10 ms·

Returning to Linux, not impressed

41 points by c3d 10y ago

INTPenis 10y ago
As a long time Linux user I am so proud that we're comparing free Linux distros with commercial OS' like Mac OS X and Windows 10.
- mfukar 10y ago
  Why is that?
- uitgewis 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not...
  - msane 10y ago
    the fact that his username is INTPenis ... doesn't quite elucidate it either, actually.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Not sure you should be proud given the basic issues he is experiencing: non-working keyboards, non functioning WiFi and no display after unplugging a monitor from a laptop. It's a bit like being proud that someone compares your Lada to their Bugati :-)
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    The basic issue seems to be that the user purchased a machine known not to have great linux support tried to put linux on it and discovered that it didn't have great linux support. Obviously developers try to support as much hardware as possible with varying degrees of cooperation from the manufacturers but its not reasonable to expect support for every device under the sun. Developer hours are expensive and finite the logical solution is to buy machines with linux in mind if you want to run linux. This is probably why I've been running Linux for 13 years with limited difficulty because I take responsibility for making reasonable choices instead of complaining.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Except... I've been using Linux for close to 15 years now and in that time it hasn't gotten any better at providing a stable desktop experience. You can even go all the way back and read JWZ's rant on how the GNOME project just drops all bugs that are "too old" and how this newfangled GNOME 2 thing has all the old issues, but just resets the bugzilla because it's a "new project". The current state of Desktop Linux is the same as Desktop Linux 15 years ago, and it will never change. I still use it, because I like all the control it gives me, I just don't like having to exercise said control so often.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    You could totally ignore crud like gnome and have a consistently working experience that just keeps getting better except pulseaudio seriously can we just crowd fund an entirely new linux audio stack from scratch please I'll contribute.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Please not, or we'll end up with two disjunct audio stacks. There are people (like me) for whom PulseAudio has been working wonderfully without any problems at all from day one. Admittedly, "day one" was not when Ubuntu switched to PulseAudio well too soon. It was around 2012, and it was just magical to have the whole network transparency of audio devices just work.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >As a long time Linux user I am so proud that we're comparing free Linux distros with commercial OS' like Mac OS X and Windows 10. As probably an even longer time Linux user (used it back in 1997 to 2004, used classic unices previously, use mostly OS X since and Linux on vms and servers), I can't share that pride. Back in 1999 or so, the slogan and the idea was that Linux will soon prevail "on the Desktop". Every year since then, until the idea died out, has been touted as the "year of Linux on the Desktop". And not in the same of some people happily using it either. Those existed back in 1999 too, heck I had a KDE based desktop and used Konqueror as my main browser. It also wasn't about "this phone runs the Linux kernel with some custom company frontend, but otherwise there's nothing especially Linuxy about it, and you couldn't tell it from a QNX or iOS phone with a similar facade". So, no Android is not that dream fullfilled. "Linux on the Desktop" meant undertaking Microsoft (OS X was negligible or not still existing then) at their own desktop/office desktop game, and for if not the majority, of a huge share (30% or more) of users. Which basically means: a stable desktop OS, with a suite that covers all the basics. And what we have? - Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations. - On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with. - Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X. - Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making) - OpenOffice (and it's various forks) are still not as capable as MS Office and full of quirks and slowdowns, plus the bizarro old-school UI. And tons of other things besides...
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    > Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations. Is that the OS's fault? Manufacturers supply drivers for Windows, but Linux is left to just figure it out by itself.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Well, that's the way Linux wants it (figuratively using "Linux" as a substitute for large parts of the community), it doesn't want those stinking binary closed drivers, and manufactures wont get out of their way to create and open source drivers for their stuff.
- dagw 10y ago
  "We've" been doing that since forever. I distinctly remember a slew of articles back when windows 2000 was a thing.
- piyush_soni 10y ago
