> We need a consistent way for third-parties to distribute software
Isn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration from.
The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least .deb, .rpm and tarball packages.
In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.
The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls, bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).
Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.
After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.
If App stores took inspiration from anywhere it was the iTunes music store and other similar digital media stores, although the first such system, the 'Electronic App Wrapper'[1] for NeXT, predates Linux, distros, OSX and iTunes. So maybe it's a more iterative process where digital software stores inspired iTunes, which in turn inspired the latest generation of App stores?
I believe that the author means that vendors have been saying for a very long time that there is no cross-distribution place to keep config files, or set of environment variables, etc. What the Linux Standard Base was invented to address.
Both OS X and modern Windows desktops have process sandboxing that is actually used. Perhaps Linux will catch up, but it's not looking very good right now.
Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only programs that are written by your friends.
Not really, at least Linux has formal-ish model of how processes are supposed to interact. The Windows security model starts badly plus about 10 000 special cases that aren't documented where you will trip various heuristics only there in the first place because Windows does not have a good security model to begin with. All this to enable people do download shareware from the internet, run it and have it probably not own the users PC.
And yet as of 2015, getting sound to work properly is still a crapshoot. Artsd was a major pain 13 years ago, I'm sure pulseaudio has more features today, but it's still an intractable mess.
What is on in your end that sound is still such an issue?
Admittedly my system is PulseAudio-free with only one exception, that being Skype. I should consider using a compatibility layer like apulse that just multiplexes ALSA calls under the hood.
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for about 15 years, and sound has always been a pain to deal with. I used S/PDIF on my last machine, and it took me months of browsing through endless threads to get the thing to work properly. Skype just won't play any sound as of my last install, I have no idea why, I've given up on it.
To get my last monitor to work properly, I had to manually enter modelines in xorg.conf. If the monitor goes in powersave mode, the full resolution won't be available until I restart X. (It's a Seiki 4K TV, not standard by any means, but hardly "exotic")
Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't recommend desktop Linux to anyone normal, I just tell them to get an Apple computer.
IIRC I remedied my Skype installation by uncommenting the hardware detection modules (udev and static) in default.pa(5). You could try starting it from the apulse shim, alternatively.
I'll agree PulseAudio is esoteric, but thankfully not that many client applications have a hard dependency on it, though it is popular with integrated DEs.
But the fact that I need a tip on HN to know which config files to edit to get Skype working is precisely why Linux on the Desktop isn't quite there yet :)
(the fault may very well lie with Skype, but from a user experience standpoint, that's irrelevant)
my sound worked out of the box with pulseaudio -- installed the package, added start-pulseaudio-x11 to my ~/.xprofile (arch doesn't have anything by default), and it worked.
even skype (!) worked out of the box (both speakers and microphones).
I was actually impressed by GNOME the last time I had to print. It found the required driver in seconds, downloaded it in a few instants, and I was ready to print. Compared to Windows where I had to search during half an hour the driver on the HP website and it installed 350 megabytes of crapware.
(of course it's not the same experience for all printers, my 15 years old printer works perfectly on Windows and Linux, and I can't install a network Ricoh printer on Windows or Linux)
Printing is so much easier to do on Linux than on Windows now. I think at some point a group of people must have decided that they weren't going to be the butt of any more jokes about printing, and decided to completely fix it.
Setting up my home printer under Windows takes me the best part of 30 minutes every single time I need to do it. Under Linux its detected automatically, and works first time.
That group of people was Apple. They threw their weight behind the CUPS project in the early 2000s, hired the main developer, and continued to finance its development.
I'd completely forgotten about Apple's involvement with CUPS, but that does explain a lot. Between that and Bonjour/Zeroconf early 2000s Apple made my home networking life so much easier.
I have very inexpensively kept two kids printing over most of their entire school careers with Epsons, recently with an NX330 wireless all-in-one which just works and refillable carts. I can only remember one clog/cleaning issue, but a new cart resolved it.
I was in the market to buy a printer that I wanted to use with Linux. I looked at the compatibility chart for Epson printers. Every single one is supported. Made my life easy. True to form, it worked out of the box. Avahi found it. Used the Cups web interface to install the driver. No issues.
