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I used a Linux desktop (Ubuntu, specifically) for a few months at work this year, but ended up switching back to OS X. The number of basic, table-stakes stuff t
by msbarnett 10y ago
I used a Linux desktop (Ubuntu, specifically) for a few months at work this year, but ended up switching back to OS X. The number of basic, table-stakes stuff that was still utterly broken in day-to-day usage was astounding.
(Since someone will inevitably ask, because they personally never have any issues: off the top of my head: the barely-adequate Alfred replacement forgot its keybinding on the daily. Unity's hotcorners would stop working randomly until I cleared and reset them in the prefs. Mouse acceleration was a disaster on my bluetooth trackpad so I wrote a bunch of calls to the synaptics command line util to reset it to something close to reasonable -- but it would randomly reset and I'd have to re-run the script. HiDPI support is a random mess of things working well or appallingly depending on author, toolkit, time of day, and orientation of the sun. The typography situation is awful -- every third person will point you at a different guide to "fixing" it, but they just result in different kinds of awful. The GUI would hard-lock occasionally and no amount of keyboard poking would get me to a TTY I could reboot from -- seemed to be something Systemd was doing. Getting simple system logs is cryptic bullshit thanks to Systemd's binary mess now, naturally. Etc, etc. I could go on for days.)
- StreamBright 10y agoI wish there was a systemd free desktop Linux...
- msbarnett 10y agoThere are. If that was my only issue, I'd happily have put up with Gentoo's compile times.
- contingencies 10y agoGentoo has full support for binary packages if compiling irritates you.
- digi_owl 10y agoGiven that systemd is the latest iteration of the freedesktop kits (powerkit/powerd now talks to logind to do suspend and hibernate), it will be increasingly hard to do if one want to use any of the major DEs or their relevant toolkits.
- vladimir-y 10y ago> Systemd's binary mess now On the contrary, Systemd has brought a standard, a replacement for messy scripts and logs used before. Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Gnome itself is shitty thing in my opinion, KDE is too complex, XFCE is nice.
- stonogo 10y agoA standard has a specification.
- vladimir-y 10y agoI made my point, with some arguments, I'm not here to join Systemd holy war, it would be an off topic.
- msbarnett 10y ago> Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Listen: I learned unix by installing MkLinux on a PowerMac G3 (the beige kind that came with MacOS, the single-tasking cooperative OS from the '80s) in 1997. I built my first PC in '99 or '00 and ran Debian on it until the old glibc transition broke so much that I switched to Gentoo, and much later to slack & arch. I've done the distro-shuffle. There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works. Everything is constantly being rewritten, and some percentage of it is egregiously, embarrassingly broken at the user-facing level. In some ways it's even worse now than it was in the early 2000s. So after nearly 20 years of "you shouldn't have used distro X you should use distro Y", I think I'll pass. And despite this rant in 3 years I'll probably be dumb enough to think "well maybe this time things are finally working well", yet again.
- vladimir-y 10y ago> There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works. That's why it's advisable to use simpler stuff, not like the Gnome/KDE based systems, etc. Actually Linux works well enough for me.