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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

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Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#341

Post by rbanffy »

sametmax wrote: post #277
michaelmrose wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't in denial people are by and large aware of the issues an average person experiences when using Linux and the resources or lack thereof available to reverse engineer an entire universe of unfriendly hardware vendors work to enable joe blow to take his $399 walmart special and install linux on it. If people want linux on the desktop to offer a more polished experience the only way about it is for everyone…

> unfriendly hardware vendors You mean people with economical pressure to be profitable ? As a Linux user, I know I represent a fraction of the market. I'm grateful when people invest in us, because I know it's a great move in principle, but it's not always one money-wise. Building hardware is HARD. Selling is HARD. Being dismissive to the people not being able to provide linux support is not going to win them to our…

> You mean people with economical pressure to be profitable ?

Selling more hardware is usually good for a hardware manufacturer. So is having fewer people returning their equipment because it doesn't work.

> not being able to provide linux support

Most kernel developers would be ecstatic just with proper documentation of the hardware being sold.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#342

Post by rbanffy »

bluedino wrote: post #280
alxlaz wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Linux since about the same time, and while I find the five-broken-implementations thing rather exhausting at times, I am more than thankful for it. It's one of the reasons why Linux (and FOSS software) is so damn useful. Just look at Windows land, where they do have one implementation to rule them all, more or less (Windows 10). Everyone who dislikes its telemetry or almost touch-only interface is eit…

I really want to know how GNOME 3 even saw the light of day, and why distros like Fedora even went with it. Unusable.

I'm using Gnome shell since the early days and, so far, I'm very happy with it. But, then, I also use macOS on my Macs and I'm very happy with them too. All of them run everything I throw at them just fine.

I find the lack of options to customize GNOME irrelevant - I'm way past the day I cared about the wallpaper or the icons or the colors of the window chrome. I pay attention to what's inside the window, not its border.

The other day I fired up a Solaris 10 VM so I could give Wikipedia a proper Solaris/CDE screenshot and I was surprised it's actually still usable - the terminals are responsive and the rest, oh well... You don't want to use a GUI to copy files, do you?

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#343

Post by rbanffy »

Animats wrote: post #191
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…

Desktop is a dying market. Actually, tablets are a dying market.[1] Laptops are a declining market. Fewer desktops are being sold, but they're lasting longer because there's no reason to replace them. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

So, as we move forward, all these desktops will end up having stable and mature support. Drivers are often lacking for bleeding edge components, but stuff that was released 3 or 5 years ago tends to be very solid unless it's something obscure nobody has ever seen.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#344

Post by sametmax »

rbanffy wrote: post #341
sametmax wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unfriendly hardware vendors You mean people with economical pressure to be profitable ? As a Linux user, I know I represent a fraction of the market. I'm grateful when people invest in us, because I know it's a great move in principle, but it's not always one money-wise. Building hardware is HARD. Selling is HARD. Being dismissive to the people not being able to provide linux support is not going to win them to our…

> You mean people with economical pressure to be profitable ? Selling more hardware is usually good for a hardware manufacturer. So is having fewer people returning their equipment because it doesn't work. > not being able to provide linux support Most kernel developers would be ecstatic just with proper documentation of the hardware being sold.

> Selling more hardware is usually good for a hardware manufacturer. So is having fewer people returning their equipment because it doesn't work.

It all depends of the ROI. In hardware the economy at scale is at play, and it doesn't go well with niches.

> Most kernel developers would be ecstatic just with proper documentation of the hardware being sold.

I agree. That's mostly a matter of culture. Many companies won't publish docs, because they are either afraid of competition, pirating, or looking stupid.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#345

Post by megous »

pjmlp wrote: post #340
megous wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't. I mean they can on their phones. But that's a tiny percentage of the total Android HW. All the big SoC vendors would have to get on board and rewrite their milions of lines of their kernel code on top of Fuchsia. Android is also not just phones, but also on tablets, tv boxes, etc. This would just cause even more fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.

Google Play Services access contract.

Threats don't magically make the port a cheap or reasonable proposition to the SoC/smartphone vendors.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#346

Post by rbanffy »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #142
darkpuma wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was surprised when I saw the newest Vega firmwares show up in my /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with a kernel update only 6 days after the release of the last AMD GPU -- and on Manjaro, where updates are supposedly delayed a little. AMD touted "day one Linux support", which I don't know if they fulfilled, but they're certainly more committed to Linux than Nvidia. Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a pr…

> price-per-performance unit standpoint

You know... If the thing doesn't work, price doesn't matter that much. I prefer something more reliable that's not as fast (I've been using Intel GPUs for many years now)

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#347

Post by pjmlp »

megous wrote: post #345
pjmlp wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Play Services access contract.

Threats don't magically make the port a cheap or reasonable proposition to the SoC/smartphone vendors.

It is a business decision, take or leave it.

I doubt very much that SoC/smartphone would bother to contribute to microG instead.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#348

Post by Const-me »

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…

> I'm sure that installing Atom and VS Code would introduce me to two more file pickers.

I’m sure they will both use the same one.

I don’t like Electron because slow and consumes too much RAM, but I have to admit they do have that unified API. It’s quite high-level, and relatively stable because there’s only a single implementation.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#349

Post by michaelmrose »

sametmax wrote: post #277
michaelmrose wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't in denial people are by and large aware of the issues an average person experiences when using Linux and the resources or lack thereof available to reverse engineer an entire universe of unfriendly hardware vendors work to enable joe blow to take his $399 walmart special and install linux on it. If people want linux on the desktop to offer a more polished experience the only way about it is for everyone…

> unfriendly hardware vendors You mean people with economical pressure to be profitable ? As a Linux user, I know I represent a fraction of the market. I'm grateful when people invest in us, because I know it's a great move in principle, but it's not always one money-wise. Building hardware is HARD. Selling is HARD. Being dismissive to the people not being able to provide linux support is not going to win them to our…

Unfriendly is assholes who ship hardware that neither follows standards nor bothers to ship with documentation. I'm not dismissing them nor will we win them over to any side because they aren't even part of the conversation they only converse with oems buying millions of units.

Re: Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

#350

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

darkpuma wrote: post #335
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't OS-level accounts, they have no (local) permissions system applied to them, they're just profiles. Regardless, I can assure you that basically nobody used them in the 90s.

I can assure you, they got a lot of use in the 90s, and they were used for exactly the same reason people still make separate accounts for their family members on their computers today. It's not about security. It's about keeping separate preferences. Your hypothesis that XP somehow forced the concept of separate accounts on regular home users because NT was used on servers is just bizarre. People who wanted separate…

> I can assure you, they got a lot of use in the 90s

Alright, maybe that's a regional thing or something. I knew of no one who did that.

Regardless, even you admit that it was not about security, so why have user accounts? Simply being able to change the profile is sufficient.

> The UX of the device that lives in your pocket needs to be different from the UX of a device that sits in the middle of your living room for the whole family to use, like a television.

I still contend that this is an incredibly tiny use-case today, precisely because mobile devices have largely supplanted the role the 'family computer' used to serve. More importantly, that use case can be served without user accounts.

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