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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

• ninjakeyboard 11y ago
  Thanks you so much for putting a stop snowing link in. We released some christmas easer eggs without any way to turn the music off or make the snow stop and it drove everyone insane :P
  • i336_ 11y ago
    I think Arc messed up: your comment is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214, a thread about all OSes needing to die horrible deaths. I'm very curious about whatever context this comment was intended for though :D
• PaulHoule 11y ago
  This is a situation that hasn't changed much since 1996 and the story of why it hasn't changed is a lot more interesting than a large enumeration of the faults. To compare it to Windows, Windows really has evolved a lot since the bad old days. Linux beat the pants off Windows 3.1 completely. Both Win95 and WinNT were unstable -- Win2K was the first decent version of Windows. Linux 2.6 was the one really important thing that happened to Linux in all of that time because it was the first one that worked properly on multiprocessors.
  • melted 11y ago
    > Win95 and WinNT were unstable Not to worry, in my experience Win 10 is returning to its roots of being unstable. At least on laptops.
  • linuxhansl 11y ago
    That simply isn't true. The Kernel is just one aspect of a Linux distribution. The part that is most responsible for supporting H/W. It has evolved a lot since 1996. Whenever I try I find the range of supported H/W is larger than Windows and (obviously) Apple. On other fronts things have changes radically: Video, Sound, 3D/GL, GUI (KDE, Gnome), printing, etc, etc.
    • PaulHoule 11y ago
      It has all changed and it is all busted.
      • linuxhansl 11y ago
        OK... Care to elaborate? Are/were you using a Linux distribution yourself? Or are you just parroting what you hear elsewhere?
• _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
  Main problems is still apps. After 15years with OS X I'm more or less fed up with Apple for various reasons (some bad hardware, crashing and buggy OS, ...). But what keeps me are the apps, like Lightroom, Omnigraffle, Sketch, Scrivener, ... - without them I'd use Linux.
• jacob019 11y ago
  As a daily user of Linux on the desktop for over 15 years, I can appreciate many of these complaints, but despite it's flaws Linux on the desktop is a pleasure to use and is better than any other options. This is a nice resource for kernel developers and OSS contributors who wish to make a difference and solve tough problems.
  • pera 11y ago
    Same here: started using Linux in 2000. Back then hardware support was a real big issue, software was missing, graphical environments for normal people not completely ready, etc. I think things really started to change after Ubuntu, and I would say that Linux got "ready for desktop" around 2008-9. My parents for instance have been using Ubuntu for many years (they also have a windows 7 laptop that is completely owned by malware) and they are very happy with it. Things changed a lot, but yeah, Linux isn't perfect yet, and I agree with some points (for instance the dpi thing). The only way that Linux could be massively used on desktop is by having a company like Microsoft making deals with every single manufacturer in the world for decades.
    • Ologn 11y ago
      This has been my experience as well. I started using Linux some time around 1993-1995. Linux was inferior to FreeBSD in many ways back then (and for the following few years). Things got better and better and by 2008 it was a lot better on the desktop, and I think Ubuntu gets a lot of credit for that. It still had some trouble with wireless drivers and that sort of thing, but all these problems started clearing up over time.
  • the_af 11y ago
    Same here. I'm so used to Ubuntu that Windows annoys me tremendously, which goes to show that a huge part of the user experience is familiarity with the environment. In my experience some things work better on Ubuntu than on the last Windows version I used, Windows 7. Detection of wireless HP printers, for example. Some things are exactly the same. Finally, some things work slightly worse: drivers for 3D gaming are still a bit worse on Ubuntu (unless you luck out and find the one driver that runs wonderfully and doesn't require any magical incantations), and configuring everything to work just right with some games can still be a pain. Less demanding games are just fine, and I use my Linux laptop a lot for this (heavy user of GOG.com, Humble Bundle and Steam here!). The jury is out on OS X for me. Using my wife's macbook drives me nut, mostly due to lack of familiarity. Some things are just as bizarre as with any Linux/Windows computer; for example, the other day I was advised to hard-reset the macbook because it wouldn't recognize any USB device... if this nice bit of WTF-ery had happened with Linux, the response would have been "what did you expect? Nothing 'just works' with Linux". But I guess computers will be computers regardless of the OS...
• jjuhl 11y ago
  To me this reads as "I can't use hardware xyz on linux". Well, that's no surprise. There's "wxy" hardware that you can't use with Windows or OS X as well. Today Linux supports the same amount (or more) hardware that Windows does. Hardware support is not a reason to use or not use Linux. The software ecosystem is much more important - not to mention the freedom aspect...
  • lvs 11y ago
    No, there's no consumer-level desktop hardware you can't use on either Windows or OS X or both. That's false. Hardware support is indeed a reason not to use Linux, but the question is who needs to pick up the slack. With other operating systems, manufacturers put (more or less) effort into writing device drivers that are functional. With Linux, they really do not. It's a large and moving target, and the market value of doing so is not clear to them.
    • xioxox 11y ago
      Really? There's plenty of old hardware which no longer works in recent Windows versions. It's not in a manufacture's interest to update a driver to recent OS versions. In Linux drivers usually remain for a long time.
      • ethbro 11y ago
        Example: Sony VIAO laptops http://esupport.sony.com/LA/perl/os10upgrade.pl?stage1=24&stage2=113&stage3=VGN-S450FP&month=&day=&year=&mdl=VGN-S450FP http://esupport.sony.com/LA/perl/os10upgrade.pl?stage1=24&st... "IMPORTANT: Drivers for other hardware components such as Network cards, etc..., may be available on the manufacturer's web site. Sony software applications that originally shipped with the computer may not work after installing Windows 10. Sony cannot guarantee your system capability after installing Windows 10." Had a friend with this. Sony sold division to some other corporation. Which leaves Win10 qualified drivers for such optional things as, oh, WIRELESS NETWORKING in limbo after a Win10 upgrade. Sure, you or I would pull the wifi card model, go to the manufacturer's site, and use the drivers from there. But Joe, Sally, Bob, or Jane public aren't going to get past "Wifi stopped working, and it wasn't on the update screen".
• deleted 11y ago
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• crgabrieljr 11y ago
  Tried double-tapping in the article text to get it to reflow, and got one of those bogus popups claiming my phone is infected with a virus. Thanks for trying to make my new year interesting. :-(
  • jschwartzi 11y ago
    Me too. I can't read the article at all because of it.
  • BlakePetersen 11y ago
    Mine was 'You were selected! Click OK to claim blah blah!'
  • jupiter90000 11y ago
    This happens to me as soon as I enter the website on my mobile. Get forwarded to one of those websites. Although I'm not sure why I want to read yet another person complain about Linux anyway, when I find it is excellent for certain purposes.
  • astazangasta 11y ago
    Yeah, is this considered acceptable in today's world? I goto your site and get attacked by your ad service?
  • bobajeff 11y ago
    Me too: my response was a) f@#$ this article/website and b) f@#$ Chrome for allowing websites access to the phones vibration and message pop-up window and C) closes Chrome
  • LeoPanthera 11y ago
    The site auto-redirected to malware for me. Didn't have to click anything.
