Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#31

Post by DrCatbox » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:31 PM UTC

muuh-gnu wrote: post #17

The reason I stopped recommending Linux to "normal users" is _because_ of the concept of distributions. Coupling the updates of single apps with the updates of the whole desktop or framework and libs, is just plain wrong. Having to upgrade the whole distro (including all the other installed apps you dont want to upgrade) just to install a new version of one single app you _want_ to update is a nightmare. Total bullsh…

But what is the alternative to a non-distributions based gnu linux operating system?

How do you manage the 1000 packages and their libraries and dependencies? Many of them have separate runtimes which may or may not depend on the other packages runtime. How would you design an application sandbox to cover them all?

What you're saying basically is that linux is failed. At least for me, since I cant see another way to distribute and manage the massive amount of packages that sit on gnu.org.

I agree with you, and It is my opinion that the one who solves these problem is in for a lot of business-opportunities.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#32

Post by tikhonj » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:31 PM UTC

yaix wrote: post #21

Good point. But most of these apps are written, because they can make money for the author. There just isn't a large enough user base in Desktop Linux to make that money, and hence much less people willing to invest the time to write apps. And the much smaller userbase is split up between Gnome and KDE and now Unity and Xfce and so on. So there is even less incentive to write apps.

A program that works in KDE will work in Gnome and Unity and Xfce, so that divide is not strictly relevant. In KDE, at the very least, even GTk programs look very good. And, moreover, those programs would also work on Windows and OS X.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#33

Post by icebraining » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:32 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #28

icebraining wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that having to make and sudo install is essentially impossible for a common PC user, but how does the sandboxing have any impact in user adoption?

State is the big evil in software. Minimize shared state, and many, many problems go away. Centralized package management with a web of specific versioned dependencies is a huge hairball of state as it is. And when installed applications poke around inside your system, it only takes one or two oversights here and there to mess up this state. Sandboxing, where feasible, minimizes shared state; usually at the cost of o…

That has nothing to do with sandboxing: it's a matter of distributing the libraries with the package itself, either as .so files or as a big statically compiled binary, and using those instead. Nothing forces the developer to use the distro provided libraries.

And frankly, I think this is one of the things where you can't please everyone; personally, I rather have dependencies and know that a security fix in a library will fix all applications that use it than having to hope each developer releases an updated version, like on Windows.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#34

Post by DrCatbox » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:33 PM UTC

bergie wrote: post #29

The solution for this is quite simple: split the distro to a core, and a separate 'apps' repository, and let app authors control (but with a mandatory QA step) when their software gets released or updated. We did this with Maemo (and later MeeGo), and it has worked great: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/application_quality_assurance_in_l... Cross-distro app repositories are also a possibility, thanks to the Open Build Serv…

You would still need to maintain and manage the core distro. The packages in their would update and break the systme, you'd have lvm issues and what not.

Any way, care to give links to more on maeom/meegos architecture?

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#35

Post by barrkel » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:34 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #26

barrkel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason is commitment to binary compatibility of a set of components over a time scale of 10 years or more. Linux has historically been relatively unstable, with an ideological focus on source rather than binary compatibility; and fragmented into different distros, which may have different ideas about which versions, configurations etc. of components are pieced together. That's a perfectly understandable focus…

You can statically link binaries and distribute those, which companies do when there's enough of a market to bother. That's how Matlab is distributed, for example. I think the bigger problem is that there usually isn't enough of a market; AutoCAD was discontinued on Unix because too many shops were retiring their Unix workstations in favor of Windows desktops, not because Unix software distribution was too hard.

Sure you can statically link binaries, so long as you have a license for all those libraries, or if you write your own UI etc. from the ground up not much removed from the X protocol. And when UI refreshes come around, your UI will look frozen in time in a way that UIs using standard controls don't in Windows.

And how about those libraries that control shared resources? For example, sound output. It's been many years since I bothered to try and use Linux as a desktop OS, but I recall wholesale choices of sound subsystems, with options for one subsystem to emulate another, etc. How well would that mess work with static linking? And these are only the most basic of shared resources; not thinking about file/app association, icon display in file managers, and other really really basic OS services that have seen repeated whole reinvention in Linux.

