Being one of the main VLC developers and the de-facto leader of the VideoLAN project, I hate to say it, but I am a bit in the same state of mind, lately (no, I haven't moved to Windows, though)... And yet, I am also a very strong open source advocate, and have been working on FLOSS on most Desktop Operating Systems (in my name and anonymously); and believing strongly in Computer freedom. I've been Linux users and sysadmin since 8 years now.
However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.
- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...
- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...
- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.
- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...
- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.
So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.
However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)
If you were happy with the state of the Linux desktop four years ago, which I mostly was, then good news, it's still all there if you want it. You might need to abandon or downgrade Gnome, but it's all there. (Or in my case, go through the current KDE configuration and start unchecking a lot of boxes.) But absolutely yes, the latest attempts to chase Windows down have been a disaster. For how open source fundamentally works, there has been a shocking number of Architecture Astronauts running around lately. (And I do use that term in the fully original sense [1].) The pattern of:
1. Glorious design
2. Shitty first pass, released anyhow and made a standard
3. Laboriously fixing it over the period of years until it converges on "Slightly-but-only-slightly less sucky than what it replaced"
4. Goto 1
has become the standard operating procedure of the Linux desktop world.
I am not convinced that the Gnome and KDE projects are good organizational strategies. Replacing a lumbering behemoth accountable to its many customers with lumbering behemoths accountable to essentially nobody is not an improvement, no matter how "open" the latter may be.
(Oh, and I was happy only because I'm a professional programmer and I still prefer the command line over any "semantic desktop". I freely acknowledge this is not the common case.)
"And yet, I am also a very strong open source advocate"
Having an opinion about the miserable state of the Linux desktop has nothing to do with open-source advocacy. The success of many open-source projects including Linux itself (on everything but the desktop) is proof that the model works, and can produce quality software, often better than the proprietary alternatives.
I too am an open-source advocate, and I've met insult and disdain when I rant about the desktop "holy cow". There's just something there that makes people blind to the issues, and it's the same thing that makes the issues pile up and not get fixed. It just doesn't happen very often now because I seldom give enough of a crap about this long-lost battle to even enter the discussion.
I remember the way PulseAudio was abruptly included in Ubuntu and the problems that this initially caused a lot of the applications that made use of audio as a result - but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history.
The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.
Decisions about where to go next re. Desktop paradigms are tricky ... but I think the main problem is lack of strong and decisive leadership; largely due to the problems inherent to an open development hierarchy. A paradigm shift often requires a leap of faith. Without that, any changes becomes a patchwork or amalgamation of multiple people's ideas - which in my mind isn't optimal.
I reckon Mark Shuttleworth is trying to create a paradigm shift with Ubuntu .. and I applaud him. There's so much life left in Linux as desktop platform. To state otherwise is shortsighted, and ultimately damaging to an incredibly vibrant and worthy platform.
Thank you for this.
I have a personal peeve with the direction that KDE has been taking with the semantic desktop - the tremendous slowdown because of that and absolutely no focus on usability. Plus the desktop looks like an 80's Eurodance video (as compared to Gnome 2).
They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8.
Power management with linux on laptops has been going downhill since sometime and today I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 (maybe Phoronix is right with its power regression hullabaloo)
Suspend and resume still sucks (https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 presumably fixed in 2.6.38 but still gives me problems frequently).
Displayport/HDMI out on my laptop does not send out audio and until I used a custom PPA kernel, multi-monitor out on my laptop used to lockup frequently.
All of these things work seamlessly on Windows 7.
I am willing to pay good money for a seamless Linux desktop (~100$ for something that works seamlessly and timely updates) - if that's what it takes to get someone to focus on something of value, like TuxOnIce, rather than placement of close buttons on the left vs right.
What's the replacement for PulseAudio for the average user? I personally have a sound card with hardware mixing, and I don't have anything playing sounds other than xmms2 and mplayer, so raw ALSA works for me. But if you want features like "move this audio stream to my Bluetooth headset", you need what PulseAudio offers.
(And yes, on my video-playing box, I use PulseAudio, and listen to stuff with Bluetooth headphones. Turn them on, audio switches to Bluetooth without the mplayer session even being affected. Turn them off, back to the TV's speakers. It just works. And I set this up by clicking pretty things in a GUI.)
I think part of the problem these days is that the most creative and innovative efforts are going towards the browser. And, indeed, if browsers keep growing and start to provide an credible, sandboxed, near-native-app equivalent(e.g. pNaCl + local caching, low-level input, sound and video APIs and full network capabilities) the desktop could potentially be stripped all the way back to the programmer-and-sysadmin-centric environments we had in the mid-80s, and usability focus could be on supporting the browser experience instead, as ChromeOS is attempting.
As it is, the Linux desktop is still working towards "yesterday's experience," since we don't have good enough browsers and there are tons and tons of legacy apps. Unfortunately, supporting yesterday's experience is harder for usability since it's conceptually richer, and most of these concepts are dueling at the bits-and-bytes level, where they're hard to reason about and present in digestible ways. The browser can blackbox a lot of stuff behind the standard APIs, something which the OS does not enjoy.
Another problem, just as large, is that there continues to be lots of new hardware, and correspondingly new drivers to support and specs to reverse engineer(since many manufacturers remain unwilling to assist). This is a problem that can only be solved by maintaining a hardware taskforce roughly proportional to the amount of new hardware released, but it's not particularly interesting or sexy, and it's not a core goal of most of the Linux ecosystem to create premium-grade drivers for all hardware.
You know, I think part of the problem is that a lot of the leaders of the Linux desktop experience are building these large, complex structures and applications where they are not needed. The best Linux desktop wouldn't be the one that solves all of our problems by specifically considering them, it'd be one that solves them by obviating them.
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.
I regard Unity and Gnome shell as still being experimental, and not delivering a very comprehensive or polished experience. If you want to get serious work done then stick with Gnome 2.x (for example Mint 11).
As of December, I'm all Linux. I run Ubuntu at home. I use Linux at work, except when I need to debug OS-specific browsers. I never want to go back; Gnome hits my sweet spot. I want an OS that starts up and becomes invisible until shutdown, and I never want to touch the mouse. Ubuntu's out-of-the-box installation is probably still unusable for people without a tech background, but I love it.