  • enobrev 11y ago
    Happened to me using Hacker News 2 on Android, which made the "Malware Warning" popup show over the HN comments. Tried a few different ways to actually read the article, since the conversation was interesting, but in the end, just gave up and figured I'd read it later on my desktop.
• edtechdev 11y ago
  I've been using Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS since 2006, and I can't disagree with many of the annoyances. Especially with regards to graphics drivers and the switch to the Unity desktop. I tried Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop and it is nicer, but couldn't commit to it I guess. But everytime I use Windows and Macs again, I get even more annoyed. Mainly with how slow things are. Even on a new Windows 10 desktop or laptop, it's not uncommon to have to wait minutes for things to settle down after booting and logging in, or waiting while updates are installed during startup or shutdown. And on OS X, the spinning beachball was one of the main reasons why I stopped macs for the most part in 2002 or so. I figured it was just a byproduct of OS X still being early in development and computers not being fast enough or having enough RAM. But no, everytime I try a brand new mac, it still pops up, especially when trying to type in a URL or something like that. The bouncing in the dock and not knowing if an app is running or shutdown or not is annoying, too. But as long as you keep your stuff backed up or in the cloud (like google drive, google music, etc.), and stick mostly to stuff that works cross-platform (Chrome browser, Libreoffice, cross-platform IDEs, etc.), it's very painless to switch being OS's or devices or to wipe and reinstall things. Even Microsoft Word and Excel work in the browser nowadays, though I still usually just stick with Google Docs.
  • zitterbewegung 11y ago
    I have my things backed up on the cloud and I used linux for awhile for my development system. Apparently for MacBooks there is something screwed up with ACPI so that it won't suspend correctly. Also, every time I would run out of battery the system would have problems booting up. Eventually I went back to Mac OS X after running the computer out of battery and then having it unable to start.
  • eropple 11y ago
    FWIW -- I have my own complaints about OS X (a lot of them), but I can't remember the last time I got beachballed, certainly not something like typing a URL.
    • geggam 11y ago
      The entry level mac mini is terrible and beach balls surfing. I am surprised they sell it. ( cant upgrade the memory either )
• bkor 11y ago
  The website is hard to read on mobile because it is wider than my screen. Bit unfortunate. Regarding VA-API: Since gstreamer-vaapi 0.7.0, Totem finally works with VA-API. Before only MPV worked. IMO if you used mplayer you better just switch to mpv. It still doesn't work perfectly in VLC, though AFAIK VA-API should be built in. In my experience filing bugs was enough to get improvements. Once it works well enough distributions should install it by default. IMO it pretty reasonable to achieve "va-api installed by default" for major distributions during 2016 provided enough people put their time in. Heard that gstreamer-vaapi will be merged into gstreamer itself, so that'll help a lot as well. Regarding laptop support: Canonical seems to do a lot in this area. Testing Ubuntu and adding (upstreaming) workarounds/quirks to e.g. the kernel. Some problematic items I wasn't aware of (good to have this list). E.g. font anti aliasing. Stuff like that is why freedesktop.org started, to have a way to agree on such things. At least for some of the items on this list I have the idea that I can help to improve. Some items seems impossible. Still, just a little bit of effort can help a lot. Often I spend less than 30min to get improvements (though mostly thanks to actual paid developers putting in their effort). Edit: The site should remove the swearing. You can be explicit in your disagreement without needing to swear.
  • zanny 11y ago
    Up until fairly recently I had a number of issues with VLC and vaapi / vdpau, but now it all seems to work well. I even have working accelerated video in Chromium by removing the GPU blacklist and it works fine. The only things missing now on the video front for Linux is good encoder support, but I can get that right now with ffmpeg - its just missing in a lot of capture software. Though we really should all converge to openmax at some point. Like, all encode / decode with openmax in the future. It just makes bloody sense.
• jcastro 11y ago
  This "Android is not Linux" meme is pretty silly. "Android contains the only Linux component - the kernel" can also describe any distribution/OS using Linux.
  • timdiggerm 11y ago
    Shouldn't it be "Android is not GNU/Linux"? Then it'd be true.
  • pjmlp 11y ago
    Google could replace Linux with any POSIX kernel and only OEMs and NDK users that use unofficial APIs would notice.
  • izacus 11y ago
    So how does classifying Android as being Linux help anyone? Who does that definition help? The most important drivers (video, camera) aren't compatible with desktop, userspace isn't either, most binaries won't work properly due to use of libbionic, etc. So what kind of useful definition is "Android is Linux" when you can't really reuse any Android components on desktop Linux distributions?
    • jcastro 11y ago
      It's just completely arbitrary. Other than "It uses a linux kernel" there's no list anywhere of what makes something "a real Linux". Everything around the kernel is a pile of reusable components that make up an operating system. As far as I can tell there's no gatekeeper that says "Tool A in combination with the kernel is a real linux, but android components don't count." And no one could be that gatekeeper because Free Software lets people use what they want. So who draws that line? This is a list of complaints of what happens when putting certain blocks that make an OS not work like a cohesive whole. One vendor (Android) decided to use an entirely different set a blocks (as is their right), and then people are like "Well that doesn't count." How does it not count? If you don't like the set of blocks that are out there you make your own blocks, that seems to be a fundamental point of using OSS in the first place, the right to say "I want to use different blocks". It's not any less a Linux than my Ubuntu machine or my Nest thermostat or whatever flavor is on my router.
• ishbits 11y ago
  I've been using Linux on the desktop daily since about 1998. It may look a little prettier today, but I find it crashes and freezes a whole lot more these days.
  • massysett 11y ago
    In my experience the kernel and drivers are better than ever, but the desktops are awful and have grown worse. When KDE 4 came out I went to simple window managers like i3 and fvwm. These are extremely stable but things as simple as looking at photos in file manager are painful, and forgetting how to change the clock when I fly to a new timezone is frustrating.
    • workitout 11y ago
      Unity, like it or not, is quite stable.
  • at-fates-hands 11y ago
    This is surprising to me. I do most of my web development on Linux Mint and crashes are rare - like Sasquatch rare. I've also used: Mandriva Unbuntu 14 Slackware And had the same near-perfect performance with those distros as well. I was always told one of the great advantages with Linux is how stable it is and for the last decade or so, I've found that to be true. Now I'm curious to know what you're doing to make your OS crash so much.
  • workitout 11y ago
    I have run Ubuntu and RedHat on multiple hardware, Desktop, not just server, dozens of machines the past 10 years. Freezing on all those hardware combinations was never a problem. Crashing was absolutely never a problem.
• condescendence 11y ago
  I don't get articles like these. First of all this website is worse than any OS environment I've ever used. So right from that standpoint I sorta gulped a bit before reading on. Graphics driver issues in linux are nothing new, Nvidia a few years back started officially porting drivers to linux but that doesn't solve all the problems. There's also projects like Nouveau; so if you're complaining about linux desktop from a drivers standpoint....get in line. As for the Windows issues: >Windows boot problems are often fatal and unsolvable unless you reinstall from scratch Someone has never used Hirens boot disk >no system wide update mechanism wat >no enforced file system and registry hierarchy wat >Android is not Linux (besides have you seen anyone running Android on their desktop or laptop?) Actually yes I have, I have it running on mine now. Android-x86 Project. At first I'll agree Android was not linux, there were some major differences but these have since been changed. I'm sorry if this is nitpicking the post but my I don't understand how these make it to the top of HN
  • izacus 11y ago
    It's a single location summary of things that still have to be done / are lacking in the project. It's thus useful for contributors to see what needs work, since it's easy to get tunnel vision when working on a project. Don't you have such yearly reviews on your long-running projects?
