12 ms·

Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2020 edition

115 points by spekcular 6y ago

pizza234 6y ago
I take the chance to report that, embarrassingly, Bluetooth is broken by default on Ubuntu, and has been since 18.04, due to wrong settings in the Pulseaudio configuration file. This has been reported against 18.04, and has been ignored. What are users going to think when they try such a basic functionality?
- hawski 6y ago
  I have lots of bad experiences with Bluetooth. On Moto G1, Nexus 5x, Pixel 1, Aquaris X, Dell laptop with recent Windows 10, ARM Chromebook, x86 Chromebook, Ubuntu. While connecting between those devices, connecting to a Jabra headset, Lenco soundbar, noname mobile speaker, OneAudio headset, Renault Laguna audio system. Issues varying between: can't see any device at all; can't see the device I'm trying to connect to; can't connect; can connect, but the device freezes and needs a restart; can connect, but the sound still comes out of an internal speaker; can connect everything works, but then it stops working and above apply; everything works, but have to pair every time. It's dreadful everywhere. I think I had somewhat better experience with a Macbook, but at this stage I use bluetooth as little as possible, so can't really say. Sorry, I guess I'm just venting...
  - yrro 6y ago
    This is a generalization, but these devices are very likely only tested until they barely work on Windows and Mac OS. And if they have to choose between a quick fix that makes it work on those two, and implementing the spec properly, they'll pick the first option. So it's on Linux to discover and work around all the brokenness (in the bluetooth host device as well as the speakers, phones, peripherals, etc...)
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Bluetooth is just massively (and possible needlessly) complex. The combinations of supported profiles and options are likely more numerous than IPsec ciphers. I've not seen a stack that doesn't spectacularly fail with at least one of my devices. It's not vendor/product specific.
- yrro 6y ago
  Which settings?
- brabel 6y ago
  Woah!!! So that's why my Dell XPS13 couldn't use my Android phone's internet via bluetooth?! I thought I was doing something wrong (I got the internet to work using the wifi hotspot instead). I am on Ubuntu 20.01 so this problem seems to still be there.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Do you mean Bluetooth audio, or actually pulseaudio impacting the whole stack? What's the launchpad bug number?
  - pizza234 6y ago
    I don't have the Launchpad bug at hand, but I have the Stackoverflow question/answer: https://askubuntu.com/q/1037370 https://askubuntu.com/q/1037370
imedadel 6y ago
Considering Microsoft's recent investments in OSS, it would be awesome to see a Linux distro developed and/or funded by Microsoft that makes the adoption of Linux an easier process.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  The meme from way back when was that openSUSE was basically "Microsoft Linux", but I don't know what triggered that (maybe YaST making AD domain membership relatively painless?).
jstanley 6y ago
> Numerous people report that Broadcom and Realtek network adapters are barely usable or outright unusable under Linux. This links to a 5-year-old thread on reddit. I have personally used both Broadcom and Realtek wifi cards in Linux and while they used to suck 10 years ago (i.e. go to a different computer, find the firmware blob you need, stick it on a USB stick and then come back to the computer you're trying to use and try to work out how to load the firmware blob), I don't recall recently having to do anything to get them to work. They just work straight away in the Ubuntu installer and you can select your network and connect, and this has been the case for several years. I'd say more than 5, but the reddit thread suggests otherwise. > X.org is largely outdated, unsuitable and even very much insecure for modern PCs and applications. I don't have any comment to add to this, other than that the word "modern" links to a slashdot thread from 2012. Are we sure this article is 2020 edition? > Web fonts under Linux often look horrible in old distros. 2 of the linked pages here have dates of 2013 and 2014, the 3rd link is to a Google+ page which no longer exists because Google+ no longer exists. And how are problems in "old distros" a 2020 problem anyway? > As much as Ubuntu might be commended they still distribute their downloaded ISO images via HTTP in 2020 Aha! Something about 2020. I went to ubuntu.com and tried to download the ISO and it came over https. I tried 3 times and got a different mirror each time, but each one was with https, so I do not understand the complaint. Maybe some of the mirrors aren't https?
- itvision 6y ago
  Inherent X.org issues have never been solved. Why does it matter what the date of the linked article is?
heinrichhartman 6y ago
Tangent: What are people using for thin clients / terminals? E.g. stuff that is deployed at e.g. airport displays for showing connections flights or self service cash-registers? Linux seems like the obvious choice as a base OS. However, running X+Firefox ontop of it seemed too clunky (slow) and unrelieable to me? - How do I make sure you recover from crashes reliably? - How do you secure the inputs, to avoid escapes from the application?
- navaati 6y ago
  That’s part of the "embedded computing" problem space, and people have been doing stuff like developing Qt application running as a systemd service and directly hitting DRM (the kernel graphical API), so no X, said application being mostly just a webview tailored to your use case. In addition to the webview you could imagine adding an HTTP endpoint to your application for monitoring and remote control, that kind of stuff. I say Qt because it’s popular in the embedded space, and indeed makes doing that kind of stuff easy (by example by having a DRM backend).
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  Considering the times I've seen airport connecting flight displays replaced with bluescreen "Your Windows 7 PC is out of support", shopping mall digital ad displays showing that a QuickTime 7 & iTunes patch is available, or the self-service grocery shopping terminals displaying a Windows XP style "Ethernet cable is unplugged" notification, I'd guess not as much thought is going into those kinds of concerns as we might like. I think I have heard of some retail chain stores using FreeDOS with a dedicated keyboard-driven accounting package to run the business, though. (In this case I'm thinking of one of the larger Luxottica owned optometry chains.)
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I feel like most of the corporate world is gravitating toward web interfaces. Works great for me, since then a "thin client" can be as simple as a stripped-down Linux running a Qt5 or Electron app (or a browser in kiosk mode) that does nothing but access that web interface (or perhaps has a couple different tabs for different systems). For actual thin-client needs, it seems like Citrix XenDesktop is the go-to nowadays. Linux as a base OS works okay for this (there are Linux ICA clients). Linux also has RDP clients for Windows terminal servers (or hell, even Linux terminal servers with an RDP server; I typically do this for openSUSE servers in corporate environments where the people doing day-to-day maintenance are used to Windows and insist on a GUI). > How do I make sure you recover from crashes reliably? Just restart the app. > How do you secure the inputs, to avoid escapes from the application? With a stripped down environment the only such escapes are ones you configure yourself. X11 and the session thereof can be configured to have zero options besides starting up your chosen application. Even if you leave Ctrl-Alt-Backspace enabled, it'd just boot right back into that app. Ctrl-Alt-F(whatever) (if still enabled) should present a login prompt, so unless the password's compromised you're good to go there, too. Then it's just a matter of locking down the app itself, which again is straightforward if the session is configured to just restart the app if it closes/crashes. A custom application (say, a Qt5 app doing nothing except presenting a WebEngine widget and perhaps some support for hardware interfacing) offers fewer escape opportunities than, say, a generic browser in "kiosk mode".
roenxi 6y ago
There is a flavour here that although the individual points are subsystem specific the overall view is very much the Linux Desktop as a whole. The Wayland commentary is especially interesting and solidifies my view that Wayland is never going to replace X, and quite possibly this is intentional on the part of the Wayland devs. Reading through the X Server and Wayland headings, some of those issues sound so structural that the most viable long term path might be containerised mini-displays under some as yet unpublicised meta-manager that rethinks how applications play with together to manage keyboard and mouse. The Wayland experiment remains a source of great entertainment. The devs are doing amazing work lightening the dependence of the Linux ecosystem on X11.
nihil75 6y ago
This list exaggerates many issues in an attempt to inflate the list. It's totally bloated, full of baseless personal opinions. A few examples: - "Nvidia open-source driver nouveau.." - why include it if not to bloat the list? - "Under Linux, setting multi-monitor configurations especially using multiple GPUs running binary NVIDIA drivers can be a major PITA" - Bollox. Gnome/Mate Display-Manager does an excellent job. If you're still using X11 manual configs than what do you expect.. - "Linux drivers are usually much worse (they require a lot of tinkering..)" - Broad statements are usually wrong. Especially this one based on an opinion from the 90's. - "Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work." - Bollox. Resume from Hybernate - maybe. But suspend works perfectly most of the time. - "X.org is largely outdated" - duh... the whole list on this topic is dated issues resolved by WM. - "Adding custom monitor modelines in Linux is a major PITA." - Is it? a one line command? and how do you do it on Windows? oh you can't... - "Applications development is a major PITA" - this is ridiculous.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- letientai299 6y ago
  Totally agree. For all the non-Mac laptops I've used, nouveau is never a problem. And Ubuntu default setting is pretty good nowadays. I'm suprise that those point make it to a "2020 Edition" list.
  - atemerev 6y ago
    Have you tried it with Pascal cards and later? It simply doesn’t work at all, with my experience.
    - letientai299 6y ago
      I don't have any experience with Pascal cards. My ones are usually the consumer laptops from Dell (Inspiron, Vostro, XPS, Precisions), Lenovo Thinkpad, HP...
tda 6y ago
I just want to say that after upgrading to 20.04 from 19.10 something went wrong so I clean installed it. Then my Intel WiFi stopped working (even though the Bluetooth did work) and my multi monitor setup kept getting screwed up on reboot where a mousclick on the left screen would register on the right screen. I tried to file bug reports with canonical but the process seemed so convoluted I just gave up and am back to Windows and MacOS again. Maybe I'll try again in a few months, maybe not. WSL2 is working pretty well for me
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Ubuntu 20.04 seem to get a lot of heat compared to previous LTS releases. IIRC 18.04 release was relatively uneventful (in a good way).
me551ah 6y ago
