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> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs

by dTal 7y ago

> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and now after finally getting fed up of being abused by a company that doesn't have your best interests at heart you return to the world of Free Software only to complain that it's still unpolished - then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin. And make no mistake, the kinds of "rough edges" you refer to are not hard computer science problems. They're broadly just the kinds of everyday maintenance things that inevitably crop up in a huge software project on an ongoing basis and are easily fixed by many eyes and a little graft. The more eyes, and the more graft, the more polished the system. For what it's worth, Desktop Linux for all its faults is still light years ahead of the competition. Far from perfect, as you say, but it really is the least bad choice. As they say - the best time to rally around Free Software is 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Has anyone made an open-source micro-violin yet? Well, there are open-source violins... http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin
- sbr464 7y ago
  This is cool, thx for sharing.
clopez 7y ago
This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)
- JabavuAdams 7y ago
  Maybe they want to get stuff done, other than puttering around in the tooling. It's a nice option to have, but would be ruinous to productivity. Also, design by committee rarely produces good UI. You can patch little UI bugs, but if you really want to holistically improve the UI it's a huge undertaking. Just because you're developer, doesn't mean you want to hack on every tool you use. Software has gotten way too big for that.
  - bb88 7y ago
    > Maybe they want to get stuff done, other than puttering around in the tooling. You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew? Or the default versions of software shipped are out of date by maybe a long, long time? https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_version_of_bash_included_in_os_x_so_old/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_ver...
    - anandsubra 7y ago
      > You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew? What kind of problems have you faced with Homebrew? Can you please elaborate? I use Homebrew all the time and it just works for me out of the box without any issues. I never had to edit configuration files or customize anything to make it do the right thing. It just works.
  - dTal 7y ago
    I can attest that using free software is not ruinous to productivity - least of all in the field of software development itself. You don't have to fix every bug you find. Just fix the odd bug, and work around the rest until somebody else fixes it; many hands make light work. But the work doesn't get done at all if you run away to proprietary platforms. You don't have to boil the ocean. Just do your civic duty from time to time. Once a year, even. If everybody on HN used desktop Linux and, once a year, invested an hour into fixing a minor, polish-level bug, desktop Linux's polish problem would completely disappear.
- kelnos 7y ago
anextio 7y ago
While I sympathize with your political position on free software, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this point of view is idealistic[1] and short sighted. The vast majority of engineers don’t commit to switching to free software not because not enough hearts and minds have been convinced yet but because the entire economy and the basis of everyone’s material existence depends on a system that is at this moment market-based. The popularity of proprietary software stacks is ultimately structural, as are the problems and caveats of proprietary software. Engineers are, in the vast majority, dependent on selling their labor to the commercial employment market for their livelihood, in many cases an extreme amount of labor in a highly competitive environment. It is absolutely great that many engineers dedicate free labor to contributing to free software, and it is completely unreasonable to expect that anything at all could make the vast majority do it. Not an unreasonable expectation of an individual, but of the structure. [1] in the sense of philosophical idealism vs materialism
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  The majority of web servers that serve all the web content that you use are Linux based. Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games. The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux. Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free. You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.
  - melenaboija 7y ago
    I don't think anybody is doubting about the huge impact of open source in science and technology, is more that maybe linux is still not a substitute for some commercial products
    - ActorNightly 7y ago
      But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems". There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce. If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.
melenaboija 7y ago
I have been dealing with computers since I started CS in school 18 years ago, and well my preferences have been changing since then. I used to love playing with computers and being able to try different linux distributions even if I had to spend 5 hours to have a usable external monitor (actually spending that time was one of the best parts) but that changed mostly because of my needs, but also because of my economy. When I had to start being more productive and I could afford it I bought my first Mac Book, and it lasted ten years! At that point I realized that maybe for me it was worth it spending that money and using that time to configure a keyboard doing something else. I feel I was the target at that time for Apple with some of their products, maybe now things have changed and I am not anymore. And I guess yes, marketing is what is driving them, but I think they are abandoning part of what they used to be their target and, hopefully, someone will fill that void with something that makes me as happy as when I bought my first Mac Book. BTW, now I am using a Pixelbook and a Mac Book for my personal stuff and Windows professionally and although is getting worst and worst I will still keep buying them.
blinkingled 7y ago
Well put! I use KDE nowadays exclusively and all the tremendous progress they showcase here - https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/ - is very real and exciting. They have made the development process easy and friendly and it really shows in terms of contributions they are getting. I enjoy reading the progress every week and digging into the bug fixes and review comments! One day I will have some free time to contribute.
Bendingo 7y ago
> then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin. This comment is unnecessarily belligerent; parent was stating facts. not complaining. Your attempt to guilt or shame them is completely unjustified.
- OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
  And just to make this more salient, I think comments like that are part of the reason why some people don't contribute.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flukus 7y ago
Well said, no pain no gain. If your not prepared to walk away from proprietary software and deal with the rough edges then you're a captive audience and the creators of the proprietary software have no incentive to improve. And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.
- OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
  > And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc. In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you. If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it? This is coming from someone that has linux as a daily driver by the way. I think over the years a lot of these rough edges have gone away, but some are still there. Sound configuration, multiple screen setup or gaming are just a couple of big examples that are still jarring and sometimes don't work right and would absolutely be a turn off for normal users, and a valid reason even for devs to say they don't want this. People make it sound like these excuses are "entitled" from devs who don't want to contribute, but that just reveals that they think they're entitled to that dev's contribution, which is not true.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it? Because it gets a little old seeing people reason themselves into a position where they are stuck with apple and it's the fault of linux as the GP did. If only linux were better I wouldn't have to keep buying apple. If they aren't willing to jump ship then apple has zero incentive to change anything, so they're just stuck and unwilling to accept any way out. > In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you. It is, at least getting myself off abusive proprietary software is the goal. I can write at length of the problems in linux, but at least I'm not stuck complaining about telemetry and being too lazy to do anything about it anymore. I've still got a way to go in other areas.
whoisthisguy 7y ago
I would be very happy to pay $140 one-time price for a fully functional, working Linux desktop environment. Even if it's limited to way fewer hw configurations than a Windows OS. Btw. $140 is the cost of Win 10 Pro.
Seirdy 7y ago
A thousand times this. Desktop Linux is the smoothest and most user-friendly computing I've ever experienced. Also, to those who didn't get the reference: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/

