This was a pretty interesting read. I've been using Trusty on a desktop (his problems are laptop, maybe somewhat different) for about 2 years as my primary machine. This is one of the lines that really stood out for me:
>>How can a consumer figure that out?
I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used".
Like the author, I also tried to upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04. The difference is I was on a desktop VM. I went with just upgrading the existing VM thinking it would take less work than spinning up a new VM and transferring all my files and settings, but that turned out to be a huge miscalculation.
Originally left it to upgrade overnight, only to come in the morning (this is on my work machine) to see that it hanged somewhere in the process and wouldn't move on without user input. So I proceeded with clicking through all the prompts, and when 14.04 first loads, it's SO SLOW. Long story short, it took me 4-6 hours to finally get it usable. The whole time I was thinking, "how could they mess this up so badly?"
The host OS for the VM is Windows 7, and I have to agree with the author, it is much better to use. I only run the VM for the command line, but may upgrade to Windows 10 when Ubuntu on Linux comes out of beta this summer.
> How can a consumer figure that out? I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used".
Though, to be fair, even as a Windows user and relatively firm fan of Windows, that happens for me routinely on Windows. Windows Update in particular is confusing with its many error messages that either magically resolve themselves if you retry enough times or require significant and arcane manual resolution. Managing home network file systems and printers with Windows in 2016 seems basically unchanged from 1998. Microsoft added "HomeGroups" to make this a bit easier for lay people, but they have more or less abandoned to its Windows 7 iteration, with virtually no evolution since. Now they channel their efforts toward integrating their cloud storage services.
Generally speaking, this is the trouble with general purpose computing and general purpose operating systems—there are rough edges and a huge number of corner cases that get ugly. In several decades of evolving these systems, we've not buffed those rough edges down as much as we'd like. It's similarly the reason mobile operating systems are popular for primary computing devices for a growing segment of the population. (Although, I will add that mobile operating systems are picking up the same rough edges as their capabilities expand to encompass more of the terrain typically associated with general purpose systems.)
The more portable the device, the worse hardware support seems to be, unless we're talking about the one operating system it was sold with (and then only maybe). Laptop ACPI is often purposefully malignant, wifi cards still have their bugs (hard to fix with proprietary firmware blobs) and let's not even get started about specially built interfaces and connectors.
And that's true across most operating systems. I recently upgraded my Dell tablet to Windows 10. Oh the humanity. And with every OS X version, problems with my 2009 Macbook are increasing, especially in the first few iterations.
Apple's post-90s hardware selection scarcity is a boon for them, as you don't really need to check that many configurations. Similarly, running Linux on slightly older Thinkpads is usually a very good bet. Doubleplus that if the wifi card is either libre enough or is replaced with one that is.
But as I'm not doing the hyper-mobile thing (I don't work from a beach or cafe and don't even like conferences), a desktop is usually the best choice for me. Cheap, fast and you can build one with fewer faulty components.
Yes. I really wish there was a distro I could just recommend to people that Just Works, but there isn't. I've been using Arch Linux for a decade and it's fantastic, almost never breaks. But no way would I recommend it to someone who wasn't interested in editing config files by hand. But every other distro I've tried breaks horribly, especially during updates. And they make installing proprietary software (nvidia drivers, Steam) a huge pain. i understand the ideological bent, but I just want things to work. And, as a Wine developer and user, Arch is the only distro with a functional multiarch setup.
At the end of the day, I just don't recommend people switch to Linux.
I've had great success with Mageia as a distro that Just Works. They're the Mandrake offshoot from 2011, and on every laptop I've tried them on, everything worked out of the box, without configuration. For many of those laptops, I went through a major version upgrade (3->4, 4->5, etc), also without problem.
It's basically because of Mageia that my linux hand-editing config know-how has atrophied down to nothing.
Yeah, my experience with 14.04 has been seriously sub-par, 12.04 was much better.
Seems Ubuntu and desktop Linux is seriously regressing, with the newer kernels my laptop won't suspend any more (Thinkpad T530 w/ Ivy Bridge and Intel graphics), after 4+ years of flawless usage. Seriously, nothing went wrong for years and now there's some horrible regression that has fucked up the whole experience and I can't suspend my laptop. WTF (and I have checked mailing lists, it is an upstream bug of some sort though some blame the kernel, others blame systemd).
