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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

• phakding 8y ago
  Terrible article. Bad things done by Nvidia is Linux problem? Adobe stopped developing flash for Linux is also Linux problem? Linux is "a lot less" secure than windows because updates are not forced like in windows? I can't this person seriously.
• wwarner 8y ago
  All this is true, but not really fair. Count up the issue raised by the OP, and Nvidia really has the most power to stabilize the linux desktop. I read that gamers who want peak performance on Linux can get the proprietary Nvidia drivers running well. So it's possible, but it will never be without the friction of open source running along side signed proprietary binaries. What I would love to know is why linux isn't equal or superior to Apple and Msft in power management.
  • VeejayRampay 8y ago
    how can it every be superior to Apple when they control the whole thing from processors to OS through hardware (and most peripherals), impossible feat
  • shereadsthenews 8y ago
    Linux seems equal in power management to Apple. On my ThinkPad X1 Carbon with the 57 W-h battery I get a good solid 8 hours of work and often the system consumes as little as 4W. My MacBook Pro with a 54.5 W-h battery runs for at most 4 hours. Now, it's true that I had to edit dozens of little configs to get the ThinkPad with Linux up to where a ThinkPad with Windows is right out of the box, such as enabling PCIe ASPM and making it still be enabled after resume from suspend, but to my knowledge there are not such power efficiency hacks available to the user on macOS, and it's bad by default.
    • wwarner 8y ago
      Thanks -- I'll have to put a bit more effort into this the next time I run a linux laptop.
    • Sendotsh 8y ago
      Do you have a link to a good guide for setting up power stuff on the X1C? I've found a few but they conflict, so I'm keen to hear from someone who actually has it all working well.
    • asark 8y ago
      The biggest power efficiency hack for macOS is to avoid running JS anywhere other than in Safari, and there as little as possible. Chrome and Firefox both eat battery like crazy. Firefox worse than Chrome, but either will take a couple hours off your battery life versus Safari. And running lots of heavy JS tabs or "apps" will do even worse. Not that that necessarily has anything to do with the differences you're seeing in particular, just worth noting. Wrong browser, 20-30% worse battery life. Wrong site open in some tab in the background, 30-60% worse battery life. The overwhelming majority of what takes my Mac battery life from 8+ hours to 4 or less is Javascript or some heavy Java IDE or something. User software that gives a damn about how much power it uses makes a huge difference, well outside of just "don't run video games on battery power" and other obvious stuff.
  • ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > Nvidia really has the most power to stabilize the linux desktop nVidia/ATI had the power to stabilize the Windows desktop too about a decade ago but didn't. (https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/ https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsib...) IIRC, Microsoft had to move to the entirely new WDDM video driver model and its TDR mechanism (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/timeout-detection-and-recovery https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di...) to finally put an end to video driver BSODs. The odds of nVidia getting motivated enough to bring their Linux support up to par with Windows is nil.
  • flukus 8y ago
    Anyone thinking about gaming on linux should be buying AMD and avoiding nvidia these days, there drivers are fully open source and because of that they work well out of the box and are constantly improving. > So it's possible, but it will never be without the friction of open source running along side signed proprietary binaries. AMD are proving otherwise. > What I would love to know is why linux isn't equal or superior to Apple and Msft in power management. I think it has now, my old dell laptop now get's a lot more life running ubuntu than it ever did on windows. I get 3-4 hours or more out of it and used to only get a couple under windows.
• doctorpangloss 8y ago
  Well, a big problem here might be engineering thinking, as opposed to design thinking. If you view the problem as, "I have to enumerate all the [Linux on Desktop] problems, and if I enumerate enough problems and fix all the ones I enumerated in the right order, then I've solved [Linux on Desktop]," then "Main Linux problems on the desktop" is, by virtue of having done exactly that, and not being the first or last iteration of that, part of the problem! Not that I begrudge Linus Torvalds for saying things sort of like, Linux is evolved, not designed. It just shows that one of the big holes it has is its use on the desktop, and the major Linux designed product (Android) isn't really libre, and that Linus is a brilliant guy but he doesn't have answers to everything nor claims to. Meanwhile take a look at elementaryOS, which I think has a lot of opinions you'd never find in an evolved or engineering-rational platform (like their own UI programming language). I think if they had the resources of a giant corporation they could make a meaningful impact on the desktop market. I'd say it's very similar to a debate I heard from head of an architecture school attached to a university better known for its engineering. "When we looked at expanding the campus, decisions were made in terms of parking spaces per square foot, and whichever had the most parking spaces per square foot is where we would build the building." It's not that he's going around arguing his ambitious and less efficient designs are better, just because he's coming in with qualitative or emotional impacts incalculable by an enumerative cost-benefit analysis. He's just saying enumerating all the considerations, and then solving, is a really reductive way of thinking about things.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• stendinator 8y ago
  _For instance Microsoft and Apple regularly update ntoskrnl.exe and mach_kernel respectively for security fixes, but it's unheard of that these updates ever compromised the boot process._ I had updates rendering my computer unbootable by messing up the MBR at least twice.
  • jaimex2 8y ago
    Exactly. You cant walk away from Windows 10 without the chance of coming back to a bricked system because it auto-updated and broke.
    • sgc 8y ago
      This issue of Windows update and other lock in trends is 80% of the reason I just (in the last month) switched to a Linux desktop. The other 20% is that the ui on Linux has finally progressed enough that I could consider it the least worst option. That is a first since I tried many times and wound up reverting to Windows. So far the only thing that really bugs me is that I have to apply fixes in the terminal. Like installing a printer only to find the scanner function was installed but wasn't configured - and the only way to get it to work is read a few forums until you can figure out which of the myriad installed utilities will actually return the info you need to configure the driver, etc. It's often a few, because the first half dozen results are wrong! Strangely enough, I don't find anything in Linux to rival Notepad++, WinSCP, or AutoHotKey - just the type of thing I was expecting to find new and improved. Those programs just have a better UI, and great functionality, to get things done without going full command line commando or buying into a the resource bloat of full ide. Right now I am using both sublimetext and visual studio code, because they both have things the other lacks. I could just use np++ for everything before. Doubling my ram made that less painful than it would have been otherwise. Obviously a very personal itch, but one I suspect a number of people who are on the cusp of accepting a Linux desktop might have. But I trust Linux's stability since I have had zero issues in decades of administering my servers, and don't worry about updates the way I do on a less informative OS. Specifically, once you are used to apt, the list of packages that will be installed tells you a lot about what might break or not on your system. And there will always be a way to revert to older libs if necessary, which might not be true on a locked OS.
• stendinator 8y ago
  All this time spend creating this list could've been spent fixing at least one single little thing.
  • sullyj3 8y ago
    Making the issues known isn't just pointless complaining. Everyone who reads this might potentially be interested in contributing.
    • stendinator 8y ago
      Nice strawman. I never said it's pointless complaining.
      • gsich 8y ago
        But you implied it.
      • petersellers 8y ago
        That's certainly what you implied with your post, though.
• smlacy 8y ago
  How about a list of all the things that really work great? I've been using Linux on the desktop for nearly 20 years and I'll have to say it's fantastic, despite the occasional headache, which seems to be at a far less frequency than other major desktop operating systems.
