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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2021 edition

• waynesonfire 5y ago
  2021 edition, same as the 1991 edition.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Really? I was on the "Linux Desktop" bandwagon in 1997 for awhile. It fizzled, and I returned to using just an empty MotifWM + xterm. Never looked back. I recently installed Focal Fossa's default desktop GUI and I just find it awkward as hell and buggy (bluetooth is a mess, constantly have to restart the service on the CLI). I think the struggles of the Linux desktop is ripe for a historical analysis as to why it is so problematic.
    • PaulHoule 5y ago
      ... and the amazing spectacle that since 1997 or so "you build it" and "they don't come" and then the enthusiasts just won't listen to the reasons why people don't use it. I remember the hate and invective I heard from one GTK developer about a bug that prevented menubars from working correctly in GTK apps when you ran them in a captive window with an X server under Microsoft Windows.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • officialchicken 5y ago
    Using HTML 2.01 formatting though - complete with icons instead of bullets for <li> tags
  • api 5y ago
    This thread is full of smug dismissals of these issues, so the list will be as long or longer in 2025. Ultimately it's a lack of resources. A company could produce a polished Linux desktop but nobody will pay for it so it won't happen.
    • markstos 5y ago
      The landscape of funding is shifting. Through Patreon and Google Sponsors, I'm funding developers to work on Linux on the M1 chip, a keyboard driving browser (Qute) and Linux security (Spectrum OS). As a reminder, Chrome OS is Linux. Google is funding that and some parts of it benefit the rest of Linux. Google has also been working recently to get more improvements that they made to the Linux kernel upstreamed in a more timely fashion. Sway is a great desktop environment for power users that was supported from crowdfunding and with a lot of volunteer help.
      • diskzero 5y ago
        Funding has changed, I agree. I hope that some entity could provide some type of crowd-funded solution for a general purpose desktop environment, but am more than pessimistic. My opinion of Chrome OS is that it is a cancer and I don't want Google anywhere near anything to do with the free software movement. I don't want their kernel pushes, I don't want their libraries and I don't want their opinion. Yes, I am an extremist, but Google and Facebook (and others) are not ethical partners. I have made compromises in the past and they have yielded nothing of value to me. Thank you for funding the work for Linux on M1. That really does matter!
    • Toutouxc 5y ago
      > A company could produce a polished Linux desktop but nobody will pay for it so it won't happen. I could see myself paying let's say $100 a year for a polished Linux desktop. "Polished" meaning no screen tearing, video hw acceleration, working power management, macOS (or at least Windows) level of GUI consistency, nice package manager with a curated app store. How many customers would be required to support a project like this?
      • diskzero 5y ago
        Tens of thousands. Probably more. Subscription models are customer kryptonite. They run screaming with pain when you propose them, and only grudgingly accept them when no other option exists. Providing a subscription model for a desktop environment adds additional complexity. Do you want to be cut off from using your desktop when your subscription lapses? As a developer, I am not interested in you paying me $100 for a year and then be able to use the product for life. My mind will change if you are willing to pay $1000 up front. As a software developer and entrepreneur, I founded companies that could sell software for $499, provide one upgrade and then charge a smaller amount for additional upgrades. Those days are over. I recently spent a significant sum develop a mobile application for a niche market. It was well liked, worked well, provided a real solution for a real problem. It was offered as a subscription. Endless one star reviews and hate. It was offered for $49.99. Endless one star reviews and hate. Something has gone wrong with consumer expectations on pricing and the effort required to fund development of software that meets customer expectations. I feel we are in a software dystopia and can't figure out how to fund product development.
• rwmj 5y ago
  Weird list of non-problems and not understanding how Linux works (and a few problems). A few points picked at random: There's no concept of drivers in Linux aside from proprietary drivers for NVIDIA/AMD GPUs which are separate packages: almost all drivers are already either in the kernel or various complementary packages (like foomatic/sane/etc). I would say this is a feature rather than a bug. It's impossible for the user to understand whether their hardware is indeed supported by the running Linux distro and whether all the required drivers are indeed installed and working properly (e.g. all the firmware files are available and loaded or necessary printer filters are installed). Your hardware generally either works or doesn't work. If you are looking for Linux-compatible hardware to purchase, you'll need to do a few internet searches first, which is the same as any other OS. 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. The Qt company also changed the licensing model for their toolkit which makes using the library under Linux problematic to say the least. Complete misunderstanding of how Linux is distributed. The distros keep your software working with newer versions of Gtk or Qt, and deal with licensing. It's not something that end users need to worry about. Also the obsession with "screen tearing"! I just don't get this frequent objection. I watch videos often in X11 which is supposed to be impossible because of this "tearing" thing, but somehow it doesn't bother me at all.
  • nyanpasu64 5y ago
    > The distros keep your software working with newer versions of Gtk or Qt This doesn't help obscure software (like BambooTracker or vgmtrans) which isn't shipped by most distributions. Additionally a distribution isn't going to port a Qt 5 app to Qt 6 for you; if the original developer doesn't, someone else might do it a few years later, or never. Sure, a distribution might ship Qt 5 indefinitely, but it's going to slowly fall behind over the next few years, like what's been happening to Qt 4. Worse yet is software dependent on the KF5 KDE support libraries. Ironically, old creaky-looking software like Strawberry (based off Clementine, based off KDE 3's Amarok) and Qsynth/QjackCtl (dated look and feel) are the first ones to port to Qt 6 (before KDE applications), because they don't depend on KDE libraries which need to be ported first.
• rvz 5y ago
  Oh dear so no change since then? Maybe that explains why the best Linux Desktop out there is Windows 11 at this point. Downvoters: So this is all wrong then? WSL does not exist or perhaps cannot run a Linux distro? Is this person wrong about WSL running Linux GUI apps on Windows then? [0] Maybe 2021 IS the year of the Linux desktop on Windows, also meaning that Windows is the best Linux distro for the desktop? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961346
• medo-bear 5y ago
  to any dev comming from windows (come to think of it, i actually dont know any devs that use windows) or mac that wants to get work done i recommend to try popos. it has great driver support including nvidia
  • neither_color 5y ago
    I second Pop_OS. It's the first distro that "just works" for me. I installed it on my laptop(a lenovo legion with an nvidia GPU) about a month ago and I haven't had to make any system-level modifications to it. I downloaded it with NVidia drivers packaged in already and out of the box I could set display scaling to a cozy 125%. I love the window tiling, and being able to explicitly set floating windows too, which to me goes one step beyond Windows/MacOs default window management behavior. I can snap VS to the left half of the screen, a browser to the right, and set a floating window that I'm reading from(examples, code snippets, figma) on top that doesn't go away when I switch focus between VScode and the browser. Previously I was using MacOS with an app called magnets for window snapping(something built into windows) but there still weren't any utilities that could consistently let me set floating windows ala iPadOS behavior.