Anecdotal, but suspend has always been a huge frustration for me (T510). Between trying different video drivers and kernels and having them bork the machine I decided to see if any modern release of a distro would just work out of the box (hardware acceleration or no, whatever the OOTB Live experience gave).
My procedure was to boot the Live version, then standby and wake multiple times and see which would reliably work. I had been on Ubuntu for a while but it didn't work, neither did (maybe unsurprisingly) Mint, but Fedora just worked. I've stuck with Fedora for a while and have gone for good stretches where standby + resume would work for weeks... and then fail inexplicably.
But with Fedora it's the best it has been in the 6 years I've had this machine.
Could it be the constant back-porting of patches that leads to problems? And in fact you are using and old, patched kernel? Perhaps a truly new kernel would surprise you.
My experience is the opposite, 12.04 used to crash(X) on me quite often. I did have some problems with 14.04 that would send a regular user go back to windows, but nothing I couldn't solve in a few minutes.
I tried to use arch, but I ended up fiddling with dwm and other stuff instead of working on what I should and I don't really like any of the linux DE's other than unity. So I don't really see any good alternatives for a distro to use with as little hassle/configuration as possible.
Is it just me or do most of his issues seem video related? In which case that would probably be a driver issue which would be poor vendor support and not necessarily a problem with Ubuntu.
Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?
One thing that Ubuntu really falls flat on is third party video driver support. The default nVidia blobs for instance are stuck on an ancient version that don't support modern cards very well and break every time the kernel updates (so twice a week).
The fix is to ditch Ubuntu's "third party" support and just install it directly from the nVidia website instead. This is a bit of a hassle (you have to shut down X on the first install), but it fixes the breakage on every kernel update and gets you a far more modern driver.
I find Ubuntu's insistence on maintaining bug comparability on LTS releases to be pretty baffling. mplayer's GUI doesn't work out of the box, and the fix is easy, but they refuse to do it because it's an LTS release. nVidia drivers are broken but again, you can't fix it because it's LTS. Zsh manpages don't get installed, but that can't be fixed because it's LTS. Whatever happened to being the distro where everything just works out of the box?
Yes, that's the whole point: LTS only recieves security updates and nothing else.
There are two products here, for two kinds of people:
LTS is a product for people who want security updates but absolutely no other changes.
The next release is a product for people who want bug fixes and new features, in addition to security updates.
Your comment is essentially asking "but why didn't they make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor?". They didn't make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor because it's the spicy flavor, not the mild flavor.
The unstable releases have their own problems though. The big one being that the old repos disappear almost the instant they version bump, meaning you have to be willing to drop everything and upgrade when they do to not be left behind. Plus LTS is the default.
Ubuntu doesn't really have a good middle ground distribution. Something like the old -STABLE release track on BSD where you get fixes and reasonable support but no ABI changes or major OS changes.
"Oh no, my desktop experience on a completely free operating system made by volunteers doesn't work as well as one made by thousands of well-paid employees. I guess I'm going to write a rant blog post, and then sit back and wait for someone to fix my problems instead of learning how to help with the effort."
Honestly, these posts have been around since the dawn of Linux. Unless the author actually decides to get involved with the effort, I don't see how relevant this is. Making a complete operating system is hard and requires a lot of work, which is why the desktop still is Linux's biggest challenge. There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are still around, because it does a lot of very hard things right, and it's easier when you're paying people and forcing them to do the boring grunt work that makes a completely OS.
Sure, but this kind of experience has been going on forever, and your kind of complaint won't change the fact that most people won't use Linux ever. Users don't care about this.
Criticisms where all they do is rant and file bugs are 100% useless. How about proposals on how to fix the issues? Or is that only reserved for the people who work on the actual product?
>Criticisms where all they do is rant and file bugs are 100% useless.
You might not know about a bug until it is reported because your particular configuration doesn't trigger it. Or should everyone run your "blessed" configuration?
You know, I see these types of comments a lot. Where because someone hasn't done something equivalent, or the skills to do so. Means they have no right to criticize.
This software is released under the premise that it is free, and the assumption that it is an actual working operating system.
Unless you're the master of everything, then I'm assuming you've never been a critic of any movie or your favorite sports team. Right?