  • Apocryphon 8y ago
    Users will always pay attention on what they miss out by using a lesser-known alternative, than what they gain.
  • cheerlessbog 8y ago
    I'm guessing you're relatively tech savvy and enjoy troubleshooting (within reason). Most people aren't, of course.
    • peller 8y ago
      Not the person you're replying to, but I fall in the same boat as them as far as Linux experience goes. And for me, I find I have way more trouble doing things on Windows/Mac than Linux. I think it's really more a way of thinking about how a "desktop OS" is supposed to work. People coming from Windows expect things to work the same, and that's just not the case. Likewise, when I unluckily find myself on some closed-source box, _very little works how I expect_. And man is troubleshooting harder, because there are so many "surprises." My point is, I think blaming the operating system is not the answer - users need to adjust their expectations and open their mind a little. This is a somewhat poor analogy, but it's sort of like a Chinese citizen (closed-source user) becoming a citizen of a democracy (open-source user). The government is going to work differently, and you can't claim democracy is broken just because it's so different from authoritarianism.
      • hutzlibu 8y ago
        "This is a somewhat poor analogy, but it's sort of like a Chinese citizen (closed-source user) becoming a citizen of a democracy" I like that analogy (even though I am still looking for that pure democracy/open source government). In Linux you have the freedom to do allmost anything with the system, but you have to know what you are doing, as the system usually does not stop you, when you are about to do anything stupid. Windows makes me mad, when it tries to manage me. Like "Yes I really want to use this computer without firewall or antivirus, because it is not connected to the internet and never will be because it serves another purpurse." To do this you need to mess with obscure registry settings, the default behavior of windows is enforcing it and nowdays also updates, because most users don't know or care what they are doing and are used to be told what to do. So I believe it is good that I can do anything with my system, but everybody started as a newb once so a more beginnerfriendly version could be helpful. But Linux main problem is hardware support, and fixing broken audio/graphic/wifi driver is something which can drive away very experienced people. (it drove me to ChromeOS for my laptop)
• 0xb100db1ade 8y ago
  What I get out of this is that while each of these issues may be individually dismissed, they together make for a very "non-premium" experience. I use linux myself, but when people I know try it out, they immediately leave after encountering problems with audio, dpi scaling, etc
  • hackits 8y ago
    It's open source you could spend your time fixing the issues and collaborating with other source project's to bring a better unified experience for users for Linux. Yeah..... you've got `more` important things to do. Linux have all-ways been a hobbiest project. It your mindset when going into it.
  • baroffoos 8y ago
    I have found its super dependent on what hardware you get, Especially on laptops. I always pick hardware that works perfectly with linux and I am left with a very premium experience but when using linux on bad hardware like macbooks and broadcom wifi everything just doesn't work right.
    • marcus_holmes 8y ago
      I have a MacBook that is malfunctioning under MacOS (it's running at 60-80% CPU usage when idle, known problem, no fix available). I tried installing Linux on it, couldn't get it working at all. I have a Dell XPS15, specifically chosen because the XPS line is supposed to work well with Linux. Numerous problems, all related to drivers. But the main problem is that every time Windows updates it wipes out GRUB. I figured that my problem is that every laptop I've bought has been designed for a non-Linux OS. So I've ordered a Purism laptop, which should arrive any day now. Hopefully actually buying a laptop designed and built to run Linux will provide a better experience.
      • baroffoos 8y ago
        I'm using a dell XPS 13 (one of the new ones) and it works wonderfully. I don't run windows on it so I don't have any issues with my bootloader and I saw advice on the internet to get one with no nvidia gpu so I got one with intel graphics. It really does feel like a OSX level premium feel. The only bit I am missing is fractional dpi scaling which is apparently on the way but turning on big text in accessibility mode works well enough for now.
• jcastro 8y ago
  I get that some people don't like linux, but some of these examples are just ridiculous. Linux is administered by ssh therefore administrators don't know how to check so therefore they don't bother to update systems because "they're afraid that something will break." C'mon.
  • dcbadacd 8y ago
    That's unfortunately true.
• Dahoon 8y ago
  >"most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10" Uhm, no. Not really. With hacks by the user (or OS) maybe, but if hacks are allowed then most of that list can be deleted.
  • hartator 8y ago
    Aren’t computers just a hack of physics laws? I think the line between a hack and genuine software is more blurry than what we would assume.
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      A “rock we tricked into thinking.”
      • Casseres 8y ago
        A bunch of sand powered by spinning rocks.
  • gsich 8y ago
    Yes, really. Most games do not however. I don't have programs though for testing. Edit: http://www.ecsis.net/pub/netuser/ftp.html http://www.ecsis.net/pub/netuser/ftp.html tried Rftp, worked with Windows 10. At least 22 years of compatibility.
    • Dahoon 8y ago
      Testing a single .exe as simple as Calculator doesn't show much. How about running StarOffice 4.0?
      • gsich 8y ago
        It shows compatibility, which you doubted in the previous post ("no, not really"). Doesn't matter how simple you deem the program. Where can I download it?
  • 8y ago
• hartator 8y ago
  The only thing about Linux I never really like is the package system. Like if you want to install a new software, you usually don’t get .exe or .dmg. If you are lucky, the developer or some fans took the time to package it. Then you can do ‘apt-get’ ‘yum’ or ‘pacman’. However, packages got stalled and sometimes don’t match the original author intent. You can also build from sources, but it takes time and you have to know a bit of CLI. It never felt true freedom to me. But more like whatever the community feels make sense for whatever distribution weird dictactorship. Just a feeling and I still love and support Linux.
  • mixedCase 8y ago
    Between Flatpak and AppImages we have good solutions for both people who prefer package managers as well as people who prefer a single file that can be run on double click. As far as solutions goes, this problem is solved. They just need to be better known by software distributors.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Flatpak is over-engineered garbage. You still can't even install things on different disks without setting up an entirely new 'installation' or whatever they call it. And you still need a repo. Meanwhile I can trivially make most Windows software work from a USB drive I can carry around between computers. AppImage can do that too, since it is a lot less over-engineered, but sadly very few developers use AppImage and it even distributions like Nitriux that claim to support AppImages don't display icons for them. Could be trivially solved with a standard for embedding icons in ELF, but the unix world hates the very concept of a program that isn't spread all over the file hierarchy and isn't full of hard-coded paths so it'll never happen.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        I'm surprised to find that you have good luck with that; last time I looked, it was a nightmare for anything that didn't explicitly support portable mode because everything expects to save stuff into the registry.
• hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  I've been using a Google Pixelbook (their flagship Chromebook product) as my main development machine for the past couple months, and I love it. The ChromeOS "Crostini" project allows you to run a full Debian instance in a container, but with the other benefits of a Chromebook and ChromeOS. Each new release of ChromeOS brings better enhancements to Crostini, e.g. right now backups are manual but a native "one click" backup is coming soon - https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/news/crostini-linux-backup-restore-import-export-tremplin-chrome-os-74/ https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/news/crostini-linux-backup-... . FWIW some of the tools I run are the IntelliJ suite, Atom, postgres, Docker, etc. IMO Linux on the desktop is awesome, it just happens to be running in a container on ChromeOS.