It doesn't have to be Windows or Linux, it can be Windows and Linux. I just use Arch Linux on my Windows machine using WSL 2. Arch is my favourite linux distro with a really brilliant package manager and because of it being bleeding edge. By running it inside of WSL2, I don't have to bother much about stability since it's running inside Windows. But at the same time I get a full blown proper linux distro for my development work.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  And similarly, Windows runs incredibly well under QEMU if you want to do it that way around, though that kind of setup really requires a second GPU to be performant so is better suited to desktops.
eql5 6y ago
Get yourself a Tuxedo and be happy for the rest of your days: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en
- seqizz 6y ago
  Until you need support, according to reviews: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com
  - eql5 6y ago
    Support was excellent in my case. They responded quickly, and solved my issue competently. I agree that not all of their laptops are top quality, but mine is just perfect for me, couldn't be more satisfied.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I really wish more "Linux-friendly" laptop vendors would ship with AMD GPUs instead of NVIDIA. I get that there are probably constraints from upstream whitelabel manufacturers, but still. Even the high-end Ryzen based laptops on that site seem to only offer NVIDIA GPUs, which is lame. It's 2020. Ain't nobody got time for NVIDIA driver issues.
caro_douglos 6y ago
I don’t recommend Linux as a desktop anymore (free99 sold me for a while though). Still beats windows on older hardware..when it comes to minimal browser boxes Linux is still the best.
- pizza234 6y ago
  That's a bit throwing the baby with the bathwater. There is a significant amount of people who use their machines in extremely simple ways, ie. web browsing. Desktop Linux is perfectly fine for that.
  - Xolvixica 6y ago
    Unfortunately I have to disagree with even that. Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video, so you tend to get tearing/stuttering or at the very least a higher CPU load when watching YouTube for example, compared to say Windows, resulting in increased battery consumption if a laptop or at the very least increase fan speeds. I know it's being worked on with Firefox having acceleration worked on in Wayland, but right now, if even the simplest and most common use-cases have major downsides compared to Windows/OS X, it's hard to justify moving to a worse experience. Windows rules with vendor support, that's just how it is. I've grown tired of having to compromise.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      AFAIK OSX hides from userland the support for VP9 decode acceleration present in the Macbook's hardware, Youtube's primary codec these days, so now Firefox supports VAAPI under Wayland it is already ahead of OSX/Macbooks in this regard.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      > Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_... In short: Firefox supports it under Wayland since version 75 (and for more formats since 76). Not that I've really noticed this being an issue under X11.
lewiscollard 6y ago
> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. There is in fact a solid rationale behind this. > No polish, no consistency and no HIG adherence (even KDE developers admit it). See also: every operating system. It's unfair to pick on Linux for this since pretty much every Windows and Mac program seems to want to invent its widgets & unique behaviours, and this has been the case since at least the late 1990s when I got into computers.
- jstanley 6y ago
  Lol, I missed that. Is the article claiming that ext4 is not case-sensitive?
  - lewiscollard 6y ago
    The author may be thinking of this work from last year: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/ https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/ I do not know if this has since been merged.
  - itvision 6y ago
    The article says that native Linux filesystems _are_ case-sensitive and that could be an issue for users. I've been working with computers for over 30 years and I haven't had a single case when I needed hello and HELLO in the same directory.
- m463 6y ago
  I think the problem with case sensitivity is that either EVERYTHING has to be either case-sensitive OR case-insensitive. It would be very hard to change such a deeply-rooted assumption. I have worked with collisions between case-sensitive and case-insensitive filesystems, and let me tell you it's not pretty. Some common problems: #include <Foo.h> // not found cp FOO.BAR FOO.bar foo.BAR /case/insensitive/file/system (all files cannot survive.) I think some problems might be very hard to change.
- itvision 6y ago
syllogism 6y ago
There are so many legit problems to be sad about, but he ruins the list by bloating it with like 20-30% crap/bullshit entries. Why? Would be so much better and more productive if he kept it tight. He actually doesn't even have the issue that got me the most when I switched back from OSX (I hadn't been using Linux on laptops). libinput is developed by one guy, so instead of real usability testing, he just sort of plays around locally and asks a few friends to record inputs so he can analyse them. This results in really terrible defaults for the trackpad acceleration and clicking, that I could only override with xinput commands that referenced the device IDs, but the device IDs would often change on reboot.
- ornornor 6y ago
  You might have already solved that since then, but you can also add config files to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mytrackpad.conf and that will set the properties you want for libinput devices at startup. Works on my xubuntu so I can disable the trackpad and use only the track point with custom acceleration and sensitivity values.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    I'm not the parent but when I go through the trouble of creating a custom config I go one step further and switch to using synaptics driver instead of libinput.
- m463 6y ago
  OTOH he does have some things coded in green. But yeah, it looks overly critical. It might seem less biased if there was a subsystem-by-subsystem scorecard, showing positives and "needs work" items side-by-side.
  - itvision 6y ago
    > It might seem less biased if there was a subsystem-by-subsystem scorecard, showing positives and "needs work" items side-by-side. And then we'll have wars on what's serious and what's not. Year, right. :-)
bengalister 6y ago
I have to agree with the post that explains areas of improvement. I have been an ArchLinux/Gnome user for 1.5 years on my home laptop but I am pondering switching back to Windows since WSL2 support. I am currently writing this message from Windows10 partition. Windows10 has also its painpoints like Telemetry, default apps that I don't want, not following Unix philosophy (configuration with simple text files) and ability to customize but it is improving also. For me the remaining painpoints for Linux on the desktop even if it improved a lot over the years are: * bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable. Sometimes my bluetooth headset connects instantly, sometimes it takes 30s to 1mn, sometimes it never connects automatically and I have to do it manually. I did not have that issue on Mac OS X/W10. Also I have yet not figured out why an audio profile is added with gnome bluetooth but not when I use sway as desktop environment * resume from suspend reliably. Sometimes my network connectivity is broken after resume and cannot be recovered easily. I need to reboot. * Graphic drivers support even if not running Nvidia simplifies it a little bit. For Intel IGpu, it is ok but it seems still less performant than on Windows/Mac * lack of full featured drivers and software for some hardware especially for printers, scanners or fingerprint readers, the available ones lack proprietary features but it is obviously not Linux's fault. * lack of default video acceleration for browsers. Even if it is now possible with Firefox on Wayland with some configuration and Chromium but with community managed VAAPI support * Multiple screen and especially switching from Hidpi and low dpi. It is a really mess here due to different GUI toolkits being used and lack of standard. GTK has its own way, you can do with X or Wayland fractional (but blurry) scaling too. For instance what I do now on Gnome wayland is not doing any fractional (blurry) scaling but text scaling of 1.22 by default and using systemd udev revert to 1.0 when I plug my external display... as for Gnome I like it, I find it to be a MacOS GUI clone with a lack of customization that can be circumvented with extensions except for performance (still laggy even if it improved also a lot).
- arronax 6y ago
  > bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable Without patching of pulseaudio, microphone on a bluetooth headset doesn't work anyway. I'd take not snappy but working any day, really. Maybe in Pulseaudio 14 this will get resolved, there are a couple of proposals/drafts already.
blickentwapft 6y ago
The biggest most obvious slap you in the face problem with the Ubuntu desktop is cut and paste. This is the key thing a desktop should get right but it’s so wrong. It uses different keys to both OS X and windows, whereas it really should seamlessly offer both key combinations. And it’s inconsistent between applications. We’re so far down the Linux desktop path for cut and paste to be this broken.
- pizza234 6y ago
  This is an odd complaint. Cut/paste on Linux has been broken for a long time (possibly it's a past problem now), but not for the key bindings (d'oh), rather, for programs using incompatible APIs/frameworks, causing copy/paste not to work all the time. Even this, I think has been fixed, though, as I haven't been using a clipboard manager for a long time.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    I sometimes have issues with pasting screenshots into Rambox on my work laptop (it works most of the time, but sometimes it'll just inexplicably break, forcing me to paste the screenshot into a paint program first and then copy/paste into Rambox). Other than that, yeah, copy/paste ain't much of an issue. It's also really nice to be able to select text with my mouse and middle-click to paste (and it works across pretty much every non-game app I've used).
- panpanna 6y ago
  > It uses different keys to both OS X and Windows Why should this be a problem? You are on a different system, learn to use it the way it was intended. Ctrl-C has a different meaning in Unix. It has been so before windows and Macs existed.
  - blickentwapft 6y ago
    This is so precisely a representation of Unix think, and why Linux has such a problem competing as a desktop.
vkazanov 6y ago
Like 80% of the issue go away if you buy a machine with linux preinstalled. All the hardware issues are solved, all things just work. And there choice too: Dell, tuxedo, system76 and others I have bought like 4 Dell xps 13 developer edition machines so far, never had any problems. Why do ppl expect software to work on random crap windows-only machines?! There problems that can only be solved by vendor good will. At least do you homework and check if your favourite distro supports the hardware you buy. Arch has a wonderful hardware-related wiki, ubuntu certifies machines, etc...