Yup. A sports team is a great analogy. Someone I know was on the 49ers team plane, and one of the part-owners started throwing a tantrum about Frank Gore's performance that night, and pointing out all the things he did wrong. Of course, I would be $10,000 that that particular owner has never, ever taken even a high-school-level tackle in his life. And to think of him berating Frank Gore and telling him how to run the football is ludicrous.
So yes, complaints from people who aren't in the business are pretty much absolutely irrelevant.
> Oh no, my desktop experience on a completely free operating system made by volunteers doesn't work as well as one made by thousands of well-paid employees
According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 700+ employees.
When I build something, I ask people for feedback on it. The people who say "wow that's awesome" are great, but the people who say "yeah it's OK, but that bit doesn't work for me" are better, because their feedback is actionable. I can use it to improve.
The post was actionable feedback. Ubuntu can use this to improve.
The alternative is that they release something, there's complete silence, and no-one uses it. Which is much, much worse than people criticising it.
This works when you're asking your friends about your app. It doesn't work when you have millions of users. You will be getting complaints about everything and anything and everyone has their own agenda as to what is the most important.
well, there's tools to help you scale, but the principle remains the same. Users telling you why they don't use your product is still much, much, much better than people just walking away silently.
Updating a Ubuntu install has been a "surprise", some things start working, some others stop working
It seems there are two types of packages, the "base system" (kernel, libs, etc) which is rock-solid but anything that gives "user friendliness" is a crapshoot
Every year I try and switch over to a Linux desktop from Mac and every year I rage quit because of some stupid bug. On the surface things always work "flawlessly", but then I try something slightly out of the ordinary and I'm digging through logs and obscure message boards to figure out what is broken (adjusting the speed of my mouse off hyper drive... More than the slider allows).
In the end I think I'll probably end up using a chromebook for Linux if I want to escape from BSD Mac. Or just stick with Mac on the laptop and Linux on the server.
Haha, I have the opposite experience, usually I use Linux to get things done. When I configure my wife's Mac (which I also often use) I get so frustrated that I can't use TimeMachine to make backups to an smb-share (Why? I ended up using rsync). Also, I can't use sshfs without significant hassle. FTP is not support in finder... And I have once spent an entire night trying to make my external mouse not feel like I'm mousing through mud only to find out that the mouse behavior (accel curve etc) can't be adjust anymore since Leopard (or something) came out. That was pretty frustrating.
Other that those things osX is pretty stable but it does get slow over time, I have 16GB of ram in my 2011 Core-i7 MBP, I see a lot of beach-balls even though I reinstalled last year.
I keep seeing this repeated, why would it be OK not to use tools to fix issues in Linux but not OS X?
Here tools to fix your issues:
- Time Machine only support HFS+ filesystem but you can use the excellent: Carbon Copy Cloner
- For mounting SFTP, FTP and any cloud drive use: ExpanDrive
- It's actually not the mouse curve, it's the rendering buffer, most people don't notice it but a windows user should, fixable with: Smoothmouse
- If it's slow you probably don't have an SSD drive in that computer, so while it's indexing all hundreds of thousands of files it will be slow while using it.
My biggest question is why does the author keep trying to use Ubuntu and Unity, and not just switch to a different distro.
My experience with Ubuntu has been really similar to his, 10.04 was the peak, I had a great setup with gnome 2, everything was fast and responsive, things worked, crashes happened very infrequently. Every release after it has seemed significantly worse than the previous ones. And I put the blame on Unity and Canonical forking every Gnome application to work with it.
Anecdotally, I play around with two VMs, a Debian one running Gnome, and an Ubuntu 14.04 one. The Debian VM has half the ram and processing power as the Ubuntu one, and still runs significantly faster. Gnome 3 is great, and if I were still running linux full time I'd use it as my DM.
Completely agree. I used to use Debian, then Ubuntu since 6.06, the last Ubuntu that was usable for me was 9.10, I didn't even bother to install 10.04, just switched back to Debian. When Gnome2 changed to G3 I gave up and installed KDE on my every * N *X machine. Still using KDE, never came back to Ubuntu. I didn't have any problem author described, no one ever asked me to help them with such problems - I converted a lot of people to Linux or PCBSD.
