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I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

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Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#21

Post by andrewmcwatters »

prmoustache wrote: post #18

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

You'd be cut off from nearly the entire CSS and JavaScript-using World Wide Web, for one.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#23

Post by hedora »

ablob wrote: post #22
diarheadave wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Did you read the article?

Ignoring the comment you replied to, I am curious about the claim that pipewire is incompatible with the audio card.

I get that pulseaudio cannot default to using an output with speakers. This happened to me too on every single login, so I switched to pipewire, which is capable of saving settings between seessions (pulseaudio claims to support this, but it's been broken for over 10 years based on my internet searches).

I guess I got lucky that pipewire can talk to my card?

I'd expect it to be far enough up the stack where hardware compatibility wouldn't matter.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#24

Post by hedora »

chronid wrote: post #5

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better. From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security. I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

I noticed the one bright spot in the article is debian, though even that's broken for me thanks to systemd.

I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.

Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.

(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#25

Post by knighthack »

tomjuggler wrote: post #4

Yeah have to agree with everything in this article, the state of audio on Linux! And Wayland also, "not there yet" for so many years. As a sighted person I can only imagine the frustration, I too find myself writing scripts to keep things working the way I want.

I find it ridiculous how "writing scripts to keep things working the way I want" can be a source of frustration.

To me, that's a source of pleasure.

I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/

The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#26

Post by hedora »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #17

In the 2000s, a video of Nelson Mandela explaining "Ubuntu" was included in every iso[1]: "A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to…

The big commercial distros hit a common failure mode for open source projects. There's a lot of money in cloud, which means there are a lot of vendors that want to extend things in ways that make the vendors' products relevant. Those vendors end up being the ones that fund future devlopment work, so they control the direction of the ecosystem for the projects they rely on (instead of users / hobbyists / hardware vendors / etc).

So, we get stuff like Ubuntu's fleet management service and flatpak/snap instead of things that actually improve the user experience.

The whole ecosystem is this way. Look at the stuff RedHat has been shovelling. The article mentions gtk3/4, wayland and pulseaudio. I'd add systemd to the list. All of those introduced multi-decade regressions into the desktop experience. The only reason they were funded was because they force churn in smaller open source projects, killing competition from lower-resource developers, and consolidating the ecosystem in the big shops.

Heck, RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant GPL violation, but IBM throws a lot of money around, so most people just look the other way:

RedHat ships source code of GPL binaries for RHEL, but only if you pay them. The source code comes with the following restriction: If you redistribute it, they'll refuse to renew your support contract. This clearly violates the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#27

Post by hedora »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #21
prmoustache wrote: post #18

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

You'd be cut off from nearly the entire CSS and JavaScript-using World Wide Web, for one.

Put another way, as a user that prefers CLI + text mode (and stuck with DOS whenever possible for many years after installing Windows 3.0), I'd rather not start a desktop environment.

These days, there's basically no choice. Most software (even the text editor at work: VS Code) has abandoned text mode.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#28

Post by arp242 »

I tried setting up some text to speech stuff years ago, and I ended just giving up. Everything kind of worked, except when it didn't.

Linux generally works fine for everything else for me, but this is definitely not its strongest point. My general impression was that many tools were very much developed by people in their spare time, and just not having enough of it. In theory it could all work because all the bits are there, but there's no "chief of accessibility" that can patch things over in the various projects.

The flexibility and decentralisation of the Linux ecosystem is great for some less common use cases; I wrote my own WM and some other X11 tools that work a bit quirky, but works really well for me. This would be very hard to do on Windows or macOS. But for some other less common use cases ... yeah, not so great.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#29

Post by hedora »

justinrubek wrote: post #9
benoau wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "tinkered with" is the right description for using Linux as a daily driver. It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown. Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

I've found this is distro dependent. I'm happily using devuan, an even-more-conservative variant of debian, and it's rock solid.

I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.

I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#30

Post by prmoustache »

idw wrote: post #20
prmoustache wrote: post #18

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

It might help to know that blindness takes many forms. Having no sight at all is what many people assume but is not what many blind people experience. So some blind people can use accessibility tools together with the sight they do have which may for example only be in a small part of the area most people can see, or may be blurry, or otherwise impaired.

I didn't consider that indeed, thanks.
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