9 ms·

Why Desktop Linux (Still) Sucks. And What We Can Do To Fix It.

73 points by r11t 17y ago

houseabsolute 17y ago
If history is any evidence, nothing. :P
- davidw 17y ago
  Actually, as someone who has used Linux as desktop software since 1996, I would say the exact opposite: it's making rapid progress compared to where it was once. Perhaps it still hasn't quite caught up, but I'm relatively certain that soonish, it will be 'good enough' for an ever-larger segment of the population. It's already 'good enough' for a lot of people.
  - jim_dot 17y ago
    it will always "soon" be ready for large-scale adoption. But it never will.
    - davidw 17y ago
      Until it is. In 2006 we had Ubuntu on all computers at the company I worked for, because most of the people were either 1) developers and used it anwyway or 2) didn't really need more than a browser and openoffice anyway, and were thus perfectly content with it.
krschultz 17y ago
The easiest problem to tackle is .RPM vs .DEB debate that should have ended about 3 years ago. If the LSB had said .DEB it might have happened, but since the "official" standard and the actual majority are diametrically opposed it doesn't want to happen. And of course the filesystems don't perfectly match across distros.
- pyre 17y ago
  From what I hear, .DEB is a bitch to do anything outside of the norm, whereas .RPM is much easier and less complex of a package format. That said, I much prefer the apt system on Debian, and Ubuntu. What really needs to happen is to take the best of both worlds and merge it into something of a complete system.
  - sirn 17y ago
    Well, like Arch Linux's Pacman and AUR? :) I found Pacman to be easy and simple--on the same level as APT, and when the binary package doesn't do what you want, packing your own package is really easy. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System
    - sandGorgon 17y ago
      upvoted for pacman. I actually have only tried arch at a friend's place, because for some anal reason Arch does not provide livecds. Only a command shell from where you must build your system up, which is quite a pain. But I have only heard good things about pacman (and it's ultra simple package format). It enables Arch's rolling releases model, which means that you are always up2date without having to go from Beserking Baboon to Chittering Chimpanzee. It is a much saner model for a stable, usable desktop system. If you can manage to combine this with a kernel update technology like ksplice, you have a super stable, updated Linux desktop without ever having to reboot (which makes the whole splash screen effort quite pointless actually)
      - arch_hunter 17y ago
        You should really try Arch. I was initially hesitant, because of the whole 'Build you own Linux!' thing, but after doing it once I learned LOTS and realized that it was not near as difficult as it sounds. There is excellent documentation in the Arch wiki, and the forums are helpful. And I have to say, installing arch linux taught me more about linux than anything else that I have ever done.
moultano 17y ago
I wish talks like these had transcripts. I listened to the first half, but don't have the time for the whole thing.
- hobb0001 17y ago
  tldw? Anyone? sigh It's so annoying when you have to sit through a hour-long video for what would otherwise be a 5-10 minute read.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    Might get something from the Mozilla Drmbeat project in a few years; maybe Google's speech recognition subtitles will be able to e port as transcript when it's properly live, too...
- jgg 16y ago
  I listened to the first half, but didn't listen to the second half, since by that time him constantly cutting out on the mic had driven me insane.
theschwa 17y ago
I think it boils down to what he was talking about at the end: Linux users need to be willing to buy software, and Linux software developers need to be more business savy.
- sandGorgon 17y ago
  upvoted. We buy our linux-based office software (we do NOT use OpenOffice). There should be more paid-for apps that are of much better quality than what's available. I believe that Linux (or some distro) should incorporate licensing/DRM into the OS itself - which you have the freedom to turn on or off. More or less, it means an app store, but indie developers will not have to worry about building licensing into their software.
  - drivebyacct 17y ago
    What? Microsoft and OS X have rich libraries of cost-based applications and they don't require any licensing or DRM embedded in the OS. Why on earth would an operating system that hinges itself on openness take a more Draconian step than any other major OS distributer has (mobile OSes aside)?
    - sandGorgon 17y ago
      Because you need to jumpstart the paid-apps ecosystem. I am not talking about approval processes, but something more on the lines of an Android app store than an iphone one. What you get by that is : 1. signed software 2. small time developers dont have to worry about licensing 3. Distribution channel 4. Payment gateway The windows or the mac system was never built on the basis of a package management system, which Linux inherently has. Dont we _already_ have an app store in Linux? Only, there is no way for a developer to make money off Apt or Yum.
      - nitrogen 17y ago