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It kind of helps until you get a Linux update and a perfectly working driver gets replaced by some WIP alternative in name of FOSS. Had that experience with an Asus laptop sold with Ubuntu LTS.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    That's the risk when the perfectly working driver is binary only and the original vendor has just thrown it over the wall, with no intent of maintenance. Speaking of ASUS, I've yet to buy something from them that doesn't have some quirk. The last thing I bought from them, a GPU, had never updated it's firmware, despite AMD releasing it to OEMs and other OEMs releasing it to their customers. Unlike your laptop, my GPU at works with the FOSS driver, its just limited while UEFI is running.
laumars 6y ago
> No high level, stable, sane (truly forward and backward compatible) and standardized API for developing GUI applications (like core Win32 API - most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10 - that's 24 years of binary compatibility). Both GTK and Qt (incompatible GTK versions 1, 2, 3, 4 and incompatible Qt versions 4, 5, 6 just for the last decade) don't strive to be backwards compatible. So just install the previous version of those toolkits with the application (or use your package manager which will do that for you). Windows gets around this by installing basically everything in the base install and that causes the OS footprint to be grossly inflated. Where as Apple basically stick their middle finger to backwards compatibility and tell devs they have to update their applications. Personally I think Linux has the right approach here: being new features but allow old libraries to be installed when required.
- yyyk 6y ago
  Distros like to deprecate the previous version of these toolkits and not include them at all. Installing GTK1 or QT <= 4 is beyond the capacity of ordinary users (not of HN crowd of course).
  - laumars 6y ago
    If an application in the repos depends on it, then that version of Qt or GTK will also be available in the repos. What's more likely to happen is: - either that application is either dropped from the repos for being unmaintained (if it's using a library that old then there's likely other issues with it) - or some other helpful sole would fork the project and update it to run on a newer version framework This is also very distribution specific. For example ArchLinux still supports Qt 3 applications and libraries in the community repos however I wouldn't expect the same from CentOS (though admittedly I've also not checked).
    - yyyk 6y ago
      Well, our scenario is that the app is not updated, so that's kinda assumed. What usually happens is that distros drop apps due to old library version, and if the user needs it, than the user has to build all the deps, and most users can't do it. I didn't know Arch had older versions - most distros are very eager to drop, since supporting (or even compiling) these huge frameworks past EOL becomes harder and harder.
jokoon 6y ago
Money and corporate influence and culture is a big cause of most of those problems. If Linus Torvalds had been born american (just discovered he is naturalized american since 2010 https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/ https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/ ), I'm pretty certain Linux would be quite a different beast today. Generally, computing works best when the software dictates the homogeneity of hardware, something Microsoft managed to do. Microsoft is able to influence the hardware industry, which is why windows is a success. I'm also suspecting microsoft got some kind of relationship with hardware vendors, to help them write drivers etc. If you look at android, it's exactly the same scenario: the hardware follows the software, not the other way around. Hardware will always be the problem, especially as long as hardware tools are also proprietary, and generally all you need to do is follow how the US maintains its grip on the industry.
yyyk 6y ago
This list is too sprawling and too detailed. If the author used the same format he used for the summary or for his summary of Windows issues, and then put the detailed list under the summary, it would be far more useful. Most Linux problems on the Desktop aren't the result of individual bugs/issues, but of structural problems, and highlighting these problems first would be much more accessible and useful than the bug reports.
- itvision 6y ago
  > If the author used the same format he used for the summary or for his summary of Windows issues But there is one: 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...
  - yyyk 6y ago
    I noticed that (that's the "Summary" I mentioned). But reading it after the very long text about individual bugs is much less useful. Most position/research papers put the executive summary/abstract first with good reason - that helps the paper be better received. Maybe even organizing the lists as collapsible items could help the presentation be better* . As for the summary list, it too can benefit from a more probing look which tries to look at the issue more deeply, much more than listing individual issues. For example, ABIs and APIs are often unstable on purpose, especially on the kernel. Linus has long arguments supporting the unstable model and some Free software proponents like that this encourages GPL code. Do we want the Windows model? Maybe a shim could supply that? Or maybe we shouldn't have even that due to Free software reasons? (RMS tried that which gcc and it was one of the reasons that led to LLVM gaining traction). Or development speed? * That doesn't require JavaScript. One could use HTML5's simple summary/detail elements. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/details https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... There are css hacks which can achieve the same result on HTML4, but they are much more complicated and I suspect a list on Linux issues shouldn't care about supporting Internet Explorer.
    - 6y ago
pdimitar 6y ago
I wonder if a semi-centralised -- and hopefully curated -- list of Linux-approved hardware can be maintained somewhere? Even though I am generally sceptical towards desktop Linux due to a multitude or really weird issues some people report, I also know that it works quite rock-solidly for much more others. So I'd say nowadays "vet your hardware before investing in a Linux station" is a fair and balanced advice -- especially in a world where most hardware vendors just make a half-done Windows driver and peace out. Furthermore, I wonder if something can be built on top of such a curated list of approved Linux hardware like, say, troubleshooting tips for multi-monitor setups, or multi-sound-card setups, or general weirdnesses that occasionally happen only to some? At this point I believe it's really fair for the Linux community to give up on most of the hardware. But IMO if Linux is to have some mindshare of the desktop segment it should have a curated list of approved hardware and tidbits for addressing rare issues and improving the general quality of life. (And let's not forget X11's scandalous ability to allow every program to capture keystrokes. This has to be addressed in an ergonomic matter one day. Qubes is quite nice and all but it's a pain to setup. Somebody has to wrap this stuff in the usual brainless Next->Next->Next GUI wizards sometime.)
- swiley 6y ago
  Just check the arch/Debian/gentoo wiki before you buy something heh. If you want a truly centralized list all the drivers are kept in one repo on kernel.org
- nabla9 6y ago
  There is For Ubuntu see: https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/
- yrro 6y ago
  For RHEL: https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2... I don't think we'll ever see a "Linux" hardware compatibility list because what you really need is a "this particular version of this particular distribution" compatibility list.
speedgoose 6y ago
It still hurt me a bit to say it, but I have a really smooth experience with Linux on Windows 10 thanks to WSL2, the new Windows terminal, and the integration with VS Code. I use Linux a lot on desktop through windows and I have almost none of the issues listed there. Windows has other issues but not as annoying or time consuming to fix for me.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m4r35n357 6y ago
My desktop is a Raspberry Pi, you insensitive clod!
harha 6y ago
I think linux works reasonably well on the desktop as long as you stick to the standard settings, i.e., running only linux, accepting the way things were set, not worrying too much about loud fans, etc. The big issue I have is the mixed quality of documentation for "normal users" (those between just accepting everything on the one side and going through all man pages on the other), which always gives me an uneasy feeling that I didn't quite set something up the right way and that it could lead to issues somewhere along the way. While it would be nice to have, I don't necessarily need a graphical/terminal configuration tool (though it would be nice when I'm setting up things that I only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how it works, e.g. wifi). What I really need is a good wiki that is up-to-date and useful posts on stack exchange. Now this is where I run into problems: Arch for instance has a great wiki, but many posts, articles, etc. are for Ubuntu, which doesn't have a very useful wiki.
- swiley 6y ago
  The man pages are the documentation for users? I would say stay away from gnome if your fans are running all the time, it’s a terrible DE and you don’t need it. Just install eg fvwm or xfce (or lxde or whatever you like.) >I only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how it works, e.g. wifi) That’s going to cause issues no matter which OS you run. Just read the wpa_supplicant man page (or the appropriate documentation if your distro uses something else and you don’t want to change it.) You can skim for just the things you need and grab an example config, it’s not a hard tool to use and it only takes a couple minutes. After you do this you won’t be surprised when it breaks in a way you don’t understand.
djhworld 6y ago
I installed Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2015 a few weeks ago to try it out, mainly because of one killer app - the i3 window manager. It's been a blast, albeit not without some frustrations. The good - WiFi worked out of the box - i3 is awesome - battery life seems fine The bad/annoying - took me a while to get a reliable way of setting sufficient Xrandr settings to allow me to extend my desktop onto a 2nd monitor. - took me a while to find out the right commands to use to switch keyboard layouts when I plug in an external keyboard. - I've seen suspend not work properly a few times when closing the laptop lid - have to get used to new keyboard shortcuts for copy&paste and other things, this is more of a problem with switching from OSX -> Linux rather than a fault of Linux - firefox performance is really really bad. like horribly slow switching tabs, and all the items on a website seem to load in really slowly, especially on resource hungry websites (e.g. YouTube). I've tried installing nightly, enabling webrender etc, but it's just been dogshit slow. In comparison, Chrome feels lightning fast so sadly, I've had to switch. - hardware video decoding in web browsers doesn't seem to be supported? i've been reading around, apparently there's a patched version of chromium out there that supposedly supports it - but it doesn't like that's ever going to go mainstream. I was shocked loading a video and seeing my CPU fan maxing out! I'd imagine the xrandr/keyboard issues are mostly because of the manual nature of i3wm, over say Gnome where it might be more fluid The depressing At work I have a 2019 MBP which won't support linux out of the box (well - I'd imagine it boots, but it seems like there are horrible audio/wifi/input issues and problems with the T2 chip) and I really want to use i3wm at work. I'm tempted to get a VM going as a substitute...
