16 ms·

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux

by cletus 14y ago

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what I want. I don't want to dick around with Windows managers or the like. Some do and that's fine but almost no one really does. Whereas Windows and OSX can (and do) dictate a topdown vision for the desktop experience, Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? Whatever the case, this really matters for a desktop experience. I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. It could be an update gone awry. It could be corp-specific modifications. It could be anything. But the point is: I don't care what the problem is, I just want it to work. In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. In many others too. I can't describe to you how much torture it always seems to be to get anything desktop-related to work on Linux. I loathe it with a passion. I've long since given up any idea that Linux will ever get anywhere on the desktop. It won't. That takes a topdown approach, the kind that anarchies can't solve.

_delirium 14y ago
Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete. My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average. I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.
- theatrus2 14y ago
  There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.
  - dchichkov 14y ago
    Actually OSX development environment is only horrible to cross-platform / open-source application developers. But if you are Apple pet developer then you'd just use XCode/XCode projects/etc for all your needs. And would be very happy with that.
    - 4ad 14y ago
      As a cross platform open source developer that uses Mac OS X and Linux about the same (Mac OS X on desktop, Linux on laptop) I don't see what's so horrible about Mac OS X in this regard. At worse, it's the same. I don't prefer either for programming (I do prefer Mac OS X for other things, though).
      - dchichkov 14y ago
        Well, developing using native toolchain is horrible. Because of legacy gcc 4.2 and unstable and often broken clang. At least about a year back it was the case. No. Scratch that. It is still the case. I just remembered helping a coworker hack some open source package to make it compile with clang. We lost an hour or so, completely unnecessarily. Would have taken him 30 seconds to apt-get it on linux. And well, not using the native toolchain, and using something like mac ports feels like I'm under cygwin all other again. No, thank you. I love 13" Air, but as a development environment Macs are quite broken. Plus that home key on the full desktop keyboard... If you are linux+mac user, you know what am I talking about :) Curious, what package management system are you using to install libraries/packages? Ports? Fink? Homebrew?
wheels 14y ago
> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same machine. Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings. It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.
- diminish 14y ago
  To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..
  - atirip 14y ago
    Hardware? What hardware? Frankly, I havent bought nothing over last 10 years. I have laptop, you see...
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Laptops are not hardware now?
    - snitko 14y ago
      I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 recently, plugged it in via USB and was not able to browse it because, as far as I understood, MacOSX has no support for "media devices" whatever that is. I had to download some obscure Samsung "Kies" software through which I was able to get to the filesystem and upload some files. Wasted hours.
joe_the_user 14y ago
Two years ago, when it was experiencing a considerable upswing in use, Canonical was in the position to at least partly dictate some standards. And an Ubuntu install also would "just work" (and still does in my experience). Unfortunately, I think they kind of snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by attempting to go to a "modern user interface". The big problem is that neither designers nor programmers really enjoy incremental progress (designers want a big canvas and programmers want clean code). Gnome2 really was/is good enough for most people use easily AND it was/is simple and powerful not to stand in the way of the existing users (programmers, Linux Geeks, Linus himself,etc). Whether Unity and Gnome 3 work for average people or not, they certainly alienated the existing Linux desktop users and that is an important segment.
- jebblue 14y ago
  Yes, yes that' is it right there, Unity and Gnome 3 both are terrible compared to Gnome 2. I wish the Gnome 2 team would re-materialize and come out with Gnome 4, just Gnome 2 with a higher version number.
squidsoup 14y ago