        Lindows/Linspire actually had an app store back in the day, where developers could package and distribute commercial software. It used apt as its backend. Since that didn't work out, it looks like the next best alternative is something like Steam. It seems highly possible that Steam will be released for Linux (a port already exists). Valve could be persuaded by enough software developers to add non-game software to their system. Neither system required/requires DRM to be integrated into the OS.
acon 17y ago
I think what Linux really needs is to embrace some way of getting software outside apt/yum. Having to go through the package managers forces you to be an administrator to install software, and the developer and user have no say in which version of the application you get. I think Linux distributions should be platforms which developers can develop applications for which they can distribute however they wish. Then users can choose which applications and which versions to install and does not have to go through the AppStore like package management system. I also think applications should be stand alone. If they need anything outside the platform, these dependencies should be delivered as part of the application.
- russell_h 17y ago
  Every binary distro I've ever used (SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora) came with a little GUI that let you install packages without going through a repository. Just download the .deb/.rpm and double click on it. This is how a lot of projects deliver their latest builds. If you're talking about a unified package format (it doesn't seem like it) then thats a completely different issue. As for 'stand-alone' applications, that doesn't make much sense for open source stuff, but there's nothing stopping you from distributing your software that way. A lot of commercial software for Linux is delivered that way.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    But everything packaged that way still demands to be installed as root, linked against their depgraph of ancient fucked-with libraries, and split apart into pointlessly separate packages.
    - nailer 17y ago
      It asks for your own password (ala Mac - that said, it could simply ask you to confirm ala Windows). End users don't do linking or worry about dependencies.
  - acon 16y ago
    Unfortunately this isn't used enough. It is not used by Firefox and Thunderbird. Instead they provide .tar.bz2 files. I was pleasantly surprised by skype and chrome, who actually provide rpms and debs. Nice! Open Office gave me a tarball with a myriad of debs. Not the nicest kind of packaging. Unfortunately the distributions performs their own packaging of a lot of these applications which may give some people the idea that they should use the version packaged by the distribution. The distributions should really stop doing this and refer people to the official packages instead. Otherwise users will be stuck on old versions. I also don't know how well this kind of delivery mechanism works with automatic updates. Do the external packages get updated in the same way as the packages delivered by the distribution or does anything like Sparkle exist for Linux?
richardw 17y ago
So much of Linux is designed and modified by committee, so change is slow and painful. Apple managed to get a seriously hot UI onto FreeBSD in a (relatively) short time. Linux has everyone and their dog bartering to make changes, so the UI goes nowhere. Stop copying Windows, already. Start menu sucks. Dump X.
- thingie 17y ago
  Did you listen to the talk? :) X.org is quite an advanced graphic system mostly doing what you want it to do. Throwing it out and trying to make something new (for what gain?) means wasting so much resources that it's not even nice. (And how is X related to some start menu?)
  - nailer 17y ago
    Depends. Most apps don't link against X, but the toolkits. If the toolkits can be modified to support a cleaner network protocol (something primarily vector based rather than bitmap based). I don't think the parent poster is saying that X is related to GNOME and KDE's start menu clones, other than they both need changing.
    - thingie 17y ago
      How cleaner? X11 is very extensible, if you wanted some vector graphics methods, you could just make an extension. Whole font drawing got replaced in this way, nobody really use old X core fonts anymore, everybody now uses client-based Xft system. (Well, yes, you could make a new version without this old stuff. But backwards compatibility and so.) In fact, this is what happens if you are drawing with OpenGL, you use X11 just to make a window to draw in, set some other stuff, handle input, but drawing itself completely sidesteps X11 and X server.
      - nailer 17y ago
        Are extensions negotiated over the network? So two hosts can decide they support a random high level primitive and just send that instead?
nessence 17y ago
I gave up on Linux. Not fodder; ^ if you agree.
batterseapower 17y ago
The blog post from the speaker has a link to the slides: http://lunduke.com/?p=1075 http://lunduke.com/?p=1075
Maro 17y ago
Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of OSX.
- lovskogen 17y ago
  Yeah, desktop linux sucks at installing apps.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  There's no reason this couldn't be done now, someone just needs to implement that in PackageKit and it would work fine on many distros and package managers. The backend and everything is all there, just make a drag and drop event instead of clicking an "Install" button. That said, installation of software on Linux has been one its shining points for a long time. Package management is awesome and neither OS X or Windows offer it.
  - coffeeaddicted 17y ago