  • schleck8 5y ago
    Multiple distros have Nvidia driver support. MX has a dedicated installer for it.
  • inetknght 5y ago
    I also recommend Pop!_OS. It's great if you're looking for something that "works out of the box". There's some nitpicking that I could do that most power users would be interested in but the nitpicking isn't worse than other hardware vendors. But System76 (who build Pop!_OS) support staff are A+. Support tickets are responsive. They're active on Discord. They use the products they build. If you're looking for nitpicking, I would say that some laptops internal displays with simultaneously with external displays while others might need some configuration and a reboot. It can be difficult to navigate their website to find the configuration -- but their support staff are quick to point to URLs on the website and offer help. I personally disprefer the Gnome interface that comes preinstalled and much prefer Cinnamon. But switching is easy if you're already familiar with Linux and System76 does support it (but you have to install it via command line). I had a hardware issue and sent it in for repair within the warranty period. They were able to cross-ship a loaner laptop, had the repair done pretty quick, and then I returned the loaner laptop. No out-of-pocket cost to me -- they provided shipping labels for both directions. It was honestly some of the best support experiences I've had.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  Saying, "Don't call this FUD" up top doesn't prevent this from being possibly the most blatent FUD I've seen in a long time. Check if your hardware supports your OS before you buy it. Guess what? Then it all works great. What a waste of time.
  • vadfa 5y ago
    People are used to Windows where literally all hardware works. So that statement is not that evident.
    • bogwog 5y ago
      Linux runs on a Nintendo Wii. Windows does not run a Nintendo Wii. Windows hardware support sucks.
      • vadfa 5y ago
        Why would anybody want to install Windows on a Nintendo Wii?
        • selfhoster11 5y ago
          Why not? A true hacker would consider it.
    • mixedCase 5y ago
      >People are used to Windows where literally all hardware works Hahaha fuck no. I spent two weeks trying to get a Lenovo Y50's touchpad to work properly on modern Windows. It's impossible. Official drivers are unmaintained and whatever you get whether generic or frankensteined-in works terrible compared to the out of the box experience on a Linux distro.
      • colesantiago 5y ago
        Just get/buy a PC pre-installed with Windows? Don't most people do this?
• dsomers 5y ago
  This makes me glad I switched from being a Linux desktop enthusiast over a decade ago. I’m still a Linux server enthusiast, and I greatly appreciate all the hard work volunteers put into Linux desktop software — but the hassle and lack of polish keeps me on the Mac for desktops. It was fun for a while Linux Desktop, I wish you the best but I’ve moved on.
  • markstos 5y ago
    Congratulations on getting your ports back!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • peheje 5y ago
      and 120 hz screen
    • handrous 5y ago
      What's really crazy is that Apple can screw up several times in a row (abrupt removal of all ports; Touch Bar; flawed keyboard design), even such that the screwups overlap and are occurring all at once, and... there's not really anyone else to go to. Their products are basically their own category—everyone else is that far behind on overall UX, capabilities, and average (maybe not worst-case) experience—so your choices are "just live with the bad parts and hope they fix it next time" or "slice off your nose". It really sucks. I'd love for them to have anyone nipping at their heels. (Windows user from '94-present [gaming and other non-serious uses, for most of that time], mainly a desktop Linux user from 2000-2011 and I still try it out every couple years, FWIW—alternated between nodding along and going "holy crap, still?!" for all of TFA)
      • peheje 5y ago
        Maybe in regard to their new APU's, but everything else I think PC's are just as great. There has also been some really nice Windows laptops in most recent years. I got a business HP laptop (think it was probook series) for work when I started 2 years ago. It was awesome, great trackpad, keyboard, battery life, speed etc. Had to move over to Macbook Pro 16" due to some technical setup in the workplace. It's great too but not ahead on anything really. Lower battery, more heat. Slower. Also Intel though. Lot of issues with connecting non-Apple displays. Also heard the Dell XPS should be great. I just think many people think Macbook good, PC bad. Because they ARE willing to spend 2500$ on a Mac but their last PC they spend 1000$, and then they to compare. But I concede, currently Apple APU's has no match.
• jniedrauer 5y ago
  Where's the gnome file picker missing a thumbnail view since April 2004?
• medo-bear 5y ago
  i smell a lot of MSbots here :)
  • fishtacos 5y ago
    Pointing out deficiencies in other OS's does not make one an MS bot.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • dang 5y ago
    This breaks the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
• eMSF 5y ago
  I've actually read through this rant some years past. It's mostly low-SNR opinionated junk mixed with some valid observations. In general, I could not recommend it.
  • itvision 5y ago
    > mostly low-SNR opinionated junk Care to expand on that? The poll under the article kinda proves the opposite.
• atemerev 5y ago
  I can write a list of issues with the Windows desktop, and it will be about the same length. Or Mac desktop, for that matter. Software sucks in general.
• yellow_lead 5y ago
  I'm excited to see if NixOS will relieve some of the packaging problems. Still, that's just one distro.
• Thaxll 5y ago
  This post is 100% accurate, one thing that people won't beleive is that it's almost 2022 and there is no hardware acceleration when playing video on your browser in Linux, yup CPU is pegging like crazy to play some stuff that is trivial to decode with a GPU. I have a laptop from 2021 and yet somehow VLC is not able to use the GPU for video decoding. Something that windows has been doing for the last 15 years. So you have slow video rendering, high CPU / battery usage. Other crazy stuff: have you tried to install that version of x11 to get the latest opengl, then have you tried to put that firmware in the folder etc etc ... Does your kernel has the backport from version 5.10.x no? well when you get back from sleep have a black screen etc ... same problems as 20 years ago on Linux. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/chromium#Force_GPU_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/chromium#Force_GPU_accelera...
  • kiwijamo 5y ago
    I know it's proving the point in the article, but I thought I'd let you know Firefox can be configured to do hardware acceleration. There's a nice article in the Arch Linux wiki that describes the steps needed to turn it on: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acce... I've done this and the battery life on my ThinkPad (Intel graphics) while watching videos in Firefox has improved heaps. My last 20% is around an hour instead of only 15mins. It's silly how it's turned off by default even though it works just fine. But again proving the point of the article I guess...
    • pizza234 5y ago
      > It's silly how it's turned off by default even though it works just fine This can't be really stated based on anecdata; for example, my case has been unsuccessful - I had issues, so I had to disable it.
