27 ms·

The part that I find increasingly unpleasant (and unsettling) is that, overall, the quality of the entire experience has been declining. Four years ago, suspen

The part that I find increasingly unpleasant (and unsettling) is that, overall, the quality of the entire experience has been declining. Four years ago, suspend/resume was pretty much a solved problem on regular, run-of-the mill hardware. It worked out of the box, hardly needed any tuning, hardly had any performance problems. It was messy when it was introduced but by 2011 or so, we pretty much took it for granted. Nowadays, it feels like the year is 2003 again (only I have a lot less hair so it's a weird kind of 2003). I bring my system out of suspend and the text on my desktop icons is corrupted (!?) and some network connections are mysteriously failing (this one is particularly nasty, and I have no idea what to trace it to; ICMP works fine, but TCP connections to some systems just don't work anymore because the SYN/ACK never gets to me. I initially thought this was my ISP doing something funky with their routing, but alas, my Windows laptop doesn't have this problem). And this isn't really new and shiny hardware that would sort of understandably have these problems, it's a five year-old desktop.

massysett 10y ago
Yikes. I'm sad to see that stuff backsliding. Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. I used i3 with Debian. That kept things simple enough so I could understand them. That meant no niceties like a display manager. Back then I could explain the differences between startx and xinit, and I could compile kernels. The desktops were way too complicated to fix if they broke. I tired of the whole thing after doing my USA income taxes through fill in PDFs because there is no commercial Linux software. I didn't want a browser based solution. I bit the bullet and bought a Mac. It is the best computing decision I ever made. Proprietary software is readily available and works. Free software is available through Macports. It's Unix when I need it, but when I want a GUI it always works. I spend much less time fixing broken stuff. I miss my Thinkpad keyboard. Also, since Mac is an expensive proprietary platform, bugs in free software take longer to fix. For instance the GHC Haskell compiler currently has issues on Mac OS Sierra and it will take awhile until they fix that. However there are many things on Mac that I could never get in Linux, such as the awsome trackpad and Duet, which gives me a cheap second monitor via an iPad. My days running Linux on hardware are over. If I really want Linux I will get a Mac or even a Windows machine and then run Linux in a VM.
- notalaser 10y ago
  > Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely I used to do that for a very long time, too, but it's getting unpleasant. A lot of things get upset if you don't have a "proper" session running behind the scenes. It requires me to learn more about xdg and systemd than I can learn without giving in to existential dread about my profession, and frankly, it's a shame to see decades of progress in the GUI go wasted on me just because the Linux community won't get its act together. In some ways, I think I'm more or less like the proverbial dinosaur in this regard. Virtually no one developing for Linux cares about the desktop anymore. The Linux "community" is, increasingly, a bunch of huge hardware manufacturers, automotive consortiums and a few companies with large datacenters to run. This is where the money -- and most of the development effort -- is. Most of the people who were interested in, and could meaningfully contribute to usability-related efforts and desktops have long gone to web or Apple land. Edit: in fact, I think virtually everyone I know has moved to macOS, OpenBSD or Windows. Can't blame them.
- ensiferum 10y ago
  >> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. My experience is that Linux works better on the desktop in general. Laptop's on the other hand have always given me trouble. Overall it's sad to see that the "year of the Linux desktop" is always 10 years from now and it's realistically speaking never going to happen.

massysett 10y ago

Yikes. I'm sad to see that stuff backsliding. Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. I used i3 with Debian. That kept things simple enough so I could understand them. That meant no niceties like a display manager. Back then I could explain the differences between startx and xinit, and I could compile kernels. The desktops were way too complicated to fix if they broke. I tired of the whole thing after doing my USA income taxes through fill in PDFs because there is no commercial Linux software. I didn't want a browser based solution. I bit the bullet and bought a Mac. It is the best computing decision I ever made. Proprietary software is readily available and works. Free software is available through Macports. It's Unix when I need it, but when I want a GUI it always works. I spend much less time fixing broken stuff. I miss my Thinkpad keyboard. Also, since Mac is an expensive proprietary platform, bugs in free software take longer to fix. For instance the GHC Haskell compiler currently has issues on Mac OS Sierra and it will take awhile until they fix that. However there are many things on Mac that I could never get in Linux, such as the awsome trackpad and Duet, which gives me a cheap second monitor via an iPad. My days running Linux on hardware are over. If I really want Linux I will get a Mac or even a Windows machine and then run Linux in a VM.

notalaser 10y ago
> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely I used to do that for a very long time, too, but it's getting unpleasant. A lot of things get upset if you don't have a "proper" session running behind the scenes. It requires me to learn more about xdg and systemd than I can learn without giving in to existential dread about my profession, and frankly, it's a shame to see decades of progress in the GUI go wasted on me just because the Linux community won't get its act together. In some ways, I think I'm more or less like the proverbial dinosaur in this regard. Virtually no one developing for Linux cares about the desktop anymore. The Linux "community" is, increasingly, a bunch of huge hardware manufacturers, automotive consortiums and a few companies with large datacenters to run. This is where the money -- and most of the development effort -- is. Most of the people who were interested in, and could meaningfully contribute to usability-related efforts and desktops have long gone to web or Apple land. Edit: in fact, I think virtually everyone I know has moved to macOS, OpenBSD or Windows. Can't blame them.
ensiferum 10y ago
>> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. My experience is that Linux works better on the desktop in general. Laptop's on the other hand have always given me trouble. Overall it's sad to see that the "year of the Linux desktop" is always 10 years from now and it's realistically speaking never going to happen.