    Some package management (apt) would be better if it would be easier for 3rd party vendors to get into the sources.list. For now you either have to get users to edit that file by hand (for which they might not even have the rights) or you have to use another installation mechanism which avoids the package management to which they are used and lose the advantages of stuff like upgrade. Maybe there should be a sources.list per user which allows normal users also to install software and distros could be set-up to work with a certain file-type in a way that if you click it on the web, then a default installer goes up which guides you all the way through the installation. Right now the situation is that if you want anything that's not in the "official" package repositories (probably the majority of software ...) you are getting into a world where installation is harder than in any other OS. And that is true as well for open-source applications (you want newest blender or one that is months behind?) as closed-source applications (which simply don't get into official repositories anyway). I also tried using one of the binary installers for a while, but when it stopped working with newer distros (my application still worked) I guessed that tar.gz and zip are for the moment simply the best I can really offer and that's still what I'm using for now.
nitrogen 17y ago
If the camera person for that video reads this, I suggest placing the speaker in the bottom-left/bottom-right corner of the video frame and keeping the slide visible at all times. You can pan around when people ask questions, but keep as much of the slide visible as possible and move back when the question is done.
k-zed 17y ago
The major advantage of "Desktop Linux" (that I've been using happily for quite a few years now) is that it's utterly unlike Mac OS X or Windows. We use Linux not because it's free, but because it's more comfortable, the UI is better and friendlier, and developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier. Everything Gnome, Ubuntu and this sort of people do work against these advantages. We use Linux because of its differences - these differences to other systems need to be accentuated (zsh, the suckless project, etc), not fought against (Ubuntu, network-manager, HAL, etc). By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop.
- bad_user 17y ago
  > We use Linux because of its differences I don't know who you speak for, but it's not about me ... I use Linux because it's cheap and I'm in control. Other than that I love having aptitude and a good repository, but every once in a while I really wish there was a click-to-install standard and I also really wish I wouldn't burn my weekend over wireless issues. > developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier You're not speaking about desktop applications / games. That's hell-like compared to the alternatives, being partly the reason why companies like Adobe aren't investing in it ... I've worked there and I know the arguments that are flying back and forth. > By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop. People should and will work on whatever they want, and all "wasted effort" arguments are bullshit. If you think there are better paradigms that should be explored, then jump in and show the world how right you are. Talk is cheap.
  - k-zed 17y ago
    > You're not speaking about desktop applications / games Those apps aren't hard to develop because libraries or the environment or whatever; they're hard to develop because their developers want them to be closed, so recompilation and putting them into the real package management system is impossible. Starting with such a handicap makes things complicated :) > If you think there are better paradigms that should be explored, then jump in and show the world how right you are The better paradigms have been known and used for 20 years (such as the Unix paradigm of connecting multiple programs, the CLI, and so on). That it doesn't appeal to some end users is not our problem. (also username post combo, but just kidding :)
machrider 17y ago
The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well. It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.
- colonelxc 17y ago
  It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made). If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro, they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.
  - vorador 17y ago
    But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?
    - nailer 17y ago
      I think you're both right. What I think would made a real difference is making some cruel-but-kind decisions about deprecation. State officially the other mechanisms are broken, then drop everything that doesn't use pulse from the repositories.
  - 16y ago
known 17y ago
Linux on Desktop is offering too many options for users to install and configure apps.
macco 17y ago
Does somebody know who is the speaker? Didn't see it on the blip.tv page.
- macco 17y ago
  Bryan Lunduke - sorry I saw it on the video now.
Kilimanjaro 17y ago
Sell Ubuntu (and other apps like OOo, Gimp, etc) for a nominal $9.95 Give two options in the download area of your software, one green button with a $9.95 download and one blue button for a free download. Both pointing to the same package. If you want to contribute to open source, click the green one. Also sell it on best buy and walmart for $9.95 to reach the non-tech-savvy audience. Even if they drop it on the trash can when they get home. At least some money goes to the pockets of the open sourcerers, which is better than none.