Yup, I agree. At work my machine had Ubuntu 14.04 preinstalled when I started in late 2014 and I gave it a couple of months but couldn't get friendly with Unity. Eventually I installed Debian unstable (which I've been using with xfce on my private laptop for years) over it —it's a university, I can run whatever distro I like. I'm really happy with Gnome 3 with some very minor extensions (alt-tab behaviour, workspaces in a grid).
That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm.
> That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm.
I had that one too. From memory it was fixed in 15.04.
Totally agree. I've been on Gentoo since 2012. Any issues with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth have mostly been because the chipsets on my MSI laptop were too new to be supported (it was kinda neat being on a bug tracker listening to what worked and what didn't and being one of the first to get that particular ath10k Wi-Fi chip working. Now it's in the official stable kernel/linux-firmware so hopefully it will "just work" for everyone else).
Gentoo + i3 has been great for me. I occasionally had hibernate issues, but I've had that with Windows and Mac laptops in the past as well. Basic acpi suspends I never seemed to have an issue with. Networking reconnects too.
I will say that my draw to Gentoo and Linux is that I'm a developer and I don't really mind working on these problems. It takes a little longer to get stuff working for me, but I gain knowledge about how my system works and how the full stack operates. That's not for everyone and it's been years since I advocated Linux on regular peoples' (non-developers/tech people) laptops.
Ubuntu was suppose to be that golden distro back in the mid 2000s that finally made Linux accessible on the Desktop. After trying to get some friends to use it, almost all of them went back to XP at some point. I still think Linux distros are great developer operating systems and if you do any web Java/Scala/Ruby/Python, you should really look at trying to work natively in Linux with a tiling window manager. Ubuntu might be good for people who just want to browse the web and check e-mail, but Google Chromebook seems to do that pretty well without sucking at it.
For my personal installs I just run Arch with the latest version of Gnome stable.
The reason I still suggest an Ubuntu derivative is because it's really easy to find instructions on how to do something, and their still mostly the same. I don't know if the same is true for Fedora just because I haven't used it before and encountered the same googling problems.
Of course, this may be a bad thing, because the number of wrong answers, or unanswered questions out there.
Fedora has a lot less packages then Ubuntu, enough that it makes a difference. I'm sure I could manage but it'd be very painful for my wife and kids, and I like to dog-food the systems they use.
Im kind of surprised why this perception exists, when most of the kernel/Gnome/systemd/driver developers are actually employed by Redhat. Canonical actually employs very few people.
Redhat is the largest Linux company out there and the only thing it probably does is ensure software is well supported.
I ran Ubuntu for 10 years before switching to Fedora on my laptop. And I have been blown away.
Linux is still flexible. I am willing to pay for an OS that just works and I will accept a fair amount of opinionated software (like systemd or Ubuntu's snappy package format) if that makes it happen.
I am a consumer who wants an OSX experience in the Linux world. And there are millions out there like me.
Am I forcing you to buy in ? not at all - the beauty of Linux is that you can use LFS, Gentoo or Arch which allows you to customize and play with your particular set of philosophies.
Not all opinionated software is malicious - at the end of the day, software is merely an expression of the person and their beliefs. And sometimes they just want to believe in one thing.
LFS sure (though it is really going back to first principles), Gentoo at least for now (some there seem insistent on turning OpenRC into a Systemd clone), but Arch?! The distro that went systemd by "executive" decree, and basically pulled the "deal with it" meme as a response to complaints?
And frankly recent history at both LFS and Gentoo shows how nasty systemd is.
Gentoo forked udev to eudev, and LFS later adopted eudev, because after udev got merged with systemd every systemd release changed how to extract udev from the larger code blob.
Heck, LFS now have effectively split in two. They are maintaining one document for "classic" Linux, and one for systemd Linux.
I think so, because they use stock gnome apps, Ubuntu + Gnome will keep the Unity forked versions of Gnome apps (iirc, I haven't gone this route in ~4 years, right).
Plus its one less step, and if I'm trying to get someone to switch to linux, I don't want to let them even try to use Unity because, despite how pretty it is, it's just so slow.
I mean, I already use Ubuntu 14.04 as a standard install with Gnome 3 setup. It would be a hassle to do a clean install, setup my dev environments, apps etc. if i was to install ubuntugnome from scratch. But as soon as a clean install opportunity arises, I'll do that.
