Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#171

Post by pitaj » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:36 AM UTC

cossovich wrote: post #32

I've been using Ubuntu LTS versions since 12.04 on Thinkpad T and X series laptops and I'm a very happy camper - out of the box Ubuntu doesn't suck for me, it "just works". I moved from OS X on latest Apple laptops to make my daily job (interaction design + web development) more productive (e.g. workstation running the same OS as servers, tooling etc) but now it's my preferred OS + hardware combo from a end-user pers…

What file explorer do you use? Nautilus pisses me off. I'm 100x more productive with Explorer on Windows.

Some features I'd like:

- Being able to open the context menu for the current folder, even if there are enough files to fill the view, without going up a level - Being able to jump to files/folders in the current directory by name without opening search results - Being able to add functionality to the context menu

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#172

Post by rhinoceraptor » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:49 AM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #90

I wish that there would be one unified API for creating desktop programs on Linux. Right now it's somewhat coalesced on GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, though there are a number of others out there. I use Linux in a VM for very hobbyist level embedded development (think Arduino and the like). Driver problems are non-existent, all of the technical problems are non-issues in this environment. The problems that I see are all to d…

To be fair, the Arduino IDE is java swing, so it doesn't look quite right on any platform.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#173

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:51 AM UTC

There are a couple main problems with Linux as a desktop.

1) Is (obviously) hardware support. While one or two vendors will produce a small number of Linux-compatible drivers, they don't do QC testing of all their products on Linux, whereas they almost certainly do for Windows or Mac.

Distros, and OSS devs in general, have to support a wide range of software and hardware in every possible configuration. This includes not only individual components on a system, but how they are tied together, and the proprietary extensions (keyboard buttons) that allow the user to operate them. But there's no way any company could possibly test all software with all hardware. Even if they did such insane amounts of testing, they'd need to pay someone to fix all the bugs that would come out of it. No OSS company I'm aware of has the bankroll of an Apple or Microsoft, to say nothing of all the hardware vendors' investments.

Trying to support OSS on proprietary platforms is like trying to become the development and support for every such product in existence, and those products are often black boxes. The only reliable option is to pick a distro, then find hardware which has been explicitly certified for that distro. This is usually a short list, and becomes shorter as you try to find something that fits your needs and budget.

2) Is an even more intractible problem: limitations of the software.

Do I need some software which is platform-dependent? Then I should use that platform. Trying to shoehorn it into Linux is just a recipe for frustration and support calls to your cousin's son Eddie who you heard is really good with this Linux thing.

Then there's the difficulty of operating a system which is only designed to work in a particular way. Want to use some software which doesn't have an official package? Good luck figuring out how to install it. Have some problem on the system? Good luck figuring out what magical combination of "console commands" might make it work again. And don't even bother telling your ISP or work that you use Linux when you call with a support problem, because they'll just tell you to get bent.

Really, it all comes down to money. Nobody is spending the money on Linux to become an officially supported Desktop, because it would be unaffordable. Linux will always be a hobbyist OS as long as nobody supports it.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#174

Post by meditate » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #152

meditate wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>someone to make a decision about the one true way to do things. Things don't really work this way in free and open source development. There is no one person to make decisions, consensus is reached when the quality of something raises "above the bar" and actually improves things for all involved parties. If someone wants there to be an über-library that serves everyone's use case then it's up to them to go and do th…

You're absolutely right. I wonder if something like DBus and PulseAudio could happen with my UNC pain point. With the assumption that the goal is for "vi //server/share/file.txt" to work the same as "notepad.exe \\server\share\file.txt" does on Windows, here are my thoughts. First off, notepad.exe doesn't really care about the fact that it's a UNC path. It just opens the file with CreateFile (either CreateFileW or Cr…

All that has been doable for quite some time, you could mount SMB shares like that with smbfs since early releases of Samba, and later with the CIFS fs driver. You do need root to mount things that way, so it isn't ideal.

For the more complicated stuff it can be done but not everything is available via a simple GUI. GNOME and KDE have their own virtual filesystem layers in userspace, GVfs and KIO, I don't know what KIO does but GVfs supports a bunch of network backends and has a FUSE driver that can mount its own virtual filesystems and expose them to outside applications. So the features are there but I don't think they are well-presented right now, maybe someone can prove me wrong though.