73 points by r11t 17y ago

houseabsolute 17y ago

If history is any evidence, nothing. :P

davidw 17y ago
Actually, as someone who has used Linux as desktop software since 1996, I would say the exact opposite: it's making rapid progress compared to where it was once. Perhaps it still hasn't quite caught up, but I'm relatively certain that soonish, it will be 'good enough' for an ever-larger segment of the population. It's already 'good enough' for a lot of people.
- jim_dot 17y ago
  it will always "soon" be ready for large-scale adoption. But it never will.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Until it is. In 2006 we had Ubuntu on all computers at the company I worked for, because most of the people were either 1) developers and used it anwyway or 2) didn't really need more than a browser and openoffice anyway, and were thus perfectly content with it.

krschultz 17y ago

The easiest problem to tackle is .RPM vs .DEB debate that should have ended about 3 years ago. If the LSB had said .DEB it might have happened, but since the "official" standard and the actual majority are diametrically opposed it doesn't want to happen. And of course the filesystems don't perfectly match across distros.

pyre 17y ago
From what I hear, .DEB is a bitch to do anything outside of the norm, whereas .RPM is much easier and less complex of a package format. That said, I much prefer the apt system on Debian, and Ubuntu. What really needs to happen is to take the best of both worlds and merge it into something of a complete system.
- sirn 17y ago
  Well, like Arch Linux's Pacman and AUR? :) I found Pacman to be easy and simple--on the same level as APT, and when the binary package doesn't do what you want, packing your own package is really easy. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System
  - sandGorgon 17y ago
    upvoted for pacman. I actually have only tried arch at a friend's place, because for some anal reason Arch does not provide livecds. Only a command shell from where you must build your system up, which is quite a pain. But I have only heard good things about pacman (and it's ultra simple package format). It enables Arch's rolling releases model, which means that you are always up2date without having to go from Beserking Baboon to Chittering Chimpanzee. It is a much saner model for a stable, usable desktop system. If you can manage to combine this with a kernel update technology like ksplice, you have a super stable, updated Linux desktop without ever having to reboot (which makes the whole splash screen effort quite pointless actually)
    - arch_hunter 17y ago
      You should really try Arch. I was initially hesitant, because of the whole 'Build you own Linux!' thing, but after doing it once I learned LOTS and realized that it was not near as difficult as it sounds. There is excellent documentation in the Arch wiki, and the forums are helpful. And I have to say, installing arch linux taught me more about linux than anything else that I have ever done.

moultano 17y ago

I wish talks like these had transcripts. I listened to the first half, but don't have the time for the whole thing.

hobb0001 17y ago
tldw? Anyone? sigh It's so annoying when you have to sit through a hour-long video for what would otherwise be a 5-10 minute read.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Might get something from the Mozilla Drmbeat project in a few years; maybe Google's speech recognition subtitles will be able to e port as transcript when it's properly live, too...
jgg 16y ago
I listened to the first half, but didn't listen to the second half, since by that time him constantly cutting out on the mic had driven me insane.

theschwa 17y ago

I think it boils down to what he was talking about at the end: Linux users need to be willing to buy software, and Linux software developers need to be more business savy.

sandGorgon 17y ago
upvoted. We buy our linux-based office software (we do NOT use OpenOffice). There should be more paid-for apps that are of much better quality than what's available. I believe that Linux (or some distro) should incorporate licensing/DRM into the OS itself - which you have the freedom to turn on or off. More or less, it means an app store, but indie developers will not have to worry about building licensing into their software.
- drivebyacct 17y ago
  What? Microsoft and OS X have rich libraries of cost-based applications and they don't require any licensing or DRM embedded in the OS. Why on earth would an operating system that hinges itself on openness take a more Draconian step than any other major OS distributer has (mobile OSes aside)?
  - sandGorgon 17y ago
    Because you need to jumpstart the paid-apps ecosystem. I am not talking about approval processes, but something more on the lines of an Android app store than an iphone one. What you get by that is : 1. signed software 2. small time developers dont have to worry about licensing 3. Distribution channel 4. Payment gateway The windows or the mac system was never built on the basis of a package management system, which Linux inherently has. Dont we _already_ have an app store in Linux? Only, there is no way for a developer to make money off Apt or Yum.
    - nitrogen 17y ago
      Lindows/Linspire actually had an app store back in the day, where developers could package and distribute commercial software. It used apt as its backend. Since that didn't work out, it looks like the next best alternative is something like Steam. It seems highly possible that Steam will be released for Linux (a port already exists). Valve could be persuaded by enough software developers to add non-game software to their system. Neither system required/requires DRM to be integrated into the OS.

