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What killed the Linux desktop

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Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#351

Post by Shamanmuni »

seabee wrote: post #135
derleth wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools. And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.

Bad hardware/drivers are more likely to be the culprit...

When something doesn't work or works badly on Linux, the critics always say it's Linux fault (just read the comments here). Hold Windows and OS X to the same standard and you'll see they aren't so wonderful in comparison.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#352

Post by ironcladlou »

mbell wrote: post #239
cletus wrote: post #97

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy . Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out o…

Coming from the perspective of a developer: I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no,…

Your needs are strikingly similar to mine, down to the choice of apps and launcher. What I noticed after a week of full time Gnome3 Shell use was that it was similar enough to OSX (but with the niceties of a proper window manager) that I'm finding myself hooked. Makes my ThinkPad a reasonable facsimile of my MacBook from a keyboard-nav centric, "keep out of my way" perspective. I love OSX on the MacBook, but hate it when docked. Gnome Shell gives me a reasonable OSX-like Linux experience on the laptop, but with a great docked experience to match.

Can't speak to the seamless suspend/resume support, etc on your choice of hardware, and I acknowledge that if that kind of stuff doesn't work, it'd be a dealbreaker.

Just saying, Gnome3/Shell is at least worth checking out if you like the OSX workflow and use just a few apps day to day for development.

Thanks for the writeup of your experience!

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#353

Post by antihero »

ajross wrote: post #130
antihero wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for sound? I use Pulseaudio on my desktop (custom built with a M-Audio Delta 2496 Pro soundcard) and on my laptop (crappy Lenovo G575) and I don't have any problems at all. All I do is have this line in my .xinitrc: [[ -x /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 ]] && start-pulseaudio-x11 & And it works perfectly! If I want to change my volume or manage which device it outputs on, I just run pavucontrol

What distro are you using that you are having to start pulseaudio manually? I swear I thought it was default everywhere.

I'm using Arch, but this applies to any distro if you don't use a DM and instead use xinit.

I much much prefer the simplicity of only using what I at least partially understand - the more magic (ie a DM) the more shit to go wrong that you don't understand.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#354

Post by antihero »

jlgreco wrote: post #273
ajross wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distro are you using that you are having to start pulseaudio manually? I swear I thought it was default everywhere.

He might be using Arch or Gentoo, or another of the more "DIY" oriented distros. Last time I used Gentoo you still had to really go out of your way to install pulseaudio, though that was four years ago so I don't know if that has changed.

It's Arch, and it's really rather easy to install PA

  # pacman -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa
And if you're ok with having GConf installed (ugh)

  # pacman -S pavucontrol paprefs

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#355

Post by JoeAltmaier »

seabee wrote: post #135
derleth wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools. And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.

Bad hardware/drivers are more likely to be the culprit...

Sorry to hear about that.

Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X, so driver support can be difficult (Windows update helps a lot on that).

Also, are you overclocking? Using a 4-year-old motherboard? There has to be some reason for BSOD - it's not a normal condition. Not making excuses, hundreds of millions of machines run for years without doing it.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#356

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

Nux wrote: post #211

Please ignore Icaza. As for the famous death of Linux on the desktop let me tell you something: IT NEVER HAPPENED. What are those people smoking? I've been using Linux for the last decade and every year it gets better, more polished, more integrated, featuring a better design; I hear more & more people talking about it and using it. Linux is more alive than ever on the desktop! Depending on your needs, Linux can make…

The Linux desktop never did any better -- RELATIVE to the rest of the market -- than Ximian Desktop on Red Hat 6.2. If de Icaza wants to blame someone for the failure of the Linux desktop, I would point the finger back at him. He's the one that dropped out of the effort, became a Microsoft shill, and continues to push (the speciously patented) Mono to this day. Also, I don't know why he's lamenting a strong leader casting a clear vision on the desktop these days. Canonical is doing EXACTLY that.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#357

Post by sixbrx »

josephcooney wrote: post #286
hnriot wrote: post #5

Speaking as someone running a Linux desktop (and am writing this on one) there's not much to say other than I agree. I run linux because work gave me a PC and there's no way I can write software on Windows. Of course we all have servers managed off in the corporate cloud somewhere that run ssh/vnc etc, but there's no way I wanted to install putty again or miss out on the unix commands that make (work) life more enjoy…

Why is / inherently better as a path delimiter than \ ? DOS was built to be compatible with VMS and other DEC OS's, which used / as a switch character.

Because nearly every programming language uses \ as an escape, which means in string literals that you have to double escape the \ which is error prone and ugly.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#358

Post by jeremyjh »

zanny wrote: post #307
cletus wrote: post #97

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy . Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out o…

> Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? I say Mark Shuttleworth is doing this, and no one is paying attention. Unity was a unified vision, it was just different and no one wanted different. And that is fine for a new target audience he wanted for the OS, which was everyone else in the world . Look at what they are doing now, Ubuntu on tabl…

Yes but most of the people who are "leaving Ubuntu" are just switching the desktop environment or using a system downstream of Ubuntu. It makes for a lot of drama but it doesn't much hurt Ubuntu community support (which is their greatest strength, and why I use Ubuntu) because so many of the packages remain the same.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#359

Post by keeperofdakeys »

josephcooney wrote: post #286
hnriot wrote: post #5

Speaking as someone running a Linux desktop (and am writing this on one) there's not much to say other than I agree. I run linux because work gave me a PC and there's no way I can write software on Windows. Of course we all have servers managed off in the corporate cloud somewhere that run ssh/vnc etc, but there's no way I wanted to install putty again or miss out on the unix commands that make (work) life more enjoy…

Why is / inherently better as a path delimiter than \ ? DOS was built to be compatible with VMS and other DEC OS's, which used / as a switch character.

If you could arbitrarily pick any character, both are as good as each other. However '\' is currently an escaping character in nearly every program that needs such a function, so as things currently are, '/' is better. This begs the question of when '\' as an escape character became mainstream though.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#360

Post by nathanb »

jvm wrote: post #207
nathanb wrote: post #27

I think the article does a great job of explaining the problem, but doesn't explore the ramifications far enough. Let me give an example: a few months ago, a new version of Skype was announced for Linux. I was excited, since I used Skype 2 for Linux but then it stopped working for me and I couldn't be bothered to fix it. But if you go to the Skype for Linux download page, you will find a few downloads for specific di…

What distro are you running? It must be sort of out there that you're having such difficulties. I'm running Arch which is not widely supported, but user submitted build recipes (think brew on OSX but with way more options) work 95% of the time (e.g., no trouble with Skype, Spotify, etc.)

I'm running Arch as well, though I don't use the AUR. Stuff tends to crustify too much and too easily in there.
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