  Depends on how you look at it. I see that even after so long, it's still not 'comparable' with any of the commercial OSs from a UX perspective. I come back to try Linux every 3-4 years or so, and every time I face so 'basic' problems that I'm almost immediately turned off by it. Displays not working on cards, basic GUI not working, strange connectivity problems, hardware compatibility problems, and then I have to turn the 'geek mode' on, just to solve these problems which wouldn't have occurred on any other OS and I'd be actually working on the things that matter to me. Within no time, you're found manually fiddling with files like xorg.conf in the black terminal. The worst problem is, almost always someone would come up and reply with one standard answer : "Oh, that's because you're using distro <x>. Had you used distro <y>, this problem would never occur!". More than two decades, and Linux hasn't got the basic things right, and still remains a Nerd only OS (and it's coming from a nerd).
fortytw2 10y ago
perhaps, "returning to RHEL" would be a much more accurate title. The author has totally understandable grips with RHEL that don't necessarily reflect non-RHEL based linux distributions, nor are they problems that I have personally, despite running Linux (arch / gentoo) on my daily drivers for years
- unhammer 10y ago
  Also, he's installing Fedora (w/Wayland) on Apple hardware, and using NFS. There's quite a lot of things that can go wrong there compared to the less adventurous Linux experience of, say, Ubuntu LTS on a Thinkpad/XPS/Zenbook.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - vetinari 10y ago
    The biggest mistake is installing on Apple hardware. Fedora on Thinkpad (including Wayland) is very nice, accessing Synology via SMB or even AFS works very nicely. If I was feeling adventurous and had a need for remote block devices, I would try iSCSI too.
- akoster 10y ago
  For those interested in using RHEL-based distros for a desktop use-case, this blog post may be helpful: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-perfect-desktop.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-perfect-desktop....
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- loudmax 10y ago
  I think I feel the same way as you, but it really comes down to expectations. I never had trouble with the GUI interface on an Arch or Gentoo install because I've only ever done command line installs. I've had other issues. For example, I had to learn a lot about power management in Linux to get wifi working without draining the battery. And I'm fine with that, that's what I expect out of Arch. RHEL shouldn't be like that. It should install with minimal surprise or weirdness. I recognize the author's complaint about the "Done" button because RHEL uses the same installer. I have a similar complaint along those lines. The system prompts you to set up a non-root account, but you have to click a checkmark to make this user an administrator (ie. in group wheel). Unless I'm completely misreading the target market, making the first user created an administrator should be opt-out, not opt-in. It's not a big deal, but it seems careless. As for Fedora, I don't know. I haven't had the kind of experiences the author describes when installing Fedora, but Fedora systems have never been stable enough for me to stick with. They install okay, then a month or two later you run an update and suddenly your desktop's max resolution to be 640x480 or audio or wifi no longer works. Maybe it's because I've always used LXDE or XFCE instead of GNOME, but oh god I can't stand GNOME.
bjakubski 10y ago
It seems author consistently is using "GB" when he means "TB". I don't believe he's running 4-bay NAS with 8GB of total disk space in 2016
- oldopsguy 10y ago
  Yeah I saw this as well and actually scrolled to the top of the page to check what year it was written :P
formula1 10y ago
Great article. I remember when I tried toying around with fedora A while back, I thought that redhat would surely have a better product than debian. Its not just fedora. Ubuntu also has some frustrating issues in 16.04. I dont particularly want to install a nonfree operating system and I dont really imagine myself spending weeks trying to get an arch perfect. But sure do waste a lot of time in ubuntu :/
binaryapparatus 10y ago
It is bit of a nonsense to pick one distro with specific UI and call it 'Linux' in general. I did similar thing with Arch recently, was long time user that switched to Mac six years ago. Then due to all the suspicious moves from Apple I installed Arch again and can't be happier. Linux is what you make of it, not what any distro thinks it should be. I am using xmonad and there is nothing silly looking on my screen. If doing any usability tests, fedora/red hat would be very low on my priorities list.
- formula1 10y ago
  Do you use X11 on arch or no? Ubuntu has been having weird network problems and sleep problems for me. Looking into it has led to little to no answers. Im assuming the annoying part about arch will be trying to get a relatively simple desktop experience but most tutorials take you down quite a path to get there it seems
  - binaryapparatus 10y ago
    Yes, X11 with xmonad, it all works perfectly. I also don't use any login manager, I log in into console then use startx to start gui. This way it is easy to test and debug things before booting X11, if I ever break anything. Never happened so far but I like having pure console at start.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Yup. Ever since I went i3 I found that most endless discussions about desktop UI are essentially meaningless twaddle. Using a tiled WM fundamentally changed the way in which I interact with my machines, and for the better. I still like the ubuntu eyecandy, but I only see it at most once or twice a year just before I install i3.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    I second this. i3 is probably the best WM ever made. It's dead simple to configure, endlessly configurable, but also works right out of the box. And three keyboard shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+Q, $mod+E) are all you ever need to learn (although I'd certainly recommend learning all of them. It's just better. The same way that vi and emacs are better than Notepad and Gedit.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Mathnerd314 10y ago