  • hartator 8y ago
    Oh cool. My 2017 MacBook Pro is just getting the stuck key issue. Is performance wise the chrome browser faster than the Windows one?
    • jamiek88 8y ago
      Apple will fix that for free btw. I took my out of warranty 2017 mob and had no issues getting a repair.
• jrockway 8y ago
  I feel like a lot of the usability quirks that Linux has are trying to shoehorn a multi-user system into a single-user context. For example, there is so much work done (and even complaining in favor of doing that work in this article) to make it possible for multiple people to sit at the same computer. Nobody does that! Most people have more than one computer! Why do people spend their free time on that use case? This could be a long rant, so I'll keep it short... but someday I'm just going to rip the concept of users out of Linux and see what it looks like. Oh no, you say, malware will get you! Unlikely. Malware running as my user can fuck over my life just as easily as malware running as root. So why even pretend that that's a good isolation model? It doesn't prevent any attacks. (As for how Linux in 2019 is doing... I recently switched back to Ubuntu for a desktop. Whenever I lock the screen and have DPMS enabled, it forgets that I have two monitors and that I want 200% DPI scaling when it wakes back up. What? Back in my day you had to hard-code the resolution and monitor configuration in the X11R6 config and there was no way to change it without restarting the X server. May I please have those days back? At least once it started working, it kept working.)
  • coryrc 8y ago
    You got downvoted, but I mostly agree. I think mandatory strict selinux rules, containerize all user programs, or similar approaches are now more important for the threat vectors we face today on the desktop. I just discovered Apple's feature of requiring you to press a couple keys to authenticate a new keyboard. Doing that on GNU/Linux would be very hard.
    • JonathonW 8y ago
      That dialog (the "your keyboard cannot be identified" dialog) is about layout detection, not "authentication". IIRC, it's also skippable (but I haven't seen it in a long time; I've mostly switched over to Apple keyboards and they don't trigger that dialog).
      • coryrc 8y ago
        Ah, thanks. Either way, a feature much more difficult in the Linux world, unfortunately.
• Anon1096 8y ago
  Most of these aren't Linux on Desktop issues that any day to day user will ever encounter. A lot of them yes, but stuff like the author's issues with x.org being a bad piece of software are completely orthogonal to anything a desktop user of Linux will care about. This list would be a lot better if it were cut to just the major issues.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Why is the defense for "there are problems with Linux" always some appeal to the workflow of a strawman 'average user'? A class of people which, I might add, still show no interest in using Linux.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      Because as a general rule the power users already have minimal problems and can fix them pretty easily. So the next concern is people who aren't familiar with the system, i.e. average users.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        Have you considered that even many power users don't want to use Linux Desktop? It has by no means won over even that crowd.
    • headsoup 8y ago
      This is the silly thing. There is no objective 'works' or 'doesn't work' that applies to 'the average user' because there are so many use cases and configurations. And it doesn't matter. For a large bunch of people Windows has been crap for its whole existence, but it works with X, or is the only thing compatible with Y, or because no one demonstrated anything better. I.e. exactly how the iPhone got such traction (also with the marketing). Linux is [i]just as good[/i] as Windows and vice-versa, where the use case is compatible...
• cossovich 8y ago
  I've been using Ubuntu LTS versions since 12.04 on Thinkpad T and X series laptops and I'm a very happy camper - out of the box Ubuntu doesn't suck for me, it "just works". I moved from OS X on latest Apple laptops to make my daily job (interaction design + web development) more productive (e.g. workstation running the same OS as servers, tooling etc) but now it's my preferred OS + hardware combo from a end-user perspective. I have to switch back to an Apple machine for testing and pairing with co-workers at least once a week and between the new Apple laptop keyboard, the random reboots (awaking from sleep), shitty web font rendering and intermittent errors relating to Apple ID, I don't miss it. I really loved OS X quite a few years ago but between the latest hardware (don't get me started about cords/dongles needed for a 2018 Macbook Air) and growing list of OS X quirks I'm always happy to return to Ubuntu 18.04 on my Thinkpad T450s. I think many of the points raised in the article affect people making desktop software for Linux rather than end-users of desktop Linux. It seems like a global list of issues for the entire desktop Linux ecosystem - which is totally valid but I think a more accurate title of the article might be "Why developing desktop software on Linux sucks" or "Why creating a desktop Linux distribution sucks" because I think my desktop Linux setup rocks!
  • hermitdev 8y ago
    Just an aside, at a previous job, I worked with devs that used Macs, where I had a Linux VM on a windows laptop (and we deployed to Linux). Numerous times, I found bugs in coworkers code because they ignored case sensitivity in filenames. Yes, OS-X is BSD and unix based, but by default, the file system is cases-insensitive, like Windows, amd apparently if you make it case sensitive, you can brake a lot of popular Mac software.
  • pitaj 8y ago
    What file explorer do you use? Nautilus pisses me off. I'm 100x more productive with Explorer on Windows. Some features I'd like: - Being able to open the context menu for the current folder, even if there are enough files to fill the view, without going up a level - Being able to jump to files/folders in the current directory by name without opening search results - Being able to add functionality to the context menu
• jaimex2 8y ago
  Steam's Linux support is fantastic these days. Almost everything works through their Wine fork.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    And yet it hardly matters. https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/19/linux-gaming-steam-valve-epic-games-store/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/19/linux-gaming-steam-valve...
• magicalhippo 8y ago
  I've been running KDE Neon on NUC for a while, and Kubuntu before that since KDE 3.5 days. But still it's not ready to become my primary desktop. The main issue for me is RDP-like (not VNC-like) remote desktop experience. Without that I'm not even gonna try. I mean the kind where I check my desktop before I leave for work, resume the session remotely from work (when compiling or whatever), and pick up when I get home. With performance which makes one forget it's a remote session, and bidir clipboard sharing. So until then, Windows on the desktop it is. I can always run Linux on the NUC or in a VM.
  • azinman2 8y ago
    Apple somehow has fast VNC between its computers. Anyone know why it’s so much better? Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but nothing related to VNC.
    • 05 8y ago
      Compared to RDP, Apple’s remote screen sharing is a laggy buggy joke. Still works better than the Linux one, though..
  • swiley 8y ago
    Most decent applications on Linux are CLI and run in a tty. So most people do that with ssh+tmux
  • blackfawn 8y ago
    I've been quite happy with NoMachine[0]. It has probably even more options than RDP (file transfer and drive sharing options, various graphics and audio options, etc.) You can even watch videos through it if your connection is decent. You can pick up an existing X session or start a new one. [0]: https://www.nomachine.com https://www.nomachine.com
    • magicalhippo 8y ago
      I just tried, again. Even on LAN (same switch in fact) the performance is worse than what I got when I was RDP'ing to my desktop in Norway from a hotel in Hawaii. And it didn't forward audio at all. I'll check it out from work tomorrow, but so far it's usable but not exactly great when compared to RDP.
• dingo_bat 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this is just me, because the linked article doesn't seem to mention it. My Ubuntu Linux install cannot play certain youtube videos. Win10 on the same laptop plays everything. It's so weird!
