-and-drop doesn't work as reliably as on KDE (or didn't when last I tried), proxy settings have to be configured individually, etc.

xmonad - urgh. Underdocumented if you don't want to learn haskell, and doesn't even have a browser etc. last I looked.

There's not a whole lot wrong with KDE, but for my use cases it's still worse than it was on version 3.5 (the aforementioned transparency problem, and the lack of a music player with the features of amarok 1.4 are my main issues). That's the most irritating part.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#65

Post by lmm »

anon1385 wrote: post #48
adambyrtek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's using hash tables, so he's using glib2, and that's far better than everyone implementing their own hash table.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#66

Post by wazoox »

The main conclusion of this article: Network Manager is utterly broken. I concur. It's quite good for laptops and basic desktop, and absolutely unusable for any development desktop or server.

The main and gravest sin of Network Manager is that is absolutely ignores what's in /etc/network/interfaces (or similar configuration files for other distros AFAIK), and makes most usual stuff (bonding, bridging, vpns, etc) nigh to impossible. It may be relatively easy to fix, dunno.

Fortunately from my experience, you can simply remove it altogether without any problem, at least under "reasonable" distros such as debian.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#67

Post by binarycrusader »

lmm wrote: post #62
binarycrusader wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Soun…

That's a nitpick really. Every major OS from windows 95 onwards (BSD included) could/can do software mixing on cards that didn't have hardware mixing, except for linux/OSS.

And that was only true if you were using the version of OSS included in Linux.

The commercial version of OSS supported software-based mixing when the hardware didn't support it.

Same as the version of OSS found in Solaris today.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#68

Post by wink »

binarycrusader wrote: post #44
hp wrote: post #39

This 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 Soun…

Despite all the incorrect or misleading facts (you spotted quite a few more than I did) I can totally relate to what I think was the author's intention in writing it:

Magic.

Modern linux distributions are doing many things in a way that is, at best, surprising and, at worst, undebuggable.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" comes to mind quickly.

Working with Linux in the 90s was surely not as easy as it is today, and probably for the better. But I also find myself longing for the old days at times. Examples are lack of NetworkManager (like lack of Bridge support in the version on my laptop, no clue if it's been fixed upstream, I'm using distro packages) or certain hald/dbus automagic things. And no, I won't go into details and that can be held against me, but there frustrations and annoyances - surely partly to be blamed onto me and partly to the software. Coming from that, I feel with the author.

Then again I'm also glad I don't have to wade knee-deep into config files every time I want to change something. :)

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#69

Post by FooBarWidget »

nknight wrote: post #54
FooBarWidget wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Operating systems with much more reliable and user-friendly network configuration interfaces (Windows and Mac) continue to permit advanced users to fiddle with their settings on the command line without actively impeding them. Desktop Linux has gone from assuming users are developers to assuming users are morons who must be protected from themselves. This, and some other imbalances (such as surrendering good sense to…

As others have pointed out, NetworkManager has a CLI.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#70

Post by nknight »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #69
nknight wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating systems with much more reliable and user-friendly network configuration interfaces (Windows and Mac) continue to permit advanced users to fiddle with their settings on the command line without actively impeding them. Desktop Linux has gone from assuming users are developers to assuming users are morons who must be protected from themselves. This, and some other imbalances (such as surrendering good sense to…

As others have pointed out, NetworkManager has a CLI.

If you think nmcli qualifies as command line network configuration, you've never done any advanced network configuration at all. nmcli is a bad joke, with all the limitations of NetworkManager itself, and a really crappy interface to boot.

iproute2 is the gold standard of command-line network configuration on Linux, and for good reason. That NetworkManager conflicts with it instead of taking proper advantage of it is the whole problem.

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