    • commoner 5y ago
      Firefox has enabled hardware acceleration in GNOME Shell by default as of versions 84 (X11) and 85 (Wayland), if you are using AMD or Intel graphics.[2] The feature is enabled in KDE Plasma and XFCE by default (X11 only) as of version 88, also for AMD and Intel graphics.[2] [1] https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/firefox-were-finally-getting-hw-acceleration-on-linux/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/firefox-were-fin... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696495 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696495
• mrintegrity 5y ago
  When i share my Linux desktop in a Teams call with developers and they see how I can run multiple ssh sessions in tmux running in a drop down Tilda terminal, connecting to 5 or 6 servers and running commands within a few seconds, and then those same developers try to do the same on windows, using mobaxterm and they get lost in sub menu hell and modal prompts i just cry a little inside. so much time wasted clicking through pointless menus, not just theirs but everyone in the meeting
  • vips7L 5y ago
    Everything you described just works on Windows. I have a drop down quake style terminal with windows terminal and it supports multiple tabs and sessions via OpenSSH. Combined with powershell it’s a really pleasant experience. All of this is developed and supported by Microsoft too.
    • mrintegrity 5y ago
      Great, what's it called? I will forward the link to the dev team in question :)
      • theli0nheart 5y ago
        I don’t know what the OP was referring to but WSL is Linux on Windows. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/
        • indymike 5y ago
          So run Linux inside Windows to fix Window?
      • vips7L 5y ago
        https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+terminal https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+terminal
  • ModernMech 5y ago
• cletus 5y ago
  This is a detailed, depressing and really damning view of the current state of the world. Some general thoughts: 1. Some things are clearly not Linux's fault, like proper support from NVidia; 2. The decision to make device drivers part of the kernel (as modules or otherwise) is really showing itself to be a problem. Interestingly, this was one of the drivers behind Fuchsia since device drivers are a huge pain point. 3. Some of these were news to me just because I hadn't attempted to use them (eg the 10 bit color depth issues). That one's kinda sad because it doesn't seem to even require such hardware to expose those issues. Just set your color depth in xorg.conf and watch the world burn (apparently). 4. Further to (3) it seems like a lot of issues remain unresolved just because they don't affect or aren't prioritized by the devs. Possibly they might require large architectural changes. Whatever the case, this is the negative of not having central product direction. Of course there are benefits to that too but this is a list of issues; 5. The Wayland list is damning as it reads like serious architectural errors were made for something that was meant to learn from X; and 6. PulseAudio continues to be the answer to the question nobody asked. This should be sobering to anyone this with even a modicum of objectivity because it reads like a list that will never be solved.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > 6. PulseAudio continues to be the answer to the question nobody asked. Getting rid of PulseAudio though became a question to an answer nobody wanted. Axing these *Kit MacOS wannabe software, and useless middleware is half the business these days if you want to make usable Linux desktop software.
    • md8z 5y ago
      This comment is really confusing to me. If you're trying to build a comprehensive desktop platform then you actually want more and more middleware. That's what entices app developers to the platform when they have a lot of structure they can work with, it's part of why Apple has been so successful at that.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > 6. PulseAudio continues to be the answer to the question nobody asked. 1. How do I change the output destination for audio from typical desktop/consumer apps without building it into ever such app? 2. How do I deliver audio across a network? 3. How do I use bluetooth audio devices that (were) not yet supported by the ALSA stack? 4. How do I allow multiple applications to use the same audio hardware without either (a) requiring (like JACK) that they all use the same sample rate and buffer size or (b) using the rather unreliable dmix ALSA library layer? 5. How do I provide a common volume control panel that allows to me control the relative gain of different applications all in one place ? I could go on.
• andrewclunn 5y ago
  Linux has been improving, but rather slowly in several regards. PipeWire, Wayland, and a few other core technologies move things forward for sure, but the fragmentation is always an issue. That said, the iOSification of Mac caused some significant regressions (which I believe they have now recovered from) and Windows resource consumption makes many things run better under proton emulation that on the latest systems. The truth of the matter is, Valve and Google are the ones who have really made Linux more viable, via emulation, base components, and the availability of web apps underpinning most users' daily workflows. All systems are viable for 80+% of users. I am glad Linux (as a wider community) is free to admit its shortcomings. Those who think this is bad for Linux's image, well I care more about having working software than effective marketing.
• baybal2 5y ago
  I will add the fall of GNOME. Effectively GNOME has erased itself from the ecosystem through botched TOPAZ. And through Gnome as a proxy, we now lost GTK, which has morphed over the years from the Gimp Toolkit to Gnome Toolkit.
  • RedShift1 5y ago
    What's TOPAZ? No acronym finder produced a result relevant in this context.
    • baybal2 5y ago
      Three Point Zero aka GNOME 3.0
• sho_hn 5y ago
  As a dev involved with some of the cited technologies, or using them for commercial products throughout my career (desktops, phones, smart TVs, cars, gaming gear): This is is a low-quality, badly researched piece. The amount of actual errors or conceptual misunderstandings in it is so numerous and overwhelming it is difficult to respond with anything other than exhaustive blow-by-blow refutation. The incorrect claims are not limited to Linux, either; a lot of the technical info about Windows/MacOS/Android are equally incorrect. That said: It makes me yearn for what a well-researched version of the same piece would look like and what it might accomplish as a signpost :-). A lot of this "what are the major problems, and what are we doing to solve them" information is currently rather fragmented and distributed over presentations at Akademy/GUADEC/XDC. The closest to a decent aggregation I can think of would perhaps be Christian Schaller's updates on what the desktop team has in store for new Fedora versions, but even that is selective by nature of the product.
  • marcellus23 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with Linux that much so I'm curious, do you have a couple examples of errors in the piece?