I'm experiencing similar frustrations after having returned to using Linux (Ubuntu) at work recently. I've spent a fair bit of time having to customise a window manager (awesomewm), just to get a somewhat usable desktop environment. I work at a university with centralised mail handled by Exchange and struggle every day with flaky, buggy mail clients Evolution/DavMail+Thunderbird. Under linux my macbook air only sleeps reliably half the time, and occasionally I find that unbeknownst to me some process has woken the laptop (with lid closed) in my bag, with the battery near critical. The latest apt-get update broke my sound. Empathy hangs for a good 2-3 minutes on load, but eventually recovers. Something mysteriously reverts my xmodmap keybinds mid-session. Other little things such as LightDM not starting until I hit enter at a black screen post boot contribute to an overall experience that feels frustratingly incomplete. I know that many of these are trivial complaints and that all of these things can be fixed. I no longer want to have to do this however. In my teens I loved tinkering with the linux desktop, designing 'awesome' Enlightenment themes and enjoyed tracking down and fixing these little problems. Now in my 30s I really just want the OS to get out of the way and let me code. OSX does this well, linux really does not. I say this with a fair bit of sadness as there are many things that I like about linux a great deal - the cli, the excellent package management, the ethos behind the OS and the open source community.
- nvarsj 14y ago
  I had nothing but trouble w/ Ubuntu when trying to use anything non-Canonical tested. I suggest using something like Archlinux where you're not forced to stick with buggy software for a 6 month cycle. And I've been really, really impressed with the latest Thunderbird/Lightning releases (14-15). Haven't had any problems at all, like I had with the older releases from several years ago. I used to be a Mail guy, but Thunderbird blows it out of the water these days.
alexchamberlain 14y ago
Nvidia card?
agumonkey 14y ago
Maybe by designing a set of base interfaces, with extension (ala opengl, w3c)
mbell 14y ago
Coming from the perspective of a developer: I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no, cygwin doesn't cut it. Fast forward to now, the only computer I manually interact with is a macbook air. The old desktop hardware became my file server(running FreeNAS) despite being many times faster than the air. Through this experience I realized what I actually cared about...I run four 'apps' 99% of the time: chrome, sublime text(everything non java), iTerm and IntelliJ(java). That is really all I care about, anything that prevents interacting with these applications as quickly as possible fails. The support stuff, git, a database, a message queue, etc. Runs anywhere. I _rarely_ interact with the 'OS' in ui terms. I rarely use finder, I only use the dock to empty the trash (launch everything through Quicksilver). At the end of the day I love OS X not because it has 'awesome' UI paradigms, but because of all the options I see it the least, it may as well not be there. OS X is the only OS i've ever used that I just don't think or care about. It sleeps, it wakes up, it deals with new screens, it does all the OS shit so I can just use the apps i want to. Thats why I am hooked using it as a dev machine.
- sirmarksalot 14y ago
  As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? It comes bundled with Windows, and has a lot of the features that are missing from the command prompt. It does have some rough edges that may cause you to dismiss it as unusable, but it offers tab completion, colored text output, and a real scripting environment (not DOS batch scripting). Every serious Windows developer I've talked to nowadays uses it exclusively.
  - mbell 14y ago
    > As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? No, and I have zero reason to do so. I don't deploy on windows, I have no reason to ever deploy on windows, so why would I bother learning another syntax just to develop on windows? It really doesn't make any sense. Powershell only makes sense for IT admins whom have to manage windows networks, it makes no sense at all for developers deploying on *nix.
rjbond3rd 14y ago
> I just want it to work... We must be doing different things, because I've been on Linux desktops with zero-to-minimal effort since 1999.
einhverfr 14y ago
If that was the only problem though we would have expected FreeBSD to overtake the desktop. the larger issue, unfortunately is just that people are afraid to switch from Windows to anything other than Mac. Android is helping there, but it will take time. Never underestimate the fear of the consumer that they will break stuff on a computer they are unfamiliar with. The fact that Windows is actually getting better may actually be a good thing regarding other possibilities of desktop software.
- canadiancreed 14y ago
  As a FreeBSD user since 2007 I found the desktop options to be just as clunky as Linux if not more so. It was the only part of the OS that didn't just work when I used it in my travels, so it's stayed as server duty. If there was an open source windows managing system that was on par with Mac's version...whole new world. (There might be, I havnet' looked since 2009 so)
espeed 14y ago
I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. Is this in Chrome on sites like YouTube? If so, I believe it started with Chrome 20 when Chrome switched to its native Flash driver (see http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjNGaaQ http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjN...). This happened to me too, and I still haven't resolved it.