by dTal 7y ago

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago

Has anyone made an open-source micro-violin yet? Well, there are open-source violins... http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin

sbr464 7y ago
This is cool, thx for sharing.

clopez 7y ago

This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)

JabavuAdams 7y ago
Maybe they want to get stuff done, other than puttering around in the tooling. It's a nice option to have, but would be ruinous to productivity. Also, design by committee rarely produces good UI. You can patch little UI bugs, but if you really want to holistically improve the UI it's a huge undertaking. Just because you're developer, doesn't mean you want to hack on every tool you use. Software has gotten way too big for that.
- bb88 7y ago
  > Maybe they want to get stuff done, other than puttering around in the tooling. You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew? Or the default versions of software shipped are out of date by maybe a long, long time? https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_version_of_bash_included_in_os_x_so_old/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_ver...
  - anandsubra 7y ago
    > You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew? What kind of problems have you faced with Homebrew? Can you please elaborate? I use Homebrew all the time and it just works for me out of the box without any issues. I never had to edit configuration files or customize anything to make it do the right thing. It just works.
- dTal 7y ago
  I can attest that using free software is not ruinous to productivity - least of all in the field of software development itself. You don't have to fix every bug you find. Just fix the odd bug, and work around the rest until somebody else fixes it; many hands make light work. But the work doesn't get done at all if you run away to proprietary platforms. You don't have to boil the ocean. Just do your civic duty from time to time. Once a year, even. If everybody on HN used desktop Linux and, once a year, invested an hour into fixing a minor, polish-level bug, desktop Linux's polish problem would completely disappear.
kelnos 7y ago