    • sho_hn 5y ago
      In general, the article has an odd mix of "this sucks about computers in general right now" and "this sucks about Linux specifically and with better alternatives available" points, and I think is worse for not picking a consistent direction. It feels a bit like a collection of claims found on forum threads over the years, by authors with differing levels of expertise and at different points in the timeline. For example this point: > Traditional Linux/Unix (ext4/ reiser/ xfs/ jfs/ btrfs/etc.) filesystems can be problematic when being used on mass media storage. - This is not equally true for all of the file systems named and for all of mass storage media. For quite a few of these combinations, Linux actually has the best solution available. Some of these file systems are also very niche and a general user will never even encounter them. Standard systems default to the most generally useful ones. - I can take a guess that this is probably thinking of things like inadequate TRIM support and then may be outdated, and also no different from highly complex, often device vendor-specific scenario trees on the competing systems. - In the combinations where it is true, it is generally also true for broadly used competing filesystems like NTFS - and for the same reasons (lack of wear leveling, etc.). In general, the points that focus on general user experience more broadly and are not Linux-specific tend toward being the better ones in the piece. The more technical and Linux-specific it gets, the worse: > Wayland doesn't provide multiple APIs for various crucial desktop features (global keyboard shortcuts, drag-n-drop, systray, screenshotting, screencasting, UI rendering acceleration, and others) which must be implemented by the window manager/compositor, which means multiple applications using the said features can only support their own Wayland compositor implementations. It's a conceptual mistake to assume that Wayland (an IPC tech stack and protocol to regulate exchange of pixel buffers between processes and arbitrate shared access to i/o hardware w/ event routing, with facilities to add further protocols) should be responsible to provide all of the listed features. The equivalent features in other systems are usually provided by seperate APIs as well. It's also mistaken to assume that just because Wayland does not provide a feature, a standard does not exist that fills the role, making it a non-problem. In Linux desktop architecture Wayland intentionally specializes in the functions listed above, while many other IPC problems are addressed through D-Bus and standardized D-Bus protocols. An example of this from the list would be the systray. Some other entries in the list are just outdated and have been addressed by later work in the Wayland protocol family. > Wayland doesn't provide a universal basic window compositor thus each desktop environment has to reinvent the wheel In practice the Wayland implementation landscape has greatly consolidated. There are projects providing Wayland implementations as middleware used by many of the smaller HMIs, e.g. wlroots. Having a standard protocol spec independent from implementation does not mean implementations can't be reused, that's just orthogonal. > Wayland and its window managers/compositors have very high requirements in terms of support from both hardware and kernel drivers which prevents it from working on far too many configurations. X.org and Windows on the other hand can work on an actual rock using e.g. VESA. Nothing in Wayland requires specific hardware. > Applications (or GUI toolkits) must implement their own font antialiasing - there's no API for setting system-wide font rendering. Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. This is correct as far as the first claim goes, but then goes off the rails when describing the competing systems and in painting it as a problem. First of, font rasterization and text shaping in Linux has long since standardized, with all major app stacks consolidating on the freetype and harfbuzz libraries. Those two are used in the same roles on Android. On Windows and MacOS, modern APIs for this are likewise no longer part of the display server/windowing system, and often there are actually multiple APIs for the job supporting different features. Windows, say, added Direct2D in addition to the existing GDI at some point. Plenty of Windows apps also render through freetype/harfbuzz these days, bundled by the cross-platform UI libs they use in lieu of Microsoft APIs. I.e. the technical mistake here is assuming Wayland is somehow unique here and not just reflecting broad tech trends. In some cases the reality on Linux is actually more consolidated than elsewhere, and this is one: There is no meaningful competition to the freetype+harfbuzz stack. This inaccuracy is where it gets really complicated: If you know to recognize it as such, this talking point originates in internal debates in the Linux community about the X to Wayland transition, the logic of the change-averse going "X had standard fonts and Wayland does not, so it's bad!" - even though that's already wrong, because while X had standard fonts at inception, they stopped being used by apps decades ago. And then it's backed up by an incorrect comparison to the other systems, because the original author of the claim, a Linux user, didn't know better. This sort of thing makes this list hard to evaluate by users of other systems - the content is often sifted from a strange place. A lot of this reads like excerpts from a flame war on fictional Star Trek technology. Phasers are bad because tachyon couplings suck vs. Klingon disruptor grids! > Wayland does not provide a basic universal unified graphical toolkit/API (and Wayland developers will not implement it) akin to Win32 which means applications using different toolkits (e.g. Qt, GTK, Enlightenment) may look and behave differently and there's no way to configure all of them once and for all. The API scope of Win32 falls far short of what a modern UI lib provides, and Microsoft has many different generations and flavors of UI libs on top of Win32 (MFC, WinForms ... Maui is the latest one I think?). Many Windows apps are in fact written using non-native toolkits such as Qt and Electron as well these days. This is a variation/continuation of the earlier sort of inaccuracy. Broadly speaking, windowing systems never particularly favored server-side rendering or server-side toolkits, with Wayland's predecessor, the X Windowing System, just a short-lived odd one out - but even in X-based desktops, apps converted to client-side rasterization using UI toolkit stacks long, long before Wayland came about. Disagreeing with these directions is fine, but it's disagreement with much of an entire industry and spanning many systems. The rest of the Wayland section is largely the same - a weird mix of incorrect, misattributed and outdated.
• JasonFruit 5y ago
  I understand some of these are problems for some users on some hardware for some use cases, I really do. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm not particularly a Linux specialist, but have happily and without trouble used Linux as my primary desktop OS since 2007. It's gotten easier every year, with a little hiccup when Gnome got too useless and I had to learn something new. I've used it on old and new hardware, high- and low-spec machines, and have had no problems. I guess I don't get what expectation it's not meeting at this point.
• xojoc 5y ago
  [dead]
  • dang 5y ago
    Can you please stop promoting your site like this? That's not what HN is for, and we're getting complaints about it.
• cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  I don't really understand the point of this article. The vast majority of these things don't affect me of a day to day Linux Desktop user. I get that these are "problems" about Linux but the focus on "on the Desktop" makes it seem like it affects my end experience as a user on the desktop which 90% of the time it doesn't. A lot of this may be distro specific as well. I have been on Manjaro for the last 5 years and haven't looked back. Previously I was on Linux Mint and I wasn't a fan of Debian based OS on the desktop, rolling release works much better for me and Manjaro curbs the risk of this by having its own repos. I rarely find any software that I need to install that's outside of the AUR. I've never had a distro update that's broken everything, unlike when I was on Debian based desktop OSes. It's been a long time since I've had to do dodgy stuff like edit config files or compile drivers from source - having access to the latest kernel, unlike on Debian desktop devices, is awesome for this. I'm not saying this stuff isn't valid and shouldn't be addressed but Windows, Mac, everything is kind of a shitshow behind the scenes cobbled together, and it makes sense that a desktop OS is going to be less clean and more buggy in that regard.
  • jgilias 5y ago
    I second this. Like all of what you wrote applies to me as well. Manjaro 'just works' for me for quite a few years now. AUR is great, I've found some really obscure software there, and that also 'just works'. Like, everything has been so frictionless that it's borderline boring.
    • cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
      Hah, same, I think I had built up all this stuff around Linux and assuming that I'd have to tinker and in the past 5 years or so when things "just work" it took the fun out of it in a way, haha. That being said I get more sleep and am probably healthier overall due to it but I kind of feel like I'm glad to have gone through Linux bootcamp while I was younger to learn the basics :)
    • itvision 5y ago
      Unfortunately anecdata is anecdata. Meanwhile in the past seven days: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&chfieldfrom=7d&list_id=1099399 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cre...