On the topic of supported platforms, when I bought a new laptop, I went with Toshiba because, at least with the Japanese models, every single one supports Linux.
The fact that I can buy new, off the shelf equipment and have it work on Linux with no issues is really what is new for me. You still have to do your homework, but I remember the days of having to look around for used equipment to make sure that it would work with Linux. Those days seems to be over.
My lily-white ass it has. If anything, my experience with the Linux distro ecosystem in the last year is worse than I have ever had with Linux going back some 20 years. I would frankly trade any of the dozens of broken "robust desktop distros" for just Red Hat 7 or Mandrake or early 2000's Debian.
I have gone through any of nearly a dozen different distros in the last year, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, more I'm probably forgetting, and every single one of them failed within weeks. Most wouldn't even boot on my hardware, others had weird limitations, while still others just completely ate themselves during routine updates or version changes.
At this point I'd sooner use FreeBSD, or swallow my annoyance with PC-BSD's security model and give that another go.
same. i use arch with awesomewm and everything works quite fine. i only had one kernel panic and that was due to the freaking wifi drivers (macbooks have broadcom wifi and their linux support is just horrible).
I had one crash when I left a terminal open and my four-year-old came in and began playing with the mouse, copying and pasting the same stuff over and over rapidly.
I've not been able to reproduce it yet. He's still in there, it's been 2 months now for four hours each day. My wife says it's not good for him but the needs of OSS must come first!
- Hardware issues are major PITA, touchpads never work, when you have a convertible laptop, keyboard doesn't disable when turning it into a tablet mode and so on. Not to mention audio.
- No distro has nice fonts.
- In my case, Ubuntu took exactly an hour before throwing an error at me.
I use Linux every day and I prefer it to Windows or Mac OS X, but take your pink glasses off, please.
Eh, I agree with you for the most part minus the fonts. I happen to like Ubuntu's font face and fonts are a rather subjective thing. Otherwise, yeah, I run Linux in a VM for a reason.
"- Linux is as far from a gaming platform as ever."
I will not make the mistake of claiming that Linux has solved the problem, but this really isn't true. Even as recently as five years ago, if a game was published, Linux either couldn't run it, or required crazy emulation schemes. This list is far better than it used to be: http://store.steampowered.com/search/#sort_by=Reviews_DESC&t...
If Valve wanted to keep pushing Linux gaming, it could probably make it a real thing. My guess is that they won't, because the strategic point of their Linux support was to make Microsoft realizes there is indeed a viable alternative so the rent they can charge is not as much as they were threatening. Plus in the meantime Microsoft got a different CEO who has been much less belligerent. So, lest I sound like a fanboy, my prediction is that you are looking at the high point of Linux gaming right there in that link.
Still... who knows. Having done the work they've done, it may yet be in Valve's interest to keep the threat alive for SteamOS, and a lot of the latest engines are growing Linux support. (When you support all the consoles, all the phones, all the portable consoles, and Mac and Windows, Linux is hardly a huge additional platform to support anymore, especially when you're already supporting Android, which I know doesn't mean you support "linux" but isn't completely irrelevant either.)
But there is definitely stuff that works now, which means that it's a big improvement over 5 years ago. If you like this is far more about how the situation was utterly hopeless 5 years ago than how it's heaven-on-Earth now.
This is obviously not true. While it may be far from Windows or from Consoles the fact of the matter is that you can right now buy high end dedicated Linux gaming machines backed by the premiere game distribution eco-system in existence:
http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/
That's not enough, it's not all the way, but to pretend that this didn't happen, or doesn't matter is stupid.
I agree on Hardware issues, I just installed openSUSE Leap, installed the nVidia drivers, and my desktop promptly stopped working entirely. While installing all Windows drivers on an empty box takes some time, too, it's a vastly more robust process.
Every touchpad I had worked with was much better on Linux, touchpads on Windows were too laggy to even work with (if you are used to OSX)
Fonts...
I still haven't figured out how set up Windows fonts on 14" full HD to be readable -- small are small , large fonts are blurred.
Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example).
> Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux.
> Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi.
Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is _very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time).
In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy font rendering and obsolete packages.
And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the graphics. Same in 2015.
Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.
I agree with you so much. The last time I had an experience where I thought my computer ran *nix really well, it was a Celeron 500 Thinkpad X21 with OpenBSD. I have not had sound work as well before or since (next best? IRIX with an Octane2.)