• Octoth0rpe 8y ago
  > Android is not Linux I really, _really_ hate this statement. Android meets the only definition of 'linux' that matters IMO: it runs on a linux kernel. That's linux, full stop. That said, I do find myself agreeing with most of the points listed there. I just not sure I'd call them 'linux on the desktop' issues per se. They're wayland/xorg issues, deb/rpm/flatpack/snap issues, pulseaudio/alsa issues, gtk/qt issues, etc. None of which are tied to the linux kernel. The fact that all of those technologies can and do run on bsd kernels (er, maybe not alsa). Android is linux. Chromeos is linux. The issues above are really issues with the free/libre desktop distributions, mostly not linux per se. ....maybe I'm just a pedant on this issue.
  • AckSyn 8y ago
    It's not Linux. Just live with it.
  • azinman2 8y ago
    Yes but when you say “state of the Linux desktop,” all of this gets bundled in. A fair number of bits also touch the kernel directly — sound, video, etc.
  • swebs 8y ago
    I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
• Havoc 8y ago
  Yeah this is why I stick to windows for desktop. Just the thought of having to fight pulse audio and bizarre gfx driver issues gives me ptsd It’s cool for servers though
• UncleEntity 8y ago
  > All native Linux filesystems are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. Less than 0.01% of users in the Linux world depend on this feature. The horror... Though I wonder why users would be confused since this only really applies to the command line and there were (multiple) other points complaining about users having to use the command line. user: cd Foo bash: cd: Foo: No such file or directory user: wget https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10/win10.iso && echo "screw you linux!1!"
• ilovecaching 8y ago
  I use GNOME (Fedora 29). Works fine, except for things that NVIDIA and Cisco keep locked down (driver and codecs). Other than that, GNOME is just kind of a wacky desktop (activities and no desktop launcher are just stupid). But it does work, and I would be fine recommending it to my grandma with some extensions installed to make it more like Windows UX.
  • ilovecaching 8y ago
    I should also mention that Linux has improved, macOS has seriously regressed. All the time bugs, and if you want to plug in you Mac into anything not made by Apple, good luck.
• blaze33 8y ago
  Linux as the open-sourced work of brilliant software developers wouldn't power most servers if it sucked. But could designing good desktops need more than just good code? Good kernels successfully run code. Good desktops successfully help users. I guess different goals require different designs? Edit: to clarify, I didn't mean desktops don't require well designed software. Just had in mind that a desktop also have to take human psychology and human limitations into account.
  • gmueckl 8y ago
    Wait, you are confounding some things. A software design is good when it allows all of its parts to be elegant and meet the requirements. In no way does that say that a desktop OS is required to be designed badly. Linux is powering servers and high performance computing because it is good at these things: mostly static hardware configuration, set up once during system installation high performance, modularity and the ability to inspect a deeply running system of you are an expert. It ticks all the boxes for these specidic environments. On the desktop, not so much. For example, the concept of device files is hindering use cases that should "just work". When I plug in USB headphones, a new audio device is created. Fine. But I need to enter the device file name or ALSA device string onto half a dozen programs to use it. All I would want is to have the audio rerouted automatically. Pulseaudio was touted as the solution to that problem, but ar what cost? We're now literally stacking audio systems on top of audio systems and sacrifice to arcane gods to have it work. When I plug in a USB drive, I now have to look up its device file name in order to mount it manually. The software stack required to automount it from a desktop environment is atrociously complex, because it requires root privileges to mount a device not listed in /etc/fstab with a user flag. And because any number of drives can be connected in any possible order, no entries in fstab can be made. This clash of UNIX-like concepts and modern user expectations is what is holding Linux back. The underpinnings are not bad. They were just designed for a different task. So, yes, you can build a user friendly OS. Yes, it can have a clean design. But it won't be called Linux anymore.
    • fatboy93 8y ago
      Just curious, but I had the same issues, turns our I didn't install gvfs and associated handlers for mounting unmounting drives. Turns out installing it resolved most of my USB connection issues
• bb88 8y ago
  The article is not entirely accurate, and can be hit or miss. Granted, I'm cherry picking, but I'm cherry picking the pieces which I have direct knowledge which are definitely misleading. > ! X.org architecture is inherently insecure - even if you run a desktop GUI application under a different user in your desktop session, e.g. using sudo and xhost, then that "foreign" application can grab any input events and also make screenshots of the entire screen. A linux user would say, "So that's not a bug, that's the power of the root user. Don't do that or lock down your root access." Then this one: > ! The kernel cannot recover from video, sound and network drivers' crashes (I'm very sorry for drawing a comparison with Windows Vista/7/8 where this feature is implemented and works beautifully in a lot of cases). To be fair, if you google "Nvidia BSOD" and you'll get something like this from four months ago: https://www.eteknix.com/nvidia-release-new-2080ti-drivers-stop-bsod-issues/ https://www.eteknix.com/nvidia-release-new-2080ti-drivers-st... And if you think the mac's are awesome, (which the software might be, I don't know) the hardware has some serious issues which has turned me off from buying one. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=louis+rossmann https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=louis+rossmann Also to be fair, it's possible that Dell laptops have similar issues, but Apple hardware failures make a lot of noise in the media.
  • swebs 8y ago
    >> ! X.org architecture is inherently insecure - even if you run a desktop GUI application under a different user in your desktop session, e.g. using sudo and xhost, then that "foreign" application can grab any input events and also make screenshots of the entire screen. >A linux user would say, "So that's not a bug, that's the power of the root user. Don't do that or lock down your root access." It's actually recognized as a huge problem and one of the driving forces behind Wayland.
• kgwxd 8y ago
  "Problems stemming from low Linux popularity" That's the only real problem. Given popularity, everything else would quickly stop being an issue.
  • shaan7 8y ago
    And popularity will happen only if the problems go away :P
• dsego 8y ago
  A few killer apps and none of this would matter. Unfortunately, the linux desktop has none, which is a shame.
• swebs 8y ago
  >Year 2015 welcomed us with 134 vulnerabilities in one package alone: WebKitGTK+ WSA-2015-0002. I'm not implying that Linux is worse than Windows/MacOS proprietary/closed software - I'm just saying that the mantra that open source is more secure by definition because everyone can read the code is apparently totally wrong. Huh? Those 134 vulnerabilities were found because people can see the code. If it were closed source, they would probably still be there today.
  • maxerickson 8y ago
    Closed source software is not opaque, people study how it works all the time.
• ekianjo 8y ago
  This article is wrong on numerous on its claims either because some are just false, or some are skewed by a perception of how things "should" work which is utter bollocks. Like LTS not being suitable is complete nonsense. You can easily add a repo to have up to date GPU drivers and never have to worry about it. Steam having only indies games misses completely the Proton era. I could go on and on. It seems like a hit piece from someone who is out to prevent people from considering switching.
• sandov 8y ago
  I think it would be useful to separate this in problems that are Linux's(!) fault and problems that are someone else's fault(e.g. nvidia, the hardware market, intellectual property laws, the user himself). (!) With "Linux" I mean GNU/Linux distros.