• mikenew 5y ago
  I'd love to nitpick and disagree with some of these, but I think that misses the broader point: I'm someone who believes that it would be a huge benefit to the world if desktop Linux were 10X more popular than it currently is. And ultimately, if there are concrete problems that are holding back Linux adoption, that's good. That means they can be fixed (at least in theory), and that as a result desktop Linux will have wider adoption. If it turns out that all these problems are just "not our fault, dumb end users, just learn to google" and so on, then we're screwed. Linux adoption is just out of our control and there's nothing to be done.
  • jsperson 5y ago
    Years ago I used Linux as my daily driver. That was before kids and a real house and all the other things that go with being a father and husband. Now, I ain't got time for that. I need something that works and doesn't require a lot of fiddling. I also support four other machines for various family members (total of eight including mine). I encouraged everyone to buy Macs. That lowered my support effort by 80%. I use one Windows machine for work. No Linux anymore (except WSL2) and I wouldn't even consider it.
    • raegis 5y ago
      My solution to the excessive fiddling was Debian Stable. I've been using it since 2007-ish and it does not get in the way of anything. But I agree with you on the Mac OS thing--the only tech support I have to provide is babysitting Time Machine and the occasionally hardware failure (which just requires a payment to Apple, and two round trips to the Apple store).
  • bitwize 5y ago
    It's somewhere in the middle. I think that what hampers Linux adoption is the same thing that hampered Windows adoption: lack of OEM preinstalls. Windows was a nuisance that took too much resources and slowed your system down, so nobody ran it and few ISVs targeted it as a priority -- until a 386SX with VGA and 4 MiB of RAM became the default low-end option in 1990 or so. Then, vendors started bundling Windows 3.0 in with their systems (likely urged by Microsoft) and suddenly there was a huge Windows installed base, and applications software increasingly targeted Windows. Oh, and the last thing people booted MS-DOS (or "MS-DOS mode" in Windows 9x) for was the last thing Linux enthusiasts boot Windows for today: gaming. In short, none of the UI bikeshedding we do to Linux will do any good. We have to capture OEM hearts and minds.
• RedShift1 5y ago
  Many developers don't seem to understand that people just want their computers to work. They also seem to not understand when you're throwing away a codebase, you're throwing away years of experience through bugfixes and user feedback. Everything must change and everything must be invented again. There's just no way you're ever going to get a solid desktop that way.
• jve 5y ago
  Guys. Windows 11 runs linux desktop apps via WSLg. So how about nailing 2021 as year of Linux desktop? :) Brought to you by Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
  • itvision 5y ago
    Linux apologists will never accept running Linux on top of a closed source OS.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  The biggest issue preventing me from switching to Linux on my macbook pro is trackpad support. Before I tried Linux, I never realized how important a good trackpad driver is. The mouse never moves where I want it so I have to constantly correct. It registers a tap when I don't it to yet doesn't tap when I do. Trying to use a trackpad on Linux is so frustrating. Whereas on macOS I've mastered the trackpad so that using it is easier than a mouse. I can move to and click on a random button in like 1sec. I also need to mention that macOS has two-finger scrolling, and four-finger navigation through multiple windows / screens. I use both features a ton. Linux has two-finger support but it sucks, and I don't know about any four-finger navigation. I've tried both the default linux driver and mtrack, mtrack is slightly better but still nothing compared to whatever macOS uses. AFAIK this is a well-known problem, but until it's resolved I just can't imagine using Linux on a laptop. Having a good trackpad just makes everything so much easier.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Trackpad support has gotten a lot better with Wayland and its libinput support. I have a Macbook Pro and trackpad support under Linux via Wayland is comparable to macOS. Wayland and libinput support multitouch gestures. Two finger scrolling and four finger gestures work well.
    • armchairhacker 5y ago
      thanks, I am actually going to try this Linux is otherwise a very good OS for my needs, but bad trackpad support is a deal-breaker
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
        Check out gestures[1] if you get libinput working with Wayland or X. libinput for X has less features and gesture support, though. [1] https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    It turns out great trackpad support is a relatively hard problem. There's low-level analysis, heuristics, and even some honest-to-god machine learning pattern recognition in the MacOSX software that determines "Is the user doing something or did their palm bump the trackpad there?"
• DCKing 5y ago
  There are barely any economic incentives to make the Linux desktop usable. I can't name anyone whose income would be dependent on people being happy with a Linux desktop to any significance. It's a miracle it works as well as it works in my view. Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical make some money off of Linux and sell desktop operating systems, but their customers are the enterprise (their users have to use what they get) and their primary revenue stream is around servers anyway. They finance part of the development of Gnome or KDE, but that's not a lot of money. The Gnome Foundation's total income last year was under $1 million, KDE e.V.'s was under €250k. These are by far the largest and most professional Linux desktop projects. One tiny exception is Elementary OS - which makes some donation money from their community directly to make a usable desktop experience. There you see the difference - it's a tiny project but is being well received for its core experience. Sadly it's too small to have a significant impact the wider Linux ecosystem. If this situation doesn't change, the free desktop will always be viewed as a hobby project for people scratching their own itch. Many like it that way. But vendors will find it hard to take the Linux desktop seriously, and this limits adoption from a wider audience too. The Linux desktop has no shortage of opinions, but a big shortage of money.
  • ahartmetz 5y ago
    First, there's a lot of developers scratching their own itch as you say. Second, there are probably more paid developers for desktop work than you think. They work for Red Hat, Suse, Valve (not necessarily directly employed by them), AMD (excellent drivers these days), Blue Systems (a philantropy organization supporting mostly KDE), the Qt Company, etc. If you add up all the paid developers working mostly for the benefit of desktop Linux, and "partial" paid developers whose work somehow benefits desktop Linux, it's probably several hundred at least.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    A lot of distros accept donations, how is Elementary different? Zorin even has a "paid version" which people just torrent anyways.
• drvdevd 5y ago
  So I've been running Linux (and various BSDs) on the Desktop for at least 20 years or so. All flavors and distros. And I think the problems in 2021 are mostly the same as they have always been: caused by vendors. It always comes down to what you're willing to tolerate in your desktop and hardware support and what vendors are dishing out. Most people can just install Linux nowadays on a fresh PC and be done with it. It mostly just works which is amazing in many respects. But - if you come up against some bug for some specific piece of hardware you have (eg graphics driver is not working properly out of the box), you're in for some work. And that's fine if you are OK with that. Personally, I am not OK with that anymore and here are my rules: 1. If I have a random PC I will just run Windows 99% of the time. 2. If I want desktop Linux, I will purchase from a vendor who is testing with their hardware (e.g. System 76 or PINE64) OR I might buy a chrome book for Crostini. But I don't consider Chrome OS or Android "linux" because they are at their hearts proprietary operating systems that happen to utilize the Linux Kernel, IMO. I consider this whole issue orthogonal to systems like macOS. I appreciate the work being done for M1 by the Asahi folks and will donate to it, of course. I believe in 2021 it's time for me to start voting with my dollars if I want Desktop Linux (or phone Linux..) to be a thing. As much as I enjoy building a software system that matches my expectations, it's time for me to fully pass these expectations back to vendors, many of whom deserve my support.