    • condescendence 11y ago
      Contributors of distributions already have their goals and and sights set. Everyone knows these issues of linux, they've been ongoing for years. This list has been compiled many times, that's why I'm so harsh to it. It's literally as if someone just copied ans pasted. This is a direct copy from wikipedia: __________________________________________ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux Critics of Linux on the desktop have frequently argued that a lack of top-selling video games on the platform holds adoption back. As of September 2015, the Steam gaming service has 1,500 games available on Linux, compared to 2,323 games for Mac and 6,500 Windows games.[14][15][16] As a desktop operating system, Linux has been criticized on a number of fronts, including: A confusing number of choices of distributions, and desktop environments. Audio handling, particularly before PulseAudio became stable and widely supported. Poor open source support for some hardware, in particular drivers for 3D graphics chips, where manufacturers were unwilling to provide full specifications.[17] As a result, many video drivers have both open and closed source versions. Lack of widely used commercial applications (such as Adobe Photoshop[18] and Microsoft Word).[19][20] Lack of standardization regarding GUI API.[19] _________________________________________ Notice the things he complained about, and the things that have been edited in there for years are the exact same.
• deleted 11y ago
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• kuschku 11y ago
  #25 is wrong: > There are no antiviruses or similar software for Linux. Say, you want to install new software which is not included by your distro - currently there's no way to check if it's malicious or not. http://www.eset.com/int/home/products/antivirus-linux/ http://www.eset.com/int/home/products/antivirus-linux/
  • amluto 11y ago
    Considering that most Windows AV products appear to be remotely exploitable and to actively install malware-like things, I think the lack of Linux support for these tools is a good thing.
• Zigurd 11y ago
  My usage patterns is close to "Chromebook + Android Studio" The rest is occasional use of Eclipse, Libre Office, a smattering of command line utilities, mainly for internet information (e.g. dig). I'm not a gamer. So Windows holds no attraction, and I dislike the effort needed to secure it against Microsoft and evildoers getting at my critical data. I bought a dead MBP on a lark and will get it fixed to see if I like MacOS X better. But despite ubuntu developing rather slowly, I'm not so discontented as to leave.
• melted 11y ago
  I don't know about this article. I bough a 3rd gen Thinkpad Carbon earlier this year and Ubuntu runs better than Windows 10 on it. Not a single crash. The only thing that doesn't work out of the box is the fingerprint reader. Not that it doesn't have some rough edges, but this is enormous progress compared to just a few years ago, and the fact that it runs better than the OS _the laptop was designed for_ is a testament to that.
  • izacus 11y ago
    Your single laptop datapoint sure makes this article invalid :)
    • melted 11y ago
      The article is just as data free as my single data point. My experience contradicts it. I use Linux _everywhere_ these days, on the desktop, on the laptop, and on my workstation at work. It works well. It's just not Windows, which seems to be the author's main consternation.
      • ksk 11y ago
        >The article is just as data free as my single data point. It is not. The lack of a crash does not indicate lack of bugs. But, even a single crash confirms that bugs exist. (modulo the obvious)
      • twblalock 11y ago
        >The article is just as data free as my single data point. No it isn't. The article contains links that confirm most of the problems it mentions. The problems may not affect you, but they definitely exist, and you can't dismiss them just because your laptop works properly.
    • rodelrod 11y ago
      I add multiple data points in the form of an X32, a X61, an R61i, an X200 and a X220 all running Ubuntu perfectly. The only real problem is running Windows or Mac software which is always doable but somewhat clunky under Wine or in VMs. If Adobe and a couple others made linux versions of their software and Lenovo stopped messing around with their Thinkpads, the laptop issue would be solved forever.
• keithpeter 11y ago
  At home: Older Thinkpad (x220) with ssd. Slackware 14.1/Microlinux desktop. Seems to work OK. Noticed no mention of xfce in the OA. At work: Dual core atom small form factor PC. Large and bright 19" monitor (I swapped for an 1280x1024 one as I don't like letterbox format monitors). Windows 10 for Education works OK and has stable graphics drivers for the PC. I suspect my use cases are so basic any reasonable system would cover them.
• chx 11y ago
  I have one more which this article doesn't mention: Bluetooth. It's an extremely fragile house of cards (as far as I can figure, there are a few kernel modules, dbus, a bluetooth daemon and pulseaudio involved) and every upgrade you roll is extremely risky. Currently my BT works but after a day or so uptime it will simply stop working and nothing short of reboot helps. (More https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 here) And yes, I have been running Linux since before there was 1.0. And no, I don't like it. But the alternatives are even worse IMO.
  • cataphract 11y ago
    Bluetooth is a complete mess. Every new bluez version breaks backwards compatibility (all applications depending on it break!) and removes features.
  • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    I constantly battle Bluetooth issues on every platform. It sucks and needs to die.
    • copperx 11y ago
      This is true even on my Mac with wireless Apple accessories. Pairing issues galore if I have to change the batteries.
  • tadfisher 11y ago
    I solved it and all of my wireless-networking issues by installing Intel wireless cards in all of my computers. Broadcom and Atheros have always given me problems.
    • chx 11y ago
      Does Intel make USB bluetooth sticks? If my laptop didn't come with a combo miniPCIe card I doubt the necessary antenna is there. In a desktop, I looked for mPCIe - PCIe x1 adapters with lots of antennas but I can't really find any in low profile. So... how did you do that?
• rusbus 11y ago
  On Android this link seems to go to a malware site. Anyone else see that?
  • enobrev 11y ago
    I had the same problem. I tried three different ways of getting into the link (copy link to chrome, googling link, and of course from here) with the same spammy popups. Ended up emailing the article to myself so I could read if from my desktop.
• sandGorgon 11y ago
  I don't understand - I never see a mention of the biggest annoyance to developers on linux : consistent copy paste. It is a cognitive exercise to copy from the terminal or paste to the browser...or (the horror) copy from the terminal and paste on vim. It does not help that this works beautifully on the Mac. Is this not an annoyance to anyone else...and more importantly, considering all distros are now using libinput,can I compile my own libinput that will universally copy paste using win+c ?
  • takhn 11y ago
    ctrl-shift-C on the terminal, ctrl-V on everything else. How is this a significant annoyance to you?
  • aerique 11y ago
    Oh, this was an annoyance until I installed a clipboard manager (parcellite in my case) which automatically syncs the different clipboards.
    • sandGorgon 11y ago
      But how do you paste? I mean I have all sort of keymaps to enable paste in vim using CUA (shift-insert), but try explaining that to a first time user. Its the small things that OSX does right.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        Why would you need keymaps? As far as I know, the terminal emulator (urxvt in my case) takes care of pasting the text into Vim. I never had to configure anything to use shift-insert or the wheel button to paste.