• dcbadacd 8y ago
  Whoa this article has brought up some painful memories and I agree with so much, but yet I can't imagine using Windows, it pisses me off even more. > Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual. LDAP is a PITA. Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA. Just thinking about it gives me ptsd, I do not want a thousand users or folders on my system, they're a pain to migrate, it's really a PITA to make everything virtual. Please someone give me a nice short guide how to set up dovecot so that it stores all e-mails in postgresql? > KDE is spiralling out of control (besides, its code quality is beyond horrible - several crucial parts of the KDE SC, like KMail/akonadi, are barely functional): people refuse to maintain literally hundreds of KDE packages. KMail has had so many bugs for me, I should report but man, it's such a pain in the ass. Such ridiculous bugs as well (e.g. connection loss spawning 1000 error boxes that my GPU can't handle the layered transparency. > ! Linux security/permissions management is a bloody mess: PAM, SeLinux, Udev, HAL (replaced with udisk/upower/libudev), PolicyKit, ConsoleKit and usual Unix permissions (/etc/passwd, /etc/group) all have their separate incompatible permissions management systems spread all over the file system. Quite often people cannot use their digital devices unless they switch to a super user. In theory they're all separate things, but they interleave so much, there has to be a better system. > ! No equivalent of some hardcore Windows software like ArchiCAD/3ds Max/Adobe Premier/Adobe Photoshop/Corel Draw/DVD authoring applications/etc. Home and enterprise users just won't bother installing Linux until they can get their work done. I really miss Solidworks/Fusion 360, there's no effort at all to port those :( > ! Open source drivers have certain, sometimes very serious problems (Intel-!, NVIDIA and AMD): Flickering windows, low FPS, laggy videos, everyday struggle :( Changing compositor OpenGL mode fixes it though. > ! An insane number of regressions in the Linux kernel, when with every new kernel release some hardware can stop working inexplicably. I have personally reported two serious audio playback regressions, which have been consequently resolved, however most users don't know how to file bugs, how to bisect regressions, how to identify faulty components. I was affected by this too, qemu was broken for me for almost half a year. There's one thing that's very subjective in the article, even if the author claims otherwise. I like to call it the Winduslexia, it doesn't occur for anyone other than previous Windows users: > All native Linux filesystems are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. Less than 0.01% of users in the Linux world depend on this feature.
• Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I wish that there would be one unified API for creating desktop programs on Linux. Right now it's somewhat coalesced on GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, though there are a number of others out there. I use Linux in a VM for very hobbyist level embedded development (think Arduino and the like). Driver problems are non-existent, all of the technical problems are non-issues in this environment. The problems that I see are all to do with the lack of a common set of services for building a GUI application. Why do my text editor and Arduino IDE use different file pickers? It's because my text editor uses the KDE API, but the Arduino IDE uses something else. GIMP uses yet a different file picker from the other two. LibreOffice uses yet another file picker, that's similar to Kate's but slightly different. I'm sure that installing Atom and VS Code would introduce me to two more file pickers. The reason for this is that each of these programs uses a different GUI toolkit and, as a result, has a different concept of what a file picker needs to look like. Some of them don't even agree on which order the Open and Cancel buttons should be. Network transparency is another thing that suffers from this. On Windows, you can basically use a UNC path (\\server\share\path\to\file.txt) almost anywhere because the entire system from the file picker all the way down to the file APIs knows about UNC paths. In Linux, KDE apps do this one way, GNOME apps do it a different way, and command line tools need you to somehow mount the target server before you can even think about it. I last seriously used Windows about 14 years ago and I still miss this greatly. None of these are insurmountable problems, but it needs someone to make a decision about the one true way to do things.
  • meditate 8y ago
    >someone to make a decision about the one true way to do things. Things don't really work this way in free and open source development. There is no one person to make decisions, consensus is reached when the quality of something raises "above the bar" and actually improves things for all involved parties. If someone wants there to be an über-library that serves everyone's use case then it's up to them to go and do the work to build that. And it has been getting better in this regard. For example KDE and GNOME used to have their own IPC, multimedia & audio mixing backends, but now both have converged on DBus, GStreamer and PulseAudio, in part because these were intentionally built to be flexible low-level solutions. I'm sure there are more examples of this too but those are the first that come to mind.
• newnewpdro 8y ago
  That page is so riddled with inaccurate/mischaracterized statements I couldn't even make it past the halfway point. It's not without any truths, but there's a clearly demonstrated preference for divisive negativity over communicating facts.
• xvilka 8y ago
  As usual, NVIDIA is a major cause of Linux desktop problems. What a surprise!
• xvilka 8y ago
  "Linux has a 255 bytes limitation for file names (this translates to just 63 four-byte characters in UTF-8) - not a great deal but copying or using files or directories with long names from your Windows PC can become a serious challenge." Not sure what he is speaking about.
  • blibble 8y ago
    I'd not come across this before, but it appears to be true: $ touch $(printf 'a%.0s' {1..255}) $ touch $(printf 'a%.0s' {1..256}) touch: cannot touch 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa': File name too long (on ext4 and ZFS anyway)
  • vbarrielle 8y ago
    I'm curious how one gets long names from a windows pc given the path length limits on windows https://stackoverflow.com/a/1880453 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1880453 Maybe I'm not understanding that limit correctly but it looks like the whole path cannot be longer than 260 characters. I've hit that limit when transferring files from linux to windows. As you mention, the linux limit is in bytes, so the issue could appear in some character sets, but it still looks like the path limits are a lot more drastic under windows.
    • kkarakk 8y ago
      unicode version of windows api lets you do longer paths -upto 30k(it is transparently handled in windows explorer) example of a function that uses it- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-findfirstfilea https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/fileapi...
  • chopin 8y ago
    I wondered about this as well, especially as Windows (10) still has issues with deeply nested (=long paths) structures. Especially in conjunction with OneDrive (forced upon me at work) it's an annoyance.
• hutzlibu 8y ago
  So many words.. old, but sadly still valid: https://xkcd.com/456/ https://xkcd.com/456/
• Animats 8y ago
  He's right, of course. The Linux community has been in denial about this for years. At the kernel level and close to it, the areas that consistently give trouble are video/GPU support and audio support. GPUs are hard, but there's no excuse for the mess in audio persisting for a decade. Video/GPU support is tough, but the current situation, where you have a choice of five different NVidia drivers for the same board, all with different bugs, is not good. As the author points out, regression failures are a big problem. The sheer bloat of Linux has made it unmaintainable. And who wants that job? Big chunks of important code are abandonware.
  • zaphirplane 8y ago
    The nature of open source development is there are duplicates. The distribution usually takes chooses from the alternatives the better option and makes it the default. In the GPU driver issue you are raising what is the problem. Fedora comes with nouveau out of the box and you can install an alternative very easily. You may have a gripe but proliferation of alternatives is an unusual gripe, there are multiple browsers music players videos players file editors and even multiple DE options I guarantee if there was one music player option there would be a lot of people unhappy and a new project starter immediately
    • nitrogen 8y ago
      I've been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake was a thing; if there's one thing I'm tired of it's having the "choice" of five broken implementations of an app rather than just one that works (the reverse is also annoying, when one broken monolith crowds out five working predecessors).
