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Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#41

Post by giancarlostoro »

scalesolved wrote: post #29

I love working on Linux, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Lenovo S540 (lightweight, 16gb ram,i7,ssd). The biggest pain point for me are mainly using tools that other parts of the business want to use like: Slack -> No Linux support, Zoom (video conferencing) -> Early beta support, 1Password -> I use last pass instead. Macs have really dominated some areas of the tech scene especially in the non engineering sections of t…

I know HipChat runs on Linux very well, and on most of (if not all) my other devices. If you could convince your company to make a switch somehow, it could work. But sadly that's a nice big if, not sure if you're in a situation or position capable to convincing them. I'm also not sure of the differences between Slack and HipChat, I've only used HipChat.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#42

Post by jordanthoms »

navinp1912 wrote: post #35
vhf wrote: post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

I'm using HP ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstations with ubuntu 14 LTS since last 3 months. The only thing i miss is SSD that i didn't choose in my customization. Has 16GB RAM, i7 . I switch between Win 8.1 and linux (something lxde instead of unity). The nice thing about this linux can run VMs and it is pretty fast and even containers work well. Also Win 8.1 ultimate has hyperv role so you can use that as a hypervisor as w…

Unfortunately, one look at that will tell you that it's no match for the rMBP in design or portability.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#43

Post by kurjam »

Don't really have any frustrations to be honest. All my personal projects and stuff I do for fun (both mostly in ruby) I do on ubuntu 14.04. Use VIM, a lot of plugins and some custom CLI tools. Have never tried developing on Mac, though so maybe I just don't know what am I missing (windows isn't even a thing for ruby devs. And for good reason).

Only thing I'm kind of missing/sad about is lack of games on Ubuntu. Upside, though, I won't get lost in a "quick 20 minute brawl to clear my brain" that never lasts 20 minutes....

For sake of honesty, I do my daily job on windows. Stuff I use there is awesome. VS is nice, Windows domain works well enough and lync, outlook, fiddler, slack etc. are all nice. If, for w/e weird reason, I had to do my daily job on linux, I would be sad.

But most likely, I'm not frustrated with linux because I chose to use it for fun etc. If, in any point in my life, I would have been forced to use linux, I'd probably find a lot of problems with it.

//EDIT And uhm. I've never really had any problems with linux and hardware. For personal stuff I still run an old thinkpad t420s which hardware gets along with linux a lot nicer than it did with windows 8. Touchpad acts a bit better, touchpads 3rd button actually provides some nice functionality and most importantly, gsm card worked out of the box (something I never got up and running on windows 8). Once more, for sake of honesty, it shipped with windows 7 so maybe the drivers provided for the gsm card aren't compatible with win8. who knows.

Never had any problems with my desktops running Linux nor my previous thinkpad either.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#44

Post by scalesolved »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #41
scalesolved wrote: post #29

I love working on Linux, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Lenovo S540 (lightweight, 16gb ram,i7,ssd). The biggest pain point for me are mainly using tools that other parts of the business want to use like: Slack -> No Linux support, Zoom (video conferencing) -> Early beta support, 1Password -> I use last pass instead. Macs have really dominated some areas of the tech scene especially in the non engineering sections of t…

I know HipChat runs on Linux very well, and on most of (if not all) my other devices. If you could convince your company to make a switch somehow, it could work. But sadly that's a nice big if, not sure if you're in a situation or position capable to convincing them. I'm also not sure of the differences between Slack and HipChat, I've only used HipChat.

We migrated away from HipChat, I think the only thing that HipChat does better is it's support for Linux. Overall personally Slack is better but for a company with such huge funding it's surprising not to see a linux client.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#45

Post by burntsushi »

to3m wrote: post #34
r3bl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only tried working with one external monitor, but I had absolutely no problem with it what so ever. Audio is working great out of the box for me and I had no troubles with the trackpad neither, which I did have on my Windows system (basically, I couldn't disable some of its gestures and trackpad worked even when my fingers were slightly above it but weren't touching it, which was highly annoying to me).

I had no problems at all with one external monitor, aside from BIOS output only ever going through the internal Intel GPU, so I couldn't use the console. To get a 3rd working, I had to buy a second GPU (since there seemed to be no way to use the internal Intel GPU for X at the same time). So: 2 monitors with my original graphics card, 1 monitor with my new one. This was then somehow incompatible with XRandR, so I had…

I run three monitors on Linux using a single GPU that natively supports three monitors (e.g., an eyefinity AMD card). It just works.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#46

Post by nextos »

staticelf wrote: post #32

What I think really lack in Linux is: - Good hardware that is nice to use (look beautiful) and works well with Linux. - A great IDE that doesn't look like shit right out of the box. I know many can be configured and tampered with, but I simply do not enjoy that enough to go through the pain. Otherwise, my biggest pain and why I definately go back to Windows is that I can't play my games on my machine. Many games stil…

I think the trick is to cherry-pick laptops. There's only a handful of decent laptops in the market that run Linux very well (drivers in kernel, perfect powersaving, ACPI events from battery, etc).

My MacBook Air 11 inch 2012 (formerly used by Linus) is pretty good. So were some Lenovos like x220. These days Chromebook Pixel or Dell XPS hold some promise. Also cheap Chromebooks like some Acer and some Asus. I have my eyes on cheap ARM machines for their capability to run blobless (e.g. Asus C201).

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#47

Post by Foxboron »

scalesolved wrote: post #29

I love working on Linux, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Lenovo S540 (lightweight, 16gb ram,i7,ssd). The biggest pain point for me are mainly using tools that other parts of the business want to use like: Slack -> No Linux support, Zoom (video conferencing) -> Early beta support, 1Password -> I use last pass instead. Macs have really dominated some areas of the tech scene especially in the non engineering sections of t…

But slack do have Linux "support". You can just use the IRC gateway through any Linux clients, or look up a project like slk, https://github.com/drikin/slk

There are also projects that wrap around 1Password. http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/1password-in-linux

It's far from perfect. But the great thing with Linux in my opinion is that there are always alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#48

Post by towb »

I did the switch from OS X to linux about six months ago and I am pretty much using the same tools for front and back end web stuff. Then there is a huge plus for all the free new knowledge you get from using linux as a "power user", so if anything, the switch made it easier to deal with all kinds of things.

I suppose the question was more about low level development than in my case, where tools depend more on the system it's run on, but for me it has only been positive.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#49

Post by nextos »

vhf wrote: post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

Thinkpad retro might a thing to look forward to:

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#50

Post by stasm »

scalesolved wrote: post #29

I love working on Linux, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Lenovo S540 (lightweight, 16gb ram,i7,ssd). The biggest pain point for me are mainly using tools that other parts of the business want to use like: Slack -> No Linux support, Zoom (video conferencing) -> Early beta support, 1Password -> I use last pass instead. Macs have really dominated some areas of the tech scene especially in the non engineering sections of t…

You can use http://refract.mkelly.me/ to install Slack as a standalone web app (in Firefox and Chrome). I've done this to many service which I use frequently: Trello, IRCCloud, Messenger, Inbox, etc. and it works really well. The added benefit is that I don't need to be logged into these services on my main profile.
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