Recent LWN article r.e. linux on mac: https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/ https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/. In general it seems like a lot of pain for little gain.
lykron 10y ago
Everytime I read posts like this, I think I must be the lucky one. Fedora 25 on my laptop and desktop, and I've had no issues what so ever. The author's package manager complaints are unfounded. Complaining about yum, and yum being replaced by dnf? C'Mon, software evolves and sometimes you have to do a hard fork. The complaints about NFS seem to be a backend issue, and not an issue with the client.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  You definitely are the lucky one. I've never installed Linux without issues.
  - lykron 10y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I've encountered issues before but CentOS 7.2 and Fedora 24/25 have been good to me.
    - csydas 10y ago
      I'm with you on this one, perhaps I just got lucky. Either installs on Apple Hardware or as virtual machines, my linux installs almost always just go and do what I want them to. I think perhaps my use cases are simplistic as most are pretty much just appliance VMs or distros meant for end users (back in the day getting PPC variants of linux to run on old boat-anchor iMacs), but it's never been a headache for me, whereas very smart computer people I know can't seem to get a stable install on older Apple hardware.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Did you buy hardware with linux in mind or buy whatever and hope it would work. The former is a valid strategy the latter is more likely to be an interesting experience.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    I have never installed windows without issues, infuriating soul crushing reboot a million times while downloading random drivers from fishy sites to get some thing working bs issues. And now you have a next to useless os, with nothing on it. In linux I have a full dev stack within minutes after installing ansible. In windows, the everlasting shitstorm has now moved from category 4 to 5 forecast to last a week of hunting down and installing disjoint tools and frameworks from a plethora of one-hung-lo holes. Hell no. I'll never work in windows shop again, that shit's cray.
jheriko 10y ago
i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days. apple go to lengths to make it painful, and my experience of this is that they have gone to increasingly further lengths in increments over the last 5 years. you end up having to install some funky efi bootloader like refit or refind, even if you want to use bootcamp to install windows (i've never seen bootcamp work correctly on its own, although i have heard that it does work sometimes) - even then you end up having to hack things to get it to work correctly, or find that things like the trackpad or keyboard mysteriously don't work properly if at all... mounting your hdd into a vm in os x is often a necessity. its a nightmare. apple don't want you to do these things.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days. Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones). And of course, tons of developers do the same. I don't advocate it myself, but it's nothing extremely uncommon. They like the hardware, but want to use Linux on it. The issues you mention is not because "Apple doesn't want you to do these things" it's because Apple implements new hardware setups and features without taking into consideration whether people who want to run Linux have the drivers to use them. PC manufactures are less adventurous and rock the boat less, so Linux works more easily on them with existing drivers. But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party (e.g. change the interfaces with which the keyboard/touchpad talks to the cpu, offer graphics switching, etc.). So it wouldn't make sense to give that up to wait for Linux drivers to catch up on their new hardware.
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    > But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work". (That said, in this kind of situation Arch Linux is probably your best bet since it's rolling-release with the most-up-to-date drivers -- outside of compiling your own kernel. It's not trivial to install, though, and that's probably for the best, honestly.)
alkz 10y ago
So, the author tries to run linux on apple hardware. then he goes on installing a GUI on a server, misunderstands the difference between rpm and yum, judges package managers by command length. Also mistakes GB for TB This was a depressing read.
- laumars 10y ago
  It's weird because he uses GB correctly when talking about system memory but uses it incorrectly every time he refers to storage space. He also did a good job at the start of the article of acknowledging that Ubuntu gives a good desktop experience yet then goes on to rant about how bad Linux is in general after using one other, unrelated, distro. The whole article reads incredibly ignorantly which I wouldn't have expected given his credentials. I can only assume he approached the exercise with an axe to grind so continued his tasks in a unintentionally negative way. In my experience, if someone is impatient when using unfamiliar platforms and/or wants to find problems with it, then they will find a way to expose problems regardless of the platform.