My work dev box is a CentOS 6 PoS and while it's serviceable and works OK for dev, I have a windows VM for a reason and my personal macbook comes out often.
Also in agreement here. Actually, the last time I had a really well *nix system is when I had a MacMini :-) This sounds like a cynical remark, but it is a true.
You address every issue I have with desktop linux at the moment.
The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.
Ditto this. I have used desktop Linux for about eight years now and graphics have consistently been the largest problem. If you can get them to work at all expect abysmal performance (excepting nVidia's proprietary drivers).
Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken.
I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)
What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming".
> there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time
Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day.
> No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review
It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others.
But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.
The last few times I installed Linux on a machine went fine for 95%+ of what I expected.
First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working).
I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily.
Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing).
And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam.
Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway.
So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.
> it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example)
This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do.
> even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.
I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like myself.
> The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX
Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with crashing because of the graphics driver.
> My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs)
Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.
I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
I suspect the caches, larger than desktop processors, have a lot to do with the perceived performance. One benchmark I've been using is the set of unit tests on MAAS (dominantly CPython code). My laptop takes 20+ minutes to run them. An i5 with SSD takes 17 minutes. A VM on this Xeon box with a spinning hard disk takes 9 minutes to run them.
Linux has all the reasons to be the fastest gaming platform: something slow in the kernel slowing your game down? Submit a patch.
Yet it isn't. It's absurd. The OSS framework has worked so well for almost every other facet, it's crazy that it hasn't worked for the kernel for games. Especially game developers: those are the guys you want when performance really matters. Gaming (and very slightly Visual Studio) is the reason I use Windows at home, if Linux became more competent at that I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a big handicap.
The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA.
But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's.
The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver.
Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware.
And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL.
Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.
I have to agree my XPS15 from Dell isn't viable for native Linux installs (NVIDIA Optimus not supported on Linux, cannot connect external displays, can't really use the discrete GPU).
The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose.
Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between.
On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.).
For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM.
Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me.
Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad.
That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine.
Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.
I keep checking out Linux Mint as an alternative at every update as an alternative to Windows for family members, but it's still nowhere near where it needs to be.
Aside from that, applications like Skype have terrible support/interface for linux.
While I love (and use daily) i3-wm, I really wouldn't call it a "desktop environment" (and dwm, which is very similar to i3, was already available in 2009).
I feel like I've read an article like this every so often for the past 10 years. I run Linux on my laptop, but it's often a pain in the ass. To be fair though, all operating systems suck in their own ways.
A Desktop Operating System is so much more than what the author claims it to be. Lets break down the arguments:
- Viable Gaming Platform: Viable does not mean good.
- Hardware: Things have improved massively, I'll give the author that much, but is nowhere near where Windows is.
- Software: The grade of commercial software for linux is laughable. Sure, you can get plenty of free tools that are also available on other operating systems as well. But you'll be in trouble if you want something as good as Camtasia or Screenflow. Microsoft and Apple both have plenty of high grade commercial apps that work on their platforms.
> The grade of commercial software for linux is laughable
This highly depends on the industry. Camtasia and Screenflow are one thing, but many high-priced CAD / specialist / niche products are offering Linux versions nowadays, which helps Linux adoption in the enterprise.
All of which are not attributable to Linux per se, but to 3rd parties who refuse to deal in Linux. Reverse engineering hardware to create a driver is hard work, and all because vendors refuse to provide a stable driver for their own hardware (trackpads and graphics cards being the obvious examples). Valve has proven that there IS a gaming market for Linux when everyone said there wasn't, and proved it months in advance of the release of the first SteamBox. How many other software vendors have been parroting that "there is no market" reasoning without ever backing it up? And sometimes you have to create a market, not wait for it to exist before trying to fill it.
Used Linux as a desktop system since 2001, about KDE 3.x series.
Its been good for everything, editing photos/importing from camera/phones (digikam), organizing/listening to music, some easier video production/composing, torrenting and other file sharing, mostly programming (of course), gaming (sometimes through wine, sometimes natively depending on game). Technical writing. I dont do much else on computers. Havent ever felt, oh I really need windows or macosx for that. Not any real problems with drivers. Shit just works.
