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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#431

Post by Animats »

If only.

Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse.

- Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box.

- Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about workarounds.

- Can't use more than half of memory before the OOM killer kicks in. The default rule of the OOM killer daemon is that if a process has more than half of memory for a minute, kill it. Rust builds get killed. Firefox gets killed. This is a huge pain on the 8GB machine. Yes, I could edit some config file and stop this, but that tends to interfere with config file updates from Ubuntu and from the GUI tools.

None of these problems existed a year ago.

Re: Linux is good now

#432

Post by eru »

nine_k wrote: post #191
threethirtytwo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.

But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%. The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guar…

> This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.

I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.

Re: Linux is good now

#433

Post by Klonoar »

MerrimanInd wrote: post #176

I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft. IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creativ…

Your entire comment could be written 20 years ago and it would just about fit perfectly.

Re: Linux is good now

#434

Post by jscyc »

abrookewood wrote: post #417
curt15 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.

Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack

Do you ever find it "updated" to the snap version? I have Ubuntu on my work laptop and every so often after an update Firefox will suddenly be the snap version and I'll have to reinstall it.

Re: Linux is good now

#435

Post by z3t4 »

kentonv wrote: post #242

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draco…

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

Re: Linux is good now

#436

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Unless one has a rack of older GPU hardware that uses an abandoned EOL NVIDIA kernel driver difficult to install past kernel 6.12.x Then one faces the harsh reality of Windows users rightfully laughing at a perpetually Beta Linux OS, as Win11 still boots with the older drivers. while the dkms build randomly implodes at some point.

People dual boot SSD OS for very good reasons, as kernel permutation is not necessarily progress in FOSS. Linux is usable by regular users these days, but "Good" is relative to your use case. YMMV =3

Re: Linux is good now

#437

Post by ryukoposting »

Daunk wrote: post #300

I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.

Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...

On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!

Re: Linux is good now

#438

Post by 1970-01-01 »

>3.2% of overall Steam users.

The success measurements are quite strange. How am I supposed to think Linux is finally good when 96.8% of users do not care to adopt it. I can't think of anything else with that high of a rejection rate. The vast majority do not consider it good enough to use over Windows.

Re: Linux is good now

#439

Post by snazz »

School-Cotton wrote: post #387
buu700 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support,…

> Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable This is an understatement. It is completely impossible to even attempt to install Linux at all on an M3 or M4, and AFAIK there have been no public reports of any progress or anyone working on it. (Maybe there are people working on it, I don’t know).

In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support. There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

Sounds like the GPU architecture changed significantly with M3. With M4 and M5, the technique for efficiently reverse-engineering drivers using a hypervisor no longer works.

Re: Linux is good now

#440

Post by semilin »

Animats wrote: post #431

If only. Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse. - Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box. - Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about…

These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.

But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.

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