I spend most of my time in Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, lots of Chrome tabs for testing + looking up reference material, Emacs, IntelliJ, and lots of terminals. I almost never need other software, and when I do, it's an apt-get away.
I've had challenges - I've never seen Ubuntu completely work on a fresh install. My wireless failed on my newest desktop install. The sound on the two before that. They never bundle my wireless driver, so I drag my desktop over to my modem. My printer gives baffling error messages. My old webcam arbitrarily rezoomed as it pleased. Gnome 3 overrode the "invert colors" keyboard shortcut, which I use heavily. I needed to steal time on my girlfriend's iMac to run Portal 2. My supercharged Toshiba laptop freezes when running on battery power (may not be Linux's fault).
But these are most of the problems I've faced in the past two years. I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.
I switched to using Ubuntu on my personal machine about a year ago. I was seriously excited.
My experiences:
- Utter inability to consume streaming video, be it Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.
- Complete madness wrestling with the built-in, broken version of Ruby.
- Real difficulty finding any clear, accurate documentation.
- Out-of-date crappy versions of libraries available through apt-get.
- Printing? Ha.
- I can't play Minecraft, which is a Java game.
- GMail freezing on load 3 times out of 5.
Rather than liberating me from the bondage of win32, it has made me feel like a third class citizen of the digital world. The consequence? I am buying a Mac.
Edit: I wouldn't usually complain about a downvote, but this is a list of difficulties I have experienced when using an operating system. What do you object to?
> I want an OS that starts up and becomes invisible until shutdown, and I never want to touch the mouse.
This.
That's the same reason why I love Ubuntu as my desktop. I'm hardly doing anything outside of the browser, except for coding and writing with Vim.
> I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.
Even though upgrades aren't that frequent on other platforms, they do exist. Every two or three releases I take the chance to make a fresh start and it's incredible how fast I can set up the desktop to fit my needs. Ubuntu's/Debian's excellent package management is a huge time saver.
Indeed, I'm in the same camp. I've run into hurdles getting Linux installations to work, but nothing near the headache I've had trying to get a proper Emacs setup.
I've been using some flavour of Linux as my primary OS for over three years now. Windows 7 seems like a big improvement over previous version of Windows, but I have driver issues like you wouldn't believe, whereas Ubuntu works flawlessly on first installation on the same hardware. OSX is nice, but it's just uncomfortable because it offers a lot of what Linux offers, but in a rigid, UI-driven way that you'd expect from Windows.
For technical users, (technical users like me, at least) Linux is still where it's at.
I did the same as well after I got fed up with Windows bloat and, to your point, the way that windows is more for home users whereas I want it to get out of the way as well. And since I mostly use my box for coding, I also just got tired of working with Python on windows as well as consuming all of the developer tools as it is just natural on Linux/Ubuntu. Note that I don't do any gaming or anything.
My install experience was pretty flawless. I have moved 2 desktops and 3 laptops over to Ubuntu(10.4, 10.10 and 11.04) and have not had any real problems except for a 3d acceleration issue on a 10 year old ATI video card. Been going for about 6 months this way and really find it painful to work in Windows now.
I used to be a linux only hacker since a child. Then I bought my first Mac (the first flat screen iMac) and fell in love. Recently I installed Ubuntu to my work laptop and found several workflow enhancing applications.
My work desktop is a simple two monitor setup with xmonad, several urxvt terminals, vim instances and two browsers of choice (firefox and chrome). I love it because there's no distractions, only code is visible and browser when I need it. I even use mutt with Exchange (a very perverse setup through davmail, thank you corporate policies) so I don't get notifications for emails which would distract me from programming.
I've been there. I lasted two years with Linux and went through the same progression - hacker bliss to "dammit, I just want to get something done besides shaving yaks!" I would still take it over Windows, but not over OSX.
But in defense of Linux, it has come a long way over the last decade, due to a few earth-moving forces:
- The rise of the web and end of the Windows native app lock-in
- The mainstream acceptance of open source and platform independent software engineering
- Canonical's aggressive, financially backed push to make Linux a viable mainstream desktop OS
It's easy to forget how many classic pain points have been more or less cured: building everything from source, recompiling the kernel, font rendering, working with office documents, configuring everything manually by editing text files, complete absense of tasteful design, no cross-platform apps or games whatsoever, and nobody having ever heard of your OS.
Linux is not there yet. It's still perfectly reasonable to throw your arms up and switch. But at this point, the historical trend suggests that it will get there eventually. It has never really stopped inching forward and we haven't yet seen anything that could stop it.
The Linux ecosystem doesn't burn through capital, so it can't collapse overnight like a commercial platform can. All it needs to sustain it is interest. The interest could dry up, for example if everybody starts caring only about data and not code. But if nobody's interested in it anymore, then it probably doesn't matter if it goes away.
Strange. For me, Linux has Just Worked for the last 3 or 4 years. No hardware compatibility issues, no performance issues. I use it because it's easier.
I've also been using linux for only about three years. I have had some minor hardware compatibility issues- namely the "sleep" problem- which went away with subsequent updates.
I just can't see ever moving back to Windows because I couldn't stand to lose the shell. I could see myself moving to MacOS, but I don't understand how a sys admin could stomach doing so if I could not.
What's always amusing about these discussions is the number of people that say either
"Try _distro_ - everything just works for me!"
and/or
"research before you buy!"
The 'it all works for me crowd'. I don't believe most of you most of the time. "Works" is in the eye of the beholder, and most of the time I've found that people who make that claim don't have anywhere near the same work style that I do.
Example: running audio from 4 different apps simultaneously all mixed together is a no-brainer under OSX/Windows, but is something most Linux users don't even dream of, because they've never even been able to try it (whoops, amarok is running, so I can't get AIM sound alerts, etc.) If they've never done it, the "works for me crowd" can't possibly know what 'works' means for them is light years away from what 'works' means to me.
"Research before you buy". Where and how? Show me an up to date list which shows even most of the compatibility aspects of stuff I can go buy in a store against recent distros. Googling around and finding that I can get Ubuntu 5.04 running on hardware from 2004 does me absolutely 0 good. Manufacturers don't always show you the exact chipsets used (and may often change chipset revisions and just ship new windows drivers in the box), and yet even if you do happen to know every single internal spec of hardware before you buy it, no one else will have bought it to determine if it works. Someone's gotta be first, unless the manufacturers would actually start certifying that "distro X" runs on particular configurations (which ain't gonna happen).