        • sandGorgon 11y ago
          ahh.. I see. s/vim/gvim/g
      • EdiX 11y ago
• Animats 11y ago
  He's right. Many of the driver problems come from the fact that Linux finally worked on the desktop about the time desktop machines were replaced by laptops. Desktops with slots tended to have relatively well-defined hardware, and plugging in third party hardware was normal. This is much less true for laptops. OS development for laptops requires that laptop. It needs a Q/A organization which has one of everything you support. Linux lacks that. Microsoft got drivers under control with the Static Driver Verifier, which uses automatic formal proofs of correctness to determine whether a driver can crash the kernel. (The driver may not control the device correctly, but at least it won't blither over kernel memory or make a kernel API call with bogus parameters. So driver bugs just mean a device doesn't work, and you know which device and driver.) All signed Windows drivers since Windows 7 have passed that. This has eliminated most system crashes caused by drivers. Before that, more than half of Windows crashes were driver related. Linux has no comparable technology. The monolithic Linux kernel is just too big. What is it now, 20,000,000 lines? There's no hope of debugging that. It shows.
  • dman 11y ago
    Is Tanenbaum going to have the last laugh?
    • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Tanenbaum was vindicated two decades ago, but most people have yet to get the memo. A lot are under the impression that basic software design principles apply to everything besides operating system kernels, for some reason. And the myth is highly persistent.
      • ris 11y ago
        It's quite telling though that most microkernel proponents tend not to be kernel developers.
        • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
          Right, because most Linux proponents are kernel hackers. It's quite telling that you have no leg to stand on but to resort to hapless diversions. Or I suppose the flood of researchers who have built viable and innovative microkernel-based architectures throughout the decades are all a bunch of phonies?
• zanny 11y ago
  When you think Gnome, you probably think Fedora. Fedora and Gnome are buddy-buddy, and being basically the upstream of RHEL makes it the place to be if you are big on Gnome. KDE has Kubuntu, kind of, since its sponsored by Blue Systems, but there is a huge issue with how KDE is presented to users in that the Ubuntu release cycle has no correlation to the KDE one, and since Plasma 5 has started shipping in Kubuntu that problem has become a catastrophic deal breaker. The KDE community made a great move by breaking up the release cycles of frameworks / plasma / applications, but Ubuntu itself does not care - which lead to releases like 15.04, where 5.2 was shipped despite 5.3 coming out the same week and being significantly more stable, but Kubuntu users would never see that release until 6 months later. Now, 5.5 is out a few months after 15.10, and again a much more stable release won't see Kubuntu until April of next year. I'm pretty high on the KDE koolaid, and contribute a lot to the project, and it is the most painful experience to know there is no actual answer to the question of what distro I should be recommending to people for a KDE experience. A sane KDE distro should be shipping these new updates after a testing period - all at once, preferably, I use Arch mainly but its release model also conflicts with KDEs since - for example - 5.5 came out developed against upstream Frameworks which eventually released weeks later as 5.17 (frameworks are released monthly), but 5.5 with 5.16 was broken as hell. Applications 15.12 came out weeks later after that, and were a seamless upgrade because they were also developed against the same Frameworks version, but they were already available and thus everything went swimmingly. Fundamentally my point is that I imagine despite Fedora and Gnomes friendliness, the problem happens there too. It doesn't hurt that software availability on Fedora is awful and it is not presented at all as a consumer desktop since its more of a test bed for RHEL. Distros today are shipping around either fixed releases - that because of the fragmentation of the ecosystem nobody is targeting upstream - or around arbitrary goals, which can be years of waiting (cough, Suse, Fedora). But on the flipside an average user almost certainly does not want a fully rolling release like Arch, because breakage in Arch often doesn't stop a package from being pushed to release (and often those bugs are missed because Arch doesn't have enough users of testing to catch everything) and the constant churn means your system only works precariously in its current configuration - trying to roll back anything on Arch is insanely hard, because everything is built against the latest and greatest of everything else. Thus, there remains significant value in releasing updates at once. What I really wish we had was Kubuntu, sponsored by Blue Systems, just with updated userspace software on a regular basis (feel free to freeze the LTS, or even have two repos at install - frozen or not) This problem is mentioned in the OP, but it can be soul crushing for a developer in this purgatory because your fixes and improvements may not see the light of day for almost a year or more. Personally I'd love to see an Arch derivative (since it has IMO the least age rot and bloat of modern distros, cough Suse /etc/init.d after having systemd for years) that just did frozen monthly releases. You release, you wait two weeks, you freeze, you test, you release again all at once. Users get latest and greatest but you can also hold back anything broken until its unbroken. But that kind of commitment requires work, the kind of work you cannot just throw on hobbyists and hope gets done, the kind that needs salaries and business. I still wonder why there isn't any commercial presence of full stack computer vendors of Gnome / KDE - boutique vendors that ship distros running non-Ubuntu that then use their revenue to develop it. That was a lot of typing, but just some anecdotal remarks: Linux grsec is the greatest security project ever, and nobody supports it. Selinux / Apparmor / Tomoyo are all trash by comparison, and Arch's stock kernel doesn't even have MAC at all. It is also probably the greatest notch in Linux's belt over Windows that it can be objectively secure, when you actually care about security cough Wayland. There is a distro I see in my dreams that has secure packages, user repositories, and PAX enforcement to prevent malware from accessing anything but its own personal .config file and .share directory. Users can install their own packages rather than having to install them systemwide, but the package manager is smart enough to promote software installed by multiple users to a shared hierarchy rather than duplicating space usage. And the filesystem layout makes sense (/usr...). xdg-app is supposed to be this pancea that saves the desktop from application fragmentation. It should give us sandboxing, appstream metadata dependencies so we don't need insane duplication of all the system libraries like in click packages, and a puppy. Lets see if that ever happens. Audio will never get better. Just use pulseaudio and fix it where you can. I'm working on improving plasma-pa for KDE right now to make it more like the old Veromix widget (which was great). It already does its job of catching ALSA applications that would try to steal the soundcard, and rather than try to throw away all the work that went into it we just need to make it suck less.
• rifung 11y ago
  So is there anything that a normal developer could do to help fix these issues? After all, isn't one of the points of OSS that we should be able to mess with it and change it to our liking? Or, am I correct in assuming that Linux has gotten so big and complex it'd be unreasonable to expect your average developer to be able to make a meaningful contribution? I really enjoy using Linux, but I'll admit I still barely understand anything about it after using it for several years and it isn't from a lack of interest or trying.
• belleandsebasti 11y ago
  I agree with all the points here. Despite all of this, Linux is still my preferred desktop. Why? The power! I can literally do anything with it. Including writing my own drivers/applications. Linux is my go to for doing things with zero crap. The same can't be said for Windows nor Mac. For me, this pro weighs very close to all of the cons I have experienced, experience daily, or will experience. Also as a desktop Linux user since 2002, it has gotten a lot better. Xrandr and pulseaudio apt-get are good examples of this, despite their design criticisms. Of the things he listed, the things I would like to see most: * application-level Sandboxing * stable and universal high level application API, like Win32/GDI32/DirectX or Cocoa. GTK2+/Xlib/Xwhatever really dropped the ball here. An API that not only assumes a file system, or additionally a graphics system, but an all-encompassing desktop. * stable and universal application packaging
  • Const-me 11y ago
    “same can't be said for Windows” is subjective. I can do literally anything with my Windows. Including writing my own drivers/applications. And I can’t say the same about Linux. Not because that's impossible, but because I ain't a Linux developer.