acon 17y ago

I think what Linux really needs is to embrace some way of getting software outside apt/yum. Having to go through the package managers forces you to be an administrator to install software, and the developer and user have no say in which version of the application you get. I think Linux distributions should be platforms which developers can develop applications for which they can distribute however they wish. Then users can choose which applications and which versions to install and does not have to go through the AppStore like package management system. I also think applications should be stand alone. If they need anything outside the platform, these dependencies should be delivered as part of the application.

russell_h 17y ago
Every binary distro I've ever used (SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora) came with a little GUI that let you install packages without going through a repository. Just download the .deb/.rpm and double click on it. This is how a lot of projects deliver their latest builds. If you're talking about a unified package format (it doesn't seem like it) then thats a completely different issue. As for 'stand-alone' applications, that doesn't make much sense for open source stuff, but there's nothing stopping you from distributing your software that way. A lot of commercial software for Linux is delivered that way.
- blasdel 17y ago
  But everything packaged that way still demands to be installed as root, linked against their depgraph of ancient fucked-with libraries, and split apart into pointlessly separate packages.
  - nailer 17y ago
    It asks for your own password (ala Mac - that said, it could simply ask you to confirm ala Windows). End users don't do linking or worry about dependencies.
- acon 16y ago
  Unfortunately this isn't used enough. It is not used by Firefox and Thunderbird. Instead they provide .tar.bz2 files. I was pleasantly surprised by skype and chrome, who actually provide rpms and debs. Nice! Open Office gave me a tarball with a myriad of debs. Not the nicest kind of packaging. Unfortunately the distributions performs their own packaging of a lot of these applications which may give some people the idea that they should use the version packaged by the distribution. The distributions should really stop doing this and refer people to the official packages instead. Otherwise users will be stuck on old versions. I also don't know how well this kind of delivery mechanism works with automatic updates. Do the external packages get updated in the same way as the packages delivered by the distribution or does anything like Sparkle exist for Linux?

richardw 17y ago

So much of Linux is designed and modified by committee, so change is slow and painful. Apple managed to get a seriously hot UI onto FreeBSD in a (relatively) short time. Linux has everyone and their dog bartering to make changes, so the UI goes nowhere. Stop copying Windows, already. Start menu sucks. Dump X.

thingie 17y ago
Did you listen to the talk? :) X.org is quite an advanced graphic system mostly doing what you want it to do. Throwing it out and trying to make something new (for what gain?) means wasting so much resources that it's not even nice. (And how is X related to some start menu?)
- nailer 17y ago
  Depends. Most apps don't link against X, but the toolkits. If the toolkits can be modified to support a cleaner network protocol (something primarily vector based rather than bitmap based). I don't think the parent poster is saying that X is related to GNOME and KDE's start menu clones, other than they both need changing.
  - thingie 17y ago
    How cleaner? X11 is very extensible, if you wanted some vector graphics methods, you could just make an extension. Whole font drawing got replaced in this way, nobody really use old X core fonts anymore, everybody now uses client-based Xft system. (Well, yes, you could make a new version without this old stuff. But backwards compatibility and so.) In fact, this is what happens if you are drawing with OpenGL, you use X11 just to make a window to draw in, set some other stuff, handle input, but drawing itself completely sidesteps X11 and X server.
    - nailer 17y ago
      Are extensions negotiated over the network? So two hosts can decide they support a random high level primitive and just send that instead?

nessence 17y ago

I gave up on Linux. Not fodder; ^ if you agree.

batterseapower 17y ago

The blog post from the speaker has a link to the slides: http://lunduke.com/?p=1075 http://lunduke.com/?p=1075

Maro 17y ago

Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of OSX.