The majority of us live in a world where when we want a computer we're going to go to a local store and buy something. If Linux users want their stuff to be more widely adopted, they need to adapt to that reality. I suspect most Linux users don't really care, and are happy being 'cutting edge' and compiling new drivers to test stuff out. Really, it's an exciting and interesting way of life for some people, but one which I and many others eventually outgrow.
I started using Linux around 1998 at my university, and started using it on my own desktop later that year (with Red Hat 5.0).
I used it almost exclusively until 2006, when I finally had enough. At the time I moved to Windows and abandoned Linux on the desktop completely, but I've since switched to OS X.
I can relate to the author. I spent years messing around with my systems, which was fun for a while. Every 6 months I'd reinstall my desktop box with the lastest version of Red Hat (and then Fedora) and spend the next week or two filing bug reports in bugzilla, and patching some stuff.
But after a few years, what was a learning experience, becomes a permanent wound in your sound engineering sense. It just isn't possible that something that has an insane amount of bugs with every new release will ever be something reliable and usable. Not with so many regressions, never fixed problems, and unbelievably in-your-face issues.
I've tried to return, to see if any progress was made. About once a year I install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora, but every time it seems the same, or worse in some aspects.
My last test was Ubuntu 11.04 on an old Toshiba laptop from late 2005 that I still have. It used to work apparently fine with just the LCD brightness control not working, and later with the usual application quirks, bugs and crashes.
However, the latest version has "new" drivers for the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card, which non-working 3D acceleration that makes the default WM hang on login, and not even "glxgears" works anymore. Any attempts to disable hardware acceleration have failed (not only X doesn't have a configuration file by default anymore, but it also segfaults when trying to generate one with "X -configure" and ignores any option I set manually).
Aside from the X problems, stand-by no longer works. The machine just dies never to wake up again.
The problems just go on and on.
It isn't a usable machine for anything other than simple web browsing, and even there it has issues with flash, which stutters playing the simplest of videos, even though it doesn't peg the CPU.
I've used the knowledge I accumulated from these years for my work (where I have a bunch of Linux servers working just fine), but I say that Linux on the desktop won't ever amount to nothing, no matter how much that turd is polished.
It's even more sad if you think that while all this was going on in the Linux desktop, Apple has successfully launched an unix desktop that has been stable and usable for years. So it is possible and in a short timeframe, which means that Linux on the desktop is a failed experience.
"It's even more sad if you think that while all this was going on in the Linux desktop, Apple has successfully launched an unix desktop that has been stable and usable for years. So it is possible and in a short timeframe, which means that Linux on the desktop is a failed experience."
You're comparing apples with pears :)
Apple design an OS for a supremely limited range of hardware. Your comparison isn't fair.
Did the same thing at a similar time. Played with Linux from 1999 till 2002 then made the switch until I got a Mac mini in 2005, used Linux and OS X until 2006 when I got a Yonah MacBook and then basically used OS X almost exclusively on the desktop.
(I still have Linux servers and a Windows box as a hybrid gaming box / htpc / NAS but that should be replaced with an Apple TV, Drobo FS, and Xbox 360 or something)
I suspect this is a symptom of the author getting older, not desktop Linux getting worse.
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!
But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).
I started using linux as my main OS around '98, and stopped doing that in '05. My reasons at the time were the same: consistently problematic driver/codec support, glitches that kept cropping up requiring low-level maintenance to resolve, and low-quality productivity software (office and image editing).
The irony is that I know it's no use to complain to people still "inside" the linux community about this, because I used to be one of them and I know what I answered to those people that complained: pick better hardware (so much choice), pick better software (even more choice), learn how to use the software (you luser), learn to build your own (with this easy 23 step guide), and finally the conversation-ender "works fine for me" (so your experience is irrelevant).
It was of course all a delusion on my part. As much as I claimed that it worked fine for me, it didn't. Not really, not 100%. So it became a trade-off, which deficiencies were worse? Those of windows, those of the mac, or those of linux? I ended up on the mac, but it's also not 100%. It still sucks just a little bit. All I've ever wanted is for there to be one OS that doesn't suck, and I'll pay top dollar (or euro) to use it, but I've never found it. I always have to pick the least sucky one, and that really sucks.
Shrug. Whatever. My home machine has been Gentoo since 2006/2007 or so, while there have been problems not directly caused by me (like corrupting a filesystem then recovering it, or unmasking packages when I shouldn't) most of them are solved by config options in the kernel, USE flags, or elsewhere. I don't remember needing to ever write a device driver. The only desktop experience I lack is certain big-name games I can only get from Steam, in which case I just boot into Windows 7, curse and mutter at the (in my view) crappy UI that gets in my way, before I launch the game I want. I don't really find a plethora of poor-quality apps either, at least in the sense that apps are noticeably poorer quality than apps-in-general. With Firefox, my gentoo version is significantly faster than Windows 7's. And more and more of my apps are moving online... Ah well. Goes back to programming, which he detests doing in Windows even with cygwin
I think the postscript is quite rude. Disregarding possible criticism because he's a Linux sysadmin and has contributed to the kernel. To be fair, he's doing something wrong even if he doesn't want to admit it: choosing the wrong hardware. His most direct and important complaints come down to that.
I bought a new computer past summer and all its hardware worked properly from day zero, ethernet, wifi, 3D acceleration, suspending, hibernating and dual-monitors included. I chose the right hardware. Flash support? The 64-bit flash plugin is not crashing here. I use flashblock to avoid possible security problems, but I use it in Windows too, to avoid annoying ads with sound. The quality of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is good enough for desktop users, in my humble opinion.
And the rest of the post is debatable at least. Linux and its software ecosystem are not to blame for poor Skype support, for example.
I would support his position if only because, in this day and age, should a Linux power user have to do hours and hours of research to avoid purchasing the 'wrong' hardware? To me, his opinion boils down to: bad support for cutting edge (or even just current day) tech. He mentioned at the beginning that he was a cutting edge guy.