> Until that day arrives, one might ask why I have not tried another distribution. I doubt my experience will be much better. Many of the bugs are related to code shared across distributions. I know that a few bugs I listed in this article also exist in Fedora. Most bugs are upstream.
My thought as well. I've used Mint Mate (Mate being the Gnome 2 fork) for the last few years on Ubuntu certified laptops (Lenovo 4xxs) and have not had any issues.
My complaint about the linux desktop experience is the amount of research necessary. If you are careful to purchase hardware that is well supported, everything will go swimmingly. This isn't really different with other OSs, but that information seems a little more difficult to discover (especially with bleeding edge hardware).
(Beware of the Dell's though...their last iteration of the XPS 13 had a rough start since many of their drivers were patched for kernel 3.19 and they shipped with 14.04 (kernel 3.13) Should be more stable now, but I was right mad when I got my XPS 13 and the touchpad, keyboard, AND WiFi were all bugged out of the box.)
So even though this article is from early 2015, commenters here seem to confirm 14.04 is still bad. I've been feeling guilty lately for running 12.04 and am just waiting for a slow weekend to upgrade. I run Xubuntu and have no intention of adopting Unity. I have two monitors with an Nvidia video card. I like how in Ubuntu things "just work". Also I like running the same OS as many of my production servers. But maybe in spite of that it's time to try a new distro? Any recommendations?
If you don't mind using a command line, switch to Arch. It's always up-to-date, it never breaks, proprietary software like Steam and the nvidia drivers are available in the official repos, and it doesn't force crap like Unity onto you.
I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend. I spend enough hours fussing with systems already, so I want my desktop to "just work". In the past I thought Ubuntu was the "just works" distribution, but perhaps that is changing. "Never breaks" is pretty appealing. Maybe my stereotype about Arch is wrong!
I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane.
I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/>.
It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.
> I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out.
For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time.
If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.
Configuring has become a lot easier. I also preferred the desktop to "just work" but with a little work at the beginning I now have a laptop that "just works". Every now and then you have to do some more work because of a major upgrade of some software package. But I prefer that over a major upgrade of the entire OS every few years. I also feel like more non-standard stuff is supported properly. No fiddling with unofficial packages. Just use AUR. (Which technically also is unsupported but still has quite good quality packages)
That definitely was my experience with Arch. In my early twenties it was fun and I learnt a lot but it was also a huge time sink.
Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night.
So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.
The initial install is certainly that way -- the install media drops you to a command line and you get to partition/format disks, write network config files, etc., yourself -- but once it's running, things are very smooth. Everything is close to upstream so you don't have distro-specific crud that breaks randomly. It's a rolling release model so you just update daily or weekly and don't worry about big (12.04 -> 14.04) jumps. And as GP mentioned, the package repository is pretty comprehensive, and the community-contributed packages (AURs) exist for every obscure thing you could imagine -- Skype, Steam, etc. Definitely worth a try IMHO.
I don't think "never breaks" is an appropriate description of Arch. At the very least, you should read the mailing list to know what updates to beware of because they might break in a big way.
Yes. Arch is often "broken" intentionally, like when they switched to Py3 as the default about 1.5 years after its release. If you're not paying attention and you're not competent to recognize what's going on when your Python-based applications stop working, Arch is going to look "broken". I think this is a good test case for whether someone is suited for Arch or not; would you know what to do if you started getting weird errors that executed /usr/bin/python expecting python2 and got python3 instead? No? Maybe Arch isn't for you [yet].
Despite that, I find Arch is the least disruptive distro to daily work because it doesn't meddle. Canonical is full of people who think they are Steve Jobs and decide they're going to overhaul System Y with some super-special never-before-seen invented-here components this release because it's the visionary way to do things (and that other competing revitalization effort that's seeing widespread adoption, well, it's not). The result is 2-3 Ubuntu releases that are bug-ridden and really not production ready until the new system can stabilize. It seems as soon as one major userspace component begins to mature they decide to rip out another core component (Gnome->Unity; X->Mir).
Source: Arch and Ubuntu user for the last 10+ years
Ubuntu 16.04 is coming out April 21st, I have high hopes for it. There is a lot of really cool stuff coming in the new release. Perhaps you could give it a go.