  • krylon 5y ago
    I mostly agree. Except that on my personal machines, I will run Linux or a BSD variant 99% of the time. ;-) At work, I never had much of choice, it was Windows all the way. I know it sucks if the OS does not support your hardware well. And I don't blame people who do not have the time or patience to deal with that. I certainly don't. I used to love spending weekends getting sound or wifi to work, but I have been "too old for this s___" for more than a decade. But personally, I have not run into any problems in more than a decade. I will admit, though, that I have learned to do a little (and I mean little) research before purchasing hardware. Back in the early 2000's, Win modems and printers used to be a minefield for Linux users, but these days, picking hardware that Just Works(tm) is shockingly easy to someone who remembers the "good" old days. I think the main barrier to most people is that Linux is just different from Windows, starting with picking a distro, then picking a desktop environment, and so forth. I still consider it fun to experiment with different distros and desktops, but I can understand that most people don't want to spend/waste their time with that. Which also means that PC vendors have pretty much no incentive to put Linux on their machines except for targeting developers. I don't think Linux (or any of the BSD systems) will ever become a mainstream OS on the desktop, and I can live with that. I might sound a bit cynical, but at least it means that Linux is not and will not be an attractive target for malware. Given all the crap that Windows users put up with, be it malware or system updates randomly breaking things, I think a fair amount of people might find it worth the effort to give Linux a try. I used to work as a Windows admin, so I'm not just guessing here. But if it hasn't happened by now, I doubt it's going to anytime soon. People tend to like what they know, and with all the third-party software available on Windows and Windows only, Microsoft is going to spend a lot of effort maintaining backwards compatibility for a long time.
• duckmysick 5y ago
  My major struggle in Linux (Ubuntu) is with audio. 1. I have an external USB microphone. Works fine (most of the time, see below), except it's always a default device for both input and output. I don't understand why. I expect my extrnal speakers to be the output source if nothing else is plugged in. I have to often manually change the output source. 2. Sometimes I want to use headphones. And sometimes when I plug them in, the output doesn't switch to the headphones. So I have to do it manually. Occasionally it still doesn't work and the sound continues playing through the speakers. 3. Happened to me a few times - my USB microphone disappears completely from the device list. Even though the light is on. Unplugging and replugging doesn't work either; only a complete reboot does. I even have a custom bash command that restarts pulseaudio. I'm using it more often than I should.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Forget about PulseAudio and use PipeWire.
• dang 5y ago
  Past related threads: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2020 edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368115 - May 2020 (177 comments) Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241394 - Feb 2019 (391 comments) Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214 - Dec 2015 (371 comments) Main Linux problems on the desktop, 2015 edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351799 - Oct 2015 (1 comment)
• overton 5y ago
  the OS landscape is pretty grim in 2021 in general: - Some Linux distros are getting pretty usable, but there are also still plenty of rough edges and limited support for certain apps. It's understandable because the community is under-resourced. - After having last used Windows XP, I was astounded at the lack of polish and QA on Windows 10. It seems that I encounter some bug or UX mess every time I use it. And this is supposed to be the 'good' iteration in their good/bad release cycle? - MacOS is tied to expensive hardware which you may or may not want. The new M1 arch also makes it less useful for web dev work.
• codedokode 5y ago
  For someone these are problems and for someone the problems are completely different. For example, I don't consider issues with hardware drivers Linux's problem. Users should not buy random hardware and expect it to work in Linux. Instead there should be an official list of recommended hardware and users should buy only it. If there is no NVIDIA on the list then you should not buy NVIDIA's card. Or I don't notice any problem with multiple monitor support because I don't have them. But there are some real problems, for example: - no API for drivers that would allow reusing drivers in other OSes or maybe run them in the userspace. - no support for running Windows drivers that exist for almost any hardware - no sane way to install and run (third-party) software. Many programs require you to run scripts as a root, they silently add their keys, add their servers to package manager's source list (basically, they install a backdoor that gives them full control over your system). - no sane way to run software without giving it too much privileges. If you run a program, it has complete access to your home directory, cookies, browsing history, hardware serial numbers, scanning WiFi (which can be used for geolocation).
  • peheje 5y ago
    "there should be an official list of recommended hardware and users should buy only it" That official list would have to be provided by the seller of said HW, like it's happening now for nvidia, intel, amd, logitech etc. etc. else who to call when it doesn't work? In the end, as with anything it's all about the dough.
• RNCTX 5y ago
  Reading my own comments to the blog post years later is fun: > rsyslog decided at some point between 2018 and 2020 to break the config file format that had been in use for years before that mystery point in time. I don't know exactly when they did it, I only know when it dawned on me that I wasn't getting logwatch emails anymore. I don't know if they added any new feature which justified breaking the configs, and I do not care, and I will not read their docs or notes to find out. I will only downgrade, version lock, and submit bugs that I know to be facetious to cause someone the grief of having to click on them to close them. It is the distro's job to provide me a working core component and if the provider of said component breaks it, it is the responsibility of the distro to not ship their changes until they figure out a migration that doesn't require me to hand-write new configs. My position remains unchanged, I will never remove the apt version lock on rsyslog.
• nemetroid 5y ago
  > There are still many printers which are not supported at all or only barely supported - some people argue that the user should research Linux compatibility before buying their hardware. Any printer that supports AirPrint is going to work in Linux, and most new printers do (since they want to support printing from iOS). So if you're buying a new printer, it's arguably not really necessary to research Linux compatibility.