- Unman 10y ago
  Yes. Doesn't seem like a reliable witness at all.
- facorreia 10y ago
  Also, aknowledges that Ubuntu does a good job polishing the user experience, and is "not impressed" with Linux when trying Fedora.
- legulere 10y ago
  Your comment is more depressing in my opinion, as it shows that it's still typical with the linux to blame users. Software is there to be used by humans, if you put the blame on your users, you have actually failed to design the software correctly. Why blame someone for wanting to install linux on apple hardware (which btw is often better supported than other hardware)? Why blame someone developing 3D acceleration for virtual machines for wanting to have a GUI on the server that contains test VMs? Why blame someone for being annoyed having to know the difference between 3 package manager programs? Why blame someone for talking about the usability of command line options, of which command length certainly is a part?
pif 10y ago
I wonder: how greedy do you have to be to complain about something you choose freely and you got for free?
- coldtea 10y ago
  Just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. If I get some free food in a soup kitchen and get food poisoning, I'll complain as well. Not only you should look a gift horse in the mouth, you should also check it for any diseases before you put it in your stable lest it infects you or other animals there. And if it is indeed sick, you do have a leg to complain, even if it was a gift. But, free software is not exactly a gift. It's also something people put out (and often companies put out) to reach as many people as possible, and they do want it to be adopted and users to like it. Besides, by your logic users not involved in free software projects should never criticize and complain about their shortcomings. How would their developers know what users want, and what's wrong with their programs then? And no, not all development contribute the free software projects just for themselves and/or other community members only. Some really want the software to be adopted by as many users as possible, and are interested in their feedback.
bmh_ca 10y ago
I just set up a linux desktop, first time in over a decade. It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to try) just wouldn't find the network adapter owing to some obscure error that took hours to track down any information on. Debian found the network adapter, but the USB devices wouldn't work. I had to tweak the USB bios settings – sometimes it'd work with the keyboard, sometimes with the USB flash drive I was installing from, sometimes not at all. To make USB work reliably I had to set the BIOS to use USB 1.1. Oh boy. Slow, but it worked. It took a lot of fighting to convince the computer to use the network settings I wanted it to. I basically spent as much time turning off whatever-the-hell it was trying to do (network-manager, I'm looking at you), and edit the settings directly. It took about 11 hours to get the thing setup (including the time to download 4 distros). There were many other nuisance and time-consuming issues. All that said, now that it's setup it'll probably run perfectly until it physically dies. The firewall setup, though reasonably complex, was straightforward with ufw. VPN was a bit of a nuisance, but predictable. So it would seem that a lot of effort depends on choosing the right hardware, and I'm probably missing out on some of the newer distros abilities (not that debian is old, but Ubuntu & Elementary OS clearly have had more resources put into the desktop-refinement).
- basch 10y ago
  were all four of your test distros Debian based? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-best-linux-distro-of-2016-arrived-at-the-last-moment/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-...
  - bmh_ca 10y ago
    Indeed they were all Debian based. It is my bias for familiarity — I regularly set up servers with Debian. I'll check out Fedora – Thanks for the link. I wouldn't have thought to look at it. Cheers
    - basch 10y ago
      it was the topic the parent article was frustrate with, ars had a different experience. Fedora 24 was their favorite as well, albeit with concerns.
partycoder 10y ago
So you try one distribution and suddenly make a blanket statement over all the Linux ecosystem? There are many more distros out there. I wonder if Ubuntu or ArchLinux might present these issues.
Gonzih 10y ago
So Ubuntu is not linux and Fedora is? Yes, running Linux on macbook is a hard job, but it's doable. And all those minor issues have workarounds at the end. Older macbook you have higher chances that hardware was reverse engineered and kernel will support it better.
michaelmrose 10y ago
"Red Hat provided me with a 15″ Mac Book Pro. Since this was one of their choices of machine for developers, I assumed it was well supported by Fedora" Why didn't he google Mac Book Pro Linux?
xbmcuser 10y ago
If you want to run Linux get or build a PC that is compatible ie linux drivers have been released by the hardware manufacturer. Running Linux on a Mac where most drivers have been reverse engineered and then comparing it to OSX which was built for the hardware is a bit disengenous.