    • belleandsebasti 11y ago
      Yeah that's fair. Though I think there is more of an abundance of open source code on Linux that I can build off of and use freely. Windows utilities are usually closed source, hence not easily extendable.
• agentultra 11y ago
  I stopped using Linux as my primary desktop OS around 2012. Until then I was an Arch user with my own desktop environment built on StumpWM and a hodge-podge of hand-selected tools. There was no Gnome or KDE in my setup. I liked it quite a bit. I used Ubuntu on my laptops since I wanted to spend less time administering drivers and arcane configuration formats. This is a good list. I just got tired of the configuration formats, crappy drivers, inconsistencies, dependencies... I was irritated at how easy it was for Apple users to plug in a projector and have it just work. I was irritated by every update to some random library that would cause a sub-system to stop working. I hated having to spend any amount of time administering my desktop environment. To me it should just work and the less time I have to spend trawling forums, logs, and restarting processes to find the correct incantations of dependencies and configuration variables the better. I've stuck with my MacPro Retina, despite my early trepidation about a GUI-driven proprietary OS, because I've spent probably less than an hour in the last 4 years administering it. It's still snappy and works as well as it did on day one (also the hardware is nothing short of amazing). The only thing that sucks at this point is that the OpenGL drivers Apple ships are woefully out of date and I'm thinking of jumping to Windows unless something changes (damnit I wants me compute shaders). I still use Linux every single day... just in a VM, container, or on some server.
  • agentultra 11y ago
    Oh... and integration with my devices too. I use hand-off to take calls from my phone on my MBPr all the time. I also use the Keynote app on my phone which controls the application on my laptop. The sync features I don't use as much only because I trust their cloud about as far as I can throw it. I don't remember Bluetooth or any device integration working well or at all on any Linux distro I've tried. Maybe that has changed but that kind of stuff is nice!
  • pera 11y ago
    from StumpWM to OSX? ouch
    • agentultra 11y ago
      I was not happy at first. :)
• pcwalton 11y ago
  > X.org 2D acceleration technologies and APIs aren't as mature and fast as Direct2D and DirectWrite in Windows. This complaint is confused. X is the wrong place for that stuff (the failure of XRender to live up to expectations being a testament to this). The windowing server should be multiplexing GPU buffers and that's it. Direct2D and DirectWrite are user mode, client side libraries on Windows. (Maybe the author has them confused with the legacy GDI, which lives in the kernel?) What this should say is that Skia-GL/Ganesh and Cairo-GL, which are the open source Direct2D competitors, are not at performance parity with Direct2D. I've heard this in the past, though I don't know how accurate it is anymore. Thanks to the work of Google, which depends on Skia-GL for Chrome and Android, it's made rapid progress lately. In fact, in my experience, Skia-GL is basically at performance parity with CG::OGL (i.e. the Mac/iOS 2D rendering backend)—so if the Mac is your benchmark, Linux has caught up there, if you use the latest Skia and configure it properly. Very few Linux desktop apps use Skia-GL in practice, though, which is a separate, and unfortunate, issue. (Finally, I should mention that Direct2D and its competitors constitute a really low bar if you compare to the actual state of the art in GPU vector graphics, which is stuff like Scaleform.)
  • pcwalton 11y ago
    Oh, here's another I noticed: > Year 2015 welcomed us with 134 vulnerabilities in one package alone: WebKitGTK+ WSA-2015-0002. More eyes, less vulnerabilities you say, right? Glancing through the list that was linked to, most of these vulnerabilities affected Chrome on Windows/Mac and/or Safari on Mac too. It's not fair to use general vulnerabilities in widely used Web browser engines as an indictment of Linux specifically. Nor is "look at the number of vulnerabilities in Web browser engines!" a particularly good proxy for anything other than how popular, and security-critical, Web browser engines are. (Some of the other security criticisms, for example of X, seem fair though—e.g. DRI2 is really bad.)
• mixmastamyk 11y ago
  It's true it has a lot of issues. However, I just installed Ubuntu Mate and it is pretty damn decent. GUI is robust and sleep/suspend works perfectly. Imagine a world where the Gnome3/Unity disaster didn't happen, and we'd be a lot better off on the desktop, as the last five years effort could have been directed to polish instead of reinvention, CADT style. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
• craftkiller 11y ago
  Hopefully the author is reading this: fix your ads! I can't even read 1 sentence on an android phone before your ads do full page redirects to spam. Completely unusable.
  • marcoperaza 11y ago
    Same problem here on a Windows Phone.
  • Paul_S 11y ago
    Not to excuse the owner but a friendly tip - use adblocking (Android uses a hosts file too!). Also helps with the rest of the Internet.
    • craftkiller 11y ago
      I've considered it before, but I've been avoiding using it on my phone out of some sense of social obligation. After my experience with this site, I think you're right and its time for me to put on ad blocking on mobile also. Its really a shame that a few irresponsible websites have to ruin it for everyone.
• msimpson 11y ago
  It's not like this guy is biased. He's just thorough and I appreciate that. See more: http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/best-linux-distro-this-year.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/best-linux-distro-this-year.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-iphones-and-ipads-suck.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-iphones-and-ipads-suck.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-android-sucks.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-android-sucks.html
  • clebio 11y ago
    Gotta say I agree with the basic gist (certainly haven't read this very long, excellently-detailed article yet), and I've run linux as my primary OS on various ultrabooks for the past sereral years. Just skimming, I found this bit on-point and amusing: > It's worth noting that the most vocal participants of the Open Source community are extremely bitchy and overly idealistic people peremptorily requiring everything to be open source and free or it has no right to exist at all in Linux.
    • msimpson 11y ago
      I must not be a vocal participant of Linux, then. Adobe! Shut up and take my money, already!