anextio 7y ago

While I sympathize with your political position on free software, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this point of view is idealistic[1] and short sighted. The vast majority of engineers don’t commit to switching to free software not because not enough hearts and minds have been convinced yet but because the entire economy and the basis of everyone’s material existence depends on a system that is at this moment market-based. The popularity of proprietary software stacks is ultimately structural, as are the problems and caveats of proprietary software. Engineers are, in the vast majority, dependent on selling their labor to the commercial employment market for their livelihood, in many cases an extreme amount of labor in a highly competitive environment. It is absolutely great that many engineers dedicate free labor to contributing to free software, and it is completely unreasonable to expect that anything at all could make the vast majority do it. Not an unreasonable expectation of an individual, but of the structure. [1] in the sense of philosophical idealism vs materialism

ActorNightly 7y ago
The majority of web servers that serve all the web content that you use are Linux based. Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games. The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux. Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free. You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.
- melenaboija 7y ago
  I don't think anybody is doubting about the huge impact of open source in science and technology, is more that maybe linux is still not a substitute for some commercial products
  - ActorNightly 7y ago
    But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems". There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce. If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.

melenaboija 7y ago

I have been dealing with computers since I started CS in school 18 years ago, and well my preferences have been changing since then. I used to love playing with computers and being able to try different linux distributions even if I had to spend 5 hours to have a usable external monitor (actually spending that time was one of the best parts) but that changed mostly because of my needs, but also because of my economy. When I had to start being more productive and I could afford it I bought my first Mac Book, and it lasted ten years! At that point I realized that maybe for me it was worth it spending that money and using that time to configure a keyboard doing something else. I feel I was the target at that time for Apple with some of their products, maybe now things have changed and I am not anymore. And I guess yes, marketing is what is driving them, but I think they are abandoning part of what they used to be their target and, hopefully, someone will fill that void with something that makes me as happy as when I bought my first Mac Book. BTW, now I am using a Pixelbook and a Mac Book for my personal stuff and Windows professionally and although is getting worst and worst I will still keep buying them.

blinkingled 7y ago

Well put! I use KDE nowadays exclusively and all the tremendous progress they showcase here - https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/ - is very real and exciting. They have made the development process easy and friendly and it really shows in terms of contributions they are getting. I enjoy reading the progress every week and digging into the bug fixes and review comments! One day I will have some free time to contribute.

Bendingo 7y ago

> then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin. This comment is unnecessarily belligerent; parent was stating facts. not complaining. Your attempt to guilt or shame them is completely unjustified.

OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
And just to make this more salient, I think comments like that are part of the reason why some people don't contribute.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

flukus 7y ago

Well said, no pain no gain. If your not prepared to walk away from proprietary software and deal with the rough edges then you're a captive audience and the creators of the proprietary software have no incentive to improve. And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.

OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
> And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc. In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you. If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it? This is coming from someone that has linux as a daily driver by the way. I think over the years a lot of these rough edges have gone away, but some are still there. Sound configuration, multiple screen setup or gaming are just a couple of big examples that are still jarring and sometimes don't work right and would absolutely be a turn off for normal users, and a valid reason even for devs to say they don't want this. People make it sound like these excuses are "entitled" from devs who don't want to contribute, but that just reveals that they think they're entitled to that dev's contribution, which is not true.
- flukus 7y ago
  > If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it? Because it gets a little old seeing people reason themselves into a position where they are stuck with apple and it's the fault of linux as the GP did. If only linux were better I wouldn't have to keep buying apple. If they aren't willing to jump ship then apple has zero incentive to change anything, so they're just stuck and unwilling to accept any way out. > In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you. It is, at least getting myself off abusive proprietary software is the goal. I can write at length of the problems in linux, but at least I'm not stuck complaining about telemetry and being too lazy to do anything about it anymore. I've still got a way to go in other areas.

whoisthisguy 7y ago

I would be very happy to pay $140 one-time price for a fully functional, working Linux desktop environment. Even if it's limited to way fewer hw configurations than a Windows OS. Btw. $140 is the cost of Win 10 Pro.

Seirdy 7y ago

A thousand times this. Desktop Linux is the smoothest and most user-friendly computing I've ever experienced. Also, to those who didn't get the reference: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/