41 points by c3d 10y ago

As a long time Linux user I am so proud that we're comparing free Linux distros with commercial OS' like Mac OS X and Windows 10.

mfukar 10y ago
Why is that?
uitgewis 10y ago
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not...
- msane 10y ago
  the fact that his username is INTPenis ... doesn't quite elucidate it either, actually.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
72deluxe 10y ago
Not sure you should be proud given the basic issues he is experiencing: non-working keyboards, non functioning WiFi and no display after unplugging a monitor from a laptop. It's a bit like being proud that someone compares your Lada to their Bugati :-)
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  The basic issue seems to be that the user purchased a machine known not to have great linux support tried to put linux on it and discovered that it didn't have great linux support. Obviously developers try to support as much hardware as possible with varying degrees of cooperation from the manufacturers but its not reasonable to expect support for every device under the sun. Developer hours are expensive and finite the logical solution is to buy machines with linux in mind if you want to run linux. This is probably why I've been running Linux for 13 years with limited difficulty because I take responsibility for making reasonable choices instead of complaining.
Asooka 10y ago
Except... I've been using Linux for close to 15 years now and in that time it hasn't gotten any better at providing a stable desktop experience. You can even go all the way back and read JWZ's rant on how the GNOME project just drops all bugs that are "too old" and how this newfangled GNOME 2 thing has all the old issues, but just resets the bugzilla because it's a "new project". The current state of Desktop Linux is the same as Desktop Linux 15 years ago, and it will never change. I still use it, because I like all the control it gives me, I just don't like having to exercise said control so often.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  You could totally ignore crud like gnome and have a consistently working experience that just keeps getting better except pulseaudio seriously can we just crowd fund an entirely new linux audio stack from scratch please I'll contribute.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Please not, or we'll end up with two disjunct audio stacks. There are people (like me) for whom PulseAudio has been working wonderfully without any problems at all from day one. Admittedly, "day one" was not when Ubuntu switched to PulseAudio well too soon. It was around 2012, and it was just magical to have the whole network transparency of audio devices just work.
coldtea 10y ago
>As a long time Linux user I am so proud that we're comparing free Linux distros with commercial OS' like Mac OS X and Windows 10. As probably an even longer time Linux user (used it back in 1997 to 2004, used classic unices previously, use mostly OS X since and Linux on vms and servers), I can't share that pride. Back in 1999 or so, the slogan and the idea was that Linux will soon prevail "on the Desktop". Every year since then, until the idea died out, has been touted as the "year of Linux on the Desktop". And not in the same of some people happily using it either. Those existed back in 1999 too, heck I had a KDE based desktop and used Konqueror as my main browser. It also wasn't about "this phone runs the Linux kernel with some custom company frontend, but otherwise there's nothing especially Linuxy about it, and you couldn't tell it from a QNX or iOS phone with a similar facade". So, no Android is not that dream fullfilled. "Linux on the Desktop" meant undertaking Microsoft (OS X was negligible or not still existing then) at their own desktop/office desktop game, and for if not the majority, of a huge share (30% or more) of users. Which basically means: a stable desktop OS, with a suite that covers all the basics. And what we have? - Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations. - On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with. - Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X. - Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making) - OpenOffice (and it's various forks) are still not as capable as MS Office and full of quirks and slowdowns, plus the bizarro old-school UI. And tons of other things besides...
- StavrosK 10y ago
  > Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations. Is that the OS's fault? Manufacturers supply drivers for Windows, but Linux is left to just figure it out by itself.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Well, that's the way Linux wants it (figuratively using "Linux" as a substitute for large parts of the community), it doesn't want those stinking binary closed drivers, and manufactures wont get out of their way to create and open source drivers for their stuff.
dagw 10y ago
"We've" been doing that since forever. I distinctly remember a slew of articles back when windows 2000 was a thing.
piyush_soni 10y ago
Depends on how you look at it. I see that even after so long, it's still not 'comparable' with any of the commercial OSs from a UX perspective. I come back to try Linux every 3-4 years or so, and every time I face so 'basic' problems that I'm almost immediately turned off by it. Displays not working on cards, basic GUI not working, strange connectivity problems, hardware compatibility problems, and then I have to turn the 'geek mode' on, just to solve these problems which wouldn't have occurred on any other OS and I'd be actually working on the things that matter to me. Within no time, you're found manually fiddling with files like xorg.conf in the black terminal. The worst problem is, almost always someone would come up and reply with one standard answer : "Oh, that's because you're using distro <x>. Had you used distro <y>, this problem would never occur!". More than two decades, and Linux hasn't got the basic things right, and still remains a Nerd only OS (and it's coming from a nerd).