dumb123 14y ago
"Every engineer I know... They also have a distorted view..." cletus you are one of the few people with enough karma to always grab and hold a top post spot who _actually says things worth saying_. Right on. As for "someone with the gravitas", never say never. But they might not use the Linux kernel and GNU as their "clay" or "base material". I've thought about such a person and one thing I believe is that they would be foolish to try to "sell" such a simple to use system to Linux users (and many of those users would, alas, include engineers like the ones you describe: set in their ways) nor to those engineers who worship Apple, with their belief in some mythical "user experience" [translation: _their_ experience]). In my opinion, a person with the gravitas would also need to the vision to see that the target user base who is open to change lies elsewhere. The users need to come with an open mind. I don't know what will happen to Linux. But the binary blob problem keeps getting worse. Too many Linux users are happy to accept the blobs. They don't want to read source code. They just want working devices. That's understandable. But in my opinion it's not a small problem in the long run. Apple, on the other hand, is flat out abusing its power. Not only over end users but over developers (who are of course just a particular class of end users). They are standing in the way of people's general education about computers. Keeping everyone dumb may give some developers a warm, fuzzy feeling as they watch their bank accounts grow to new levels, or dream of it, but I do think Apple's conduct, seen for what it is, will trickle down past just us fanatics on HN and elsewhere on the web. People are going to figure it out. If I was a monopoly-lover, if I loved to see "winner-take-all" in IT, as if that improved the lot for any of us (I am not and it doesn't), then my money would go on Amazon. They seem to be making the fewest mistakes. Great things will come from AWS. It is the democratisation of hosting - a sharing of power, risks be damned (unfortunately, it may also mean the monopolisation of hosting as we've never before seen). In "Dropbox", we are only seeing the very beginning of what's possible. In my view, Apple is a "disabler" (everything they introduce is restricted) while Amazon is an "enabler" (generally: they open many more doors than they close).
wmwong 14y ago
Agreed that things should just work. In case you're still looking for a fix for the dual monitor full screen issue. I had the same problem on Chrome. It was when they introduced built-in flash. You need to disable Chrome's built-in flash and everything is back to normal.
heyrhett 14y ago
relevant (and funny cause it's true): http://xkcd.com/963/ http://xkcd.com/963/
zanny 14y ago
> Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? I say Mark Shuttleworth is doing this, and no one is paying attention. Unity was a unified vision, it was just different and no one wanted different. And that is fine for a new target audience he wanted for the OS, which was everyone else in the world. Look at what they are doing now, Ubuntu on tablets, Ubuntu TV, they are pushing a unified vision, and nobody is getting behind it en masse in the Linux community because it isn't everything they wanted. They want Cinnamon, they don't like Gnome 3, where is my Gnome 2, etc. The inherent strife is the proble, not a lack of visionaries.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Yes but most of the people who are "leaving Ubuntu" are just switching the desktop environment or using a system downstream of Ubuntu. It makes for a lot of drama but it doesn't much hurt Ubuntu community support (which is their greatest strength, and why I use Ubuntu) because so many of the packages remain the same.
ps2000 14y ago
Linux on the desktop suffered from weak developer and industry support. It was until some years ago, Linux sound system latency was as powerful as Windows 3.1's. Using proprietary drivers for X or even worse for the Kernel is a mess. So obvious... Linus promised Linux on the desktop 2000 or so. The reality was different: influential groups just ignored the desktop. Now it's too late, web is becoming the predominant platform, Operating Systems are just commodity. For me it's no big difference whether I use Linux or OS X (with coreutils etc. installed). In fact I wouldn't even mind working on Windows, unfortunately I don't have the patience to setup a reasonable Unix-like dev environment. The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.
- nvarsj 14y ago
  > The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux. This is so true. Linux has a bad rap. I gave up on it a couple of years ago due to the infamous "hidden cost of linux". I switched back a couple months ago and have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now. A lot has improved in the last couple years in Linux land.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    >have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now Which version of which distro?