- lisnake 6y ago
  Yabai [1] turned out to be pretty sufficient replacement of i3 on macOS for me [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
- markosaric 6y ago
  Have you tried using SwayWM? It's compatible with your existing i3 configuration but uses Wayland as the display protocol so some of your issues could be solved by that switch (Firefox performance, hardware video decoding, multiple monitors...). See https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manager-on-fedora/ https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manage... And https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-in-sway/ https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-in...
loraa 6y ago
I dunno. Been running since 93 and it has come a long way.
ianbooker 6y ago
You can compile such a list for any operating system in 2020. Recently I evaluated three randomly selected HDMI capture devices, Ubuntu supported each of them out of the box, while Windows and MacOs struggled. With the printer in our office its the other way around. The printer at home is old, so its just Linux supported. And so on..
Haga 6y ago
The gui needs to unlearn the concept of the program and embrace the workflow instead.. In which the program is nothing but a supplier and consumer of data. With proper tooling working habbits can be deducted and result in that magic moment were you can forget the machine..
viraptor 6y ago
Some of those points seem taken a bit too far. For example: > 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. That's how I ended up with an Epson printer which works just fine with macos and Linux, but not with windows 10. I also really enjoy the fact that printer drivers in Linux have no extra features. They normally support printing from a chosen tray with chosen colours and dpi. That's all I want from a driver. I hate every single value-add option stuffed into windows drivers.
yellowapple 6y ago
Most of the problems are valid, but some of them are... very much not, and haven't been for years (and others are "problems" but absolutely not "major" by any stretch). > NVIDIA Optimus technology which is used in most laptops often doesn't work well in Linux. Then stop buying them. My laptop (Intel + AMD) works fine w/ Mesa, regardless of which GPU I'm using (Intel iGPU by default, and AMD if I set DRI_PRIME=1 for a given application, e.g. in a game's launch options in Steam). NVIDIA's terrible. This whole section of the article seems to only describe issues with NVIDIA. If you buy hardware that's not shit, then lo and behold, you'll have a better experience. > Open source drivers have certain, sometimes very serious problems If "sometimes" means "basically never", then sure. I've "basically never" have had issues with Mesa on Intel or AMD hardware (I'm indeed running AMD hardware w/ Mesa on the very desktop on which I'm typing this comment, and it's been absolutely painless out-of-the-box). > PulseAudio is unsuitable for multiuser mode sudo killall pulseaudio Wow, so hard. Plus, the hyperlink for "multiuser mode" describes exactly how to launch PulseAudio system-wide to address this very concern (even if they do nonsensically advise against it, because of course they do). PulseAudio's shitty, but this ain't a reason. > There are still many printers which are not supported at all or only barely supported And there are many more which work just about perfectly out-of-the-box, namely almost everything by HP or Brother. > Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work. On a wide variety of old and new laptops on which I've installed Linux this has simply not been an issue for years. > 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. Most users will report bugs to their distros' maintainers, who hopefully know how to file these bugs against the kernel. > X.org allows applications to exclusively grab keyboard and mouse input. If such applications misbehave you are left with a system you cannot manage, you cannot even switch to text terminals. Alt+SysRq+R, then Ctrl+Alt+F1 Wow, so hard. Like, this works for even the absolute worst lockups (it's the first step of the "REISUB" maneuver to cleanly reboot a locked-up Linux system). > X.org has no means of providing a tear-free experience, it's only available if you're running a compositing window manager in the OpenGL mode with vsync-to-blank enabled. Sounds like a "means of providing a tear-free experience" to me. And, like, does this really warrant the double-exclamation-marks? God forbid you see a graphical artifact every once in awhile. > Applications (or GUI toolkits) must implement their own font antialiasing Applications might have different anti-aliasing needs. I see no problem with this. And again, this absolutely does not warrant double-exclamation-marks. > Wayland doesn't allow XWayland applications to change display resolution Good. > Wayland doesn't allow applications to exclusively grab mouse/keyboard which is required for games and applications like VMs. Were you not just complaining about X11 allowing this in the previous section? > Traditional Linux/Unix (ext4/ reiser/ xfs/ jfs/ btrfs/etc.) filesystems can be problematic when being used on mass media storage. Okay, so don't use them. JFFS2 has been in the kernel since 2001. F2FS has been in the kernel since 2013. Both are commonly used for flash media. You're also free to use FAT like you would on Windows; that's been in the kernel since forever. Not that this seems like a real issue anyway, given that I've used ext2/3/4 and XFS on thumb drives with no problems at all. ext2 is particularly useful if you're concerned about journaling shortening the drive's lifespan. > For the same reason you cannot modify your partitions table and resize/move the root partition on the fly. I've resized my root partition on-the-fly multiple times with zero issues whatsoever. The fact that I use LVM on all my desktops/laptops might help with that. > No unified installer/package manager/universal packaging format/dependency tracking across all distros The whole point of a Linux distro is to be able to differentiate on things like package management or system configuration. No package manager is perfect for all use cases. And besides, AppImage works on pretty much every distro that uses a reasonably-modern glibc, and literally doesn't care about the distro itself. If your concern is "well I don't want to have to build packages for each and every packaging system out there", then AppImage is your tool, so use it. > It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it Which is totally possible, thanks to things like AppImage (well, you download it somewhere and mark it executable, but wow, so hard). Hell, most distros support this even for .deb and/or .rpm packages. openSUSE also has 1-click installers, but it seems like they've fallen out of fashion (which is a shame, since they address this issue pretty dang elegantly). > Applications development is a major PITA. Compared to Windows? Linux (and Unix in general) is a breath of fresh air in comparison. A PyQt5 app (for example) takes me a few hours (total) to design and develop in Linux... and then days of nitpicky troubleshooting to get it working on Windows in a way that's reasonable for end-user distribution. > Packaging all dependent libraries is not a solution, because in this case your application may depend on older versions of libraries which contain serious remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. And yet this is exactly what Windows and macOS encourage, specifically to avoid the need for users to manage libraries. Like, you can't have your cake and eat it too; either you're gonna be dealing with dependency hell or you're gonna need to package libraries with applications. ---- Continued below...
fierarul 6y ago
Oh, this paragraph is good, especially in light of the Corona impact on OSS too: > Money, enthusiasm, motivation and responsibility: I predicted years ago that FOSS developers would start drifting away from the platform as FOSS is no longer a playground, it requires substantial effort and time, i.e. the fun is over, developers want real money to get the really hard work done. FOSS development, which lacks financial backing, shows its fatigue and disillusionment. The FOSS platform after all requires financially motivated developers as underfunded projects start to wane and critical bugs stay open for years. One could say "Good riddance", but the problem is that oftentimes those dying projects have no alternatives or similarly-featured successors.
stragies 6y ago
It's 2020, and I still have to manually enable Wifi Mesh Networking (802.11s) and recompile in Debian, even Buster. But that is a minor inconvenience, and takes 5 minutes. I do that for some other package too, for some niche options, but it's very easy to do in Debian.
guggle 6y ago
I used to develop on a macbook. Then I changed employer and consequently, changed laptop too. I won't name brand and model but it was running ubuntu out of the box with the following problems: - couldn't suspend/resume properly when folded - very low battery life - overheat, a lot, and of course noisy fans then - couldn't make use of all the ports of the dock I actually liked the OS (eventually I switched to Debian/XFCE though), but should I be the one to pay for this, I would be pretty pissed off. We're talking about a 2500€ machine here.
BearOso 6y 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. Most file systems on Linux like ext4 have a 255 byte file name limit. There’s no limit in the kernel. I think Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit is worse.
- itvision 6y ago
  > Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit was lifted a few years ago.
mnm1 6y ago
> Under some circumstances the system or X.org's GUI may become very slow and unresponsive due to various problems with video acceleration or lack of it and also due to notorious bug 12309 Anyone know what he's talking about. It sounds a lot like the issue I was experiencing, but the ticket is not accessible, even when logging in. Would love to read the details. The constant, sometimes multi-minute stutters where the system became unresponsive is one of the main reasons I stopped using it last time. Every few years, I give it a shot, love it, and then something like this (or external displays no longer working 90% of the time) that just makes me give up. I've never had an install run for more than about six months without something catastrophic happening that requires a complete reinstall / restore from backup, usually due to some desktop environment issue preventing it from loading/displaying.
oliwarner 6y ago
The only problem with desktop Linux these days is there still not being more companies throwing some effort in. Adobe and Microsoft could make serious money here. Their tooling aren't just standards, they're —in many ways— the best available tools, that Linux does not have viable solutions for. Clawing our way along with alternatives, and Wine and VMs isn't sustainable. Not forever. We just need a couple of big names to start things going. But it perpetually never happens. Maybe 2021. I'm bizarrely optimistic about Microsoft. Once software support comes, and people can carry on doing their work, the weight of demand forces hardware support for oddball wifi chips, RGB mice, whatever. I can buy another mouse today, I need Illustrator and Photoshop for professional interop. As for TFA, everybody derives their annoyances from different places. Desktop Linux isn't perfect, but it's the best I've got, by some distance, for my workloads.