• acomjean 11y ago
  Linux has gotten much better. I say this as someone who booted and ran some software on desktop fedora machine from 3 years ago this year (long story, but that machine has working custom software, not rewriting this year...). Despite all the complaints, Desktop linux still remarkably better than it was just 3 years ago. That machine was almost unusable. Setting up the network on that machine was a couple hour ordeal. All the little fiddly parts that kinda work most of the time don't make for a great desktop experience. The server experience is exceptional however (I spent enough time on Solaris and HPUX to not miss those two at all)
• linuxhansl 11y ago
  Hmm... I use Fedora (and have been for many few years) and have experience none (or _very_ few) of these problems. In the past (5 or more years ago) there have been problems, and I had to tweak things a lot, compile projects myself, etc. With every release I had to do less of that, and the past years or two everything just works. Seems the article is outdated. Video: Just works. No tearing at all, automatically uses H/W decoding. External monitors just work. Resolution is automatically adjusted. 3D/GL: just works. Both Intel and NVIDIA (use Intel most of the time and simply start games with "optirun") I do not play the latest games. For that I use a Playstation/XBox. Sound: just works. Local speaker, bluetooth external speakers, all just works. GUI: Despite X11 being old it works remarkably well. I use GL compositions for desktop effects. KDE works flawlessly. Printing: Just works. When I got a new network printer KDE found it, asked me whether I wanted to use it, then downloaded the driver and asked to print a test page. That's it. And on top of this Linux enables me to always know what's going on when needed. I can drop back to a shell at any time and everything is accessible that way. I also have a MacBook Pro from work. I have _way_ more problems with that one. Random hangs with the (admittedly pretty) spinning color wheel. It did not recognize my network printer. I had to tell it the IP address, find a driver myself, install that, and then play around for a bit until it finally worked. Now I do a fair bit of software engineering on my machines, and so I might not notice the non-obvious things I do anymore. I also have the full development chain easily at my fingertips completely for free. And I might very well be biased, since Linux is what I am used to. Edit: Spelling
• ris 11y ago
  As a full-time "linux desktop" (whatever that is) user, all of these problems pain me. But of course the truth is that no other system "just works" either, so it's not as though it's unique. (We have an office full of Macintoshes which cause people endless trouble, so don't go there...) I do feel that the "linux desktop" has regressed slightly in the last few years however. My transition from a debian wheezy to debian jessie desktop certainly felt like going backwards. GTK3-ified applications have significant focus and scrollwheel problems. KDE4 appeared to have reached a peak of maturity around 4.7/4.8 - jessie's now has notifications that steal focus. Akonadi/kmail2 has made what used to be one of my favourite applications essentially unusable. NetworkManager continues to baffle as ever. Systemd/journald, well, it's mostly that I'm not particularly used to them yet, and so tracking down problems requires grappling with a bunch of new concepts every time there is trouble. It's a chore occasionally, but I still thank god every day I don't have to use macos or windows.
  • zobzu 11y ago
    Use Plasma 5 (which is "KDE5" if you will). KDE4 is not even supported anymore on some distros. It fixes most remaining annoyances of KDE4 and has been really stable for me. Even kmail 5.5 is a huge step forward compared to the buggy kmail 4.x
    • ris 11y ago
      I'm a debian stable user. KDE5 will come to me when it does. Anyway, I'm truly sceptical of KDE's trajectory now I've been burned a bit (and I'm saying this as a sort-of former "KDE person"). It seems like a lot of focus & motivation was lost around the time of the mobile/tablet/vivaldi distraction nonsense. My main problem with kmail2 is that it feels like POP3/local mail support & local filtering is a (very broken) afterthought, and while being able to do everything on IMAP would be lovely, some of us are stuck on POP3 mail for a little longer...
      • zobzu 11y ago
        ive no experience with the POP3 support even in kmail5 (I stopped using my last POP account a decade ago at least ;-) but the IMAP support in in kmail5 has been pretty good (it used to be terrible). That said, I still prefer Thunderbird. By using Debian stable you choose to use 1 or 2year old technology - so you'll have what I have in 2 years. Courage, that's just 24 month to wait ;-)
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• shmerl 11y ago
  > Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent. That's interesting, I didn't know that. Is that going to be a huge mess after Wayland transition (which is likely to happen in 2016)? I'm used to fontconfig managing global fonts settings. What will happen in Wayland case?
  • zobzu 11y ago
    its not really true. for ex i use Xorg dpi settings and xorg provided font rendering and driven antialiasing. gui toolkits can override this (and usually propose to), specially for older versions of Xorg that did not support native dpi scaling, antialising, etc.
  • tadfisher 11y ago
    In both Windows and OSX there are multiple choices for included font rendering libraries, so I'm not sure what the author is on about. There is no "system-level" font renderer on any of the three major OSes, and frankly such a thing doesn't make sense from an engineering standpoint.
    • shmerl 11y ago
      It might be not completely golbal, but fontconfig affects the vast majority of applications as far as I know. So it's something of that sort in a sense.
    • the_why_of_y 11y ago
      What choices are there? On Windows, there is Uniscribe, DirectWrite (since Windows 7) and also the legacy GDI font rendering APIs. Probably Microsoft will never remove any of these options to ensure backward compatibility. On Mac OS X, you use CoreText - the legacy QuickDraw Text is deprecated and not even available for 64 bit applications. There are also applications that do not use the platform font rendering, e.g. Adobe has their own font rendering code and current versions of Chromium and Gecko use Harfbuzz on all platforms.
• Mikeb85 11y ago
  Linux users often take the idea of 'self-examination' way too far and it turns into 'self-disparagement'. The fact is, if you vet your hardware and use a major distro (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora) you'll wind up with a perfectly functioning Linux desktop or laptop. You think about it, OSX only runs on a few laptops. Linux runs perfectly on more laptops than exist for OSX. Windows run on many laptops, more often than not quite well, not always perfect though, despite being bundled together. I've been using Ubuntu on a ThinkPad T530 for several years, it just works. Couldn't be happier. Everything works BTW, function keys, fingerprint scanner, everything. As for the Linux eco-system - major browsers work, Steam works, there's a phenomenal ecosystem around Linux if you do any sort of programming, data science, etc... I really have nothing to complain about these days.
  • FatalBaboon 11y ago
    Exactly, I've always used whatever hardware I wanted, and Linux mostly just worked. The occasional hiccups are proprietary Nvidia drivers, and some wifi chips being too recent and needing an open source driver readily available. I use Ubuntu on a dual boot, I hardly ever boot Windows. And I'm a gamer! Steam + wine is enough for me.
    • deleted 11y ago
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  • veddox 11y ago
    I don't think this is about self-disparagement, but about holding ourselves to a high standard. I love Linux, and have been using it without major problems for some time now (mainly Ubuntu-based distros). Especially if you are into programming, I'd say it beats MS hands down. However, I do acknowledge that there are still many problems that bar Linux from being an operating system "for the masses" (i.e. all those people who are not computer nerds). Many small problems can be fixed with a few commands in terminal - but which grandmother/stressed office worker/gamer kid is willing to learn how to use a UNIX shell or configure fstab just to do their stuff? And there are other problems that aren't solved as easily. I help out at the Ubuntu Forums, and I see plenty of posters with problems that the combined wisdom of a few thousand experienced Linux users can't solve. (Just have a look at the "Unanswered Posts" section.) So yes, Linux is a fantastic OS with great software available, and by all means let's keep advertising it. But let's not pretend that "it just works, right out of the box!"(TM) every time.
• vesche 11y ago
  This link has ads that are trying to execute malicious code (I'm on mobile).
• daave 11y ago
  When visiting this blog post on my Android phone, the ads (or something) redirect me to a page with popups telling me my phone has a virus and encouraging me to install an app to 'clean' it, using Google branding on some dodgy domain. I seem to get a different one each time. Reported it at https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ but mentioning here so that others don't fall victim to it.
  • irascible 11y ago
    Yep same here.