• outworlder 5y ago
  That's an interesting list. A lot of those problems, however, are things that most people won't ever see. Of course, some will have an impact on feature availability (like how HDR is still nowhere to be found, be it on Xorg, Wayland or Vulkan apps). Users care about: * Hardware compatibility. This is actually markedly improved. I did not do any research when building my PC, and yet everything works. Including the Intel wifi6 card - that doesn't work on Windows 10 out of the box and I had to use Linux to download the driver. Yeah maybe some CPU power states are not working great on my processor. I haven't hooked a Kill-a-Watt to make sure. Temps look fine. * "Every game ships broken". Ok great. However, I've been working through my entire Steam library and the vast majority work great. Latest failure I saw was on Sea of Thieves (in game voice chat broken). Graphics though? Working great. Including on other titles like Cyberpunk. Vulkan and Proton were a game changer. With AMD open source drivers. * "NVidia this, NVidia that". Yeah. That's the main thing. If you don't need a feature that's specific to NVidia, please don't buy their cards. I don't care if you are running Linux or Windows, they are actively hostile to the ecosystem. If you ARE on Linux, then good luck. You depend on their proprietary blob and that's very hit and miss. AMD will work much better on Linux (most likely, out of the box with open source drivers). Yes, for now they have some tech that's specific to them like DLSS. Their raytracing performance is better than the competition (but mind you, they are the ones actively pushing for raytracing support on mainstream games and spending marketing dollars to entice customers). They have CUDA (then again, they did whatever they could to push it). I'm actually surprised they didn't come up with a fully proprietary rendering API yet. There was a reason why Linus gave NVidia the finger.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • itvision 5y ago
    A ton of anecdata, yet 1) Tons of Wifi adapters are not supported by the Linux kernel - you need to scavenge the web and compile random git repos 2) The games _you_ play work perfectly which means all others play well. Oh, great. Now please check DXVK which already contains hundreds of quirks thus mimicking AMD/NVIDIA Windows drivers in making badly coded games work. 3) https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues - absolutely nothing there. All work perfectly. Good luck and have fun.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  Interestingly, the author hasn't picked up on Bluetooth at all. The situation is better than it was for Windows 7 (which didn't ship its own stack and there were multiple third-party stacks floating around, sometimes commercial, and those which came with dongles were usually limited in functionality) - but bluez is a nightmare in itself as is BLE support, and audio is an even worse nightmare for reasons explained in the article.
• parshimers 5y ago
  This reads like a less amusing version of the UNIX-HATERS handbook. The citation on the Linux kernel containing "a whole lot of very low quality code" is a Slashdot post. The author claims that there is "No high level, stable, sane (truly forward and backward compatible) and standardized API for developing GUI applications" like it's something that exists anywhere, and cites Win32 as an example to be followed instead of a painful business decision by one company.
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    The win32 API set is... dated to say the least, but commercial software vendors value stability. If I were a software vendor, I'd really not like having my developers waste countless hours on keeping up with externally-forced changes. That's also a reason why Electron is so successful: it abstracts all that bullshit away.
  • itvision 5y ago
    From the article: > Keep in mind that this list serves the purpose of showing what needs to be fixed in Linux rather than finding faults in it.
• shaan7 5y ago
  > strangely some Linux developers oppose to the whole idea of games on Linux That seems like a very inaccurate conclusion. The linked blogpost talks about the-then maintainer of KWin saying "hate that games change the resolution", not "I hate games on Linux". Geez.
  • itvision 5y ago
    So, he welcomes games changing desktop resolution which pretty much all of them do? I'm not sure I've understood your refutation.
    • shaan7 5y ago
      "oppose to the whole idea of games on Linux" is saying that someone does not want games to run on Linux, they don't like the idea of people playing games on Linux, they'd rather not have people playing games on Linux. "hate that games change the resolution" is saying that the person does not like one aspect of games, they wish that games wouldn't do that, they are NOT saying that games should never be played on Linux, or that they're opposed of people having fun playing games on Linux. EDIT: I'm not trying to pedantic here, this actually happened to me, when I was reading the post I was taken aback "what? is there really a Linux developer* that is opposed to games? Why would that be?" Then when I read the blog post thats linked from there I realized that wasn't the case _at all_ . * even that would mean a kernel developer, not KWin etc
• crb 5y ago
  These two seem mutually exclusive? ! 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. !! Wayland doesn't allow applications to exclusively grab mouse/keyboard which is required for games and applications like VMs.
  • itvision 5y ago
    Explained in the comments below the article.
• michaelmrose 5y ago
  > X.org architecture is inherently insecure - even if you run a desktop GUI application under a different user in your desktop session, e.g. using sudo and xhost, then that "foreign" application can grab any input events and also make screenshots of the entire screen. I don't know of any system that doesn't involve some method of running software in a VM where one could actually be reasonably secure even if the application itself was compromised. Through Mac Windows and Linux land the only way to be semi secure and the one that has mostly worked for decades is don't install malware and make it easier to install legit software by installing by default from trusted sources not random websites. A LOT of work remains to be done on the entire landscape of desktop software to change that and it remains largely undone. If this was disqualifying you would just have to give up on PCs entirely. How about > 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. There is no way to do ___ except foo which is what everyone is doing. Alrighty then. > No true safe mode for the X.org server Safe mode is called a console, ssh, or at last resort mounting it in a chroot. If this seems complicated it could trivially be automated up to the point where rescue was available by plugging in a USB drive and waiting for it to chroot AND start X giving you graphical configuration or the option to reinstall and keep existing programs and files. The problem with this getting done is the manual method works fine for most of the people who actually use Linux now. > HiDPI support is often a huge issue (many older applications don't scale at all). This isn't my experience AT ALL. Most applications are created with toolkits like GTK and QT running recent distros and setting a few env vars seems sufficient to get everything working swimmingly. What sort of applications in 2021 still have scaling issues? > ! Fast user-switching (and also concurrent users' sessions) under X.org works very badly and is implemented as a dirty hack: for every user a new X.org server is started. The author doesn't understand what the term dirty hack means. Multiple concurrent users worked fine in 2003 and continues to work fine. > It's possible to login twice under the same account while not being able to run many applications due to errors caused by concurrent access to the same files. At your login screen if you choose an already logged in user you will only be able to select unlock not create a new session. If you manage to work around that. For example switching to a tty and starting X that is really on you. > 1) Concurrently logged in users cannot access the same USB flash drive(s). This is in theory fixable but its harder than it seems. Files need to be mounted belonging to usersname:users instead of username:username and new files have to be created readable and writable by usersname:users which in fact would actually be sub-optimal for cases in which user accounts were intended to be an actual security boundary. The more secure default would be to simply unmount the usb drive, switch users, then mount it. Honestly though how often do 2 users on the same machine need to access the same removable storage at the same time? A more realistic issue is an external hard drive on which multimedia files are stored. Many machines have fairly anemic ssd storage that is insufficient for much multimedia and would be likely to be used with an external usb drive. However it seems likely that most users are moving away from large multimedia collections on disk and away from shared PCs so this realistically probably effects fewer and fewer people. > Keyboard handling in X.org is broken by design - when you have a pop up or an open menu, global keyboard shortcuts/ keybindings don't (GTK) work (QT). Answer the pop up and continue working > X.org does not support different scaling modes for different monitors. This seems to work on my mixed DPI configuration. > X.org server currently has no means of permanently storing and restoring settings changed by the user (xrender settings, Xv settings, etc.). NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers both employ custom utilities for this purpose. I'm not seeing why this is an issue for practical purposes I think the desktop environment provided utilities just stave and restore your settings from somewhere in ~/.config/ If you want to save global settings there is a configuration file in /etc for that. Should you not want to muck around with that nvidia-settings lets you use the handy graphical configuration and write out your present settings to the desired location. This has worked 2003-2021. How should this be handled either approach seems functional