115 points by spekcular 6y ago

I take the chance to report that, embarrassingly, Bluetooth is broken by default on Ubuntu, and has been since 18.04, due to wrong settings in the Pulseaudio configuration file. This has been reported against 18.04, and has been ignored. What are users going to think when they try such a basic functionality?

hawski 6y ago
I have lots of bad experiences with Bluetooth. On Moto G1, Nexus 5x, Pixel 1, Aquaris X, Dell laptop with recent Windows 10, ARM Chromebook, x86 Chromebook, Ubuntu. While connecting between those devices, connecting to a Jabra headset, Lenco soundbar, noname mobile speaker, OneAudio headset, Renault Laguna audio system. Issues varying between: can't see any device at all; can't see the device I'm trying to connect to; can't connect; can connect, but the device freezes and needs a restart; can connect, but the sound still comes out of an internal speaker; can connect everything works, but then it stops working and above apply; everything works, but have to pair every time. It's dreadful everywhere. I think I had somewhat better experience with a Macbook, but at this stage I use bluetooth as little as possible, so can't really say. Sorry, I guess I'm just venting...
- yrro 6y ago
  This is a generalization, but these devices are very likely only tested until they barely work on Windows and Mac OS. And if they have to choose between a quick fix that makes it work on those two, and implementing the spec properly, they'll pick the first option. So it's on Linux to discover and work around all the brokenness (in the bluetooth host device as well as the speakers, phones, peripherals, etc...)
- viraptor 6y ago
  Bluetooth is just massively (and possible needlessly) complex. The combinations of supported profiles and options are likely more numerous than IPsec ciphers. I've not seen a stack that doesn't spectacularly fail with at least one of my devices. It's not vendor/product specific.
yrro 6y ago
Which settings?
brabel 6y ago
Woah!!! So that's why my Dell XPS13 couldn't use my Android phone's internet via bluetooth?! I thought I was doing something wrong (I got the internet to work using the wifi hotspot instead). I am on Ubuntu 20.01 so this problem seems to still be there.
viraptor 6y ago
Do you mean Bluetooth audio, or actually pulseaudio impacting the whole stack? What's the launchpad bug number?
- pizza234 6y ago
  I don't have the Launchpad bug at hand, but I have the Stackoverflow question/answer: https://askubuntu.com/q/1037370 https://askubuntu.com/q/1037370

imedadel 6y ago

Considering Microsoft's recent investments in OSS, it would be awesome to see a Linux distro developed and/or funded by Microsoft that makes the adoption of Linux an easier process.

yellowapple 6y ago
The meme from way back when was that openSUSE was basically "Microsoft Linux", but I don't know what triggered that (maybe YaST making AD domain membership relatively painless?).

jstanley 6y ago

> Numerous people report that Broadcom and Realtek network adapters are barely usable or outright unusable under Linux. This links to a 5-year-old thread on reddit. I have personally used both Broadcom and Realtek wifi cards in Linux and while they used to suck 10 years ago (i.e. go to a different computer, find the firmware blob you need, stick it on a USB stick and then come back to the computer you're trying to use and try to work out how to load the firmware blob), I don't recall recently having to do anything to get them to work. They just work straight away in the Ubuntu installer and you can select your network and connect, and this has been the case for several years. I'd say more than 5, but the reddit thread suggests otherwise. > X.org is largely outdated, unsuitable and even very much insecure for modern PCs and applications. I don't have any comment to add to this, other than that the word "modern" links to a slashdot thread from 2012. Are we sure this article is 2020 edition? > Web fonts under Linux often look horrible in old distros. 2 of the linked pages here have dates of 2013 and 2014, the 3rd link is to a Google+ page which no longer exists because Google+ no longer exists. And how are problems in "old distros" a 2020 problem anyway? > As much as Ubuntu might be commended they still distribute their downloaded ISO images via HTTP in 2020 Aha! Something about 2020. I went to ubuntu.com and tried to download the ISO and it came over https. I tried 3 times and got a different mirror each time, but each one was with https, so I do not understand the complaint. Maybe some of the mirrors aren't https?

itvision 6y ago
Inherent X.org issues have never been solved. Why does it matter what the date of the linked article is?

heinrichhartman 6y ago

Tangent: What are people using for thin clients / terminals? E.g. stuff that is deployed at e.g. airport displays for showing connections flights or self service cash-registers? Linux seems like the obvious choice as a base OS. However, running X+Firefox ontop of it seemed too clunky (slow) and unrelieable to me? - How do I make sure you recover from crashes reliably? - How do you secure the inputs, to avoid escapes from the application?

navaati 6y ago
That’s part of the "embedded computing" problem space, and people have been doing stuff like developing Qt application running as a systemd service and directly hitting DRM (the kernel graphical API), so no X, said application being mostly just a webview tailored to your use case. In addition to the webview you could imagine adding an HTTP endpoint to your application for monitoring and remote control, that kind of stuff. I say Qt because it’s popular in the embedded space, and indeed makes doing that kind of stuff easy (by example by having a DRM backend).
SyneRyder 6y ago
Considering the times I've seen airport connecting flight displays replaced with bluescreen "Your Windows 7 PC is out of support", shopping mall digital ad displays showing that a QuickTime 7 & iTunes patch is available, or the self-service grocery shopping terminals displaying a Windows XP style "Ethernet cable is unplugged" notification, I'd guess not as much thought is going into those kinds of concerns as we might like. I think I have heard of some retail chain stores using FreeDOS with a dedicated keyboard-driven accounting package to run the business, though. (In this case I'm thinking of one of the larger Luxottica owned optometry chains.)
yellowapple 6y ago
I feel like most of the corporate world is gravitating toward web interfaces. Works great for me, since then a "thin client" can be as simple as a stripped-down Linux running a Qt5 or Electron app (or a browser in kiosk mode) that does nothing but access that web interface (or perhaps has a couple different tabs for different systems). For actual thin-client needs, it seems like Citrix XenDesktop is the go-to nowadays. Linux as a base OS works okay for this (there are Linux ICA clients). Linux also has RDP clients for Windows terminal servers (or hell, even Linux terminal servers with an RDP server; I typically do this for openSUSE servers in corporate environments where the people doing day-to-day maintenance are used to Windows and insist on a GUI). > How do I make sure you recover from crashes reliably? Just restart the app. > How do you secure the inputs, to avoid escapes from the application? With a stripped down environment the only such escapes are ones you configure yourself. X11 and the session thereof can be configured to have zero options besides starting up your chosen application. Even if you leave Ctrl-Alt-Backspace enabled, it'd just boot right back into that app. Ctrl-Alt-F(whatever) (if still enabled) should present a login prompt, so unless the password's compromised you're good to go there, too. Then it's just a matter of locking down the app itself, which again is straightforward if the session is configured to just restart the app if it closes/crashes. A custom application (say, a Qt5 app doing nothing except presenting a WebEngine widget and perhaps some support for hardware interfacing) offers fewer escape opportunities than, say, a generic browser in "kiosk mode".

roenxi 6y ago

There is a flavour here that although the individual points are subsystem specific the overall view is very much the Linux Desktop as a whole. The Wayland commentary is especially interesting and solidifies my view that Wayland is never going to replace X, and quite possibly this is intentional on the part of the Wayland devs. Reading through the X Server and Wayland headings, some of those issues sound so structural that the most viable long term path might be containerised mini-displays under some as yet unpublicised meta-manager that rethinks how applications play with together to manage keyboard and mouse. The Wayland experiment remains a source of great entertainment. The devs are doing amazing work lightening the dependence of the Linux ecosystem on X11.

nihil75 6y ago

This list exaggerates many issues in an attempt to inflate the list. It's totally bloated, full of baseless personal opinions. A few examples: - "Nvidia open-source driver nouveau.." - why include it if not to bloat the list? - "Under Linux, setting multi-monitor configurations especially using multiple GPUs running binary NVIDIA drivers can be a major PITA" - Bollox. Gnome/Mate Display-Manager does an excellent job. If you're still using X11 manual configs than what do you expect.. - "Linux drivers are usually much worse (they require a lot of tinkering..)" - Broad statements are usually wrong. Especially this one based on an opinion from the 90's. - "Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work." - Bollox. Resume from Hybernate - maybe. But suspend works perfectly most of the time. - "X.org is largely outdated" - duh... the whole list on this topic is dated issues resolved by WM. - "Adding custom monitor modelines in Linux is a major PITA." - Is it? a one line command? and how do you do it on Windows? oh you can't... - "Applications development is a major PITA" - this is ridiculous.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
letientai299 6y ago
Totally agree. For all the non-Mac laptops I've used, nouveau is never a problem. And Ubuntu default setting is pretty good nowadays. I'm suprise that those point make it to a "2020 Edition" list.
- atemerev 6y ago
  Have you tried it with Pascal cards and later? It simply doesn’t work at all, with my experience.
  - letientai299 6y ago
    I don't have any experience with Pascal cards. My ones are usually the consumer laptops from Dell (Inspiron, Vostro, XPS, Precisions), Lenovo Thinkpad, HP...