IME Linux is unusable beyond the command-line, preferably via ssh.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#36

Post by downx3 » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:35 PM UTC

Aqueous wrote: post #18

drdaeman wrote: post #5

I'm just an ordinary user, but I'd put my 2¢. Nowadays, any developer can create a packages for his application (and any of its dependencies) and publish it in self-hosted repositories. Users can easily add such repository to their system's sources list and bureaucracy problem's over. Well, some developers are doing this already - the only thing that keeps the rest of them is either ignorance or complexity of the pac…

What you think is easy is actually not easy. Any time you've added one, two, three more steps to a problem after clicking the link in the browser you've already lost. Adding repositories? Already too late. Touching the command line? Sorry, as much as we love it, for most users it's already too late. Going into Aptitude or Synaptic and pasting in the repository URL? Yep. Too late. This is all compounded by the fact th…

Some of the bloat could be dealt with by the file system. If you download a library you already have, then simply discard it - and make do with a reference.

What I'd like to see, is the possibility of having multiple versions of software and libraries residing on the OS with ease.

I think these problems are surmountable.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#37

Post by tikhonj » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:36 PM UTC

jamesu wrote: post #8

My impression is that the problem is more fundamental: a lot of open source and free software which finds its way onto linux is made by people who don't seem to care about the end-user experience. If it works for them, there is no need to improve it. Not all open software projects are receptive to changes, improvements or bug reports from strangers so nothing is really resolved without forking by which adds its own c…

Even more proprietary software that doesn't make it to Linux is written by people who don't seem to care about the end-user experience. I've spent enough time battling horrible programs on both OS X and various versions of Windows to know that this isn't unique to open source software.

Of course, on the proprietary platforms, the core programs--browsers, office, media...etc are all good. But that is true of Linux programs as well. And open source projects--even ones that are not terribly responsive--are still more responsive than most proprietary programs.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#38

Post by HerraBRE » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:38 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #5

I'm just an ordinary user, but I'd put my 2¢. Nowadays, any developer can create a packages for his application (and any of its dependencies) and publish it in self-hosted repositories. Users can easily add such repository to their system's sources list and bureaucracy problem's over. Well, some developers are doing this already - the only thing that keeps the rest of them is either ignorance or complexity of the pac…

I do this at http://pagekite.net - I build both RPMs and DEBs and host my own repos. This works fine for the most part and is relatively easy for technical users to take advantage of. It was a bit of work to get it working (and my packages arguably aren't good enough yet), but it's doable, even for a small shop like ours.

The problem is, this is horribly, horribly insecure.

If you add my repo to your sources.list, I can offer a "security update" to any app on your system, a binary which does anything I want.

Obviously, it would be signed by me and could be traced back to me, and I would never do that ... but it would still be a really bad idea to go around adding repos to keep up with the latest GNOME FartButton Free. Add 1000 repos, and the odds of a successful hack or a stupid packaging mistake breaking your system go up by at least that much.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#39

Post by richardk » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

I've been happily using the stable branch of Debian for about 4 years now. Whilst I agree bureaucracy and politics should be avoided where possible, it seems to me that handing everything off to a 3rd party to focus on the "core packages" harms overall system performance.

Time and again I hear people in the lab complain about all these bugs in their applications, running Debian I can honestly say I don't have this problem. Ofcourse, I don't have the latest software either, but for me that's the price I pay for a stable system.

Re: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

#40

Post by downx3 » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 12:40 PM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #13

The author is right mostly, the problem is friction and market dynamics. Adding software in a given linux distro is too nerdy. If you don't have an "app store" like gui, you've already lost most users. Command line = friction for most users, even a lot of developers who grew up with windows. As a linux nerd, I'm fine with command line + synaptic, but look at how well people have used the iTunes store, Amazon store, G…

App stores can suck too, think Blackberry. You don't have to resort to the command line to install packages. Synaptic just needs a little freshen up that's all. I far prefer it to Ubuntu's software centre. A load of crap icons and screenshots just feel like clutter, and don't tell me anything.