Desktop Linux is really for people that can/will line up all their ducks in a row (and then sometimes debug those ducks) when upgrading hardware. Even as a technical person I can understand if you don't wish to continue to pour time into that sort of thing.
To be fair, the wide adoption of notebooks made it harder to "choose" the right hardware. With a desktop PC you could just (in the worst case) replace individual components lacking proper driver support whereas with a notebook you basically have to do all that "research" up front. I think this made it somewhat harder to use Linux as a desktop OS, though it's not the fault of Linux (or some particular distribution).
While not optimal, virtualization can be a solution in many cases: Using a 64 bit Linux server, a 32 bit Linux desktop (in regards to Linux I don't quite see the benefit of 64 bit at this point) and your host OS of choice is becoming encreasingly practical with memory prices getting lower. Better than throwing out Linux (with the many great hacker -friendly features it has) or having to select an older notebook just to run it.
(I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, just wanted to add another angle)
As a firm Linux user, who has got no windows influence in my household, entire family gone Linux in some shape or form, I can't see as a power user how he is prepared to make this switch.
I know that Linux so often makes you put up with compromises and so often it is at the graphics card hurdle that it starts to annoy, but I think the 3 things he'll miss is the things which will eventually drive him back.
Firstly, the shell is one thing that seems irreplaceable, yes you could use cygwin or equivalent but nothing will fill the void of a shell that is so beautifully incorporated into the OS, more than OSX in my mind, despite them being the same shell, Linux makes no excuses and is proud of its Shell.
Transparency, Yes this is important, but something I know I could live without, as he mentions he doesnt do this as often as before and really its main purpose was for fixes with drivers.
Package Management and I would stretch further to even open source and free software will drive him back. I had a stint where I could only use Vista for about 7 days, the reminder of the horrors of "shareware" software and 30 day trials had me looking forward to getting back to "apt-get install"
I agree that a switch to Windows does not make sense. I fled to OS X because I'm a Unix biggot and don't want a system that doesn't ship with zsh or bash. Apparently darwin's posix API sucks and is different from Linux but I'm not affected by that directly so don't really care.
Cinch, SizeUp, and Divvy provide all the tiling things I need for window management and they unobtrusively just enhance my normal environment, it's great. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore. I miss dpkg and apt but homebrew is good enough and I regularly fire up Linux VMs if I just need to, vagrant is awesome for this. (vagrantup.com)
The latest Ubuntu version works so well with multiple monitors I almost can't imagine going back to standard Gnome. The interface has actually helped me become more productive.
I run NVIDIA graphics and have no problems .. I realise the latest and greatest takes a while to become fully supported on my platform of choice, and often solutions to problems require research and time - but I'd rather accept this compromise than use Windows.
Windows feels like Fisher Price, Linux feels more like Mechano - in the sense that it presents opportunities rather than fully packaged solutions
This is why I'm an OS X user. I'm not particularly bullish on OS X and find some of its guts a bit disappointing, but it's the only UNIX with a good UI that will run a significant share of the best apps out there. Yet you still get all the POSIX joy and if you strip it down, an experience that's much how Linux should be. What confuses me is why anyone would switch from Linux to Windows if they do anything where Linux had the upper hand?
> What confuses me is why anyone would switch from Linux to Windows if they do anything where Linux had the upper hand?
Makes as much sense as switching to OS X. The Mac OS is not Linux.
If you're developing for Linux, or using something like GHC where the OS X version is a least-favorite stepchild, or if you need package management as capable as APT or the FreeBSD Ports Collection – then if you aren't running Linux as your desktop OS, you're most likely running it in a VM, regardless of whether your host OS is OS X or Windows. In fact the author explicitly says he's doing as much.
So "somewhat but not quite like Linux" isn't something the author would strictly need to look for in his host OS. Intead he can take other factors into account, such as reliability, performance, available applications, and hardware choice, quality, and cost.
I feel the opposite way. I recently bought a Thinkpad T410 with Windows 7. It came with a lot of useless stuff and was impossible to run our Rails app on it (RMagick does not play well with Windows). I first switched to OSX and the driver situation was abysmal. The thing never went to sleep, even with the laptop lid closed. Wifi never worked. All this can be expected when running on non-Apple hardware. But what's worse and inherent to OSX is the terribly inconsistent key bindings. Each application behaves differently with respect to the Apple, option, and control keys. I could never configure the key bindings to my liking, no matter how many 3rd party apps I tried.
Finally I installed Ubuntu and I've never looked back. Nearly everything just worked, with the exception of plugging in an external monitor. The experience was much smoother than on Windows or Mac. I'm very happy with the Unity desktop.
One thing that has me fed up with proprietary software was that although I had purchased Photoshop CS5 for Mac, it was nearly impossible to activate. I had to call Adobe because I was upgrading from a Windows CS2 to a Mac CS5. Once I had to reinstall everything and the installer asked me to go through the whole process again. With Ubuntu I can download and install software almost effortlessly. It's not worth the hassle to spend lots of money and not even be able to use a piece of software. I'd rather use Gimp, despite some UI weaknesses. The only thing that made me want Photoshop in the first place was better compatibility with other Photoshop users' files. For myself, Gimp is more than adequate.
I'm kind of curious who has the selection bias here, me and my social group or the people responding to this thread. I've been using Ubuntu since 2008 and before that some hodgepodge of Gentoo and Fedora since '06.
Since going to Ubuntu, I seem to never have trouble with applications working, Internet connectivity, or graphics. I have two computers a desktop circa 2006 with an old ATI card (x1900, I think) and a dell mini 9 both running the Ubuntu 11.04.
I certainly have troubles with Flash, but they are infrequent and usually only necessitate killing Flash from Chrome's task manager.
On the Dell Mini, I occasionally have wifi issues, but since the 10.XX series, the frequency of these problems has dropped significantly.
As far as changing to Unity, I honestly don't care. I've been using Gnome-Do since around '09, so ditching the menus hasn't bothered me at all.
I have friends using Ubuntu as well and they don't seem to have insurmountable problems either, although they have been migrating to OS X in search of a more beautiful user experience.
But going to Windows? I couldn't imagine getting any development done on that OS.
I've not had a single major problem with Linux since adopting the following strategy: a) check whether your hardware is compatible before buying b) don't install a distro hot off the press.
