7 ms·

> Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful.

by yongjik 10y ago

> Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. The year is 2016, and every time I upgraded my Linux distro in the past several years, I had to search down several different (and incompatible) input method packages, install them one by one, try several different command-line tools to tell the system what input system the applications should expect (which they may or may not honor, depending on whether they're linked with GNOME or QT or whatever), read several howtos and stackoverflow articles, and finally settle down with the best one that supports Korean input on at least half of the applications, sort of. I forgot when was the last time Windows didn't support acceptable Korean input out of box. Sometime in the 90s, I think. > You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?" More like, "At first it crashed fifteen times, but when I followed this great article to mine my own titanium ore and replace the fuselage with my custom built one, there was no problem at all! Oh, by the way all the screws must be left-handed, don't ask me why, but I found it works best that way."

sirn 10y ago
> I had to search down several different (and incompatible) input method packages, install them one by one I'm curious what input methods have you tried. Not sure about Korean, but for my English/Japanese/Thai setup, ibus (w/ mozc/kkc/libthai) has been working very reliably so far on Arch (been using since February). On the other hand, the hunt to find something that actually works wasn't exactly fun, though.
- yongjik 10y ago
  I'm using Linux Mint with KDE. (Probably not the best tested distro out there, so maybe I reap what I sow.) At one time, ibus worked pretty well, and I was content. After one upgrade, ibus stopped working, and I couldn't make it work again. Tried skim (which I had used several years ago, but abandoned when it also stopped working for some reason): it managed to lock up X windows. Finally found uim, which almost worked the same, so I was content again. And then about a month ago I had to upgrade again (long story short: Linux magically forgot that I had a second monitor and refused to acknowledge it), and then uim stopped working in some KDE applications, including Konsole. Spent several hours trying different things. (Even tried to compile uim from source, but apparently figuring out dependencies for graphic libraries is not my strong area.) Finally just settled down for uim again. Who needs to type Korean into terminal anyway? Well, at least now I don't have to restart gvim every time after reboot, so that's the plus. See, "Why don't you report bugs" is missing the problem. For example, I had gvim running on a KDE system that somehow forgets the input method whenever I reboot the system, but when I restart gvim, it finds the input method without problem. I don't even know which application I should report this bug against. And of course I'm using distro packages that may be years old (the last release of uim was in 2013), so for all I know, the problem I have is already fixed in the most upstream version. I'm sure Windows have other problems that Linux solves quite well. I'm not arguing Linux is worse in every respect. I'm just pointing out there are a horde of problems that should have been solved for once and all fifteen years ago: there should be a metapackage, or ideally a single button that says "If you want to enable Korean/Japanese/Hindi input, press HERE," and that should be the end of story. But these problems are never properly solved, because the "bazaar" nature of Linux development means whatever solution worked today is not guaranteed to work two years later. Each solution is made of five packages developed by different teams, and maintainers drop out all the time either because they're bored or they have other life obligations. And then some other people start a new sexy project that more or less subsumes previous iterations (but in a brand new codebase), and the cycle continues. Conway's law[1] says "organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." It doesn't just apply to MS or Google: it also applies to Linux. I don't know if it can be improved, but that's the way Linux is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
fleetfox 10y ago
I have an anecdote too. Last week Windows update corrupted itself and was boot looping i spent two days trying to debug and fix it. Even repair from disc didn't help. 30+ reboots later i decided to just reinstall it. Meanwhile my two Linux desktops have no issues, and when they do i can fix it without rebooting million times and i never had to reinstall them just because they get corrupted randomly.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Windows, FWIU in the majority of cases (and at least every time I did it) still does not support being moved to a new motherboard. Every time I upgrade a Windows PC's motherboard, the windows install becomes unbootable. Linux doesn't care.
  - chungy 10y ago
    It supports moving to a new motherboard if you don't forget to run sysprep first. If you don't or can't (hello new hardware because the old died!), you're basically SoL.
    - parenthephobia 10y ago
      It would help if this wasn't the first time I'd ever heard of sysprep. Microsoft don't exactly go out of their way to advertise it. It doesn't even show up when searching from the start menu. Searching online, the easiest results to find seem to be either to manually uninstall hardware-specific drivers in the device manager, or simply to assume that motherboard upgrades will just magically work. Whilst one can find results that mention sysprep, how is a user to know that the sysprep method is the right one? And now I read: When sysprepping an existing Windows setup, it only works if the Windows was installed clean and has never been upgraded or repaired using repair install. So that's great.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Linux actually doesn't care at all. I used a laptop hard drive in a desktop which had a AMD processor instead of an Intel one (both have iGPUs) and it worked perfectly fine.
kylemuir 10y ago
I'm currently running Linux Mint on my home PC and I installed it and then tweaked from there (granted, I use English so no need to tweak the inputs). It's been very smooth - smoothest experience so far and I'd definitely recommend it to others. However, last time I installed Ubuntu it booted to a black screen of death and then googling told me it didn't come with nvidia drivers out of the box, etc.
unixhero 10y ago
More like, you didn't try to use Linux Mint. It works out of the box.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
slim 10y ago
You should maybe take over maintenance of korean package of your distribution. You'll find the work you do each time more rewarding when you'll get respect from your fellow koreans smoothly enabling korean language without thinking of it.
- greggyb 10y ago
  Or, you know, do his or her real job and have a life. Seamless internationalization is not a one-person job.
- Orangeair 10y ago
  Ooh, let's continue the metaphor. Sometimes Linux Airlines forgets to equip its planes with doors. Others in Linux Airlines, who are used to entering through the windows, suggest that you should start a door company yourself to outfit the planes.
akerro 10y ago
Nice FUD you got there. For last 5 years I had Kubuntu and OpenSUSE on my parents PCs, for the 5 years I had no psyhical access to the machines. For the 5 years I did all upgrades and distr-upgrades remotely. Never failed.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  You don't say a word if your parents use an Asian language interface? That's the parent's point, not Linux upgrades in general.
xorcist 10y ago
It sounds like you did a lot of manual work, in a way that may or may not be supported by your desktop environment, which might help explain why your upgrades are so painful. I don't use Korean locale so I don't know what troubles you might have had. Generally, I think a big problem with Linux is all the low quality advice sprinkled around Stack Overflow and other web forums where people recommend doing all sorts of forced installs and run script that "fix" your system. No wonder these people find Linux complicated. Many with bad experience from it did some bodge at some time to get some unsupported hardware working. I also dislike the idea that started to get popular in the early 00s that Linux was somehow "about choice". Sure you can swap out system components, which you can with any OS from the same era, but that doesn't mean you should. You're going to have a tough time upgrading if you run your own init system. Modern Linux distributions are great in the sense that they "just work". Plug in my printer and it just works. Third party drivers are much more common in the Windows ecosystem, and they have varied quality. Good luck getting that printer working in a modern Windows as you'll only find drivers for older versions. Suspending my Thinkpad works every time, while another laptop sometimes awakens all over again. The key to "just working" is running well known hardware (no third party drivers required) and not messing about too much with your system internals just because you read it was the cool thing to do.
glandium 10y ago
I've had no problem with IME in a long while, but every single time I install a new machine I forget how to get fontconfig to behave "correctly" wrt monospace fonts when the locale is japanese. Somehow, as long as I have japanese fonts installed, it picks a non monospace font for monospace. Which makes e.g. <pre> sections in a browser look wrong, ghex display completely fucked up, etc. Last time happens to have been two weeks ago, so now I know what I did this time: create a .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file containing: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <match target="pattern"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>monospace</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong"> <string>Noto Mono</string> </edit> </match> </fontconfig> (I used Noto Mono, but pick what you like) In case that's helpful to someone else...
3131s 10y ago
What Linux distribution(s) have you had this problem on?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Orangeair 10y ago
I am in complete agreement. No matter how many troubles Windows may have caused me over the years, at least I've never managed to somehow completely delete its entire GUI while attempting a routine software update.

