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And it's so much easier to write several hundreds of drivers for the Haiku kernel instead of one 'desktop user' scheduler for Linux.. /S

by renox 5y ago

rvz 5y ago
Well I would like to know which Linux distros I need to support and test for my GUI software to be consistently guaranteed to be ‘officially supported’ like Windows, and Mac.
selfhoster11 5y ago
The problem isn't just a "desktop user" scheduler (in fact, I'm pretty sure that compiling the kernel with a 1000Hz tick might address that). The problem is that the Linux GUI stack is largely corrupt beyond recovery: - the UI is largely awful. Most distributions adopt GNOME or resort to writing their own DE if they want to achieve a particular UX end-to-end. - the graphics stack is largely awful. X11 is bad, and Wayland is less bad but I want to see something that doesn't leave me wanting if it's the "end-all and be-all" of modernised UI stacks. - the audio stack is bad. PulseAudio should be replaced, IMO, but Pipewire may fix this - the graphics toolkits are bad. GTK still has the proverbial thumbnail picker missing, and QT has commercial licensing issues. - packaging is a mess. There are at least 3 "new" packaging formats (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap), and countless traditional packaging formats. It's a nightmare for independent software vendors, who only need to produce 1 (maybe 2) binaries per any other platform. - binary compatibility is capital-B BAD. Windows 10 can run GUI binaries compiled for Windows 95, and meanwhile Ubuntu 8.04 binaries will refuse to run on Ubuntu 20.04 unless they were statically compiled. "Don't break the userspace" begins and ends at the Linux kernel - literally everything above it, including core GUI libraries and the C runtime itself has broken old userspace usages. The problem is not reworking a scheduler, it's reworking large parts of the desktop stack and the culture surrounding it. At this point, I'd surrender Linux to the servers and wait another 10 years for another OS to have its Year of the "X" Desktop.
- anthk 5y ago
  >binary compatibility is capital-B BAD. Windows 10 can run GUI binaries compiled for Windows 95, and meanwhile Ubuntu 8.04 binaries will refuse to run on Ubuntu That doesn't matter because you can recompile all the crap you want.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Nope, you cannot. Closed-source software is as important as open-source, because some things will simply never be possible to make with an open source business model. We'll never get an open source edition of Photoshop or AutoCAD, so Linux will remain simply unusable as a daily driver to people who depend on it, hurting OS adoption. Even if you could theoretically recompile, compiling old unmaintained code on new distributions is a huge pain. Broken/removed API calls for every external library you include will be a huge pain, because they will need to be fixed manually. That's assuming the library still exists, and you don't have to port your software to some entirely new library that suddenly means you have to restructure or refactor the entire codebase to use it. That's not trivial. You need a programmer to do that, which is outside of reach of most average users.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Even heard of pkgsrc and the rest of the ports of BSD's? Huge pain? You know near nil. Most patches are not that big.
- renox 5y ago
  Most of your points are about the Linux-distributions issues. If Haiku was built on top of the Linux kernel, Gnome/Qt wouldn't matter but Wayland and the Limewire stack would probably be reused though.
rodgerd 5y ago
Several people have tried on the scheduler front. Sometimes for more than a decade. What it gets them is relentless hostility, contempt, and eventually deciding that it's easier to give up. If you knew anything about Linux history you'd know that, but I guess smart-alec retorts are easier than learning.
- renox 5y ago
  I didn't say that it was easy, I said that it was easier than supporting all the hardware than Linux support in another kernel.. That said, there are quite a few people working on 'realtime' Linux, it has some commonalities with a 'responsive' desktop..

And it's so much easier to write several hundreds of drivers for the Haiku kernel instead of one 'desktop user' scheduler for Linux.. /S

by renox 5y ago

And it's so much easier to write several hundreds of drivers for the Haiku kernel instead of one 'desktop user' scheduler for Linux.. /S

rvz 5y ago

Well I would like to know which Linux distros I need to support and test for my GUI software to be consistently guaranteed to be ‘officially supported’ like Windows, and Mac.

selfhoster11 5y ago

The problem isn't just a "desktop user" scheduler (in fact, I'm pretty sure that compiling the kernel with a 1000Hz tick might address that). The problem is that the Linux GUI stack is largely corrupt beyond recovery: - the UI is largely awful. Most distributions adopt GNOME or resort to writing their own DE if they want to achieve a particular UX end-to-end. - the graphics stack is largely awful. X11 is bad, and Wayland is less bad but I want to see something that doesn't leave me wanting if it's the "end-all and be-all" of modernised UI stacks. - the audio stack is bad. PulseAudio should be replaced, IMO, but Pipewire may fix this - the graphics toolkits are bad. GTK still has the proverbial thumbnail picker missing, and QT has commercial licensing issues. - packaging is a mess. There are at least 3 "new" packaging formats (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap), and countless traditional packaging formats. It's a nightmare for independent software vendors, who only need to produce 1 (maybe 2) binaries per any other platform. - binary compatibility is capital-B BAD. Windows 10 can run GUI binaries compiled for Windows 95, and meanwhile Ubuntu 8.04 binaries will refuse to run on Ubuntu 20.04 unless they were statically compiled. "Don't break the userspace" begins and ends at the Linux kernel - literally everything above it, including core GUI libraries and the C runtime itself has broken old userspace usages. The problem is not reworking a scheduler, it's reworking large parts of the desktop stack and the culture surrounding it. At this point, I'd surrender Linux to the servers and wait another 10 years for another OS to have its Year of the "X" Desktop.

anthk 5y ago
>binary compatibility is capital-B BAD. Windows 10 can run GUI binaries compiled for Windows 95, and meanwhile Ubuntu 8.04 binaries will refuse to run on Ubuntu That doesn't matter because you can recompile all the crap you want.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Nope, you cannot. Closed-source software is as important as open-source, because some things will simply never be possible to make with an open source business model. We'll never get an open source edition of Photoshop or AutoCAD, so Linux will remain simply unusable as a daily driver to people who depend on it, hurting OS adoption. Even if you could theoretically recompile, compiling old unmaintained code on new distributions is a huge pain. Broken/removed API calls for every external library you include will be a huge pain, because they will need to be fixed manually. That's assuming the library still exists, and you don't have to port your software to some entirely new library that suddenly means you have to restructure or refactor the entire codebase to use it. That's not trivial. You need a programmer to do that, which is outside of reach of most average users.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Even heard of pkgsrc and the rest of the ports of BSD's? Huge pain? You know near nil. Most patches are not that big.
renox 5y ago
Most of your points are about the Linux-distributions issues. If Haiku was built on top of the Linux kernel, Gnome/Qt wouldn't matter but Wayland and the Limewire stack would probably be reused though.

rodgerd 5y ago

Several people have tried on the scheduler front. Sometimes for more than a decade. What it gets them is relentless hostility, contempt, and eventually deciding that it's easier to give up. If you knew anything about Linux history you'd know that, but I guess smart-alec retorts are easier than learning.

renox 5y ago
I didn't say that it was easy, I said that it was easier than supporting all the hardware than Linux support in another kernel.. That said, there are quite a few people working on 'realtime' Linux, it has some commonalities with a 'responsive' desktop..