It would have been nice if the kernel had better support for fine-grained control over filesystems like HURD or Plan 9 do. But instead it was decided that it was better to handle those things with userspace daemons, so that's where we are now.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#175

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

hartator wrote: post #153

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And when you have a setup with Wireshark that works why update it? I am dubious that Wireshark can be an attack vector so security updates won’t be useful. Ignoring feature enhancements and bug fixes for a moment, do you really think it improbable that there are security issues in a piece of software whose entire job is to sit on the network and record everything that it sees and then translate and interpret it?

If an evil app is already communicating on the web and is already on your computer, what can it gain more?

Wireshark (usually) runs in promiscuous mode; it'd be "an evil app is already able to send something visible from your network interface" - which to be fair, might help for internal uses. It does usually mean that anything on your local network can attack you.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#176

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:02 AM UTC

ilovecaching wrote: post #107

baroffoos wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found its super dependent on what hardware you get, Especially on laptops. I always pick hardware that works perfectly with linux and I am left with a very premium experience but when using linux on bad hardware like macbooks and broadcom wifi everything just doesn't work right.

Yep. Exactly this. If you get a laptop that a GNOME developer uses, chances are you’ll run into maybe two issues a year. But try to get GNOME to run on two 4K displays and an RTX. But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. The DE has gotten much better transitively from all the work that’s…

Laptops and 2-1 devices are the future desktop, and Linux has hardly won there.

Android might run on Linux kernel, but that is a minor detail to userspace, and might be on the roadmap to be replaced by Zirkon.

So no, it wasn't won anything besides server room.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#177

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

ilovecaching wrote: post #144

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone... So what happens if/when Google switches to Fuchsia on their phones?

At this stage, I’d say I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t doubt that Google has the capacity, but replacing a kernel that works is fraught with peril, and it could very well be that Fuschia remains yet another Google research project.

Then check Android repo, they are actively adding Fuchsia support.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#178

Post by petersellers » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

stendinator wrote: post #28

sullyj3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the issues known isn't just pointless complaining. Everyone who reads this might potentially be interested in contributing.

Nice strawman. I never said it's pointless complaining.

That's certainly what you implied with your post, though.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#179

Post by zaphirplane » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #162

He's right, of course. The Linux community has been in denial about this for years. At the kernel level and close to it, the areas that consistently give trouble are video/GPU support and audio support. GPUs are hard, but there's no excuse for the mess in audio persisting for a decade. Video/GPU support is tough, but the current situation, where you have a choice of five different NVidia drivers for the same board, a…

The nature of open source development is there are duplicates. The distribution usually takes chooses from the alternatives the better option and makes it the default. In the GPU driver issue you are raising what is the problem. Fedora comes with nouveau out of the box and you can install an alternative very easily. You may have a gripe but proliferation of alternatives is an unusual gripe, there are multiple browsers music players videos players file editors and even multiple DE options I guarantee if there was one music player option there would be a lot of people unhappy and a new project starter immediately

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#180

Post by voltagex_ » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #152

meditate wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>someone to make a decision about the one true way to do things. Things don't really work this way in free and open source development. There is no one person to make decisions, consensus is reached when the quality of something raises "above the bar" and actually improves things for all involved parties. If someone wants there to be an über-library that serves everyone's use case then it's up to them to go and do th…

You're absolutely right. I wonder if something like DBus and PulseAudio could happen with my UNC pain point. With the assumption that the goal is for "vi //server/share/file.txt" to work the same as "notepad.exe \\server\share\file.txt" does on Windows, here are my thoughts. First off, notepad.exe doesn't really care about the fact that it's a UNC path. It just opens the file with CreateFile (either CreateFileW or Cr…

gvfs does some of what you ask. I guess you could trick open() with LD_PRELOAD.

For the dbus/polkit authentication prompts, I've seen it work on the command line but have no idea how it works. If anyone wants to donate, I'll spend a day and half a bottle of good whiskey and come out with a blog post.