It should be obvious to anyone who's been using Linux for a while that a new dual intel/nvidia gpu mobile card is not going to be sorted out until quite a while after release. If he was a newbie I'd feel some sympathy but he's not. The rest of his rant is about the past.
OK, I'm a Linux Desktop user on a daily basis, I use Linux Mint KDE at the moment, before that I was using Fedora KDE Spin, before that Kubuntu, ...
I've been using Linux for 6 years, the first year I was dual-booting with Windows because I had a project in asp.net, but when It was finished I formatted that partition and use it as a backup storage now.
I have a HP laptop with everything Intel on it, from WiFi card to Graphics card, and everything is supproted out-of-the-box. With plain Ubuntu Live CD I can have 3D desktops and connect to WiFi networks without a problem. For multimedia Linux is strong, Flash works without problem, although if you're on 64bit it may use your CPU more than it should.
The only problem which I have and the blog post author has is Skype and Office Suites. Skype works OK but it's not up-to-date as in Windows or OS X, and LibreOffice (or it's older dying daddy, OpenOffice.org) is OK but not perfect.
As for "Poor quality of desktop apps" point, I don't use Nautilus but Dolphin, and not Firefox but Opera, and I'm happy with it.
The point in the Linux Desktop is that you don't have to stay on the default Linux distributions choice, but you can customize/change/mix everything.
And for hardware, before buying a new machine, check if everything will work out of the box on the distribution you desire to install on it later.
bye bye past 'hardcore Linux user'
P.S. There are numerous posts where the author recalls on past problems, so, they aren't really problems now.
I'm pretty happy with Linux on the desktop these days, but I am ecstatic to see someone complaining about desktop Linux and asking for stuff to WORK instead of just yammering on about redesigning the user experience to appeal to less and less sophisticated users. It's like the good old days of Linux on the desktop, when I still felt like I was a target user instead of the enemy. These days with the Linux desktop I feel like a loving wife who is a perfect match for my husband but is doomed to be abandoned because I mirror everything he wishes he could change about himself: nerdy, niche, not someone the alpha males (the Steves) pay any attention to. And here is this guy asserting that even the opinion of an admitted "professional sys admin" and "former kernel hacker" deserves respect! I love it!
> I’ve spent a lot of time with Fedora, Gentoo and Arch Linux.
So this guy has tried two advanced distros (Gentoo and Arch), plus one "beginner" distro which (from my experience) has provided nothing but frustration, and he's giving up on Linux because it's "too hard"?
How can you claim Linux to be "too hard" when you haven't even tried Ubuntu?
The issues are not technical they have been business issues that caused Linux never to "Cross the Chasm".
Blame falls on Intel and AMD who use Linux really just as leverage against MSFT and never have given 100% commitment to it (e.g. Intel GMA500) except on severs.
The world has moved to laptops - Microsoft still gets money for every Linux machine sold and almost none are bundled with a Linux OS that works(I once bought a MSI Wind with Suse that hand an incompatible wifi card!!). Even Dell has back-peddled.
The main failure I believe has been Taiwanese hardware companies in their fear of Microsoft or their greed almost never advertise "Works with Linux".
I agree with the other poster - you would never buy Apple equipment without looking at compatibility beforehand - why not Linux.
I watch kids using Linux desktop and it is all about using browsers. Chrome and opera work very well under Linux. Tablets - are they the future of the linux desktop?
The poster neglects to mention that that the Linux desktop has moved to the hand held - android, meego maemo etc. Where the user experience was actually very good. Driver support is better than windows.
[+] [-] jbk|15 years ago|reply
However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.
- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...
- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...
- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.
- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...
- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.
So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.
However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)
[+] [-] jerf|15 years ago|reply
1. Glorious design
2. Shitty first pass, released anyhow and made a standard
3. Laboriously fixing it over the period of years until it converges on "Slightly-but-only-slightly less sucky than what it replaced"
4. Goto 1
has become the standard operating procedure of the Linux desktop world.
I am not convinced that the Gnome and KDE projects are good organizational strategies. Replacing a lumbering behemoth accountable to its many customers with lumbering behemoths accountable to essentially nobody is not an improvement, no matter how "open" the latter may be.
(Oh, and I was happy only because I'm a professional programmer and I still prefer the command line over any "semantic desktop". I freely acknowledge this is not the common case.)
[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
[+] [-] CrLf|15 years ago|reply
Having an opinion about the miserable state of the Linux desktop has nothing to do with open-source advocacy. The success of many open-source projects including Linux itself (on everything but the desktop) is proof that the model works, and can produce quality software, often better than the proprietary alternatives.
I too am an open-source advocate, and I've met insult and disdain when I rant about the desktop "holy cow". There's just something there that makes people blind to the issues, and it's the same thing that makes the issues pile up and not get fixed. It just doesn't happen very often now because I seldom give enough of a crap about this long-lost battle to even enter the discussion.
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.
Decisions about where to go next re. Desktop paradigms are tricky ... but I think the main problem is lack of strong and decisive leadership; largely due to the problems inherent to an open development hierarchy. A paradigm shift often requires a leap of faith. Without that, any changes becomes a patchwork or amalgamation of multiple people's ideas - which in my mind isn't optimal.
I reckon Mark Shuttleworth is trying to create a paradigm shift with Ubuntu .. and I applaud him. There's so much life left in Linux as desktop platform. To state otherwise is shortsighted, and ultimately damaging to an incredibly vibrant and worthy platform.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|15 years ago|reply
Power management with linux on laptops has been going downhill since sometime and today I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 (maybe Phoronix is right with its power regression hullabaloo)
Suspend and resume still sucks (https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 presumably fixed in 2.6.38 but still gives me problems frequently). Displayport/HDMI out on my laptop does not send out audio and until I used a custom PPA kernel, multi-monitor out on my laptop used to lockup frequently.
All of these things work seamlessly on Windows 7.
I am willing to pay good money for a seamless Linux desktop (~100$ for something that works seamlessly and timely updates) - if that's what it takes to get someone to focus on something of value, like TuxOnIce, rather than placement of close buttons on the left vs right.
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
(And yes, on my video-playing box, I use PulseAudio, and listen to stuff with Bluetooth headphones. Turn them on, audio switches to Bluetooth without the mplayer session even being affected. Turn them off, back to the TV's speakers. It just works. And I set this up by clicking pretty things in a GUI.)