  • notnarb 11y ago
    Easy to see for yourself that this happens by using user agent spoofing in your browser's dev tools: http://i.imgur.com/vlLV8PW.png http://i.imgur.com/vlLV8PW.png Hard to track what exactly is causing this because of the ~200 requests this website makes before redirecting your browser. The article itself links archive.org's copy of the article which I would recommend using over the original website since it appears to be free of malicious redirects: http://web.archive.org/web/20151230152933/http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html http://web.archive.org/web/20151230152933/http://linuxfonts....
  • daave 11y ago
    The site is now blacklisted for Chrome users. I've emailed the author letting him know about this issue.
  • unethical_ban 11y ago
    http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=http%3A%2F%2Flinuxfonts.narod.ru http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=http%... The page you want reviewed is http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/ http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/ This page is currently categorized as Suspicious Last Time Rated/Reviewed: > 7 days This page has a risk level of High
  • touristtam 11y ago
    AV on Windows flagged this site as being malicious.
• Paul_S 11y ago
  Quite a few of the points only cause problems to closed source development whilst having a positive effect on open source development. I don't think it's objectively a bad thing.
• serge2k 11y ago
  > Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it's definitely not ready for the desktop either. uh huh.
• jmsdnns 11y ago
  oh linux, don't listen to them... there will always be people who say your desktop experience isn't good enough. the reality for most of the computing world is that linux has already won, it's just that they're using everywhere but the desktop. it's in robots, servers, billions of devices, every android phone, the boxes that power our tv's, inside our tv's now too, and it keeps spreading. if it isn't already, it'll be powering cars soon enough. so linux... don't sweat the people who still don't have a working nvidia driver. it doesn't matter. not even a little bit. you do you, linux, and just go where ever people writing code take you.
  • MegaDeKay 11y ago
    Tesla runs Ubuntu in their cars :-)
• ryanlol 11y ago
  >You can thank me by clicking the ad at the top of the page ;-) Not a good idea.
• mAritz 11y ago
  One problem specific to gaming: Adjusting mouse pointer speed and acceleration is a huge pain. I've tried SteamOS for gaming but especially playing FPS type games is really bad with acceleration. Disabling it usually requires X.org config changes and knowledge of some semi-arcane acceleration math. It's doable, but certainly not in any way easy.
  • i336_ 11y ago
    If you're just using xset, you're missing out massively. Use xinput instead, it gives you full access to all of X's acceleration profiles and all the parameters you can tweak with them. http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration/ http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAccel... I cannot agree more that said xinput interface could do with a UI though. Not because I hate the commandline but because repeatedly entering long commands with numbers just kills it for me - there's no rapid feedback loop. And so I continue to avoid using my ThinkPads' Trackpoints because I can never get them to a point where they aren't a strain to use.....
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  This is my favorite -- "! Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to a number of problems raised to the third power. Packaging all dependent libraries is not a solution, because in this case your application may depend on older versions of libraries which contain serious remotely exploitable vulnerabilities." Sometimes I explain it that Linux is roughly 65,000 different operating systems with the same name :-) It isn't as bad as that of course but the freedom to choose means that people do choose, and the challenges of selling your non-opensource software into that pool of choices is insurmountable to most companies.
• spilk 11y ago
  The HiDPI point is pretty critical - many higher end laptops these days have HiDPI screens, and HiDPI desktop monitors are getting affordable. I think with GNOME you only get integer scale factors: way too tiny or way too big on most HiDPI screens.
  • zobzu 11y ago
    No such problem with plasma/kde. I use it on a 1080p 13' screen and a 4k 13' screen. its in fact much better than windows 10 in that area...
  • davidw 11y ago
    I have one of the new Dell XPS 13 with a high-res screen, and it works great with the exception of a few things that I mostly don't use any more, like Tk.
  • hollerith 11y ago
    >I think with GNOME you only get integer scale factors: way too tiny or way too big on most HiDPI screens. OS X has the same property (of giving only integral scale factors).
• rdc12 11y ago
  Can't remember the last time I had an issue with suspend under Linux (years ago), but on my current desktop I never managed to get suspend to work under Windoes 7. Go figure.
• hzhou321 11y ago
  Linux' philosophy (generally open source') is to create a paradise for hackers and it has accomplished that and it should be content at it. GUI desktop is for consumers who are opposite to hackers. Trying to meet both ends are silly ambitions. I am not saying Linux cannot meet the consumer ends, but it need adopt an opposite philosophy from what it starts with. When that happens, some may be happy but hackers would weep (or would they? Wouldn't they just start another paradise?) EDIT: on second thought, Google's android demonstrates my point.
• jheriko 11y ago
  i am turned off when the criticisms towards windows, whilst valid, typify the out-of-touch-with-reality-ness of many linux fanboys. real world users do not notice, much less care about these issues, nor want them fixed, nor would their user experience be significantly improved by addressing them. along similar lines they barely notice that linux exists at all. there are good reasons why linux dominates the backend space, and windows dominates user space. linux caters very well to the power user and is discoverable with a lot of research - the kind power users will do. windows caters acceptably to the casual user and is so well known they needn't bother advertising (but continue to do so anyway...). the one problem that is bigger than anything listed here, imo, is that the linux development community is building something they want rather than what others want and then not selling it to anyone especially well. there have been great strides in this area, but its still not enough. ubuntu is a joy to install and use compared to linuxes of old. (i remember well struggling with 'red hat for dummies' in the 90s). but... its not advertised in the mainstream or known about as an alternative - why its worth using etc. and appears that it might suffer the classic problems for regular users that put them off alternative platforms - things like "doesn't have MS Word which I (think) I need for work (because I've never even heard of OpenOffice or LibreOffice etc. let alone tried such things)" its great to see that Dell offer it as an option these days, at least. but until more people know about it and understand that it won't prevent them from doing what they want, they just aren't going to use it.
  • IshKebab 11y ago
    What planet are you on? Of course real world users notice these issues. It's just that real world users eventually realise Linux isn't going to change so they go back to Windows (see Linus's various "I'm doing it right; shut up" comments on security, stable driver ABIs, etc.).
    • jheriko 11y ago
      Earth. you might want to come back down to it... a minuscule proportion will complain about those things. the vast bulk of real world users haven't even tried linux or know it exists.
• midnitewarrior 11y ago
  This sounds like it's finally going to be the year of Desktop Linux.
• reedlaw 11y ago
  As a developer I feel neither Windows nor Mac OS are ready for the desktop. Windows is almost completely useless and you need to immediately resort to Cygwin or a VM to get anything useful done. Mac OS is much more useful out of the box but lacks up-to-date packages and a good package manager. I haven't used Mac OS recently enough to comment on Homebrew, but the last time I tried it was no where near as robust as many Linux package managers are. Arch Linux has a huge amount of user-submitted packages so that even relatively unknown projects tend to be easy to install.
• rythie 11y ago
  I'll add: NFS home directories don't seem to be tested by KDE developers, taking 30seconds or so to start fully everytime you move machine because they generate stuff in /tmp. Most programs don't take quota into account when calculating free space, and fail in weird ways when it gets exceeded Cups password authentication can't send a prompt to the user. Windows did this in XP (OSX has this problem too)
• jetskindo 11y ago
  The biggest problem is that the moment I touch the screen the page redirects to advertising and malware.