      • AsyncAwait 8y ago
        As someone who also uses Linux since Mandrake, I am tired of people telling me there should be just one desktop, file manager etc. There needs to be competition in FLOSS also, nowdays I use both desktop environments, depending on the hardware and mix and match components. For example I prefer Okular even on GNOME. If people so desire a 'unified experience', you have Windows/macOS. I came to Linux as a refugee from these and am tired of the attempts to pull it in the same direction. Not everything has to be the same, in fact that's a terrible world to live in. I am also tired of people saying things on Linux are "broken", they aren't any more broken than on macOS/Windows. Granted, you may have to get compatible hardware, which is only fair considering that's what you're doing when purchasing a Win/macOS machine and yet on Linux there's somehow this grand expectation that any random cram HW should just work. You don't expect anything not designed with macOS in mind to work there, so why Linux? I use macOS at work and experience not so rare kernel panics. There was also just a bug in Premiere blowing up speakers on the MBP, being allowed to log in without a password, APFS logging encryption password in plain text etc. Yet somehow no-one is as strict on that as insisting on Linux somehow 'not working' even as am sitting here being productive on it for over a decade.
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  There are a couple main problems with Linux as a desktop. 1) Is (obviously) hardware support. While one or two vendors will produce a small number of Linux-compatible drivers, they don't do QC testing of all their products on Linux, whereas they almost certainly do for Windows or Mac. Distros, and OSS devs in general, have to support a wide range of software and hardware in every possible configuration. This includes not only individual components on a system, but how they are tied together, and the proprietary extensions (keyboard buttons) that allow the user to operate them. But there's no way any company could possibly test all software with all hardware. Even if they did such insane amounts of testing, they'd need to pay someone to fix all the bugs that would come out of it. No OSS company I'm aware of has the bankroll of an Apple or Microsoft, to say nothing of all the hardware vendors' investments. Trying to support OSS on proprietary platforms is like trying to become the development and support for every such product in existence, and those products are often black boxes. The only reliable option is to pick a distro, then find hardware which has been explicitly certified for that distro. This is usually a short list, and becomes shorter as you try to find something that fits your needs and budget. 2) Is an even more intractible problem: limitations of the software. Do I need some software which is platform-dependent? Then I should use that platform. Trying to shoehorn it into Linux is just a recipe for frustration and support calls to your cousin's son Eddie who you heard is really good with this Linux thing. Then there's the difficulty of operating a system which is only designed to work in a particular way. Want to use some software which doesn't have an official package? Good luck figuring out how to install it. Have some problem on the system? Good luck figuring out what magical combination of "console commands" might make it work again. And don't even bother telling your ISP or work that you use Linux when you call with a support problem, because they'll just tell you to get bent. Really, it all comes down to money. Nobody is spending the money on Linux to become an officially supported Desktop, because it would be unaffordable. Linux will always be a hobbyist OS as long as nobody supports it.
• sandGorgon 8y ago
  > Create a universal packaging format for bundling software which supports signatures, weak dependencies, isolation (aka sandboxing/virtualization), clean uninstallation and standard APIs to make it possible to integrate an application with your DE. Well this battle is lost. There was always the RPM/DEB/PKGBUILD split. But rather than unifying the standards, we now have Flatpak vs Snap split. It is seriously frustrating that when distros can agree on core infrastructure stuff like systemd-vs-upstart and wayland-vs-mir ... we still have a software distribution split that is more political than technical. This ultimately hurts linux - because there's never going to be that clear monopoly in the packaging space. Someone or the other is going to say "I can only package for X. All others can go figure it out themselves". I dont know... maybe APK (android) has won as the predominant linux packaging format ? I'm kind of waiting for ChromeOS as the true Linux distro.
  • geezerjay 8y ago
    It's not a political issue if you want to force distros to move their entire packaging infrastructure to a backward incompatible format that might still not be compatible with other distros because they ship specific versions of some packages which are in addittion packaged in a very particular way. Switching to RPM/DEB/PKGBUILD is not a simple problem, because the problem isn't really which packaging infrastructure is used.
    • sandGorgon 8y ago
      But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about TWO competing FUTURE formats that were invented to carry the battle forward. Snap and Flatpak is already incompatible with what came before. They chose to not come to a a middle ground quite deliberately.
• mrtweetyhack 8y ago
  "It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI". Not true. I have to use regedit all the time.
• deafcalculus 8y ago
  PS4 is basically a modified Free BSD. So, "fixing" Linux desktop is probably doable, but extremely difficult to profitably do. Valve seemed interested when Windows introduced the App store and seemed to be going App store / Play store way, but now that Microsoft is losing interest in Windows, they don't have as much incentive to pursue Linux.
  • ddebernardy 8y ago
    PS4 is not really comparable. (Nor is macOS, for that matter.) It's one thing to get some *nix flavor to work on standardized hardware. It's another to make it work on the wide variety of computing devices where you could install Windows.
    • deafcalculus 8y ago
      True, but hardware compatibility isn't the only thing wrong with Linux desktop. There's a lot of broken stuff on the software side too (ex: X windows as the article points out). In fact, hardware compatibility hasn't been that much of an issue on desktops in recent times. We have a couple hundred Linux desktops (not laptops) at my university, and what I find is that if you're using last-gen Intel CPU with iGPU on a desktop with Ethernet, hardware compat isn't much of an issue at all.
• blt 8y ago
  Linux will never completely shed its heritage as a software development system for a machine hooked up to a teletype and a tape drive.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    NeXTSTEP and macOS did it pretty well.
• Mikeb85 8y ago
  As imperfect as Linux is, it's still better than Windows' dumpster fire and Apple's jail. And as of right now I have an Acer Swift with an AMD Ryzen/Vega API which is running Ubuntu completely flawlessly. As in, everything works, all the time - WiFi, suspend, function keys, plugging in external monitors, etc... It could be better, but I can say that about every product I've ever owned (and yes I've had an iPhone, it's the reason I never bought another Apple product ever again).
• sprash 8y ago
  Wayland was supposed to be the rescue from the arcane outdated X11 and it is severely disappointing. The reason is that it does not offer enough features. It should have font rendering, it should have window decorations by default it should have native UI widgets and much more. None of it is offered and the responsibility is pushed away to others like Gnome, KDE and believe it or not, X11. IMHO the monolithic kitchen sink approach of systemd should be applied to wayland. Not the other way around.
  • Meing4im 8y ago
    I would argue that wayland is still in beta. They are still designing extensions to reimplement X11 desktop features. But with wlroots things have picked up pace.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Beta for over a decade. That's Google levels of beta. When can we expect a real wayland release then? 2035? When it will still be 10 years behind DWM?
• SMFloris 8y ago
  I use Linux for gaming almost everyday with Steam/Proton. It works flawlessly 90% of the time. I find no issues with my linux desktop whatsoever. It is stable, I rarely restart it, updates so far didn't break a thing.
  • simonh 8y ago
    To be viable as a general desktop environment for non-technical users, that has to be true not just for some users like yourself, but for all but about a few in a thousand users across a very wide cross section of available hardware.
    • AsyncAwait 8y ago
      > across a very wide cross section of available hardware This is a sticking point I just cannot get behind. When you're purchasing a computer running Windows, it is optimized for Windows. When you're purchasing a Mac, it is optimized to run macOS. So it should logically follow that if you want hardware optimized to run Linux, you should purchase that specifically. Expecting Linux to work flawlessly on any random junk is a feat you're not expecting of any other OS. Therefore by that logic, for Linux to be good enough on the desktop, it has to ascend to places no other OS does.