[+] [-] chipsy|15 years ago|reply
As it is, the Linux desktop is still working towards "yesterday's experience," since we don't have good enough browsers and there are tons and tons of legacy apps. Unfortunately, supporting yesterday's experience is harder for usability since it's conceptually richer, and most of these concepts are dueling at the bits-and-bytes level, where they're hard to reason about and present in digestible ways. The browser can blackbox a lot of stuff behind the standard APIs, something which the OS does not enjoy.
Another problem, just as large, is that there continues to be lots of new hardware, and correspondingly new drivers to support and specs to reverse engineer(since many manufacturers remain unwilling to assist). This is a problem that can only be solved by maintaining a hardware taskforce roughly proportional to the amount of new hardware released, but it's not particularly interesting or sexy, and it's not a core goal of most of the Linux ecosystem to create premium-grade drivers for all hardware.
[+] [-] pavpanchekha|15 years ago|reply
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.
[+] [-] vegai|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] motters|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jakevoytko|15 years ago|reply
As of December, I'm all Linux. I run Ubuntu at home. I use Linux at work, except when I need to debug OS-specific browsers. I never want to go back; Gnome hits my sweet spot. I want an OS that starts up and becomes invisible until shutdown, and I never want to touch the mouse. Ubuntu's out-of-the-box installation is probably still unusable for people without a tech background, but I love it.
I spend most of my time in Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, lots of Chrome tabs for testing + looking up reference material, Emacs, IntelliJ, and lots of terminals. I almost never need other software, and when I do, it's an apt-get away.
I've had challenges - I've never seen Ubuntu completely work on a fresh install. My wireless failed on my newest desktop install. The sound on the two before that. They never bundle my wireless driver, so I drag my desktop over to my modem. My printer gives baffling error messages. My old webcam arbitrarily rezoomed as it pleased. Gnome 3 overrode the "invert colors" keyboard shortcut, which I use heavily. I needed to steal time on my girlfriend's iMac to run Portal 2. My supercharged Toshiba laptop freezes when running on battery power (may not be Linux's fault).
But these are most of the problems I've faced in the past two years. I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.
[+] [-] DanI-S|15 years ago|reply
My experiences:
- Utter inability to consume streaming video, be it Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.
- Complete madness wrestling with the built-in, broken version of Ruby.
- Real difficulty finding any clear, accurate documentation.
- Out-of-date crappy versions of libraries available through apt-get.
- Printing? Ha.
- I can't play Minecraft, which is a Java game.
- GMail freezing on load 3 times out of 5.
Rather than liberating me from the bondage of win32, it has made me feel like a third class citizen of the digital world. The consequence? I am buying a Mac.
Edit: I wouldn't usually complain about a downvote, but this is a list of difficulties I have experienced when using an operating system. What do you object to?
[+] [-] ch0wn|15 years ago|reply
This.
That's the same reason why I love Ubuntu as my desktop. I'm hardly doing anything outside of the browser, except for coding and writing with Vim.
> I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.
Even though upgrades aren't that frequent on other platforms, they do exist. Every two or three releases I take the chance to make a fresh start and it's incredible how fast I can set up the desktop to fit my needs. Ubuntu's/Debian's excellent package management is a huge time saver.
[+] [-] GrooveStomp|15 years ago|reply
I've been using some flavour of Linux as my primary OS for over three years now. Windows 7 seems like a big improvement over previous version of Windows, but I have driver issues like you wouldn't believe, whereas Ubuntu works flawlessly on first installation on the same hardware. OSX is nice, but it's just uncomfortable because it offers a lot of what Linux offers, but in a rigid, UI-driven way that you'd expect from Windows.
For technical users, (technical users like me, at least) Linux is still where it's at.
[+] [-] enoren|15 years ago|reply
My install experience was pretty flawless. I have moved 2 desktops and 3 laptops over to Ubuntu(10.4, 10.10 and 11.04) and have not had any real problems except for a 3d acceleration issue on a 10 year old ATI video card. Been going for about 6 months this way and really find it painful to work in Windows now.
[+] [-] pimeys|15 years ago|reply
My work desktop is a simple two monitor setup with xmonad, several urxvt terminals, vim instances and two browsers of choice (firefox and chrome). I love it because there's no distractions, only code is visible and browser when I need it. I even use mutt with Exchange (a very perverse setup through davmail, thank you corporate policies) so I don't get notifications for emails which would distract me from programming.
[+] [-] extension|15 years ago|reply
But in defense of Linux, it has come a long way over the last decade, due to a few earth-moving forces:
- The rise of the web and end of the Windows native app lock-in
- The mainstream acceptance of open source and platform independent software engineering
- Canonical's aggressive, financially backed push to make Linux a viable mainstream desktop OS
It's easy to forget how many classic pain points have been more or less cured: building everything from source, recompiling the kernel, font rendering, working with office documents, configuring everything manually by editing text files, complete absense of tasteful design, no cross-platform apps or games whatsoever, and nobody having ever heard of your OS.
Linux is not there yet. It's still perfectly reasonable to throw your arms up and switch. But at this point, the historical trend suggests that it will get there eventually. It has never really stopped inching forward and we haven't yet seen anything that could stop it.
The Linux ecosystem doesn't burn through capital, so it can't collapse overnight like a commercial platform can. All it needs to sustain it is interest. The interest could dry up, for example if everybody starts caring only about data and not code. But if nobody's interested in it anymore, then it probably doesn't matter if it goes away.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ori_b|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] araneae|15 years ago|reply
I just can't see ever moving back to Windows because I couldn't stand to lose the shell. I could see myself moving to MacOS, but I don't understand how a sys admin could stomach doing so if I could not.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|15 years ago|reply
"Try _distro_ - everything just works for me!"
and/or
"research before you buy!"
The 'it all works for me crowd'. I don't believe most of you most of the time. "Works" is in the eye of the beholder, and most of the time I've found that people who make that claim don't have anywhere near the same work style that I do.
Example: running audio from 4 different apps simultaneously all mixed together is a no-brainer under OSX/Windows, but is something most Linux users don't even dream of, because they've never even been able to try it (whoops, amarok is running, so I can't get AIM sound alerts, etc.) If they've never done it, the "works for me crowd" can't possibly know what 'works' means for them is light years away from what 'works' means to me.