by cletus 14y ago

_delirium 14y ago

Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete. My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average. I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.

theatrus2 14y ago
There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.
justincormack 14y ago
Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.
- dchichkov 14y ago
  Actually OSX development environment is only horrible to cross-platform / open-source application developers. But if you are Apple pet developer then you'd just use XCode/XCode projects/etc for all your needs. And would be very happy with that.
  - 4ad 14y ago
    As a cross platform open source developer that uses Mac OS X and Linux about the same (Mac OS X on desktop, Linux on laptop) I don't see what's so horrible about Mac OS X in this regard. At worse, it's the same. I don't prefer either for programming (I do prefer Mac OS X for other things, though).
    - dchichkov 14y ago
      Well, developing using native toolchain is horrible. Because of legacy gcc 4.2 and unstable and often broken clang. At least about a year back it was the case. No. Scratch that. It is still the case. I just remembered helping a coworker hack some open source package to make it compile with clang. We lost an hour or so, completely unnecessarily. Would have taken him 30 seconds to apt-get it on linux. And well, not using the native toolchain, and using something like mac ports feels like I'm under cygwin all other again. No, thank you. I love 13" Air, but as a development environment Macs are quite broken. Plus that home key on the full desktop keyboard... If you are linux+mac user, you know what am I talking about :) Curious, what package management system are you using to install libraries/packages? Ports? Fink? Homebrew?

wheels 14y ago

> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same machine. Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings. It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.

diminish 14y ago
To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..
- atirip 14y ago
  Hardware? What hardware? Frankly, I havent bought nothing over last 10 years. I have laptop, you see...
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Laptops are not hardware now?
  - snitko 14y ago
    I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 recently, plugged it in via USB and was not able to browse it because, as far as I understood, MacOSX has no support for "media devices" whatever that is. I had to download some obscure Samsung "Kies" software through which I was able to get to the filesystem and upload some files. Wasted hours.

joe_the_user 14y ago

Two years ago, when it was experiencing a considerable upswing in use, Canonical was in the position to at least partly dictate some standards. And an Ubuntu install also would "just work" (and still does in my experience). Unfortunately, I think they kind of snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by attempting to go to a "modern user interface". The big problem is that neither designers nor programmers really enjoy incremental progress (designers want a big canvas and programmers want clean code). Gnome2 really was/is good enough for most people use easily AND it was/is simple and powerful not to stand in the way of the existing users (programmers, Linux Geeks, Linus himself,etc). Whether Unity and Gnome 3 work for average people or not, they certainly alienated the existing Linux desktop users and that is an important segment.

jebblue 14y ago
Yes, yes that' is it right there, Unity and Gnome 3 both are terrible compared to Gnome 2. I wish the Gnome 2 team would re-materialize and come out with Gnome 4, just Gnome 2 with a higher version number.

squidsoup 14y ago

I'm experiencing similar frustrations after having returned to using Linux (Ubuntu) at work recently. I've spent a fair bit of time having to customise a window manager (awesomewm), just to get a somewhat usable desktop environment. I work at a university with centralised mail handled by Exchange and struggle every day with flaky, buggy mail clients Evolution/DavMail+Thunderbird. Under linux my macbook air only sleeps reliably half the time, and occasionally I find that unbeknownst to me some process has woken the laptop (with lid closed) in my bag, with the battery near critical. The latest apt-get update broke my sound. Empathy hangs for a good 2-3 minutes on load, but eventually recovers. Something mysteriously reverts my xmodmap keybinds mid-session. Other little things such as LightDM not starting until I hit enter at a black screen post boot contribute to an overall experience that feels frustratingly incomplete. I know that many of these are trivial complaints and that all of these things can be fixed. I no longer want to have to do this however. In my teens I loved tinkering with the linux desktop, designing 'awesome' Enlightenment themes and enjoyed tracking down and fixing these little problems. Now in my 30s I really just want the OS to get out of the way and let me code. OSX does this well, linux really does not. I say this with a fair bit of sadness as there are many things that I like about linux a great deal - the cli, the excellent package management, the ethos behind the OS and the open source community.