I mostly use ubuntu on the server, but jump between Debian, CoreOS and Ubuntu, and mostly have had a pretty good experience with ubuntu on the server.
I run Xubuntu 14.04 here and it's been great. I thought it was a worthy upgrade to 12.04. Also I just put it on a friend's new Lenovo (dual boot) at his request and he is enjoying it, having only used Windows before. So I kind of get the feeling that OP has at least a few very particular system-specific or setup-specific things (I don't even use bluetooth, let alone on multiple systems) going on that aren't affecting everybody. Could be wrong.
My main machine has been a Macbook Pro for the last 4 years, and as long as I don't need to be using Photoshop or Coda, I'd rather be using Xubuntu on a system with even half the specs.
A lot of my customers use Ubuntu on their production servers, but I don't really understand why. You're getting the latest stuff, but there's no guarantee that it all works reliably. They invariably come across problems such as imagemagick crashing (on an earlier version of ubuntu), or avconv using up all your memory when converting some ogv files to mp4 (current bug on 14.04), plus a bunch of others.
I always use CentOS on my servers, and have been very happy with it. It's rock solid. I haven't even upgraded to CentOS 7 yet. I just moved to a new server in March and decided to stick with CentOS 6 until systemd becomes a bit more stable.
I've been running Ubuntu 14.04 for a couple of months now for my home/dev PC. My experience overall has been excellent. I run VMWare Workstation 12 pro for my test environments.
The only recommendation I have is to never run Ubuntu with an AMD card with their proprietary drivers.
I use ubuntu on Macbook Pro and its a clunky experience for sure. The main issue is that the drivers aren't up to date with the latest hardware so there are all types of bugs if you try into install ubuntu on certain hardware. I would say if you wan't a more seamless experience you should try to use certified hardware so it just works.
I've come back into the warm embrace of OpenBSD this year, and couldn't be happier. On supported hardware (cheapo refurb ThinkPad T420) everything works out of the box. Suspend/resume, graphics, Wi-Fi, sound, etc... Hibernate to disk works seamlessly despite full-disk encryption being present as well.
Everything Just Works (TM). I don't care if Linux is a wee bit more performant or supports a wider range of hardware. Truth be told, I simply want to do my thing & not think about the computer as such. I'm way past that age when "they say it's free, if you get it to run; the geeks say hey - that's half the fun!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8) was a viable approach to computing.
I think the key part of your experience is "on supported hardware."
I've run Ubuntu on a desktop machine for years and generally things have worked quite well. But I make sure that Linux will support it before I upgrade my video card.
I really prefer Linux but I wouldn't install it on a random laptop.
1. significantly faster vioscsi(4) driver for VirtIO SCSI adapters -- I can live with vioscsi being up to 2x slower than Ubuntu or FreeBSD, but 5x - 10x slower is probably a deal breaker for some other folks that would like to use OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, Linode, etc.
2. binpatches directly from OpenBSD, similar to the way a third-party is providing them at https://stable.mtier.org/
Other than that, really love OpenBSD and even their man pages are awesome.
Whatever for would you use vioscsi on a laptop? I'm only asking because the original discussion seemed to be somewhat laptop-centric. Apart from that, now that the initial Xen port is breathing (I ran it on EC2 just before 5.9 was cut and almost had a happy heart attack) I suspect the other goodies will follow quickly.
CLI or not, don't you ever close the lid of your laptop expecting it to suspend without whirring its fans inside your bag for hours on end, and then resume without losing its ability to connect to wireless networks?
I do use Linux at work by way of Vagrant, and it's great for that. It's Linux on the desktop that appears to be unsuitable for everyday use.
If you want to use linux on the desktop, you have to buy your hardware with linux in mind.
You don't have that concern with Windows because mainstream PC manufacturers need to support Windows to be profitable, but there's the exact same problem with OS X. It feels a little different because the OS comes preinstalled, but you're still choosing the hardware for the OS.
If you buy a machine that is reputed to work well with linux, it works well with linux. If you don't bother to check that, you might end up with a bit of homework.
Never. In fact, my laptop connects to wireless networks even before I can unlock my screen.