lovskogen 17y ago
Yeah, desktop linux sucks at installing apps.
cookiecaper 17y ago
There's no reason this couldn't be done now, someone just needs to implement that in PackageKit and it would work fine on many distros and package managers. The backend and everything is all there, just make a drag and drop event instead of clicking an "Install" button. That said, installation of software on Linux has been one its shining points for a long time. Package management is awesome and neither OS X or Windows offer it.
- coffeeaddicted 17y ago
  Some package management (apt) would be better if it would be easier for 3rd party vendors to get into the sources.list. For now you either have to get users to edit that file by hand (for which they might not even have the rights) or you have to use another installation mechanism which avoids the package management to which they are used and lose the advantages of stuff like upgrade. Maybe there should be a sources.list per user which allows normal users also to install software and distros could be set-up to work with a certain file-type in a way that if you click it on the web, then a default installer goes up which guides you all the way through the installation. Right now the situation is that if you want anything that's not in the "official" package repositories (probably the majority of software ...) you are getting into a world where installation is harder than in any other OS. And that is true as well for open-source applications (you want newest blender or one that is months behind?) as closed-source applications (which simply don't get into official repositories anyway). I also tried using one of the binary installers for a while, but when it stopped working with newer distros (my application still worked) I guessed that tar.gz and zip are for the moment simply the best I can really offer and that's still what I'm using for now.

nitrogen 17y ago

If the camera person for that video reads this, I suggest placing the speaker in the bottom-left/bottom-right corner of the video frame and keeping the slide visible at all times. You can pan around when people ask questions, but keep as much of the slide visible as possible and move back when the question is done.

k-zed 17y ago

The major advantage of "Desktop Linux" (that I've been using happily for quite a few years now) is that it's utterly unlike Mac OS X or Windows. We use Linux not because it's free, but because it's more comfortable, the UI is better and friendlier, and developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier. Everything Gnome, Ubuntu and this sort of people do work against these advantages. We use Linux because of its differences - these differences to other systems need to be accentuated (zsh, the suckless project, etc), not fought against (Ubuntu, network-manager, HAL, etc). By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop.

bad_user 17y ago
> We use Linux because of its differences I don't know who you speak for, but it's not about me ... I use Linux because it's cheap and I'm in control. Other than that I love having aptitude and a good repository, but every once in a while I really wish there was a click-to-install standard and I also really wish I wouldn't burn my weekend over wireless issues. > developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier You're not speaking about desktop applications / games. That's hell-like compared to the alternatives, being partly the reason why companies like Adobe aren't investing in it ... I've worked there and I know the arguments that are flying back and forth. > By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop. People should and will work on whatever they want, and all "wasted effort" arguments are bullshit. If you think there are better paradigms that should be explored, then jump in and show the world how right you are. Talk is cheap.
- k-zed 17y ago
  > You're not speaking about desktop applications / games Those apps aren't hard to develop because libraries or the environment or whatever; they're hard to develop because their developers want them to be closed, so recompilation and putting them into the real package management system is impossible. Starting with such a handicap makes things complicated :) > If you think there are better paradigms that should be explored, then jump in and show the world how right you are The better paradigms have been known and used for 20 years (such as the Unix paradigm of connecting multiple programs, the CLI, and so on). That it doesn't appeal to some end users is not our problem. (also username post combo, but just kidding :)

machrider 17y ago

The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well. It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.

colonelxc 17y ago
It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made). If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro, they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.
- vorador 17y ago
  But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?
  - nailer 17y ago
    I think you're both right. What I think would made a real difference is making some cruel-but-kind decisions about deprecation. State officially the other mechanisms are broken, then drop everything that doesn't use pulse from the repositories.
- 16y ago

known 17y ago

Linux on Desktop is offering too many options for users to install and configure apps.

macco 17y ago

Does somebody know who is the speaker? Didn't see it on the blip.tv page.

macco 17y ago
Bryan Lunduke - sorry I saw it on the video now.

Kilimanjaro 17y ago

Sell Ubuntu (and other apps like OOo, Gimp, etc) for a nominal $9.95 Give two options in the download area of your software, one green button with a $9.95 download and one blue button for a free download. Both pointing to the same package. If you want to contribute to open source, click the green one. Also sell it on best buy and walmart for $9.95 to reach the non-tech-savvy audience. Even if they drop it on the trash can when they get home. At least some money goes to the pockets of the open sourcerers, which is better than none.