nvarsj 14y ago
I had nothing but trouble w/ Ubuntu when trying to use anything non-Canonical tested. I suggest using something like Archlinux where you're not forced to stick with buggy software for a 6 month cycle. And I've been really, really impressed with the latest Thunderbird/Lightning releases (14-15). Haven't had any problems at all, like I had with the older releases from several years ago. I used to be a Mail guy, but Thunderbird blows it out of the water these days.

alexchamberlain 14y ago

Nvidia card?

agumonkey 14y ago

Maybe by designing a set of base interfaces, with extension (ala opengl, w3c)

mbell 14y ago

Coming from the perspective of a developer: I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no, cygwin doesn't cut it. Fast forward to now, the only computer I manually interact with is a macbook air. The old desktop hardware became my file server(running FreeNAS) despite being many times faster than the air. Through this experience I realized what I actually cared about...I run four 'apps' 99% of the time: chrome, sublime text(everything non java), iTerm and IntelliJ(java). That is really all I care about, anything that prevents interacting with these applications as quickly as possible fails. The support stuff, git, a database, a message queue, etc. Runs anywhere. I _rarely_ interact with the 'OS' in ui terms. I rarely use finder, I only use the dock to empty the trash (launch everything through Quicksilver). At the end of the day I love OS X not because it has 'awesome' UI paradigms, but because of all the options I see it the least, it may as well not be there. OS X is the only OS i've ever used that I just don't think or care about. It sleeps, it wakes up, it deals with new screens, it does all the OS shit so I can just use the apps i want to. Thats why I am hooked using it as a dev machine.

sirmarksalot 14y ago
As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? It comes bundled with Windows, and has a lot of the features that are missing from the command prompt. It does have some rough edges that may cause you to dismiss it as unusable, but it offers tab completion, colored text output, and a real scripting environment (not DOS batch scripting). Every serious Windows developer I've talked to nowadays uses it exclusively.
- mbell 14y ago
  > As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? No, and I have zero reason to do so. I don't deploy on windows, I have no reason to ever deploy on windows, so why would I bother learning another syntax just to develop on windows? It really doesn't make any sense. Powershell only makes sense for IT admins whom have to manage windows networks, it makes no sense at all for developers deploying on *nix.

rjbond3rd 14y ago

> I just want it to work... We must be doing different things, because I've been on Linux desktops with zero-to-minimal effort since 1999.

einhverfr 14y ago

If that was the only problem though we would have expected FreeBSD to overtake the desktop. the larger issue, unfortunately is just that people are afraid to switch from Windows to anything other than Mac. Android is helping there, but it will take time. Never underestimate the fear of the consumer that they will break stuff on a computer they are unfamiliar with. The fact that Windows is actually getting better may actually be a good thing regarding other possibilities of desktop software.

canadiancreed 14y ago
As a FreeBSD user since 2007 I found the desktop options to be just as clunky as Linux if not more so. It was the only part of the OS that didn't just work when I used it in my travels, so it's stayed as server duty. If there was an open source windows managing system that was on par with Mac's version...whole new world. (There might be, I havnet' looked since 2009 so)

espeed 14y ago

I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. Is this in Chrome on sites like YouTube? If so, I believe it started with Chrome 20 when Chrome switched to its native Flash driver (see http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjNGaaQ http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjN...). This happened to me too, and I still haven't resolved it.