tda 6y ago

I just want to say that after upgrading to 20.04 from 19.10 something went wrong so I clean installed it. Then my Intel WiFi stopped working (even though the Bluetooth did work) and my multi monitor setup kept getting screwed up on reboot where a mousclick on the left screen would register on the right screen. I tried to file bug reports with canonical but the process seemed so convoluted I just gave up and am back to Windows and MacOS again. Maybe I'll try again in a few months, maybe not. WSL2 is working pretty well for me

neurostimulant 6y ago
Ubuntu 20.04 seem to get a lot of heat compared to previous LTS releases. IIRC 18.04 release was relatively uneventful (in a good way).

me551ah 6y ago

It doesn't have to be Windows or Linux, it can be Windows and Linux. I just use Arch Linux on my Windows machine using WSL 2. Arch is my favourite linux distro with a really brilliant package manager and because of it being bleeding edge. By running it inside of WSL2, I don't have to bother much about stability since it's running inside Windows. But at the same time I get a full blown proper linux distro for my development work.

ubercow13 6y ago
And similarly, Windows runs incredibly well under QEMU if you want to do it that way around, though that kind of setup really requires a second GPU to be performant so is better suited to desktops.

eql5 6y ago

Get yourself a Tuxedo and be happy for the rest of your days: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

seqizz 6y ago
Until you need support, according to reviews: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com
- eql5 6y ago
  Support was excellent in my case. They responded quickly, and solved my issue competently. I agree that not all of their laptops are top quality, but mine is just perfect for me, couldn't be more satisfied.
yellowapple 6y ago
I really wish more "Linux-friendly" laptop vendors would ship with AMD GPUs instead of NVIDIA. I get that there are probably constraints from upstream whitelabel manufacturers, but still. Even the high-end Ryzen based laptops on that site seem to only offer NVIDIA GPUs, which is lame. It's 2020. Ain't nobody got time for NVIDIA driver issues.

caro_douglos 6y ago

I don’t recommend Linux as a desktop anymore (free99 sold me for a while though). Still beats windows on older hardware..when it comes to minimal browser boxes Linux is still the best.

pizza234 6y ago
That's a bit throwing the baby with the bathwater. There is a significant amount of people who use their machines in extremely simple ways, ie. web browsing. Desktop Linux is perfectly fine for that.
- Xolvixica 6y ago
  Unfortunately I have to disagree with even that. Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video, so you tend to get tearing/stuttering or at the very least a higher CPU load when watching YouTube for example, compared to say Windows, resulting in increased battery consumption if a laptop or at the very least increase fan speeds. I know it's being worked on with Firefox having acceleration worked on in Wayland, but right now, if even the simplest and most common use-cases have major downsides compared to Windows/OS X, it's hard to justify moving to a worse experience. Windows rules with vendor support, that's just how it is. I've grown tired of having to compromise.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    AFAIK OSX hides from userland the support for VP9 decode acceleration present in the Macbook's hardware, Youtube's primary codec these days, so now Firefox supports VAAPI under Wayland it is already ahead of OSX/Macbooks in this regard.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > Firefox (the default browser in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_... In short: Firefox supports it under Wayland since version 75 (and for more formats since 76). Not that I've really noticed this being an issue under X11.

lewiscollard 6y ago

> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. There is in fact a solid rationale behind this. > No polish, no consistency and no HIG adherence (even KDE developers admit it). See also: every operating system. It's unfair to pick on Linux for this since pretty much every Windows and Mac program seems to want to invent its widgets & unique behaviours, and this has been the case since at least the late 1990s when I got into computers.

jstanley 6y ago
Lol, I missed that. Is the article claiming that ext4 is not case-sensitive?
- lewiscollard 6y ago
  The author may be thinking of this work from last year: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/ https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/ I do not know if this has since been merged.
- itvision 6y ago
  The article says that native Linux filesystems _are_ case-sensitive and that could be an issue for users. I've been working with computers for over 30 years and I haven't had a single case when I needed hello and HELLO in the same directory.
m463 6y ago
I think the problem with case sensitivity is that either EVERYTHING has to be either case-sensitive OR case-insensitive. It would be very hard to change such a deeply-rooted assumption. I have worked with collisions between case-sensitive and case-insensitive filesystems, and let me tell you it's not pretty. Some common problems: #include <Foo.h> // not found cp FOO.BAR FOO.bar foo.BAR /case/insensitive/file/system (all files cannot survive.) I think some problems might be very hard to change.
itvision 6y ago

syllogism 6y ago

There are so many legit problems to be sad about, but he ruins the list by bloating it with like 20-30% crap/bullshit entries. Why? Would be so much better and more productive if he kept it tight. He actually doesn't even have the issue that got me the most when I switched back from OSX (I hadn't been using Linux on laptops). libinput is developed by one guy, so instead of real usability testing, he just sort of plays around locally and asks a few friends to record inputs so he can analyse them. This results in really terrible defaults for the trackpad acceleration and clicking, that I could only override with xinput commands that referenced the device IDs, but the device IDs would often change on reboot.

ornornor 6y ago
You might have already solved that since then, but you can also add config files to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mytrackpad.conf and that will set the properties you want for libinput devices at startup. Works on my xubuntu so I can disable the trackpad and use only the track point with custom acceleration and sensitivity values.
- kasabali 6y ago
  I'm not the parent but when I go through the trouble of creating a custom config I go one step further and switch to using synaptics driver instead of libinput.
m463 6y ago
OTOH he does have some things coded in green. But yeah, it looks overly critical. It might seem less biased if there was a subsystem-by-subsystem scorecard, showing positives and "needs work" items side-by-side.
- itvision 6y ago
  > It might seem less biased if there was a subsystem-by-subsystem scorecard, showing positives and "needs work" items side-by-side. And then we'll have wars on what's serious and what's not. Year, right. :-)

bengalister 6y ago

I have to agree with the post that explains areas of improvement. I have been an ArchLinux/Gnome user for 1.5 years on my home laptop but I am pondering switching back to Windows since WSL2 support. I am currently writing this message from Windows10 partition. Windows10 has also its painpoints like Telemetry, default apps that I don't want, not following Unix philosophy (configuration with simple text files) and ability to customize but it is improving also. For me the remaining painpoints for Linux on the desktop even if it improved a lot over the years are: * bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable. Sometimes my bluetooth headset connects instantly, sometimes it takes 30s to 1mn, sometimes it never connects automatically and I have to do it manually. I did not have that issue on Mac OS X/W10. Also I have yet not figured out why an audio profile is added with gnome bluetooth but not when I use sway as desktop environment * resume from suspend reliably. Sometimes my network connectivity is broken after resume and cannot be recovered easily. I need to reboot. * Graphic drivers support even if not running Nvidia simplifies it a little bit. For Intel IGpu, it is ok but it seems still less performant than on Windows/Mac * lack of full featured drivers and software for some hardware especially for printers, scanners or fingerprint readers, the available ones lack proprietary features but it is obviously not Linux's fault. * lack of default video acceleration for browsers. Even if it is now possible with Firefox on Wayland with some configuration and Chromium but with community managed VAAPI support * Multiple screen and especially switching from Hidpi and low dpi. It is a really mess here due to different GUI toolkits being used and lack of standard. GTK has its own way, you can do with X or Wayland fractional (but blurry) scaling too. For instance what I do now on Gnome wayland is not doing any fractional (blurry) scaling but text scaling of 1.22 by default and using systemd udev revert to 1.0 when I plug my external display... as for Gnome I like it, I find it to be a MacOS GUI clone with a lack of customization that can be circumvented with extensions except for performance (still laggy even if it improved also a lot).

arronax 6y ago
> bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable Without patching of pulseaudio, microphone on a bluetooth headset doesn't work anyway. I'd take not snappy but working any day, really. Maybe in Pulseaudio 14 this will get resolved, there are a couple of proposals/drafts already.

blickentwapft 6y ago

The biggest most obvious slap you in the face problem with the Ubuntu desktop is cut and paste. This is the key thing a desktop should get right but it’s so wrong. It uses different keys to both OS X and windows, whereas it really should seamlessly offer both key combinations. And it’s inconsistent between applications. We’re so far down the Linux desktop path for cut and paste to be this broken.

pizza234 6y ago
This is an odd complaint. Cut/paste on Linux has been broken for a long time (possibly it's a past problem now), but not for the key bindings (d'oh), rather, for programs using incompatible APIs/frameworks, causing copy/paste not to work all the time. Even this, I think has been fixed, though, as I haven't been using a clipboard manager for a long time.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I sometimes have issues with pasting screenshots into Rambox on my work laptop (it works most of the time, but sometimes it'll just inexplicably break, forcing me to paste the screenshot into a paint program first and then copy/paste into Rambox). Other than that, yeah, copy/paste ain't much of an issue. It's also really nice to be able to select text with my mouse and middle-click to paste (and it works across pretty much every non-game app I've used).
panpanna 6y ago
> It uses different keys to both OS X and Windows Why should this be a problem? You are on a different system, learn to use it the way it was intended. Ctrl-C has a different meaning in Unix. It has been so before windows and Macs existed.
- blickentwapft 6y ago
  This is so precisely a representation of Unix think, and why Linux has such a problem competing as a desktop.

vkazanov 6y ago

Like 80% of the issue go away if you buy a machine with linux preinstalled. All the hardware issues are solved, all things just work. And there choice too: Dell, tuxedo, system76 and others I have bought like 4 Dell xps 13 developer edition machines so far, never had any problems. Why do ppl expect software to work on random crap windows-only machines?! There problems that can only be solved by vendor good will. At least do you homework and check if your favourite distro supports the hardware you buy. Arch has a wonderful hardware-related wiki, ubuntu certifies machines, etc...