fortytw2 10y ago

perhaps, "returning to RHEL" would be a much more accurate title. The author has totally understandable grips with RHEL that don't necessarily reflect non-RHEL based linux distributions, nor are they problems that I have personally, despite running Linux (arch / gentoo) on my daily drivers for years

unhammer 10y ago
Also, he's installing Fedora (w/Wayland) on Apple hardware, and using NFS. There's quite a lot of things that can go wrong there compared to the less adventurous Linux experience of, say, Ubuntu LTS on a Thinkpad/XPS/Zenbook.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vetinari 10y ago
  The biggest mistake is installing on Apple hardware. Fedora on Thinkpad (including Wayland) is very nice, accessing Synology via SMB or even AFS works very nicely. If I was feeling adventurous and had a need for remote block devices, I would try iSCSI too.
akoster 10y ago
For those interested in using RHEL-based distros for a desktop use-case, this blog post may be helpful: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-perfect-desktop.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-perfect-desktop....
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
loudmax 10y ago
I think I feel the same way as you, but it really comes down to expectations. I never had trouble with the GUI interface on an Arch or Gentoo install because I've only ever done command line installs. I've had other issues. For example, I had to learn a lot about power management in Linux to get wifi working without draining the battery. And I'm fine with that, that's what I expect out of Arch. RHEL shouldn't be like that. It should install with minimal surprise or weirdness. I recognize the author's complaint about the "Done" button because RHEL uses the same installer. I have a similar complaint along those lines. The system prompts you to set up a non-root account, but you have to click a checkmark to make this user an administrator (ie. in group wheel). Unless I'm completely misreading the target market, making the first user created an administrator should be opt-out, not opt-in. It's not a big deal, but it seems careless. As for Fedora, I don't know. I haven't had the kind of experiences the author describes when installing Fedora, but Fedora systems have never been stable enough for me to stick with. They install okay, then a month or two later you run an update and suddenly your desktop's max resolution to be 640x480 or audio or wifi no longer works. Maybe it's because I've always used LXDE or XFCE instead of GNOME, but oh god I can't stand GNOME.

bjakubski 10y ago

It seems author consistently is using "GB" when he means "TB". I don't believe he's running 4-bay NAS with 8GB of total disk space in 2016

oldopsguy 10y ago
Yeah I saw this as well and actually scrolled to the top of the page to check what year it was written :P

formula1 10y ago

Great article. I remember when I tried toying around with fedora A while back, I thought that redhat would surely have a better product than debian. Its not just fedora. Ubuntu also has some frustrating issues in 16.04. I dont particularly want to install a nonfree operating system and I dont really imagine myself spending weeks trying to get an arch perfect. But sure do waste a lot of time in ubuntu :/

binaryapparatus 10y ago

It is bit of a nonsense to pick one distro with specific UI and call it 'Linux' in general. I did similar thing with Arch recently, was long time user that switched to Mac six years ago. Then due to all the suspicious moves from Apple I installed Arch again and can't be happier. Linux is what you make of it, not what any distro thinks it should be. I am using xmonad and there is nothing silly looking on my screen. If doing any usability tests, fedora/red hat would be very low on my priorities list.

formula1 10y ago
Do you use X11 on arch or no? Ubuntu has been having weird network problems and sleep problems for me. Looking into it has led to little to no answers. Im assuming the annoying part about arch will be trying to get a relatively simple desktop experience but most tutorials take you down quite a path to get there it seems
- binaryapparatus 10y ago
  Yes, X11 with xmonad, it all works perfectly. I also don't use any login manager, I log in into console then use startx to start gui. This way it is easy to test and debug things before booting X11, if I ever break anything. Never happened so far but I like having pure console at start.
ageofwant 10y ago
Yup. Ever since I went i3 I found that most endless discussions about desktop UI are essentially meaningless twaddle. Using a tiled WM fundamentally changed the way in which I interact with my machines, and for the better. I still like the ubuntu eyecandy, but I only see it at most once or twice a year just before I install i3.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  I second this. i3 is probably the best WM ever made. It's dead simple to configure, endlessly configurable, but also works right out of the box. And three keyboard shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+Q, $mod+E) are all you ever need to learn (although I'd certainly recommend learning all of them. It's just better. The same way that vi and emacs are better than Notepad and Gedit.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Mathnerd314 10y ago