      • simonh 8y ago
        If the point is that this is a problem for vendors to solve, not the Linux desktop community, then that's fine. I can live with that.
      • breakingcups 8y ago
        What? When I'm purchasing a computer, any computer, I know with (near) 100% certainty it will run Windows flawlessly. I definitely expect Windows to run on any random junk.
        • AsyncAwait 8y ago
          > What? When I'm purchasing a computer, any computer, I know with (near) 100% certainty it will run Windows flawlessly. I definitely expect Windows to run on any random junk. So do you expect Windows to run flawlessly on a Chromebook? I'd guess not. When you're purchasing random hardware in a store it most likely comes per-installed with Windows and has been made for and tuned for Windows. It's just that Windows has such marketshare that the vast majority of computers are per-installed with Windows and have drivers primarily for Windows.
• michaelmrose 8y ago
  There are plenty of valid complains including many touched on in the article but there is also some unvarnished nonsense. "Pulseaudio is unsuitable for multiuser mode - yes, many people share their PCs (an untested solution can be found here)." This would lead one to believe that multiple graphical logins playing sound doesn't work in actuality Pulseaudio runs as a process per user and the observed behavior is the same as switching users on a windows machine. When you switch to a users graphical session that users sound comes out of your speakers. Further this allows it to be configured per user and for it to run without super user privileges. The only thing you can't do is say play music as one user and switch to another users desktop and listen to said tunes while hearing your users applications. In most cases you actually don't want random apps you can't by design effect or shut up playing over your desktop. So this is the right decision in every possibly way. "No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing (implemented in all modern OSes except Linux), many old or/and proprietary applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headaches." The last application that I recall that I had an issue with grabbing the sound device directly was a 15 year old version of Skype. Pulseaudio does all of the above and as it is and has been the standard desktop apps are expected to integrate with it and by and large that has been the case for about a decade now. The fact that somewhere out there old broken non compliant apps exist isn't a compelling argument. All popular platforms have a mixture of crappy and useful apps. People generally deal with this by using their favorite search engine to find good applications for their task. "What if the user decides to switch from Windows to Linux when he/she already has some hardware? When people purchase a Windows PC do they research anything? No, they rightly assume everything will work out of the box right from the get-go." They "rightly" expect hardware that the manufacturer doesn't want to support on Linux will be reverse engineered by volunteers because they already invested their money in a manufacturer that only supports windows. When the kind of person that could help you out makes 200k at Google it turns out that 50k of their time is not available to protect your $99 investment in your printer. If you pay $15 a month for hulu + hbo, 10 a month for spotify, $14 a month for netlfix, $150 for cable in the next 5 years you will pay. $900 for hulu $600 for spotify $840 for netflix $9000 for cable If you paid for all 4 you bought a halfway OK used car. Perhaps a fraction of that might buy a more polished experience you don't need to piss and moan about. Ultimately everyone will eventually upgrade their machine. Almost all hardware that a consumer would encounter or consider could also run windows. If you are considering switching to Linux and your current machine consider making Linux a part of your NEXT purchase. If you don't like it you can easily turn around and put Windows on it or hey put both.
• dschuetz 8y ago
  I believe that those problems are the price of free development. When everybody can contribute anything, which is a good thing in itself, there is no streamlining or refining of the end product. There are soo many interfaces and standards which often are used in parallel that it's actually an achievement when a Linux system is still able to boot. Open Source is a good thing, but not in regards of user experience and stability. There is no guarantee for anything. When it works - it works. When it doesn't work - people will hopefully fix it, or at least contribute resources. When it doesn't work and nobody fixes it, what then? I wish I had the expertise so that I could fix everything myself if needed, but let's stay realistic. Nor have I resources to spare. I have to rely on others' efforts. I've cross-compiled a Linux system from scratch for PowerPC once and it worked great. It worked up until I needed to recompile glibc because of some bugs threatening system security. Then everything went to hell. My prime interest in Linux and Open Source ceased to exist at this very moment. The dependency system in Linux is a nightmare, because basically there is none that guarantees consistency. How are cross- and circular dependencies even possible? And that's the price for freedom - chaos. It's great that anything works somehow. But there is no future to build upon.
• bayesian_horse 8y ago
  I'm really happy with Linux on the desktop. Yes, occasionally I have problems with graphics drivers, but normally not (NVIDIA), both on and older desktop pc and a laptop, and I really prefer it.
• fghtr 8y ago
  Everyone for some reason expects that GNU/Linux should work on every hardware configuration. I don't understand that, honestly. Why is there no such requirement for MacOS? Why do Windows-certified hardware have to work flawlessly with GNU/Linux? Just buy a Desktop/Laptop certified for GNU/Linux and stop complaining.
  • killjoywashere 8y ago
    Apple invalidates their own hardware, usually about 7-8 years after production. I’m sure Microsoft will too.
    • fghtr 8y ago
      Does it mean that the developers of GNU/Linux must provide compatiblity with every piece of hardware in the world?
      • killjoywashere 8y ago
        Quite the opposite. I'd call that solid evidence that they don't owe the market infinite backward compatibility. Nevertheless, those of lesser means will always seek out low-cost solutions like installing Ubuntu on a 10 year old laptop and they will be predictably frustrated when things don't work. When an incidental fraction of your audience is "all the world's poor and downtrodden", you're going to get a lot of people looking for solutions. To some extent that works in your favor: from those poor and downtrodden will very likely emerge some brilliant hackers and technical leaders.
  • Krasnol 8y ago
    > Why is there no such requirement for MacOS? Probably because nobody expects much from MacOS anyway? One relevant part of the Apple world is, that it works within it's narrow world of Hard- and Software. This is how they sell it. There is much much more Win-certified hardware out there. Much of it isn't used (for Win) anymore and therefore cheap as hell for excample. This is the hardware you'd expect your software to work with. This is where it's worth to invest time in.
• rbanffy 8y ago
  I refuse to take seriously a person who complains of lacking Adobe Flash support in 2018.
• cuillevel3 8y ago
  I find the 'how to fix Linux' chapter hilarious. Anyhow, the article touches a lot of the problem zones and it would be great if companies profiting from Linux would start investing in the desktop. Regarding security Linux has some advantages, like being open source and not being an attractive target for malware. I remember there was a Blackhat talk a few years back, detailing the security features of windows. I'd love to see a comparision with Ubuntu or Fedora.
• mijoharas 8y ago
  One surprise for me is that there is no mention on bluetooth. I have a reliable way of connecting a bluetooth headset; trying to connect between 2 and 10 times until it works. There are constant transient failures which is not what I expect from software in 2019.
• ensiferum 8y ago
  The problem is that a lot of these issues would require co-operation and agreement from multiple different teams to have a solution that would cover the whole system. But in the Linux world nobody really has the authority to make things work and play nice nice and to manage and design the whole system architecture. Distros do what they can of course, but they don't want to deviate too much with custom patching from upstream. So their work doesn't solve all of these problems. The year of the Linux on desktop is always 10 years from now ;-) Ps. I'm a Linux user and I quite like it on a desktop, wouldn't bother on a Laptop anymore, getting things like suspend to RAM or hibernate, bluetooth, wifi to work reliablly is just too much effort.