pjmlp 6y ago
It kind of helps until you get a Linux update and a perfectly working driver gets replaced by some WIP alternative in name of FOSS. Had that experience with an Asus laptop sold with Ubuntu LTS.
- vetinari 6y ago
  That's the risk when the perfectly working driver is binary only and the original vendor has just thrown it over the wall, with no intent of maintenance. Speaking of ASUS, I've yet to buy something from them that doesn't have some quirk. The last thing I bought from them, a GPU, had never updated it's firmware, despite AMD releasing it to OEMs and other OEMs releasing it to their customers. Unlike your laptop, my GPU at works with the FOSS driver, its just limited while UEFI is running.

laumars 6y ago

> No high level, stable, sane (truly forward and backward compatible) and standardized API for developing GUI applications (like core Win32 API - most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10 - that's 24 years of binary compatibility). Both GTK and Qt (incompatible GTK versions 1, 2, 3, 4 and incompatible Qt versions 4, 5, 6 just for the last decade) don't strive to be backwards compatible. So just install the previous version of those toolkits with the application (or use your package manager which will do that for you). Windows gets around this by installing basically everything in the base install and that causes the OS footprint to be grossly inflated. Where as Apple basically stick their middle finger to backwards compatibility and tell devs they have to update their applications. Personally I think Linux has the right approach here: being new features but allow old libraries to be installed when required.

yyyk 6y ago
Distros like to deprecate the previous version of these toolkits and not include them at all. Installing GTK1 or QT <= 4 is beyond the capacity of ordinary users (not of HN crowd of course).
- laumars 6y ago
  If an application in the repos depends on it, then that version of Qt or GTK will also be available in the repos. What's more likely to happen is: - either that application is either dropped from the repos for being unmaintained (if it's using a library that old then there's likely other issues with it) - or some other helpful sole would fork the project and update it to run on a newer version framework This is also very distribution specific. For example ArchLinux still supports Qt 3 applications and libraries in the community repos however I wouldn't expect the same from CentOS (though admittedly I've also not checked).
  - yyyk 6y ago
    Well, our scenario is that the app is not updated, so that's kinda assumed. What usually happens is that distros drop apps due to old library version, and if the user needs it, than the user has to build all the deps, and most users can't do it. I didn't know Arch had older versions - most distros are very eager to drop, since supporting (or even compiling) these huge frameworks past EOL becomes harder and harder.

jokoon 6y ago

Money and corporate influence and culture is a big cause of most of those problems. If Linus Torvalds had been born american (just discovered he is naturalized american since 2010 https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/ https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/ ), I'm pretty certain Linux would be quite a different beast today. Generally, computing works best when the software dictates the homogeneity of hardware, something Microsoft managed to do. Microsoft is able to influence the hardware industry, which is why windows is a success. I'm also suspecting microsoft got some kind of relationship with hardware vendors, to help them write drivers etc. If you look at android, it's exactly the same scenario: the hardware follows the software, not the other way around. Hardware will always be the problem, especially as long as hardware tools are also proprietary, and generally all you need to do is follow how the US maintains its grip on the industry.

yyyk 6y ago

This list is too sprawling and too detailed. If the author used the same format he used for the summary or for his summary of Windows issues, and then put the detailed list under the summary, it would be far more useful. Most Linux problems on the Desktop aren't the result of individual bugs/issues, but of structural problems, and highlighting these problems first would be much more accessible and useful than the bug reports.

itvision 6y ago
> If the author used the same format he used for the summary or for his summary of Windows issues But there is one: 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...
- yyyk 6y ago
  I noticed that (that's the "Summary" I mentioned). But reading it after the very long text about individual bugs is much less useful. Most position/research papers put the executive summary/abstract first with good reason - that helps the paper be better received. Maybe even organizing the lists as collapsible items could help the presentation be better* . As for the summary list, it too can benefit from a more probing look which tries to look at the issue more deeply, much more than listing individual issues. For example, ABIs and APIs are often unstable on purpose, especially on the kernel. Linus has long arguments supporting the unstable model and some Free software proponents like that this encourages GPL code. Do we want the Windows model? Maybe a shim could supply that? Or maybe we shouldn't have even that due to Free software reasons? (RMS tried that which gcc and it was one of the reasons that led to LLVM gaining traction). Or development speed? * That doesn't require JavaScript. One could use HTML5's simple summary/detail elements. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/details https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... There are css hacks which can achieve the same result on HTML4, but they are much more complicated and I suspect a list on Linux issues shouldn't care about supporting Internet Explorer.
  - 6y ago

pdimitar 6y ago

I wonder if a semi-centralised -- and hopefully curated -- list of Linux-approved hardware can be maintained somewhere? Even though I am generally sceptical towards desktop Linux due to a multitude or really weird issues some people report, I also know that it works quite rock-solidly for much more others. So I'd say nowadays "vet your hardware before investing in a Linux station" is a fair and balanced advice -- especially in a world where most hardware vendors just make a half-done Windows driver and peace out. Furthermore, I wonder if something can be built on top of such a curated list of approved Linux hardware like, say, troubleshooting tips for multi-monitor setups, or multi-sound-card setups, or general weirdnesses that occasionally happen only to some? At this point I believe it's really fair for the Linux community to give up on most of the hardware. But IMO if Linux is to have some mindshare of the desktop segment it should have a curated list of approved hardware and tidbits for addressing rare issues and improving the general quality of life. (And let's not forget X11's scandalous ability to allow every program to capture keystrokes. This has to be addressed in an ergonomic matter one day. Qubes is quite nice and all but it's a pain to setup. Somebody has to wrap this stuff in the usual brainless Next->Next->Next GUI wizards sometime.)

swiley 6y ago
Just check the arch/Debian/gentoo wiki before you buy something heh. If you want a truly centralized list all the drivers are kept in one repo on kernel.org
nabla9 6y ago
There is For Ubuntu see: https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/
yrro 6y ago
For RHEL: https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2... I don't think we'll ever see a "Linux" hardware compatibility list because what you really need is a "this particular version of this particular distribution" compatibility list.

speedgoose 6y ago

It still hurt me a bit to say it, but I have a really smooth experience with Linux on Windows 10 thanks to WSL2, the new Windows terminal, and the integration with VS Code. I use Linux a lot on desktop through windows and I have almost none of the issues listed there. Windows has other issues but not as annoying or time consuming to fix for me.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

m4r35n357 6y ago

My desktop is a Raspberry Pi, you insensitive clod!

harha 6y ago

I think linux works reasonably well on the desktop as long as you stick to the standard settings, i.e., running only linux, accepting the way things were set, not worrying too much about loud fans, etc. The big issue I have is the mixed quality of documentation for "normal users" (those between just accepting everything on the one side and going through all man pages on the other), which always gives me an uneasy feeling that I didn't quite set something up the right way and that it could lead to issues somewhere along the way. While it would be nice to have, I don't necessarily need a graphical/terminal configuration tool (though it would be nice when I'm setting up things that I only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how it works, e.g. wifi). What I really need is a good wiki that is up-to-date and useful posts on stack exchange. Now this is where I run into problems: Arch for instance has a great wiki, but many posts, articles, etc. are for Ubuntu, which doesn't have a very useful wiki.

swiley 6y ago
The man pages are the documentation for users? I would say stay away from gnome if your fans are running all the time, it’s a terrible DE and you don’t need it. Just install eg fvwm or xfce (or lxde or whatever you like.) >I only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how it works, e.g. wifi) That’s going to cause issues no matter which OS you run. Just read the wpa_supplicant man page (or the appropriate documentation if your distro uses something else and you don’t want to change it.) You can skim for just the things you need and grab an example config, it’s not a hard tool to use and it only takes a couple minutes. After you do this you won’t be surprised when it breaks in a way you don’t understand.

djhworld 6y ago

I installed Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2015 a few weeks ago to try it out, mainly because of one killer app - the i3 window manager. It's been a blast, albeit not without some frustrations. The good - WiFi worked out of the box - i3 is awesome - battery life seems fine The bad/annoying - took me a while to get a reliable way of setting sufficient Xrandr settings to allow me to extend my desktop onto a 2nd monitor. - took me a while to find out the right commands to use to switch keyboard layouts when I plug in an external keyboard. - I've seen suspend not work properly a few times when closing the laptop lid - have to get used to new keyboard shortcuts for copy&paste and other things, this is more of a problem with switching from OSX -> Linux rather than a fault of Linux - firefox performance is really really bad. like horribly slow switching tabs, and all the items on a website seem to load in really slowly, especially on resource hungry websites (e.g. YouTube). I've tried installing nightly, enabling webrender etc, but it's just been dogshit slow. In comparison, Chrome feels lightning fast so sadly, I've had to switch. - hardware video decoding in web browsers doesn't seem to be supported? i've been reading around, apparently there's a patched version of chromium out there that supposedly supports it - but it doesn't like that's ever going to go mainstream. I was shocked loading a video and seeing my CPU fan maxing out! I'd imagine the xrandr/keyboard issues are mostly because of the manual nature of i3wm, over say Gnome where it might be more fluid The depressing At work I have a 2019 MBP which won't support linux out of the box (well - I'd imagine it boots, but it seems like there are horrible audio/wifi/input issues and problems with the T2 chip) and I really want to use i3wm at work. I'm tempted to get a VM going as a substitute...

lisnake 6y ago
Yabai [1] turned out to be pretty sufficient replacement of i3 on macOS for me [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
markosaric 6y ago
Have you tried using SwayWM? It's compatible with your existing i3 configuration but uses Wayland as the display protocol so some of your issues could be solved by that switch (Firefox performance, hardware video decoding, multiple monitors...). See https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manager-on-fedora/ https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manage... And https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-in-sway/ https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-in...

loraa 6y ago

I dunno. Been running since 93 and it has come a long way.

ianbooker 6y ago

You can compile such a list for any operating system in 2020. Recently I evaluated three randomly selected HDMI capture devices, Ubuntu supported each of them out of the box, while Windows and MacOs struggled. With the printer in our office its the other way around. The printer at home is old, so its just Linux supported. And so on..