by yongjik 10y ago

sirn 10y ago

> I had to search down several different (and incompatible) input method packages, install them one by one I'm curious what input methods have you tried. Not sure about Korean, but for my English/Japanese/Thai setup, ibus (w/ mozc/kkc/libthai) has been working very reliably so far on Arch (been using since February). On the other hand, the hunt to find something that actually works wasn't exactly fun, though.

yongjik 10y ago
I'm using Linux Mint with KDE. (Probably not the best tested distro out there, so maybe I reap what I sow.) At one time, ibus worked pretty well, and I was content. After one upgrade, ibus stopped working, and I couldn't make it work again. Tried skim (which I had used several years ago, but abandoned when it also stopped working for some reason): it managed to lock up X windows. Finally found uim, which almost worked the same, so I was content again. And then about a month ago I had to upgrade again (long story short: Linux magically forgot that I had a second monitor and refused to acknowledge it), and then uim stopped working in some KDE applications, including Konsole. Spent several hours trying different things. (Even tried to compile uim from source, but apparently figuring out dependencies for graphic libraries is not my strong area.) Finally just settled down for uim again. Who needs to type Korean into terminal anyway? Well, at least now I don't have to restart gvim every time after reboot, so that's the plus. See, "Why don't you report bugs" is missing the problem. For example, I had gvim running on a KDE system that somehow forgets the input method whenever I reboot the system, but when I restart gvim, it finds the input method without problem. I don't even know which application I should report this bug against. And of course I'm using distro packages that may be years old (the last release of uim was in 2013), so for all I know, the problem I have is already fixed in the most upstream version. I'm sure Windows have other problems that Linux solves quite well. I'm not arguing Linux is worse in every respect. I'm just pointing out there are a horde of problems that should have been solved for once and all fifteen years ago: there should be a metapackage, or ideally a single button that says "If you want to enable Korean/Japanese/Hindi input, press HERE," and that should be the end of story. But these problems are never properly solved, because the "bazaar" nature of Linux development means whatever solution worked today is not guaranteed to work two years later. Each solution is made of five packages developed by different teams, and maintainers drop out all the time either because they're bored or they have other life obligations. And then some other people start a new sexy project that more or less subsumes previous iterations (but in a brand new codebase), and the cycle continues. Conway's law[1] says "organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." It doesn't just apply to MS or Google: it also applies to Linux. I don't know if it can be improved, but that's the way Linux is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

fleetfox 10y ago

I have an anecdote too. Last week Windows update corrupted itself and was boot looping i spent two days trying to debug and fix it. Even repair from disc didn't help. 30+ reboots later i decided to just reinstall it. Meanwhile my two Linux desktops have no issues, and when they do i can fix it without rebooting million times and i never had to reinstall them just because they get corrupted randomly.