"Research before you buy". Where and how? Show me an up to date list which shows even most of the compatibility aspects of stuff I can go buy in a store against recent distros. Googling around and finding that I can get Ubuntu 5.04 running on hardware from 2004 does me absolutely 0 good. Manufacturers don't always show you the exact chipsets used (and may often change chipset revisions and just ship new windows drivers in the box), and yet even if you do happen to know every single internal spec of hardware before you buy it, no one else will have bought it to determine if it works. Someone's gotta be first, unless the manufacturers would actually start certifying that "distro X" runs on particular configurations (which ain't gonna happen).
The majority of us live in a world where when we want a computer we're going to go to a local store and buy something. If Linux users want their stuff to be more widely adopted, they need to adapt to that reality. I suspect most Linux users don't really care, and are happy being 'cutting edge' and compiling new drivers to test stuff out. Really, it's an exciting and interesting way of life for some people, but one which I and many others eventually outgrow.
[+] [-] jessor|15 years ago|reply
honestly, this just works out of the box for several years now (on ubuntu, debian and arch linux at least).
[+] [-] Symmetry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciurus|15 years ago|reply
The manufacturers have started certifying that Ubuntu runs on particular configurations.
For instance, here is the certification report for the Lenovo X220 that has been mentioned several times in this discussion.
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201102-7303
[+] [-] sciurus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrLf|15 years ago|reply
I used it almost exclusively until 2006, when I finally had enough. At the time I moved to Windows and abandoned Linux on the desktop completely, but I've since switched to OS X.
I can relate to the author. I spent years messing around with my systems, which was fun for a while. Every 6 months I'd reinstall my desktop box with the lastest version of Red Hat (and then Fedora) and spend the next week or two filing bug reports in bugzilla, and patching some stuff.
But after a few years, what was a learning experience, becomes a permanent wound in your sound engineering sense. It just isn't possible that something that has an insane amount of bugs with every new release will ever be something reliable and usable. Not with so many regressions, never fixed problems, and unbelievably in-your-face issues.
I've tried to return, to see if any progress was made. About once a year I install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora, but every time it seems the same, or worse in some aspects.
My last test was Ubuntu 11.04 on an old Toshiba laptop from late 2005 that I still have. It used to work apparently fine with just the LCD brightness control not working, and later with the usual application quirks, bugs and crashes.
However, the latest version has "new" drivers for the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card, which non-working 3D acceleration that makes the default WM hang on login, and not even "glxgears" works anymore. Any attempts to disable hardware acceleration have failed (not only X doesn't have a configuration file by default anymore, but it also segfaults when trying to generate one with "X -configure" and ignores any option I set manually).
Aside from the X problems, stand-by no longer works. The machine just dies never to wake up again.
The problems just go on and on.
It isn't a usable machine for anything other than simple web browsing, and even there it has issues with flash, which stutters playing the simplest of videos, even though it doesn't peg the CPU.
I've used the knowledge I accumulated from these years for my work (where I have a bunch of Linux servers working just fine), but I say that Linux on the desktop won't ever amount to nothing, no matter how much that turd is polished.
It's even more sad if you think that while all this was going on in the Linux desktop, Apple has successfully launched an unix desktop that has been stable and usable for years. So it is possible and in a short timeframe, which means that Linux on the desktop is a failed experience.
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
You're comparing apples with pears :)
Apple design an OS for a supremely limited range of hardware. Your comparison isn't fair.
[+] [-] sjs|15 years ago|reply
(I still have Linux servers and a Windows box as a hybrid gaming box / htpc / NAS but that should be replaced with an Apple TV, Drobo FS, and Xbox 360 or something)
[+] [-] argarg|15 years ago|reply
Apple got the huge advantage to have control over their hardware, which I believe makes all the difference.
[+] [-] qjz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|15 years ago|reply
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!
But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).
[+] [-] Joeri|15 years ago|reply
The irony is that I know it's no use to complain to people still "inside" the linux community about this, because I used to be one of them and I know what I answered to those people that complained: pick better hardware (so much choice), pick better software (even more choice), learn how to use the software (you luser), learn to build your own (with this easy 23 step guide), and finally the conversation-ender "works fine for me" (so your experience is irrelevant).
It was of course all a delusion on my part. As much as I claimed that it worked fine for me, it didn't. Not really, not 100%. So it became a trade-off, which deficiencies were worse? Those of windows, those of the mac, or those of linux? I ended up on the mac, but it's also not 100%. It still sucks just a little bit. All I've ever wanted is for there to be one OS that doesn't suck, and I'll pay top dollar (or euro) to use it, but I've never found it. I always have to pick the least sucky one, and that really sucks.
[+] [-] Jach|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rg3|15 years ago|reply
I bought a new computer past summer and all its hardware worked properly from day zero, ethernet, wifi, 3D acceleration, suspending, hibernating and dual-monitors included. I chose the right hardware. Flash support? The 64-bit flash plugin is not crashing here. I use flashblock to avoid possible security problems, but I use it in Windows too, to avoid annoying ads with sound. The quality of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is good enough for desktop users, in my humble opinion.
And the rest of the post is debatable at least. Linux and its software ecosystem are not to blame for poor Skype support, for example.
[+] [-] whazzmaster|15 years ago|reply
Desktop Linux is really for people that can/will line up all their ducks in a row (and then sometimes debug those ducks) when upgrading hardware. Even as a technical person I can understand if you don't wish to continue to pour time into that sort of thing.
[+] [-] kaiwetzel|15 years ago|reply
While not optimal, virtualization can be a solution in many cases: Using a 64 bit Linux server, a 32 bit Linux desktop (in regards to Linux I don't quite see the benefit of 64 bit at this point) and your host OS of choice is becoming encreasingly practical with memory prices getting lower. Better than throwing out Linux (with the many great hacker -friendly features it has) or having to select an older notebook just to run it.
(I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, just wanted to add another angle)
[+] [-] Newky|15 years ago|reply
I know that Linux so often makes you put up with compromises and so often it is at the graphics card hurdle that it starts to annoy, but I think the 3 things he'll miss is the things which will eventually drive him back.
