6 ms·

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly r

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.

eropple 10y ago
I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience, so for now I'm getting by with 14.04. But that sucks profoundly; it was my first attempt at a Linux desktop in probably three years and I was pretty disheartened by how things have gotten worse for my use cases in that time. "If you select your hardware," you can definitely have a decent time. But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  That is bizarre. I don't use a lot of Ubuntu. Having had an issue with Ubuntu and nvidia in the past, you might want to google NOMODESET and setting it at boot, which should let you boot into X/Unity and get the latest drivers. > But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware." Absolutely. But if OSes aren't directly equivalent (and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have), then it's worth sorting out those hardware issues (as frustrating as they are).
  - eropple 10y ago
    > Having had an issue with Ubuntu and nvidia in the past, you might want to google NOMODESET and setting it at boot. Thanks; I later ran into something that hinted at that. Frankly, though, at this point I don't care. I have something that works and will be patched until 2019. I don't care about my desktops. Every second I spend debugging something stupid on a desktop is a wasted second. This is bad for me and I resent it. > and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have Ehh--if you have to use that "hackability" to get something that is minimally usable, that's kind of a push. (Or, when you consider OS X, a serious negative, because the only thing I have to do to get OS X to where I want is install Homebrew and a short list of packages, none of which require configuration.) I don't care about desktop environments or tiled window managers, the extent of my interaction with my WM, which I could not name, is a sort-of reimplementation of Aero Snap. Again, if I wanted to throw a bunch of time away on an operating system, I would set up a Hackintosh and actually be able to use Photoshop. Which, in keeping with the theme of "Linux desktops are a fractal of unusability", would be a significant improvement. I tried to avoid a reboot and use the GIMP yesterday for something. I think I need counseling now. I ended up using Pinta, whose layered image format ("OpenRaster", which wants to be a standard but it seems like nobody uses it?) is so bonkers and edge-case that ImageMagick doesn't even support it, to say nothing of Photoshop or even Paint.NET. It turned out, kind of to my surprise, that Linux on the desktop offers very little to me as a Linux developer, sysadmin, and long-time entrails-reading "power user". That's pretty damning, in my book.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      > OpenRaster Another ocean boiled, courtesy of the Free Desktop Project.
      - eropple 10y ago
        Yeah...I went down a pretty bad rabbit hole trying to figure that one out. I mean, XCF already exists? And application support is marginal, rather than nonexistent.
        throwanem 10y ago
- vbernat 10y ago
  Without a bug report, nobody can tell if your case is unique or general. You spend time to rant here but with a bit of additional time, you could have opened a bug report with the appropriate information and maybe help people running into the same problem.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I think it should be obvious that I don't have a reproducible case anymore; this was a couple months ago now, after I built a desktop. Nor am I interested in expending multiple hours creating one, because that doesn't benefit me--my stuff works now, if suboptimally. I couldn't leave it in that state then, because I had work to do with that hardware; I couldn't leave it in a trashed state just in case somebody had questions and needed to autopsy it, now, could I? Expending more time than I did would be better served just biting the bullet and setting up a Hackintosh so I have an environment I like, rather than tolerate. And this isn't a "rant". I promise you, when I'm ranting, you will know.
- criddell 10y ago
  > if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience As I understand it, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a license violation. Your employer is okay with that?
  - eropple 10y ago
    I'm self-employed, so yes. I've got four grand of Apple gear in my office, and if they sold an xMac I'd buy one tomorrow. I don't consider it to be a moral question, and in practice Apple doesn't seem to really care.
    - criddell 10y ago
      I work for a software company and it's pretty strict about honoring license terms because we want our customers to do the same.
      - eropple 10y ago
        That's a fair position. From mine, Apple gets its vig from me in plenty of other ways. There's zero pirated software, music, videos, etc. in my house or my business; giving Apple another channel through which to sell me stuff, from developer licenses to apps, doesn't trouble me.
merijnv 10y ago
> Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. > If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Maybe the fact that I have to give them time is one of the major problems? You know how much time I invested in getting my Windows and OSX desktops to work flawlessly? Zero.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  We're literally talking about a 15 minute setup on a variety of nixes on a wide-range of hardware. Intel chipsets and their graphics drivers have excellent support out of the box. That goes for everything from refurbished Thinkpads to Chromebooks to used Macbook Pros to new desktops.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Are you comparing like with like, your Windows & OSX desktops were preinstalled presumably, same price brackets too?
- belorn 10y ago
  I do a windows reinstallation about once every second year, and I routinely get problems. Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. The default graphic drivers tend to "start", but is limited in refresh rate and resolution, and moving around windows shows a noticeable stutter until I install some official drivers from the graphic card manufacturer. Sound normally works without issues. On linux, the problems are almost the reverse. I have yet to have network problems on a fresh debian installation. Graphic is a all-or-nothing deal, which means either x-server starts up normally or it refuses to start completely. Sound is normally a pain, but looks to have better default behavior in the last 3 years or so.
  - Decade 10y ago
    > I do a windows reinstallation about once every second year, and I routinely get problems. Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. What are you reinstalling, Windows XP every time? Newer versions of Windows are getting better at finding and installing sane drivers for the hardware. It’s still not perfect, Windows Update doesn’t have all the latest drivers and OEMs ruin everything especially on laptops, but these days I install the latest Windows and everything usually just works.