Avoided viruses/malware without thinking about it.
Well, I followed the link to /r/unixporn and was amused to see that most of the screenshots (described as "at least on par with any other operating system") look like people desperately trying to recreate "The Matrix". I mean, sure, people on HN probably really do find evilwm a great productivity boost, but I'm pretty sure my mother wouldn't.
I've been using Linux desktop for last 10 years and I'm totally happy. I do use Windows at work daily, so I've got up to date comparison. Doesn't really make any difference if you're running Linux or Windows.
I, as well. I decided to go with the Fedora with Cinnamon on a 6-core AMD. I use my unix systems everyday, all day, going back to the Sun, SGIs, E&S, and even Amiga days. Everything from small development, to keeping recipes, video, audio, and electronics. Distaste for Gnome philosophy, this desktop system works for me in every way (except Netflix and Chromecast as I never installed Chrome). A few games on Steam I like (LFD2) run just fine (and every update run better).
For fun, i tried Linux last time early 2015 (ubuntu) and tried to play dota (was really currious what was happening with Ubuntu). After 4 days of tinkering i managed to play the game at half the framerate of Windows and then gave up. Almost nothing worked out of the box, and i had to spent a lot of time on arcaned forums trying to get basic things to work.
"Robust" is a funny word choice here. Linux desktops in the early 2000's were very robust in the sense that they were stable, predictable, and performed decently under high workloads. They weren't easy to install and set up correctly, but once you got sound and graphics working, you were good to go. Until your next hardware upgrade.
A Linux desktop is a lot easier to install now, and software support isn't as much of an issue as it used to be, largely because so much has moved to the web. I wouldn't say it's more robust though. I ran an Xubuntu laptop for several years. Even though it was the LTS version, a few times a year, something major like sound or video would break on a system update, and I'd spend a few hours getting it working again. This isn't something I'd recommend to people who want something that just works.
My Chromebook has been very reliable. I would say it's robust, but then again, I can't run Steam or GOG games on it, as mentioned in the article.
I think this is old news. I've been using Linux as my main OS since 2004 or so. People say it sucks for games, but I am not a gamer. Now, I spent a lot of time on Windows between 2008 and 2011 (corporate issued laptop) and I can tell you it really, really sucked for anything software development related (software that would not run on Windows, that is). The only thing it could do better than Linux was opening MS Office files, but that's kind of obvious.
Heh, I read the comments and I feel that everyone is right and wrong at the same time :)
The truth is all OSes suck, period. Well each one in their own unique ways at least.
Where I work(software house) 99% of people have Macs. Most of them are one release behind
because of stability issues, in newer versions.
My primary OS for the past 15 years is Linux. I've used most of the distros. My feeling
is that 10 years ago things were more stable. On the other hand it wasn't that supported
by vendors so... you had less features to worry about.
Now I use Fedora. As an example, I never had a problem with bluetooth or hibernation. After the latest kernel update I can't use my bluetooth keyboard because it causes a
kernel panic. Hibernation stopped working.
I bought my mother a new Dell laptop with Windows 8.1. When I plug my, perfectly fine,
external USB HD, sometimes it runs into amok and it takes around 5 minutes for the system
to become operational again.
I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released Windows XP. I've been running Linux ever since.
Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years.
When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.
PPA's are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.
Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on the desktop.
I'm using Arch and I really like it. However, it does take way more time and effort to install than the more mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, especially if you're like me and you're used to things like wifi "just working."
Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.
This depends entirely on the distribution you choose, not in any way on Linux.
As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub main branches.
You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date, and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.
Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared with tracking Debian stable.
Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with your own needs.
Unless, god forbid, you need the latest ImageMagick on Debian. Or heckloads of other software. I believe the commenter you replied to is much more correct than you. Application packaging / tracking up-to-date system and user packages is very far from a solved problem. On many Linuxes doing a system-wide upgrade is 90% of the time guarantee that part of your system will stop working. This has been mine, and many other people's, experience.
I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it, nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely close to what it will eventually look like in the future.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadIsn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration from.
In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.
Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.
After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper
I believe that the author means that vendors have been saying for a very long time that there is no cross-distribution place to keep config files, or set of environment variables, etc. What the Linux Standard Base was invented to address.
Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only programs that are written by your friends.
https://developer.apple.com/app-sandboxing/
X11, although at least Xorg doesn't run as root in modern distros any more. Wayland is the replacement but isn't there yet.
Linus hates security people and refuses patches that improve security within the Linux kernel. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/11/05/net-of-...
Admittedly my system is PulseAudio-free with only one exception, that being Skype. I should consider using a compatibility layer like apulse that just multiplexes ALSA calls under the hood.
To get my last monitor to work properly, I had to manually enter modelines in xorg.conf. If the monitor goes in powersave mode, the full resolution won't be available until I restart X. (It's a Seiki 4K TV, not standard by any means, but hardly "exotic")
Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't recommend desktop Linux to anyone normal, I just tell them to get an Apple computer.
I'll agree PulseAudio is esoteric, but thankfully not that many client applications have a hard dependency on it, though it is popular with integrated DEs.
But the fact that I need a tip on HN to know which config files to edit to get Skype working is precisely why Linux on the Desktop isn't quite there yet :)
(the fault may very well lie with Skype, but from a user experience standpoint, that's irrelevant)
even skype (!) worked out of the box (both speakers and microphones).
(of course it's not the same experience for all printers, my 15 years old printer works perfectly on Windows and Linux, and I can't install a network Ricoh printer on Windows or Linux)
Setting up my home printer under Windows takes me the best part of 30 minutes every single time I need to do it. Under Linux its detected automatically, and works first time.
On the topic of supported platforms, when I bought a new laptop, I went with Toshiba because, at least with the Japanese models, every single one supports Linux.
The fact that I can buy new, off the shelf equipment and have it work on Linux with no issues is really what is new for me. You still have to do your homework, but I remember the days of having to look around for used equipment to make sure that it would work with Linux. Those days seems to be over.
I wish all OSes were that easy wrt printing setup.
I have gone through any of nearly a dozen different distros in the last year, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, more I'm probably forgetting, and every single one of them failed within weeks. Most wouldn't even boot on my hardware, others had weird limitations, while still others just completely ate themselves during routine updates or version changes.
At this point I'd sooner use FreeBSD, or swallow my annoyance with PC-BSD's security model and give that another go.
This works.
other than that, everything is basically perfect.
I've not been able to reproduce it yet. He's still in there, it's been 2 months now for four hours each day. My wife says it's not good for him but the needs of OSS must come first!
- Hardware issues are major PITA, touchpads never work, when you have a convertible laptop, keyboard doesn't disable when turning it into a tablet mode and so on. Not to mention audio.
- No distro has nice fonts.
- In my case, Ubuntu took exactly an hour before throwing an error at me.
I use Linux every day and I prefer it to Windows or Mac OS X, but take your pink glasses off, please.
I will not make the mistake of claiming that Linux has solved the problem, but this really isn't true. Even as recently as five years ago, if a game was published, Linux either couldn't run it, or required crazy emulation schemes. This list is far better than it used to be: http://store.steampowered.com/search/#sort_by=Reviews_DESC&t...
If Valve wanted to keep pushing Linux gaming, it could probably make it a real thing. My guess is that they won't, because the strategic point of their Linux support was to make Microsoft realizes there is indeed a viable alternative so the rent they can charge is not as much as they were threatening. Plus in the meantime Microsoft got a different CEO who has been much less belligerent. So, lest I sound like a fanboy, my prediction is that you are looking at the high point of Linux gaming right there in that link.
Still... who knows. Having done the work they've done, it may yet be in Valve's interest to keep the threat alive for SteamOS, and a lot of the latest engines are growing Linux support. (When you support all the consoles, all the phones, all the portable consoles, and Mac and Windows, Linux is hardly a huge additional platform to support anymore, especially when you're already supporting Android, which I know doesn't mean you support "linux" but isn't completely irrelevant either.)
But there is definitely stuff that works now, which means that it's a big improvement over 5 years ago. If you like this is far more about how the situation was utterly hopeless 5 years ago than how it's heaven-on-Earth now.
This is obviously not true. While it may be far from Windows or from Consoles the fact of the matter is that you can right now buy high end dedicated Linux gaming machines backed by the premiere game distribution eco-system in existence: http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/
That's not enough, it's not all the way, but to pretend that this didn't happen, or doesn't matter is stupid.