Recent LWN article r.e. linux on mac: https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/ https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/. In general it seems like a lot of pain for little gain.

lykron 10y ago

Everytime I read posts like this, I think I must be the lucky one. Fedora 25 on my laptop and desktop, and I've had no issues what so ever. The author's package manager complaints are unfounded. Complaining about yum, and yum being replaced by dnf? C'Mon, software evolves and sometimes you have to do a hard fork. The complaints about NFS seem to be a backend issue, and not an issue with the client.

IshKebab 10y ago
You definitely are the lucky one. I've never installed Linux without issues.
- lykron 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I've encountered issues before but CentOS 7.2 and Fedora 24/25 have been good to me.
  - csydas 10y ago
    I'm with you on this one, perhaps I just got lucky. Either installs on Apple Hardware or as virtual machines, my linux installs almost always just go and do what I want them to. I think perhaps my use cases are simplistic as most are pretty much just appliance VMs or distros meant for end users (back in the day getting PPC variants of linux to run on old boat-anchor iMacs), but it's never been a headache for me, whereas very smart computer people I know can't seem to get a stable install on older Apple hardware.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  Did you buy hardware with linux in mind or buy whatever and hope it would work. The former is a valid strategy the latter is more likely to be an interesting experience.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  I have never installed windows without issues, infuriating soul crushing reboot a million times while downloading random drivers from fishy sites to get some thing working bs issues. And now you have a next to useless os, with nothing on it. In linux I have a full dev stack within minutes after installing ansible. In windows, the everlasting shitstorm has now moved from category 4 to 5 forecast to last a week of hunting down and installing disjoint tools and frameworks from a plethora of one-hung-lo holes. Hell no. I'll never work in windows shop again, that shit's cray.

jheriko 10y ago

i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days. apple go to lengths to make it painful, and my experience of this is that they have gone to increasingly further lengths in increments over the last 5 years. you end up having to install some funky efi bootloader like refit or refind, even if you want to use bootcamp to install windows (i've never seen bootcamp work correctly on its own, although i have heard that it does work sometimes) - even then you end up having to hack things to get it to work correctly, or find that things like the trackpad or keyboard mysteriously don't work properly if at all... mounting your hdd into a vm in os x is often a necessity. its a nightmare. apple don't want you to do these things.

coldtea 10y ago
>i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days. Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones). And of course, tons of developers do the same. I don't advocate it myself, but it's nothing extremely uncommon. They like the hardware, but want to use Linux on it. The issues you mention is not because "Apple doesn't want you to do these things" it's because Apple implements new hardware setups and features without taking into consideration whether people who want to run Linux have the drivers to use them. PC manufactures are less adventurous and rock the boat less, so Linux works more easily on them with existing drivers. But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party (e.g. change the interfaces with which the keyboard/touchpad talks to the cpu, offer graphics switching, etc.). So it wouldn't make sense to give that up to wait for Linux drivers to catch up on their new hardware.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  > But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work". (That said, in this kind of situation Arch Linux is probably your best bet since it's rolling-release with the most-up-to-date drivers -- outside of compiling your own kernel. It's not trivial to install, though, and that's probably for the best, honestly.)

alkz 10y ago

So, the author tries to run linux on apple hardware. then he goes on installing a GUI on a server, misunderstands the difference between rpm and yum, judges package managers by command length. Also mistakes GB for TB This was a depressing read.