scrollaway 10y ago
Windows, FWIU in the majority of cases (and at least every time I did it) still does not support being moved to a new motherboard. Every time I upgrade a Windows PC's motherboard, the windows install becomes unbootable. Linux doesn't care.
- chungy 10y ago
  It supports moving to a new motherboard if you don't forget to run sysprep first. If you don't or can't (hello new hardware because the old died!), you're basically SoL.
  - parenthephobia 10y ago
    It would help if this wasn't the first time I'd ever heard of sysprep. Microsoft don't exactly go out of their way to advertise it. It doesn't even show up when searching from the start menu. Searching online, the easiest results to find seem to be either to manually uninstall hardware-specific drivers in the device manager, or simply to assume that motherboard upgrades will just magically work. Whilst one can find results that mention sysprep, how is a user to know that the sysprep method is the right one? And now I read: When sysprepping an existing Windows setup, it only works if the Windows was installed clean and has never been upgraded or repaired using repair install. So that's great.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Linux actually doesn't care at all. I used a laptop hard drive in a desktop which had a AMD processor instead of an Intel one (both have iGPUs) and it worked perfectly fine.

kylemuir 10y ago

I'm currently running Linux Mint on my home PC and I installed it and then tweaked from there (granted, I use English so no need to tweak the inputs). It's been very smooth - smoothest experience so far and I'd definitely recommend it to others. However, last time I installed Ubuntu it booted to a black screen of death and then googling told me it didn't come with nvidia drivers out of the box, etc.

unixhero 10y ago

More like, you didn't try to use Linux Mint. It works out of the box.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

slim 10y ago

You should maybe take over maintenance of korean package of your distribution. You'll find the work you do each time more rewarding when you'll get respect from your fellow koreans smoothly enabling korean language without thinking of it.

greggyb 10y ago
Or, you know, do his or her real job and have a life. Seamless internationalization is not a one-person job.
Orangeair 10y ago
Ooh, let's continue the metaphor. Sometimes Linux Airlines forgets to equip its planes with doors. Others in Linux Airlines, who are used to entering through the windows, suggest that you should start a door company yourself to outfit the planes.

akerro 10y ago

Nice FUD you got there. For last 5 years I had Kubuntu and OpenSUSE on my parents PCs, for the 5 years I had no psyhical access to the machines. For the 5 years I did all upgrades and distr-upgrades remotely. Never failed.

Noseshine 10y ago
You don't say a word if your parents use an Asian language interface? That's the parent's point, not Linux upgrades in general.

xorcist 10y ago

It sounds like you did a lot of manual work, in a way that may or may not be supported by your desktop environment, which might help explain why your upgrades are so painful. I don't use Korean locale so I don't know what troubles you might have had. Generally, I think a big problem with Linux is all the low quality advice sprinkled around Stack Overflow and other web forums where people recommend doing all sorts of forced installs and run script that "fix" your system. No wonder these people find Linux complicated. Many with bad experience from it did some bodge at some time to get some unsupported hardware working. I also dislike the idea that started to get popular in the early 00s that Linux was somehow "about choice". Sure you can swap out system components, which you can with any OS from the same era, but that doesn't mean you should. You're going to have a tough time upgrading if you run your own init system. Modern Linux distributions are great in the sense that they "just work". Plug in my printer and it just works. Third party drivers are much more common in the Windows ecosystem, and they have varied quality. Good luck getting that printer working in a modern Windows as you'll only find drivers for older versions. Suspending my Thinkpad works every time, while another laptop sometimes awakens all over again. The key to "just working" is running well known hardware (no third party drivers required) and not messing about too much with your system internals just because you read it was the cool thing to do.

glandium 10y ago

I've had no problem with IME in a long while, but every single time I install a new machine I forget how to get fontconfig to behave "correctly" wrt monospace fonts when the locale is japanese. Somehow, as long as I have japanese fonts installed, it picks a non monospace font for monospace. Which makes e.g. <pre> sections in a browser look wrong, ghex display completely fucked up, etc. Last time happens to have been two weeks ago, so now I know what I did this time: create a .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file containing: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <match target="pattern"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>monospace</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong"> <string>Noto Mono</string> </edit> </match> </fontconfig> (I used Noto Mono, but pick what you like) In case that's helpful to someone else...

3131s 10y ago

What Linux distribution(s) have you had this problem on?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Orangeair 10y ago

I am in complete agreement. No matter how many troubles Windows may have caused me over the years, at least I've never managed to somehow completely delete its entire GUI while attempting a routine software update.