eropple 10y ago

I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience, so for now I'm getting by with 14.04. But that sucks profoundly; it was my first attempt at a Linux desktop in probably three years and I was pretty disheartened by how things have gotten worse for my use cases in that time. "If you select your hardware," you can definitely have a decent time. But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."

aaron-lebo 10y ago
That is bizarre. I don't use a lot of Ubuntu. Having had an issue with Ubuntu and nvidia in the past, you might want to google NOMODESET and setting it at boot, which should let you boot into X/Unity and get the latest drivers. > But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware." Absolutely. But if OSes aren't directly equivalent (and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have), then it's worth sorting out those hardware issues (as frustrating as they are).
- eropple 10y ago
  > Having had an issue with Ubuntu and nvidia in the past, you might want to google NOMODESET and setting it at boot. Thanks; I later ran into something that hinted at that. Frankly, though, at this point I don't care. I have something that works and will be patched until 2019. I don't care about my desktops. Every second I spend debugging something stupid on a desktop is a wasted second. This is bad for me and I resent it. > and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have Ehh--if you have to use that "hackability" to get something that is minimally usable, that's kind of a push. (Or, when you consider OS X, a serious negative, because the only thing I have to do to get OS X to where I want is install Homebrew and a short list of packages, none of which require configuration.) I don't care about desktop environments or tiled window managers, the extent of my interaction with my WM, which I could not name, is a sort-of reimplementation of Aero Snap. Again, if I wanted to throw a bunch of time away on an operating system, I would set up a Hackintosh and actually be able to use Photoshop. Which, in keeping with the theme of "Linux desktops are a fractal of unusability", would be a significant improvement. I tried to avoid a reboot and use the GIMP yesterday for something. I think I need counseling now. I ended up using Pinta, whose layered image format ("OpenRaster", which wants to be a standard but it seems like nobody uses it?) is so bonkers and edge-case that ImageMagick doesn't even support it, to say nothing of Photoshop or even Paint.NET. It turned out, kind of to my surprise, that Linux on the desktop offers very little to me as a Linux developer, sysadmin, and long-time entrails-reading "power user". That's pretty damning, in my book.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > OpenRaster Another ocean boiled, courtesy of the Free Desktop Project.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Yeah...I went down a pretty bad rabbit hole trying to figure that one out. I mean, XCF already exists? And application support is marginal, rather than nonexistent.
      - throwanem 10y ago
vbernat 10y ago
Without a bug report, nobody can tell if your case is unique or general. You spend time to rant here but with a bit of additional time, you could have opened a bug report with the appropriate information and maybe help people running into the same problem.
- eropple 10y ago
  I think it should be obvious that I don't have a reproducible case anymore; this was a couple months ago now, after I built a desktop. Nor am I interested in expending multiple hours creating one, because that doesn't benefit me--my stuff works now, if suboptimally. I couldn't leave it in that state then, because I had work to do with that hardware; I couldn't leave it in a trashed state just in case somebody had questions and needed to autopsy it, now, could I? Expending more time than I did would be better served just biting the bullet and setting up a Hackintosh so I have an environment I like, rather than tolerate. And this isn't a "rant". I promise you, when I'm ranting, you will know.
criddell 10y ago
> if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience As I understand it, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a license violation. Your employer is okay with that?
- eropple 10y ago
  I'm self-employed, so yes. I've got four grand of Apple gear in my office, and if they sold an xMac I'd buy one tomorrow. I don't consider it to be a moral question, and in practice Apple doesn't seem to really care.
  - criddell 10y ago
    I work for a software company and it's pretty strict about honoring license terms because we want our customers to do the same.
    - eropple 10y ago
      That's a fair position. From mine, Apple gets its vig from me in plenty of other ways. There's zero pirated software, music, videos, etc. in my house or my business; giving Apple another channel through which to sell me stuff, from developer licenses to apps, doesn't trouble me.

merijnv 10y ago

> Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. > If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Maybe the fact that I have to give them time is one of the major problems? You know how much time I invested in getting my Windows and OSX desktops to work flawlessly? Zero.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
We're literally talking about a 15 minute setup on a variety of nixes on a wide-range of hardware. Intel chipsets and their graphics drivers have excellent support out of the box. That goes for everything from refurbished Thinkpads to Chromebooks to used Macbook Pros to new desktops.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
Are you comparing like with like, your Windows & OSX desktops were preinstalled presumably, same price brackets too?
belorn 10y ago
I do a windows reinstallation about once every second year, and I routinely get problems. Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. The default graphic drivers tend to "start", but is limited in refresh rate and resolution, and moving around windows shows a noticeable stutter until I install some official drivers from the graphic card manufacturer. Sound normally works without issues. On linux, the problems are almost the reverse. I have yet to have network problems on a fresh debian installation. Graphic is a all-or-nothing deal, which means either x-server starts up normally or it refuses to start completely. Sound is normally a pain, but looks to have better default behavior in the last 3 years or so.
- Decade 10y ago
  > I do a windows reinstallation about once every second year, and I routinely get problems. Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. What are you reinstalling, Windows XP every time? Newer versions of Windows are getting better at finding and installing sane drivers for the hardware. It’s still not perfect, Windows Update doesn’t have all the latest drivers and OEMs ruin everything especially on laptops, but these days I install the latest Windows and everything usually just works.