• michaelmrose 5y ago
  > NVIDIA Optimus technology which is used in most laptops often doesn't work well in Linux. In cinnamon in testing I just had to right click and run on dedicated GPU. In a minimal environment I just ran steam that way and games ran via steam seemed to inherit the setting. One can also edit the command that will be run by steam or by the desktop shortcut to prepend optirun/primusrun. This didn't seem notably harder than Windows. > Linux drivers are usually much worse (they require a lot of tinkering, i.e. manual configuration) I recall in 2003 having to do tinkering but since around 2006 it was replaced with package manager install nvidia drivers. I'm honestly not sure what universe he lives in. > Most Linux distributions do not audit included packages which means a rogue evil application or a rogue evil patch can easily make it into most distros, thus endangering the end user (it has happened several times already) This sounds like an absolute ton of money that nobody wants to pay for. Most Windows and Mac users get applications by browsing the supremely user hostile web and installing software that auto updates itself meaning the second a library gets pwned and pulled in by ___ it will happily push out version n+1 that cryptolockers your family pictures and sells your credit card numbers. THIS has been happened a few times already. > No unified widely used system for packages signing and verification There is no single group of people writing or verifying software and since Linux isn't a single company I don't see how there is ever going to be one. Again lots of very boring work that requires people to be paid to do the boring work nobody would sign up for free. > There are no native antivirus solutions or similar software for Linux Presumably because there isn't a huge body of people constantly becoming infected such as to be willing to pay for their performance to be degraded for the sake of voodoo safety measures that mostly don't catch new or emerging threats. > Say, you want to install new software which is not included by your distro - currently there's no way to check if it's malicious or not. There is no way to do this effectively on windows because a package could be malicious in a way that isn't immediately obvious or would become malicious later. Most actual safety is reputational.
• lousken 5y ago
  At least with printers, they currently work better on Linux than on Windows (thanks to printnightmare)
• nerdponx 5y ago
  Serious question: could we do better with ReactOS, Haiku, or BSD? Or is Linux still as good as it's going to get, as long as there's no financial incentive to invest in it?
  • itvision 5y ago
    ReactOS is a pipedream which will never happen. BSDs are meant to be server OSes. Haiku sounds really promising but needs like 100x developers and money to take off which I don't see happening. Google's Fuchsia/Zircon is looking to replace the Linux kernel (already done for a number of devices) and hopefully userspace as well.
    • waddlesplash 5y ago
      > Haiku sounds really promising but needs like 100x developers and money to take off which I don't see happening. Oh, I don't think we're that far away from general viability. 10x the money would be more than enough, and even 2x development effort (without the money, even) would probably suffice. You can come be part of the difference ;)
      • itvision 5y ago
        I'm not a programmer unfortunately and given the fact that my brain has recently been deteriorating fast I won't even try. Perhaps I'll soon turn into a vegetable for all I know :-(
• johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  Bluetooh has been a real problem for me on a brand new laptop which is frustrating. It works great, but always cuts out. I have to restart the bluetooth software and it will work for another short while until it cuts out again. Very annoying. Apparently it has something to do with there being two bluetooth daemons running at once? And it's been happening for years [0] Anybody here ever solved this? [0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1023184/bluetooth-randomly-cutting-out-in-ubuntu https://askubuntu.com/questions/1023184/bluetooth-randomly-c...
• 0dayz 5y ago
  While I do think the list is a bit over-the-top (reading the kernel section was like reading the end times) but taken with a bit of salt and looking over the fact that a lot of the sources are 10-20+ years old, it's an okay list. Enterprise level section seems very odd: I'm struggling to think of an enterprise oriented disto that doesn't allow you to preinstall, even then I would imagine these days orchestration solves this issue. Fedora-family at least used to have software policy, no idea if it still does. They are correct about Linux toybox is still mostly geared towards server and thus desktop still lags far behind in desktop-specific fields (games, video/photo editing) when it comes to features. Kernel wise it's strange that there hasn't been any attempt made to make the kernel more modular or some structural change to experiment with the future. Although I don't think every driver should be relegated to become a module, it would be best to have a clear seperation between kernel-only API for a driver + user-only API for a driver. In other words the performant/critical part of a GPU driver should remain in the kernel but everything else should be handled in userland, that way hopefully things break gracefully. I will add 2 things: There is still no easy to change setting when it comes to mouse scroll wheel speed (in fact it's sometimes not even supported) and the default is just painful (1px + acceleration). The other criticism I got is that there's far too much non-sensical fragmentation in the Linux world, fragmentation can be a positive but it can also be a severe negative.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Linux usability for "normal users" (no not your Grandmother, real users who do more than post on Facebook) has been an interesting arc. Linux ascended rapidly from 1991-2001 and then progress slowed. It's sped up recently, and I think that's because there's nothing else left to do (you can only reinvent KDE so many times). Now we have PipeWire and Wayland and other nice things. But you know what? It's going to slow down again. Once Wayland is the default on all mainstream distros, what next? What's the next big challenge to solve? There isn't one. We've reached peak Linux. We literally can't make it any better (without exponentially more effort).
• archi42 5y ago
  Uh, plenty of true things, but sometimes just "I have a special case that's a problem": "Certain applications that exist both for Windows and Linux start up faster in Windows than in Linux, sometimes several times faster. It's worth noting though that SSD disk users are mostly unaffected." Counter anecdata: I worked on the framework to run >5000 tests on Linux and Windows for a "certain program at my old job" in the quasi-CI. For 90% of the tests, a single processes would be done in a few hundred milliseconds, but Windows took much longer than Linux due to program start up time. We initially did a strict splitting of "call $program for step a", then "call $program for step b", but due to the slow program start I did add some logic to merge the two steps where possible (90% of the cases). I can't recall exact numbers, but I think the tests were done in about 70 to 50% of the time. We saved even more time when we moved other steps c & d to Linux, which probably saved a lot of money because we devs got the test results much faster than before. But: I can imagine that different programs yield different results.
• albertopv 5y ago
  I have a recent Asus QHD monitor that works just fine with Windows 10, but Ubuntu 21.04 recognize no more than FHD resolution. A monitor issue? I don't know, I tried to investigate a little but I don't have much time anymore, things like that should work OOTB in 2021.