laumars 10y ago
It's weird because he uses GB correctly when talking about system memory but uses it incorrectly every time he refers to storage space. He also did a good job at the start of the article of acknowledging that Ubuntu gives a good desktop experience yet then goes on to rant about how bad Linux is in general after using one other, unrelated, distro. The whole article reads incredibly ignorantly which I wouldn't have expected given his credentials. I can only assume he approached the exercise with an axe to grind so continued his tasks in a unintentionally negative way. In my experience, if someone is impatient when using unfamiliar platforms and/or wants to find problems with it, then they will find a way to expose problems regardless of the platform.
Unman 10y ago
Yes. Doesn't seem like a reliable witness at all.
facorreia 10y ago
Also, aknowledges that Ubuntu does a good job polishing the user experience, and is "not impressed" with Linux when trying Fedora.
legulere 10y ago
Your comment is more depressing in my opinion, as it shows that it's still typical with the linux to blame users. Software is there to be used by humans, if you put the blame on your users, you have actually failed to design the software correctly. Why blame someone for wanting to install linux on apple hardware (which btw is often better supported than other hardware)? Why blame someone developing 3D acceleration for virtual machines for wanting to have a GUI on the server that contains test VMs? Why blame someone for being annoyed having to know the difference between 3 package manager programs? Why blame someone for talking about the usability of command line options, of which command length certainly is a part?

pif 10y ago

I wonder: how greedy do you have to be to complain about something you choose freely and you got for free?

coldtea 10y ago
Just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. If I get some free food in a soup kitchen and get food poisoning, I'll complain as well. Not only you should look a gift horse in the mouth, you should also check it for any diseases before you put it in your stable lest it infects you or other animals there. And if it is indeed sick, you do have a leg to complain, even if it was a gift. But, free software is not exactly a gift. It's also something people put out (and often companies put out) to reach as many people as possible, and they do want it to be adopted and users to like it. Besides, by your logic users not involved in free software projects should never criticize and complain about their shortcomings. How would their developers know what users want, and what's wrong with their programs then? And no, not all development contribute the free software projects just for themselves and/or other community members only. Some really want the software to be adopted by as many users as possible, and are interested in their feedback.

bmh_ca 10y ago

I just set up a linux desktop, first time in over a decade. It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to try) just wouldn't find the network adapter owing to some obscure error that took hours to track down any information on. Debian found the network adapter, but the USB devices wouldn't work. I had to tweak the USB bios settings – sometimes it'd work with the keyboard, sometimes with the USB flash drive I was installing from, sometimes not at all. To make USB work reliably I had to set the BIOS to use USB 1.1. Oh boy. Slow, but it worked. It took a lot of fighting to convince the computer to use the network settings I wanted it to. I basically spent as much time turning off whatever-the-hell it was trying to do (network-manager, I'm looking at you), and edit the settings directly. It took about 11 hours to get the thing setup (including the time to download 4 distros). There were many other nuisance and time-consuming issues. All that said, now that it's setup it'll probably run perfectly until it physically dies. The firewall setup, though reasonably complex, was straightforward with ufw. VPN was a bit of a nuisance, but predictable. So it would seem that a lot of effort depends on choosing the right hardware, and I'm probably missing out on some of the newer distros abilities (not that debian is old, but Ubuntu & Elementary OS clearly have had more resources put into the desktop-refinement).

basch 10y ago
were all four of your test distros Debian based? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-best-linux-distro-of-2016-arrived-at-the-last-moment/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-...
- bmh_ca 10y ago
  Indeed they were all Debian based. It is my bias for familiarity — I regularly set up servers with Debian. I'll check out Fedora – Thanks for the link. I wouldn't have thought to look at it. Cheers
  - basch 10y ago
    it was the topic the parent article was frustrate with, ars had a different experience. Fedora 24 was their favorite as well, albeit with concerns.

partycoder 10y ago

So you try one distribution and suddenly make a blanket statement over all the Linux ecosystem? There are many more distros out there. I wonder if Ubuntu or ArchLinux might present these issues.

Gonzih 10y ago

So Ubuntu is not linux and Fedora is? Yes, running Linux on macbook is a hard job, but it's doable. And all those minor issues have workarounds at the end. Older macbook you have higher chances that hardware was reverse engineered and kernel will support it better.

michaelmrose 10y ago

"Red Hat provided me with a 15″ Mac Book Pro. Since this was one of their choices of machine for developers, I assumed it was well supported by Fedora" Why didn't he google Mac Book Pro Linux?

xbmcuser 10y ago

If you want to run Linux get or build a PC that is compatible ie linux drivers have been released by the hardware manufacturer. Running Linux on a Mac where most drivers have been reverse engineered and then comparing it to OSX which was built for the hardware is a bit disengenous.