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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#181

Post by jaabe »

baroffoos wrote: post #95
marcus_holmes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a MacBook that is malfunctioning under MacOS (it's running at 60-80% CPU usage when idle, known problem, no fix available). I tried installing Linux on it, couldn't get it working at all. I have a Dell XPS15, specifically chosen because the XPS line is supposed to work well with Linux. Numerous problems, all related to drivers. But the main problem is that every time Windows updates it wipes out GRUB. I figure…

I'm using a dell XPS 13 (one of the new ones) and it works wonderfully. I don't run windows on it so I don't have any issues with my bootloader and I saw advice on the internet to get one with no nvidia gpu so I got one with intel graphics. It really does feel like a OSX level premium feel. The only bit I am missing is fractional dpi scaling which is apparently on the way but turning on big text in accessibility mode…

Can you plug it into a 4K display or all the shitty projector type things?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#182

Post by zaphirplane »

darkpuma wrote: post #136
godelski wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK . I have NEVER had a plug and play solution for display from my laptop. I do expect to be able to plug in an HDMI cable and be able to give a presentation. And I expect to be able to do this with an nvidia card. But they have always failed me and I don't understand why this problem still exists (I would actually be interested if someone kn…

It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.

Exactly if s wireless card didn’t work in Linux you’d hardly say Linux is a problem. You’d say don’t use that card

You wouldn’t be super happy if you just bought that PC, you’d understand thou. Another example if you buy a car and it doesn’t have android or Apple integration you’d be “damn I should have researched it”

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#183

Post by sandGorgon »

> Create a universal packaging format for bundling software which supports signatures, weak dependencies, isolation (aka sandboxing/virtualization), clean uninstallation and standard APIs to make it possible to integrate an application with your DE.

Well this battle is lost. There was always the RPM/DEB/PKGBUILD split. But rather than unifying the standards, we now have Flatpak vs Snap split.

It is seriously frustrating that when distros can agree on core infrastructure stuff like systemd-vs-upstart and wayland-vs-mir ... we still have a software distribution split that is more political than technical.

This ultimately hurts linux - because there's never going to be that clear monopoly in the packaging space. Someone or the other is going to say "I can only package for X. All others can go figure it out themselves".

I dont know... maybe APK (android) has won as the predominant linux packaging format ? I'm kind of waiting for ChromeOS as the true Linux distro.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#184

Post by crummy »

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?

Because the "evil app" is just a specially crafted JPG that your browser opened up that triggers some edge case in the old unpatched version of Wireshark that is inspecting traffic.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#185

Post by chao- »

jaabe wrote: post #181
baroffoos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using a dell XPS 13 (one of the new ones) and it works wonderfully. I don't run windows on it so I don't have any issues with my bootloader and I saw advice on the internet to get one with no nvidia gpu so I got one with intel graphics. It really does feel like a OSX level premium feel. The only bit I am missing is fractional dpi scaling which is apparently on the way but turning on big text in accessibility mode…

Can you plug it into a 4K display or all the shitty projector type things?

At work most of our developers run Linux. The hardware mixture is Dell (XPS 13, XPS 15), some Thinkpads and two who use System76. Several of us use 4K displays, and I can't remember the last time anyone had trouble with a projector. Maybe the older XPS 15 might have, once upon a time. It has an Nvidia GPU and so I want to believe it has been flaky at least once, but I cannot recall a discrete incident. All the rest have the standard Intel graphics and everything's peachy.

Distros are all either Ubuntu LTS or Linux Mint with default DEs. I am pretty sure one fellow switches to a tiling WM some of the time, but I forget which.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#186

Post by geezerjay »

sandGorgon wrote: post #183

> Create a universal packaging format for bundling software which supports signatures, weak dependencies, isolation (aka sandboxing/virtualization), clean uninstallation and standard APIs to make it possible to integrate an application with your DE. Well this battle is lost. There was always the RPM/DEB/PKGBUILD split. But rather than unifying the standards, we now have Flatpak vs Snap split. It is seriously frustrat…

It's not a political issue if you want to force distros to move their entire packaging infrastructure to a backward incompatible format that might still not be compatible with other distros because they ship specific versions of some packages which are in addittion packaged in a very particular way.

Switching to RPM/DEB/PKGBUILD is not a simple problem, because the problem isn't really which packaging infrastructure is used.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#188

Post by geezerjay »

pjmlp wrote: post #176
ilovecaching wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That is more due to how OEMs lock out non-windows OSes from running on their hardware. If users were given a choice, the "windows tax" alone would be enough to convince people to give linux a try, particularly in the low-end segment.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#189

Post by ohazi »

baroffoos wrote: post #62
0xb100db1ade wrote: post #10

What I get out of this is that while each of these issues may be individually dismissed, they together make for a very "non-premium" experience. I use linux myself, but when people I know try it out, they immediately leave after encountering problems with audio, dpi scaling, etc

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.

If you don't want to have to think about it, the answer for laptops is to buy a thinkpad.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#190

Post by pjmlp »

peller wrote: post #120
hutzlibu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is a somewhat poor analogy, but it's sort of like a Chinese citizen (closed-source user) becoming a citizen of a democracy" I like that analogy (even though I am still looking for that pure democracy/open source government). In Linux you have the freedom to do allmost anything with the system, but you have to know what you are doing, as the system usually does not stop you, when you are about to do anything stu…

I like your expansion upon it :) I definitely do agree that "onboarding" could be improved. How I dunno. To me at least, it seems like I hear a lot of success stories from the tails of the spectrum - power users and developers on one side / the complete opposite on the other. And then for everybody in the middle, there's no other way to put it than it's almost a shit show: On the software side there a million and a h…

Still waiting for that improved AMD experience to give me back the hardware video acceleration on my Brazos APU.
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