Haga 6y ago

The gui needs to unlearn the concept of the program and embrace the workflow instead.. In which the program is nothing but a supplier and consumer of data. With proper tooling working habbits can be deducted and result in that magic moment were you can forget the machine..

viraptor 6y ago

Some of those points seem taken a bit too far. For example: > 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. That's how I ended up with an Epson printer which works just fine with macos and Linux, but not with windows 10. I also really enjoy the fact that printer drivers in Linux have no extra features. They normally support printing from a chosen tray with chosen colours and dpi. That's all I want from a driver. I hate every single value-add option stuffed into windows drivers.

yellowapple 6y ago

Most of the problems are valid, but some of them are... very much not, and haven't been for years (and others are "problems" but absolutely not "major" by any stretch). > NVIDIA Optimus technology which is used in most laptops often doesn't work well in Linux. Then stop buying them. My laptop (Intel + AMD) works fine w/ Mesa, regardless of which GPU I'm using (Intel iGPU by default, and AMD if I set DRI_PRIME=1 for a given application, e.g. in a game's launch options in Steam). NVIDIA's terrible. This whole section of the article seems to only describe issues with NVIDIA. If you buy hardware that's not shit, then lo and behold, you'll have a better experience. > Open source drivers have certain, sometimes very serious problems If "sometimes" means "basically never", then sure. I've "basically never" have had issues with Mesa on Intel or AMD hardware (I'm indeed running AMD hardware w/ Mesa on the very desktop on which I'm typing this comment, and it's been absolutely painless out-of-the-box). > PulseAudio is unsuitable for multiuser mode sudo killall pulseaudio Wow, so hard. Plus, the hyperlink for "multiuser mode" describes exactly how to launch PulseAudio system-wide to address this very concern (even if they do nonsensically advise against it, because of course they do). PulseAudio's shitty, but this ain't a reason. > There are still many printers which are not supported at all or only barely supported And there are many more which work just about perfectly out-of-the-box, namely almost everything by HP or Brother. > Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work. On a wide variety of old and new laptops on which I've installed Linux this has simply not been an issue for years. > 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. Most users will report bugs to their distros' maintainers, who hopefully know how to file these bugs against the kernel. > X.org allows applications to exclusively grab keyboard and mouse input. If such applications misbehave you are left with a system you cannot manage, you cannot even switch to text terminals. Alt+SysRq+R, then Ctrl+Alt+F1 Wow, so hard. Like, this works for even the absolute worst lockups (it's the first step of the "REISUB" maneuver to cleanly reboot a locked-up Linux system). > X.org has no means of providing a tear-free experience, it's only available if you're running a compositing window manager in the OpenGL mode with vsync-to-blank enabled. Sounds like a "means of providing a tear-free experience" to me. And, like, does this really warrant the double-exclamation-marks? God forbid you see a graphical artifact every once in awhile. > Applications (or GUI toolkits) must implement their own font antialiasing Applications might have different anti-aliasing needs. I see no problem with this. And again, this absolutely does not warrant double-exclamation-marks. > Wayland doesn't allow XWayland applications to change display resolution Good. > Wayland doesn't allow applications to exclusively grab mouse/keyboard which is required for games and applications like VMs. Were you not just complaining about X11 allowing this in the previous section? > Traditional Linux/Unix (ext4/ reiser/ xfs/ jfs/ btrfs/etc.) filesystems can be problematic when being used on mass media storage. Okay, so don't use them. JFFS2 has been in the kernel since 2001. F2FS has been in the kernel since 2013. Both are commonly used for flash media. You're also free to use FAT like you would on Windows; that's been in the kernel since forever. Not that this seems like a real issue anyway, given that I've used ext2/3/4 and XFS on thumb drives with no problems at all. ext2 is particularly useful if you're concerned about journaling shortening the drive's lifespan. > For the same reason you cannot modify your partitions table and resize/move the root partition on the fly. I've resized my root partition on-the-fly multiple times with zero issues whatsoever. The fact that I use LVM on all my desktops/laptops might help with that. > No unified installer/package manager/universal packaging format/dependency tracking across all distros The whole point of a Linux distro is to be able to differentiate on things like package management or system configuration. No package manager is perfect for all use cases. And besides, AppImage works on pretty much every distro that uses a reasonably-modern glibc, and literally doesn't care about the distro itself. If your concern is "well I don't want to have to build packages for each and every packaging system out there", then AppImage is your tool, so use it. > It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it Which is totally possible, thanks to things like AppImage (well, you download it somewhere and mark it executable, but wow, so hard). Hell, most distros support this even for .deb and/or .rpm packages. openSUSE also has 1-click installers, but it seems like they've fallen out of fashion (which is a shame, since they address this issue pretty dang elegantly). > Applications development is a major PITA. Compared to Windows? Linux (and Unix in general) is a breath of fresh air in comparison. A PyQt5 app (for example) takes me a few hours (total) to design and develop in Linux... and then days of nitpicky troubleshooting to get it working on Windows in a way that's reasonable for end-user distribution. > Packaging all dependent libraries is not a solution, because in this case your application may depend on older versions of libraries which contain serious remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. And yet this is exactly what Windows and macOS encourage, specifically to avoid the need for users to manage libraries. Like, you can't have your cake and eat it too; either you're gonna be dealing with dependency hell or you're gonna need to package libraries with applications. ---- Continued below...

fierarul 6y ago

Oh, this paragraph is good, especially in light of the Corona impact on OSS too: > Money, enthusiasm, motivation and responsibility: I predicted years ago that FOSS developers would start drifting away from the platform as FOSS is no longer a playground, it requires substantial effort and time, i.e. the fun is over, developers want real money to get the really hard work done. FOSS development, which lacks financial backing, shows its fatigue and disillusionment. The FOSS platform after all requires financially motivated developers as underfunded projects start to wane and critical bugs stay open for years. One could say "Good riddance", but the problem is that oftentimes those dying projects have no alternatives or similarly-featured successors.

stragies 6y ago

It's 2020, and I still have to manually enable Wifi Mesh Networking (802.11s) and recompile in Debian, even Buster. But that is a minor inconvenience, and takes 5 minutes. I do that for some other package too, for some niche options, but it's very easy to do in Debian.

guggle 6y ago

I used to develop on a macbook. Then I changed employer and consequently, changed laptop too. I won't name brand and model but it was running ubuntu out of the box with the following problems: - couldn't suspend/resume properly when folded - very low battery life - overheat, a lot, and of course noisy fans then - couldn't make use of all the ports of the dock I actually liked the OS (eventually I switched to Debian/XFCE though), but should I be the one to pay for this, I would be pretty pissed off. We're talking about a 2500€ machine here.

BearOso 6y 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. Most file systems on Linux like ext4 have a 255 byte file name limit. There’s no limit in the kernel. I think Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit is worse.

itvision 6y ago
> Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit was lifted a few years ago.

mnm1 6y ago

> Under some circumstances the system or X.org's GUI may become very slow and unresponsive due to various problems with video acceleration or lack of it and also due to notorious bug 12309 Anyone know what he's talking about. It sounds a lot like the issue I was experiencing, but the ticket is not accessible, even when logging in. Would love to read the details. The constant, sometimes multi-minute stutters where the system became unresponsive is one of the main reasons I stopped using it last time. Every few years, I give it a shot, love it, and then something like this (or external displays no longer working 90% of the time) that just makes me give up. I've never had an install run for more than about six months without something catastrophic happening that requires a complete reinstall / restore from backup, usually due to some desktop environment issue preventing it from loading/displaying.

oliwarner 6y ago

The only problem with desktop Linux these days is there still not being more companies throwing some effort in. Adobe and Microsoft could make serious money here. Their tooling aren't just standards, they're —in many ways— the best available tools, that Linux does not have viable solutions for. Clawing our way along with alternatives, and Wine and VMs isn't sustainable. Not forever. We just need a couple of big names to start things going. But it perpetually never happens. Maybe 2021. I'm bizarrely optimistic about Microsoft. Once software support comes, and people can carry on doing their work, the weight of demand forces hardware support for oddball wifi chips, RGB mice, whatever. I can buy another mouse today, I need Illustrator and Photoshop for professional interop. As for TFA, everybody derives their annoyances from different places. Desktop Linux isn't perfect, but it's the best I've got, by some distance, for my workloads.