Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange, because I can do it, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows https://chocolatey.org/
Or https://scoop.sh/
Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#52I hear what he is saying, although I haven't run into issues with applications so much. It makes you respect how much trouble Microsoft has gone to through the years.
If I've had a problem with desktop Linux, it's been on the driverish edges. Sleep behavior, printers, graphics cards, wifi, multiple monitors. That's also what seems to make OpenBSD a pain.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#53Worth watching. But if you don’t... [Linux desktop sucks because application writers don’t make binaries that “just work”, pushing the user to always just have to recompile for their system, they try and address this in the kernel by not breaking things, but the distributions to and screw it all up, because breaking is fine so long as it’s “improving”] Tons of contrary points I’m sure, but duh. It’s really nice to be…
I use Linux top to bottom in my home. My work laptop. My wife's PC. Our plex/jellyfin media server. My sister's pc and my elderly parents PC are also ubuntu. I have found my support time for all of them dramatically went down after I got them off windows. Windows slowing down over time. I longer happens, lengthening the age of hardware and pushing off OS reinstalls, which can at times cost money based on the OEM mode…
> LTS/stable distros just work, out of the box, for most people.
Do you have any source for this? I know a few people who use Linux (or used it in the past, including myself), and number of complaints is definitely a lot higher than from the people on macOS/Windows.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that there are always going to be a ton of apps that aren't in the repos. The repos contain the top hundred apps that have a million user each, but they don't contain the top million apps that have a hundred users each. The repos get you most of the way there, sure, but they can't possibly provide every app that every user wants.
Its not the right solution for everyone, but the AUR on Arch Linux has been wonderful for managing those "hundred users each" applications.
The AUR is wonderful. Ubuntu's support for PPAs comes in at a close second, though less from a tech standpoint and more because of Ubuntu's massive community. Both provide a middle ground, inbetween the ideal of the package manager (which almost always works) and the frustration of trying to build the software from source. With the AUR, someone else has resolved most of the kinks for me already, and that's time saved that I can really appreciate.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#55What he's saying is true, but also i think the app-store type approach that apt-get provides is a major benefit. With windows i have to find some random program, hope its not malware, possibly pay for it, etc. With linux, i have reasonable assurance that packages (from main repos) aren't evil, they are free (as in beer), and i can easily search through and find something for my usecase. I can't really do that in wind…
Having a system-wide package manager where nearly all libraries are dynamically linked also has its drawbacks.
A seemingly minor update might cause a huge cascade of dependency updates which causes common Linux distributions to tend to one of these two extreme solutions: Either fix all packages in place and freeze their version numbers or just "give up" and update everything all the time. Both solutions feel like compromises to me.
Other end-user OSes don't act like this. On Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, I can have the latest 3rd party software without having to deal with intrusive updates to the OS infrastructure all the time. The BSDs handle this better, and maybe something like Ubuntu LTS + Nix on top of it might be a way around this.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#56What he's saying is true, but also i think the app-store type approach that apt-get provides is a major benefit. With windows i have to find some random program, hope its not malware, possibly pay for it, etc. With linux, i have reasonable assurance that packages (from main repos) aren't evil, they are free (as in beer), and i can easily search through and find something for my usecase. I can't really do that in wind…
Strange, because I can do it, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows https://chocolatey.org/
Chocolatey is like 10x slower than Linux package management.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#57The real issue, macos has one distribution, Windows has one distribution, Linux has so many I doubt anyone really keeps track. The issue with Linux is they’re working in fragments instead of as one. The problem is oss not the operating system but the culture it was developed in.
This isn't really a bad thing. There are lot of enterprisey distros that I absolutely despise the package management and culture. If they all operated under one I can only imagine how political the whole process would be to get anything accomplished.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#58The real issue, macos has one distribution, Windows has one distribution, Linux has so many I doubt anyone really keeps track. The issue with Linux is they’re working in fragments instead of as one. The problem is oss not the operating system but the culture it was developed in.
I don't know. I understand what you are saying, but if there was just one Linux desktop it would almost certainly have to be tailored to the lowest common denominator user and it would end up just being a less polished MacOC version. The fragmentation forces some degree of interoperability which enables more specialized and innovative approaches, like tilling window managers,functional package managers, weird shell languages. In other words, the fragmentation might be an innovation and specialization enabling feature, rather than a bug.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange, because I can do it, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows https://chocolatey.org/
Chocolatey is like 10x slower than Linux package management.
Installation also happens only a handful of times per program, versus the amount of use you get out of it.
Re: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks (2014)
#60What he's saying is true, but also i think the app-store type approach that apt-get provides is a major benefit. With windows i have to find some random program, hope its not malware, possibly pay for it, etc. With linux, i have reasonable assurance that packages (from main repos) aren't evil, they are free (as in beer), and i can easily search through and find something for my usecase. I can't really do that in wind…
Strange, because I can do it, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows https://chocolatey.org/
The fact that people just listed 4 competing tools shows exactly why this is a problem:
2 of them are essentially community run, and could theoretically at any time be taken over by a hostile (or even just an incompetant) entity and be used to distribute malware. Not that this couldn't happen through an official channel, but it's certainly far less likely.
Since the software distribution is not even, I currently have to check choco, scoop and winget for updates. It's slow and irritating, and if I need to uninstall or check a package, I need to figure out which tool I installed it with.
The software that does crossover between package managers can cause compatability issues. Just today I accidentally broke Rider since I had the .NET Core runtime installed through choco, but the .NET Core SDK installed through scoop.
I get they're trying to finally fix this through WinGet, but I can't help feel it's too little, too late.