Firstly, the shell is one thing that seems irreplaceable, yes you could use cygwin or equivalent but nothing will fill the void of a shell that is so beautifully incorporated into the OS, more than OSX in my mind, despite them being the same shell, Linux makes no excuses and is proud of its Shell.
Transparency, Yes this is important, but something I know I could live without, as he mentions he doesnt do this as often as before and really its main purpose was for fixes with drivers.
Package Management and I would stretch further to even open source and free software will drive him back. I had a stint where I could only use Vista for about 7 days, the reminder of the horrors of "shareware" software and 30 day trials had me looking forward to getting back to "apt-get install"
[+] [-] sjs|15 years ago|reply
Cinch, SizeUp, and Divvy provide all the tiling things I need for window management and they unobtrusively just enhance my normal environment, it's great. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore. I miss dpkg and apt but homebrew is good enough and I regularly fire up Linux VMs if I just need to, vagrant is awesome for this. (vagrantup.com)
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
I run NVIDIA graphics and have no problems .. I realise the latest and greatest takes a while to become fully supported on my platform of choice, and often solutions to problems require research and time - but I'd rather accept this compromise than use Windows.
Windows feels like Fisher Price, Linux feels more like Mechano - in the sense that it presents opportunities rather than fully packaged solutions
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Niten|15 years ago|reply
Makes as much sense as switching to OS X. The Mac OS is not Linux.
If you're developing for Linux, or using something like GHC where the OS X version is a least-favorite stepchild, or if you need package management as capable as APT or the FreeBSD Ports Collection – then if you aren't running Linux as your desktop OS, you're most likely running it in a VM, regardless of whether your host OS is OS X or Windows. In fact the author explicitly says he's doing as much.
So "somewhat but not quite like Linux" isn't something the author would strictly need to look for in his host OS. Intead he can take other factors into account, such as reliability, performance, available applications, and hardware choice, quality, and cost.
[+] [-] reedlaw|15 years ago|reply
Finally I installed Ubuntu and I've never looked back. Nearly everything just worked, with the exception of plugging in an external monitor. The experience was much smoother than on Windows or Mac. I'm very happy with the Unity desktop.
One thing that has me fed up with proprietary software was that although I had purchased Photoshop CS5 for Mac, it was nearly impossible to activate. I had to call Adobe because I was upgrading from a Windows CS2 to a Mac CS5. Once I had to reinstall everything and the installer asked me to go through the whole process again. With Ubuntu I can download and install software almost effortlessly. It's not worth the hassle to spend lots of money and not even be able to use a piece of software. I'd rather use Gimp, despite some UI weaknesses. The only thing that made me want Photoshop in the first place was better compatibility with other Photoshop users' files. For myself, Gimp is more than adequate.
[+] [-] danking00|15 years ago|reply
Since going to Ubuntu, I seem to never have trouble with applications working, Internet connectivity, or graphics. I have two computers a desktop circa 2006 with an old ATI card (x1900, I think) and a dell mini 9 both running the Ubuntu 11.04.
I certainly have troubles with Flash, but they are infrequent and usually only necessitate killing Flash from Chrome's task manager.
On the Dell Mini, I occasionally have wifi issues, but since the 10.XX series, the frequency of these problems has dropped significantly.
As far as changing to Unity, I honestly don't care. I've been using Gnome-Do since around '09, so ditching the menus hasn't bothered me at all.
I have friends using Ubuntu as well and they don't seem to have insurmountable problems either, although they have been migrating to OS X in search of a more beautiful user experience.
But going to Windows? I couldn't imagine getting any development done on that OS.
[+] [-] drats|15 years ago|reply
It should be obvious to anyone who's been using Linux for a while that a new dual intel/nvidia gpu mobile card is not going to be sorted out until quite a while after release. If he was a newbie I'd feel some sympathy but he's not. The rest of his rant is about the past.
[+] [-] moondowner|15 years ago|reply
I've been using Linux for 6 years, the first year I was dual-booting with Windows because I had a project in asp.net, but when It was finished I formatted that partition and use it as a backup storage now.
I have a HP laptop with everything Intel on it, from WiFi card to Graphics card, and everything is supproted out-of-the-box. With plain Ubuntu Live CD I can have 3D desktops and connect to WiFi networks without a problem. For multimedia Linux is strong, Flash works without problem, although if you're on 64bit it may use your CPU more than it should.
The only problem which I have and the blog post author has is Skype and Office Suites. Skype works OK but it's not up-to-date as in Windows or OS X, and LibreOffice (or it's older dying daddy, OpenOffice.org) is OK but not perfect.
As for "Poor quality of desktop apps" point, I don't use Nautilus but Dolphin, and not Firefox but Opera, and I'm happy with it.
The point in the Linux Desktop is that you don't have to stay on the default Linux distributions choice, but you can customize/change/mix everything.
And for hardware, before buying a new machine, check if everything will work out of the box on the distribution you desire to install on it later.
bye bye past 'hardcore Linux user'
P.S. There are numerous posts where the author recalls on past problems, so, they aren't really problems now.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|15 years ago|reply
So this guy has tried two advanced distros (Gentoo and Arch), plus one "beginner" distro which (from my experience) has provided nothing but frustration, and he's giving up on Linux because it's "too hard"?
How can you claim Linux to be "too hard" when you haven't even tried Ubuntu?
[+] [-] anthony_barker|15 years ago|reply
Blame falls on Intel and AMD who use Linux really just as leverage against MSFT and never have given 100% commitment to it (e.g. Intel GMA500) except on severs.
The world has moved to laptops - Microsoft still gets money for every Linux machine sold and almost none are bundled with a Linux OS that works(I once bought a MSI Wind with Suse that hand an incompatible wifi card!!). Even Dell has back-peddled.
The main failure I believe has been Taiwanese hardware companies in their fear of Microsoft or their greed almost never advertise "Works with Linux".
I agree with the other poster - you would never buy Apple equipment without looking at compatibility beforehand - why not Linux.
I watch kids using Linux desktop and it is all about using browsers. Chrome and opera work very well under Linux. Tablets - are they the future of the linux desktop?
The poster neglects to mention that that the Linux desktop has moved to the hand held - android, meego maemo etc. Where the user experience was actually very good. Driver support is better than windows.