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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#301

Post by i_live_there »

rbanffy wrote: post #249
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 Linux community has been in denial about this for years. That's not right. We all know support for some hardware is spotty and we all have learned to avoid that. My laptops tend to use Intel GPUs, for instance, because I want to work on them, not fix them. I'm eyeing that new Lenovo thingie with an epaper keyboard, but I know it'll run Windows and probably never be upgraded because nobody will write the drivers…

> AMD is much better in that regard. Buy AMD instead

I made that mistake... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1562530

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#302

Post by sametmax »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #283
sametmax wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope. It's still moving forward and it's still quite reliable. All my workloads run on it (except my pets that run on FreeBSD and OpenIndiana because I get a kick out of managing different OSs). That's the denial there. I'm a Linux guy. I post this from a linux distrib. But realistically, we do have a huge amount of technical debt, and less and less incentive to work on them. Case in point: every time we touch some…

If complexity's got you down, you might have better luck with OpenBSD. Coming from Linux, you'll be amazed by how simple it can be and how much of it just works. Though non-intel graphics are still shit on it afaik.

Linux has already usability issues because it's a niche. I'm not going to use a niche of a niche.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#303

Post by billfruit »

With linux, I do find that if you have a problem, finding solutions from the internet is quite easy. Some of the distributions like Arch, has very detailed documentation and active forums, and IRC channels that finding help is not difficult, unless you have some exotic setup.

OTOH, getting help for windows issues is often more difficult, if you visit windows forums, often the suggestions, solutions talked about are pretty generic, since one can't peek under the hood the amount of diagnostics possible is limited. Even if a problem solved in windows by reinstalling/restoring from backup etc, most often one does not what exactly caused the problem.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#304

Post by Tenoke »

rbanffy wrote: post #249
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 Linux community has been in denial about this for years. That's not right. We all know support for some hardware is spotty and we all have learned to avoid that. My laptops tend to use Intel GPUs, for instance, because I want to work on them, not fix them. I'm eyeing that new Lenovo thingie with an epaper keyboard, but I know it'll run Windows and probably never be upgraded because nobody will write the drivers…

>Stop buying NVidia hardware. They actively sabotage Linux development. AMD is much better in that regard. Buy AMD instead.

Sadly if you work with Deep Learning buying AMD is a surefire way to make most of the work published by others unusable without serious effort.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#305

Post by rbanffy »

i_live_there wrote: post #301
rbanffy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Linux community has been in denial about this for years. That's not right. We all know support for some hardware is spotty and we all have learned to avoid that. My laptops tend to use Intel GPUs, for instance, because I want to work on them, not fix them. I'm eyeing that new Lenovo thingie with an epaper keyboard, but I know it'll run Windows and probably never be upgraded because nobody will write the drivers…

> AMD is much better in that regard. Buy AMD instead I made that mistake... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1562530

Sorry to hear that. Is returning the machine an option?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#306

Post by syn0byte »

jmakov wrote: post #291

Switched to Windows in 2018 because of Killer WiFi card not supported on Linux. First time after 10 years I was able to suspend my laptop without having to worry it will wake up in my bag and overheat.

Linux support sucks for a high-end network card that runs the Linux kernel internally for TCP offload and acceleration?

That's some deep irony.

Their original product lines at any rate. Newer wireless models don't specify.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#307

Post by neuronic »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #19
keithnoizu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hard to enjoy the parts that work great when you have a corrupted grub boot loader, nonfunctional networking and graphic driver issues.

None of these have ever happened to me, and I started with slackware. (Maybe once around y2k a nic wasn’t supported but after waiting six months it was.)

Corrupted GRUB happened to me 7 times, so maybe we shouldn't throw around anecdotes?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#308

Post by curt15 »

pjmlp wrote: post #300
bluedino wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People saying "Linux won" because of Android would never say "Java won" which is every bit as true.

A large majority of Java developers wouldn't say "Java won" regarding Android, because it is in fact Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central.

>Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central.

Google's implementation is derived from Apache Harmony. Is the same true for Apache Harmony?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#309

Post by neuronic »

Krasnol wrote: post #257
fghtr wrote: post #230

Everyone for some reason expects that GNU/Linux should work on every hardware configuration. I don't understand that, honestly. Why is there no such requirement for MacOS? Why do Windows-certified hardware have to work flawlessly with GNU/Linux? Just buy a Desktop/Laptop certified for GNU/Linux and stop complaining.

> Why is there no such requirement for MacOS? Probably because nobody expects much from MacOS anyway? One relevant part of the Apple world is, that it works within it's narrow world of Hard- and Software. This is how they sell it. There is much much more Win-certified hardware out there. Much of it isn't used (for Win) anymore and therefore cheap as hell for excample. This is the hardware you'd expect your software t…

> One relevant part of the Apple world is, that it works

You already figured out, why people enjoy using Macs. It works and I don't need to cycle through three different system compositions before graphics, audio and WiFi work.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#310

Post by jrockway »

p2t2p wrote: post #154
jrockway wrote: post #27

I feel like a lot of the usability quirks that Linux has are trying to shoehorn a multi-user system into a single-user context. For example, there is so much work done (and even complaining in favor of doing that work in this article) to make it possible for multiple people to sit at the same computer. Nobody does that! Most people have more than one computer! Why do people spend their free time on that use case? Thi…

I dunno, I would like to be able to have a restricted account to give it to my daughter. Same for mobile device - she's too young to have her own but I would like to give her my iPad to run YT Kids for example and only that so some kind of multiuser-ness is needed but a different one. I'd say SE linux tries to achieve that but it is far from being usable.

That is orthogonal to Linux's user system, though. That model says things like "your daughter can have 25 file descriptors". It is not useful for this use case.
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