• kelnos 11y ago
  There's a lot right about this, but some factual inaccuracies like this make me wonder: Too many layers of abstraction lead to the situation when the user cannot determine why his audio input/output doesn't work (ALSA kernel drivers1 -> ALSA library2 ( -> dmix3 ) -> PulseAudio server4 -> Alsa library5 + Pulse backend6 -> Application - in other words, six layers of audio redirection; or seven layers in case of KDE since they have their own audio subsystem called Phonon). That's just not true. In the case of an application that directly supports PulseAudio, there are merely 3 levels: ALSA kernel drivers -> ALSA library -> PulseAudio Server/library -> Application In the case of an application that doesn't directly support PA (most that don't will support ALSA), it's one level little worse: ALSA kernel drivers -> ALSA library -> PulseAudio server/library -> ALSA library (pulse plugin) -> Application In that case, 4 levels of indirection. If dmix is set up in the case where PA is being used, that's a bad system misconfiguration and the distro should be slapped. So that's 3 levels of indirection for a "modern" app, and 4 if you need the compatibility layer. How are OSes like Windows and MacOSX designed? Unless they have a sound API that goes right to the kernel (and the kernel handles mixing if the hardware doesn't support it), I don't see how you can do much better than the current state of affairs, aside from having PulseAudio directly hit the ALSA kernel interfaces, which seems unnecessary. (Note: for the purposes of debugging & figuring out why sound isn't working, I'm considering the PA server and library [or "backend" as the OP calls it] a single layer. It's true that there's an extra "hop" involved there, but in practice that's unrelated to any possible audio issue but latency, which isn't what the OP is talking about.)
• zobzu 11y ago
  bla bla bla.. bunch of lines and lists all of which are refutable easily. sure linux is far from perfect (and far from bad, too) and thus there are a lot of potential valid criticism, none of which this article mention. Therefore, the author just spent time typing down a load of BS/FUD probably intended for people who don't seriously run Linux on the desktop nowadays. wow: So many items are misleading. Some of the links even lead to resolved bugs, did the author click them? Or the "no alternative to SMB". well duh... linux users... use SMB. simple as that. Or another funny point - I'd like to see the author play with a windows laptop using optimus (its a POS), or seriously gaming on macosx with all AAA titles (oh, they dont exist, too bad, yet people still love it as desktop...) Then there's list that "affect every linux user".. none of them affect me, I'm such a special snowflake! Not even one. Not even the video acceleration one that seem to be his "biggest point". Firefox uses gstreamer with hw acceleration support and h264 on youtube. In fact, my laptop uses much less power playing youtube videos on linux that on windows (turns out I do have a watt meter and I did use it when I got the laptop). So yeah.. maybe the author should inform himself a bit before typing random things.
• vvpan 11y ago
  It feels like most commenters on this thread have not read past the first page of that list, because the discussion ends at "my hardware works" or "my hardware doesn't work". There's much more on that list and imho everybody who cares about Linux should probably read past the first page.
• cdonnellytx 11y ago
  Anyone else having trouble viewing this page? I'm on iOS and every time I go to the link it redirects me to a page claiming I "won" a "reward" with an alert box that I can't dismiss without tapping OK.
  • asdfaoeu 11y ago
    Well that would explain why I get Deceptive site ahead Attackers on linuxfonts.narod.ru may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing your personal information (for example, passwords, phone numbers, or credit cards).
• grogenaut 11y ago
  FYI mozilla has this site flagged. Not sure if this is a joke or real.
• myztic 11y ago
  Interesting list. One of the biggest issues for me personally is the split effort. There are >300 distributions actively maintained, 300 projects whose sole purpose it is to package the kernel and some userland-stuff to make a usable operating system and provide for update mechanisms. 300 projects who spend resources on creating documentation, websites, giving support to users, ... And the simple truth is: It does not matter too much which distribution you use, far too much weight is put on that. How much of what you do is distribution-specific? The type of init-system (mostly not important for a Desktop), the update mechanism, packages available, available/supported Desktop Environments / Window Managers, anything I forgot? Most of the time you are running a browser, editor, terminal, video player, torrent client, openssh, steam, are using some version of python, ruby, perl, php, ... it quite simply does not matter whether you do these things on Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, ArchLinux, Gentoo or FreeBSD. Linus Torvalds described it in a similar manner once (too lazy to look for the link, but basically something like "I don't care too much about what distribution I use, I mainly work on the kernel anyways") We are users, as such we use an Operating System in order to use programs. The fragmentation probably mostly is rooted in the fact that it is quite easy to create your own distribution, and that many out there are head-strong people who are not patient enough to work their way up a command chain (regarding distributions with a democratic structure) or to succumb to what one dictator is saying. And some projects are just boring to work on, for example GUI-stuff or the code-monster Xorg. I would not want to bundle all 300 distributions into 1, but (and this of course boils down to my opinion) 20 or so would do. It is important to have alternatives, like non-systemd distributions, rolling releases, source-based distributions, et cetera, but 300... And if the focus is less on having 300+ distributions and more on making 20 or so distributions great, quality would rise without a doubt, not only ease of use, but also support, documentation, et cetera. btw: Visited this page from Firefox, was greeted by the following: Reported Web Forgery! This web page at linuxfonts.narod.ru has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences. Web forgeries are designed to trick you into revealing personal or financial information by imitating sources you may trust. Entering any information on this web page may result in identity theft or other fraud.
  • jabbernotty 11y ago
    Same issue here: "Reported Web Forgery!" It doesn't seem valid, I already took a quick look on my phone and did not see anything phishy.
• yason 11y ago
  This is probably one of the theory vs. practice issues. While I admit that the article is mostly correct then again, in practice, I haven't had much trouble with Linux in the 00's and 10's while using Debian based distributions exclusively. Surely I am not immune to the shortcomings of Linux but I don't remember having had to tweak my system as part of routine maintenance for... years. This was commonplace in the 90's. Merely upgrading or changing your X setup required tweaking configuration files, setting modelines and whatnot. I don't even know where the X configuration files live anymore. While the foundation is shallow, things generally work to the extent that I don't have to do "maintenance" on my Linux computers. Even external displays seem to work mostly just fine when presenting. I haven't missed binary compatibility once: the distros compile everything anyway when libraries update. Compared to clinging to the cruft that makes 30 year old Windows programs work in Windows 10, I feel I'm better off with Linux even if I have to kill pulseaudio a couple of times each year and there's a slight chance that one of my laptops won't resume after suspend if it's unplugged. I'm not saying that these Linux problems aren't problems. They exist and when they hit you, it hurts like hell. But my point is that Linux is imperfect as is the real world and people just tend to work around imperfections, again, like in the real world. So, mostly things work 5x better than 10 years ago and 50x better than 20 years ago.
• taurath 11y ago
  FYI I just got redirect spammed to a phishing/virus site when loading the link on Android.
• peatfreak 11y ago
  This is a good opportunity for us to be positive and to list up-to-date resources that clearly list laptops that work on Linux, or what to look for, what models are good and not-so-good, what is Free and mostly-Free, etc, etc. I am looking for a "mostly-Free", modern Gnu/Linux laptop that I can purchase either new or recently second hand but am having a terrible time trying to figure it all out.