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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?

#51

Post by scalesolved »

Foxboron wrote: post #47
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.

Oh yeah, my only minor grumblings against it are lack of one or two clients, I think with Slack's case I'd like to see them make an official client, with $160m in funding I'm sure there is leeway to get an official linux client in the works. Thanks for the slk link, gonna check it out! :)

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

#52

Post by benwaffle »

r3bl wrote: post #10

I have to say I'm pretty satisfied, even more than I was before when I was using Windows. Everything seems easier to install and I don't need gigabytes of space to build my environment. (Visual Studio, I'm talking about you!) Working with Git and gcc was as easy as it can get right at the beginning of my switch. Back in Windows days, I was primarily using Dev-C++ and a GitHub desktop client (which I really don't like…

You can use Glade for GTK+ and QtCreator for Qt

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

#53

Post by elektronjunge »

Development tools on linux continue to be great. A visual studio quality ide would be nice, but realistically I'd continue to use vim and the terminal.

What really irks me is the desktop environment situation. I haven't had a linux install in a couple of years and it seems that all of the desktops have gotten worse in the last few years. Unity continues to add on terrible features and follows the similar ui antipatterns and gnome 3 has. KDE4/5 are decent but very heavy. Xfce and lxde are great but you occasionally run into some weirdly missing features (no font manager -- why?) that make you pull in gnome/kde and question why you picked a lightweight desktop in the first place. I'm not sold on the tiling window managers, ya the tiling is nice, but they look terrible, require way too much config, and sometimes I just want to use the mouse damn it.

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

#55

Post by chris_wot »

SFjulie1 wrote: post #24

Dealing with lazy people asking stupid questions and making everyone loose time and resisting the urge to pick on them.

I once went into the #debian channel on Freenode. I'd gnaw off my right arm before I'd enter there again. But I think you'd be right at home.

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

#56

Post by collyw »

czardoz wrote: post #28
SFjulie1 wrote: post #24

Dealing with lazy people asking stupid questions and making everyone loose time and resisting the urge to pick on them.

Sometimes, people just don't know.

Most of the time techies don't know either, but have a sensible approach to finding out.

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

#57

Post by danwakefield »

Using xubuntu, switched from crunchbang a year ago after a drive failure.

It has some weird problems like forcing gnome-keyring-daemon to run which breaks ssh-agent. The only fix I have found to to create a wrapper script that always disables its ssh component.

I sometimes get focus issues requiring me to tab through the windows to refocus the correct one.

I dislike the practice of littering my home directory with dotfiles. I prefer them to be put in .config. I have 10 directories in $HOME and another 85 dotfiles/dirs there at the moment.

New ubuntu versions start you out with capitalized folder names which is annoying.

NetworkManager often bugs out. displaying in a tiny one line box you have to scroll through or disabling wifi when i attempt to start a VPN connection. I cant be bothered to learn wicd though

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

#58

Post by collyw »

nextos wrote: post #46
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…

The keyboard is missing keys (like delete) and there is no button on the mouse. Small things but pretty annoying if you are used to clicking the middle button for pasting. And the battery seems to last about half of the time compared to OSX

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

#59

Post by navinsylvester »

No gripes since Linux is by far the best development environment for most technologies. I am running Ubuntu desktop(Gnome) vms inside my macbook pro and macbook mini but going to install Ubuntu on metal itself. I like apple hardware not much their OS(especially for development). Use quite a handful of Ubuntu server edition without GUI for development and testing too. CLI can be as ease for development but with right tools and config.

Tools: vim/nano, curl, grep, rsync, find, mitmproxy, autossh, tar, syslog, seige, top, wget, netstat, lsof, sed, df, du, ifconfig, iptables -L, ping, dig, traceroute, strace, screen, tcpdump, telnet, history

Dev setup config: pathogen.vim, ssh custom host config, ssh keyless entry, ssh tunnel, .bashrc/.bash_profile, alias, /etc/init.d/, .gitignore, vurtualenv(python), vagrant, docker, bash script for automation, supervisord

As a desktop user - I am a big fan of Gnome but just don't see GTK going anywhere. My bias towards Gnome is due to it's design principle. Wish for a Qt Webkit like layer on top of Gnome for native application development. For some reason KDE seems cluttered to me but to their advantage they have Qt.

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

#60

Post by uxcn »

I prefer developing with Linux. There are generally more tools available than Mac and Windows. Some of the ones I use are xmonad, tmux, vim (nvim), ag, ycm, clang, gcc, gdb, cmake, make, ninja, perf, valgrind, strace, etc... Compared to Windows, even just having a decent shell with coreutils is huge. If there is something that a tool doesn't already do, I can generally combine other ones to do it. For example, sed can handle basic refactoring. It's also generally easier to install new tools through the package manager (I use Funtoo).

I know a lot of people tend to prefer cleanly polished IDEs, and I do use eclipse and eclim for java development, but normally IDEs tend to get in the way for me. As for the specific questions, building definitely isn't an issue and there are plenty of cross-platform build systems when it's needed. Continuous integration is usually handled separately on a build server (hudson, jenkins, team city, etc...). In fact, a lot of the collaborative tools for things like continuous integration and issue tracking are mostly usable via web applications (bugzilla, jira, etc...).

My biggest frustration is when tools that aren't usable on Linux get standardized on. Outlook is the easiest example, but for anything where it's absolutely necessary it's extremely easy to run a virtual machine with kvm and libvirt.

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