dumb123 14y ago

"Every engineer I know... They also have a distorted view..." cletus you are one of the few people with enough karma to always grab and hold a top post spot who _actually says things worth saying_. Right on. As for "someone with the gravitas", never say never. But they might not use the Linux kernel and GNU as their "clay" or "base material". I've thought about such a person and one thing I believe is that they would be foolish to try to "sell" such a simple to use system to Linux users (and many of those users would, alas, include engineers like the ones you describe: set in their ways) nor to those engineers who worship Apple, with their belief in some mythical "user experience" [translation: _their_ experience]). In my opinion, a person with the gravitas would also need to the vision to see that the target user base who is open to change lies elsewhere. The users need to come with an open mind. I don't know what will happen to Linux. But the binary blob problem keeps getting worse. Too many Linux users are happy to accept the blobs. They don't want to read source code. They just want working devices. That's understandable. But in my opinion it's not a small problem in the long run. Apple, on the other hand, is flat out abusing its power. Not only over end users but over developers (who are of course just a particular class of end users). They are standing in the way of people's general education about computers. Keeping everyone dumb may give some developers a warm, fuzzy feeling as they watch their bank accounts grow to new levels, or dream of it, but I do think Apple's conduct, seen for what it is, will trickle down past just us fanatics on HN and elsewhere on the web. People are going to figure it out. If I was a monopoly-lover, if I loved to see "winner-take-all" in IT, as if that improved the lot for any of us (I am not and it doesn't), then my money would go on Amazon. They seem to be making the fewest mistakes. Great things will come from AWS. It is the democratisation of hosting - a sharing of power, risks be damned (unfortunately, it may also mean the monopolisation of hosting as we've never before seen). In "Dropbox", we are only seeing the very beginning of what's possible. In my view, Apple is a "disabler" (everything they introduce is restricted) while Amazon is an "enabler" (generally: they open many more doors than they close).

wmwong 14y ago

Agreed that things should just work. In case you're still looking for a fix for the dual monitor full screen issue. I had the same problem on Chrome. It was when they introduced built-in flash. You need to disable Chrome's built-in flash and everything is back to normal.

heyrhett 14y ago

relevant (and funny cause it's true): http://xkcd.com/963/ http://xkcd.com/963/

zanny 14y ago

> Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? I say Mark Shuttleworth is doing this, and no one is paying attention. Unity was a unified vision, it was just different and no one wanted different. And that is fine for a new target audience he wanted for the OS, which was everyone else in the world. Look at what they are doing now, Ubuntu on tablets, Ubuntu TV, they are pushing a unified vision, and nobody is getting behind it en masse in the Linux community because it isn't everything they wanted. They want Cinnamon, they don't like Gnome 3, where is my Gnome 2, etc. The inherent strife is the proble, not a lack of visionaries.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Yes but most of the people who are "leaving Ubuntu" are just switching the desktop environment or using a system downstream of Ubuntu. It makes for a lot of drama but it doesn't much hurt Ubuntu community support (which is their greatest strength, and why I use Ubuntu) because so many of the packages remain the same.

ps2000 14y ago

Linux on the desktop suffered from weak developer and industry support. It was until some years ago, Linux sound system latency was as powerful as Windows 3.1's. Using proprietary drivers for X or even worse for the Kernel is a mess. So obvious... Linus promised Linux on the desktop 2000 or so. The reality was different: influential groups just ignored the desktop. Now it's too late, web is becoming the predominant platform, Operating Systems are just commodity. For me it's no big difference whether I use Linux or OS X (with coreutils etc. installed). In fact I wouldn't even mind working on Windows, unfortunately I don't have the patience to setup a reasonable Unix-like dev environment. The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

nvarsj 14y ago
> The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux. This is so true. Linux has a bad rap. I gave up on it a couple of years ago due to the infamous "hidden cost of linux". I switched back a couple months ago and have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now. A lot has improved in the last couple years in Linux land.
- hollerith 14y ago
  >have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now Which version of which distro?