• rawmodz 8y ago
  Linux "sucks". True. For last two weeks I was trying to install a distro, that will work wirh my Broadcom internet adapter, but no success. Also BT did not work well. Of course I could get Wifi to work after a heavy and bloody battle, and only at 2.4 Ghz, but then BT stopped working. The point is, that all those are working fine under Windows 10. No hassle. My question is, why there is no Linux distro, that can work just fine out of the box? I am not a system programmer specialist like 95% of PC users. Millions of people would like to install Linux, but just cant do it, due to lack of knowledge. Average person, just want to download, install and run a system, without thinking of finding lost drvers, kernels, waste time to search internet, to find a solution. I went trough dozens of distros, and could not find one, that would work with my ACEPC T11 mini PC. Windows 10 just do.
  • jon-wood 8y ago
    Broadcom chipsets are notorious under Linux, because its had to be reverse engineered without support from Broadcom. The reason it works out of the box on Windows 10 is because the drivers are fully supported, with Broadcom engineers providing a full implementation of everything - if they did the same for Linux then it would work perfectly there as well.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Linux isn't blameless for this problem, because they religiously enforce that drivers must be open source.
• arianvanp 8y ago
  > multiGPU rendering for games in Linux is not currently possible in any shape or form (no games or solutions). that's because crossfire has been abandoned for proper mGPU support in the new Vulkan API. which is 100% supported on Linux. this is total FUD
• mnemotechny 8y ago
  The moral of this story is: All operating system suck. It's just that they all suck differently.
• benbristow 8y ago
  TL;DR is here for anyone wondering: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#Summary https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
• fooblat 8y ago
  I have been a daily linux desktop user since 1997 and I will freely admit that part of the enjoyment for me was getting everything working and setting up my perfect desktop environment. These days, as many others have pointed out, choose the right hardware and everything just works. At my company, we are currently in the middle of upgrading aging Windows 10 desktops in the Customer Service department to Ubuntu LTS. So far the feedback is universally positive from the CS agents. Ubuntu runs faster on the existing hardware and that's about all they notice. Chrome is still chrome and that's what they use for all the CS apps, including voip calling.
• Iolaum 8y ago
  I ll just chime in with something cool I heard once: Linux is very user friendly, it's just picky about its friends. P.S. Exclusive home linux user for 3 years and counting.
• jmakov 8y ago
  Switched to Windows in 2018 because of Killer WiFi card not supported on Linux. First time after 10 years I was able to suspend my laptop without having to worry it will wake up in my bag and overheat.
  • syn0byte 8y ago
    Linux support sucks for a high-end network card that runs the Linux kernel internally for TCP offload and acceleration? That's some deep irony. Their original product lines at any rate. Newer wireless models don't specify.
• rejd 8y ago
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/4/7/423 https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/4/7/423
• username231 8y ago
  >linux problems on the desktop >Linux is administered by ssh Right... on desktops, Windows is far worse with updates as far as breaking things goes. We have to deactivate the internet on Windows 10 machines so the updates don't break everything. Microsoft do not care about breaking stuff with their updates at all. Ubuntu is the stellar opposite.
• billfruit 8y ago
  With linux, I do find that if you have a problem, finding solutions from the internet is quite easy. Some of the distributions like Arch, has very detailed documentation and active forums, and IRC channels that finding help is not difficult, unless you have some exotic setup. OTOH, getting help for windows issues is often more difficult, if you visit windows forums, often the suggestions, solutions talked about are pretty generic, since one can't peek under the hood the amount of diagnostics possible is limited. Even if a problem solved in windows by reinstalling/restoring from backup etc, most often one does not what exactly caused the problem.
• MivLives 8y ago
  I use Linux, but only in a VM. Every year or two I try to install it on actual hardware. In the past ten years it has gotten so much better. That said it is still not quite at the level I would use it as my main OS. If my laptop stops working when I'm away from my desk I really don't want to have to fix something broken. I need it to just work. And for all the many shortcomings of Windows it has been hammered on and written for a complete idiot to keep it just working a lot easier. I will keep monitoring the situation of course and the second I feel comfortable enough will make the switch. Until then I'll just keep using a vm.
• Sangeppato 8y ago
  He's absolutely right. The problem is that Windows 10 sucks as well, just in different ways (check out "why windows 10 sucks", from the same author)
• Sangeppato 8y ago
  He's absolutely right. The problem is that windows 10 sucks as well, just in different ways
• kakwa_ 8y ago
  The Linux Desktop has problems, yes, but that's Ok. We just have to accept that Linux will never be a mainstream desktop environment. A desktop environment needs a well polished experience. And this experience can only be created by centralized organizations with extensive resources, like developers, QA, designers, ergonomist, user's behavior studies and a common and consistent vision of what the experience should look. In the Linux DE world, a project can consider itself lucky if it has enough developers. Yet, these developpers are doing a wonderful job, specially given the lack of resources, with applications that are more than usable and can solve 90% of use cases. Yes, Linux DEs are sometimes a little clunky, and the overall experience might encounter issues not solvable by the average user. But that's Ok, having a well polished experience would require an order of magnitude more resources, and an organization far more vertical than the existing array of communities. Diverting so much resources for the DE goal would be a mistake. Even if by some miracle we manage to solve all the issues mentioned, we would be "X but different/better", and this business model doesn't generally do so well, it will not displace Windows/Mac OS. Linux and the OSS ecosytem should remain what it is today: a powerful and rich toolbox to build things from giant web services or phones to Vacuum cleaners, cars or milking machines, and this toolbox should keep improving. It doesn't mean we should not look around and see what is happening around us in the DE world, but it should not be the absolute priority. Building a Linux desktop should not jeopardize the use cases that made Linux a success. Linux is a clunky Desktop Environment, yes, but this clunky environment has enabled me to build software reaching thousands of people. Thank you to all the devs who have built this (mostly) working experience.
• alexsandro 8y ago
  I have Linux but there is no problems in using it. At all. So i can add that it is one of most comfortable OS i have been ever used
• AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  I think one of the disturbing parts of the linux ecosystem is how it is starting to resemble the software turnover of a gigantic enterprise. Gigantic enterprises have functioning systems, but the people that wrote them eventually leave, and the complexity of the systems is such that when they need to be updated, they are just rewritten from the ground up, with the usual mixed bag of new bugs, new features, and missing features from the previous regime. This just seems what Wayland and system.d are, especially reading the list. The number of distros is really really counterproductive. Linux also DESPERATELY needs a massive hardware support information site with graphical matrices, to help guide purchases. This alone might shame hardware providers into sponsoring device drivers. But realistically the window of Linux desktop adoption passed with Nadella taking over Microsoft and starting to right the ship on Windows, even if it is still utter garbage. There was a solid five years where Windows was being utterly insane and that was the time to strike. Linux probably should just concentrate the resources of desktop into a near-perfect clone of OSX so they can at least unite forces with the macintosh people in usability / interface familiarity.
• AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  If Google was truly not evil they would supply leadership and the billion dollars. Aws and Google alone make hundreds of billions on the back of Linux and give back almost nothing.