I agree on Hardware issues, I just installed openSUSE Leap, installed the nVidia drivers, and my desktop promptly stopped working entirely. While installing all Windows drivers on an empty box takes some time, too, it's a vastly more robust process.
> Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux.
No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-si... -- even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.
> Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi.
Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is _very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time).
In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy font rendering and obsolete packages.
And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the graphics. Same in 2015.
Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.
My work dev box is a CentOS 6 PoS and while it's serviceable and works OK for dev, I have a windows VM for a reason and my personal macbook comes out often.
The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.
Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken.
I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)
What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming".
> there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time
Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day.
> No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review
It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others.
But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.
First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working). I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily.
Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing). And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam.
Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway.
So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.
This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do.
> even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.
I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like myself.
> The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX
Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with crashing because of the graphics driver.
> My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs)
Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.
I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
Yet it isn't. It's absurd. The OSS framework has worked so well for almost every other facet, it's crazy that it hasn't worked for the kernel for games. Especially game developers: those are the guys you want when performance really matters. Gaming (and very slightly Visual Studio) is the reason I use Windows at home, if Linux became more competent at that I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver.
Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware.
And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL.
Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.
The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose.
Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between.
On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.).
For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM. Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me.
Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad.
That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine.
Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.
Aside from that, applications like Skype have terrible support/interface for linux.
MS sucks money
OS X sucks VC money
OSX sucks money
MS sucks
- Viable Gaming Platform: Viable does not mean good.
- Hardware: Things have improved massively, I'll give the author that much, but is nowhere near where Windows is.
- Software: The grade of commercial software for linux is laughable. Sure, you can get plenty of free tools that are also available on other operating systems as well. But you'll be in trouble if you want something as good as Camtasia or Screenflow. Microsoft and Apple both have plenty of high grade commercial apps that work on their platforms.
This highly depends on the industry. Camtasia and Screenflow are one thing, but many high-priced CAD / specialist / niche products are offering Linux versions nowadays, which helps Linux adoption in the enterprise.
Its been good for everything, editing photos/importing from camera/phones (digikam), organizing/listening to music, some easier video production/composing, torrenting and other file sharing, mostly programming (of course), gaming (sometimes through wine, sometimes natively depending on game). Technical writing. I dont do much else on computers. Havent ever felt, oh I really need windows or macosx for that. Not any real problems with drivers. Shit just works.
Avoided viruses/malware without thinking about it.
We develop for Linux, in a virtualbox.
It's all mostly irrelevant these days, though, as I simply run an LXDE-based Linux VM on my Windows desktop.
I tried it for a week to see if I could live with it as my primary environment.
Unfortunately not quite yet, at least for me, will try again in 5 years.
A Linux desktop is a lot easier to install now, and software support isn't as much of an issue as it used to be, largely because so much has moved to the web. I wouldn't say it's more robust though. I ran an Xubuntu laptop for several years. Even though it was the LTS version, a few times a year, something major like sound or video would break on a system update, and I'd spend a few hours getting it working again. This isn't something I'd recommend to people who want something that just works.
My Chromebook has been very reliable. I would say it's robust, but then again, I can't run Steam or GOG games on it, as mentioned in the article.
The truth is all OSes suck, period. Well each one in their own unique ways at least.
Where I work(software house) 99% of people have Macs. Most of them are one release behind because of stability issues, in newer versions.
My primary OS for the past 15 years is Linux. I've used most of the distros. My feeling is that 10 years ago things were more stable. On the other hand it wasn't that supported by vendors so... you had less features to worry about.
Now I use Fedora. As an example, I never had a problem with bluetooth or hibernation. After the latest kernel update I can't use my bluetooth keyboard because it causes a kernel panic. Hibernation stopped working.
I bought my mother a new Dell laptop with Windows 8.1. When I plug my, perfectly fine, external USB HD, sometimes it runs into amok and it takes around 5 minutes for the system to become operational again.
Life is fun. OSes are not :(
Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years.
When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.
PPA's are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.
Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on the desktop.
Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.
As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub main branches.
You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date, and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.
Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared with tracking Debian stable.
Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with your own needs.
I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it, nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely close to what it will eventually look like in the future.