But then again, I'm on a ThinkPad (with an Intel 7265 Wi-Fi card), and these things are well-designed hardware that try to stick to standards and are well supported on Linux.
If anything, this is a glowing review of the entire ThinkPad line. Most PC hardware turns into shit after a couple of years of heavy use. Not so with ThinkPads. I'm all for reuse-reduce-recycle, but very few electronic thingamajigs are capable of holding water after a certain period of time.
On the other hand, "cheapo refurb" is also indicative of my desire to minimize the expense of purchasing an additional computer.
I tried using Linux as my primary desktop mostly out of curiosity because I'm wondering what my options are as Apple continues to focus its efforts on iOS (c.f., the Mac buyers guide which paints a pretty bleak picture of the current state of Apple desktops and portables: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac) and hopes that Docker performance would be as close to native as possible without a VM/laggy shared folders in the way. Plus I had a spare PC laying around.
I didn't give it as long as the OP, but it just took way too much time fiddling to get to a stable, working place and even then things weren't as nice as on OS X with very little to no tweaking. HiDPI in particular is a mess, with support all over the place. OS X nails it. Plus there are some really great apps I use every day on OS X that there is no substitute for (Sketch, Tweetbot, Reeder, Alfred, and Photoshop come to mind.)
Even "little" things like font rendering is kind of a mess on Linux and really is a big deal if you are a developer staring at them all day or are a web developer and need to see what things look like with proper fonts installed.
I hope OS X sticks around for awhile or a worthy competitor appears. I'd think there is an opportunity for someone to create a great portable, a great desktop, and a great OS for both but I'm sure it pales in comparison to the tablet and mobile ecosystem.
The last 2 OS X upgrades has made my laptop lag too much. I now do more setup on OSX then Ubuntu. Ubuntu on the same laptop runs so much better. Only issue i have is the touchpad. Could not make it behave the same as in OSX.
I think the problem is that Canonical's reach exceeds its grasp: it has some good ideas (and maybe even a few great ones), but it can't drive them to completion. Moreover, while there're willing to be revolutionary about some things, they don't seem to be willing to take that as far as it could go (e.g. Unity breaks compatibility with lots of stuff, but fundamentally it's the same WIMP interface one knew from the 1984 Mac). Finally, they have made it progressively more difficult over the years to tweak any parts of Ubuntu (try running a different window manager, or login manager, or …).
I finally got tired of Ubuntu's far-but-not-far-enough, our-way-or-the-highway nature. Now I use Debian, with everything tuned and tweaked for the way I develop and use software. It's modular enough, it's good enough, it's stable enough. I couldn't be happier (although some days I think I'll give Arch a shot …).
I have been very happy with elementaryOS (based on trusty). Been using it on my desktop for about 4 months and I don't miss windows at all. Only thing that gives me trouble is viewing video that uses drm protection in flash. (watchespn)
Over the past 10+ years on and off I've used Linux on the desktop, mainly Ubuntu (started with 7.10), but also Arch, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, openSUSE and aside from Arch (for obvious reasons) I have got on pretty well with all of them, with very minimal tinkering. I've basically found that newer versions of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu have had less issues. I guess I've been lucky with the hardware I've had, granted I haven't owned many setups in that time frame.
This is pretty much the opposite of my experience with Ubuntu vs Windows.
All of my hardware worked immediately after install on Linux whereas Windows required hunting down drivers.
Most impressive was that the suspend/resume feature works perfectly in Ubuntu (and the suspend/resume completes in 2-3 seconds) whereas in Windows, it goes into suspend after a good bit of crunching but never finishes the resume process (I hear the system fans/drive wake but nothing else happens and requires a hard reset).
When I think of choosing hardware with Linux in mind, the primary overriding consideration for me is using Intel graphics rather than Nvidia or AMD. That sucks if you want fast 3D, but it is by far the best choice for a mostly 2D desktop experience.
Using Intel for wifi/ethernet etc is also a good (but less important) choice.
I have never once managed to get "suspend" working on my computer with any version of Ubuntu. Every time I install a new distro I immediately disable this feature. Suspend on Ubuntu is basically a "freeze/crash immediately" button.
I've experienced the majority of the bugs that the author is talking about and a lot of them do happen on a daily basis. Somehow, I just learned to live with it. It's kind of like a chronic disease.
For me operating systems are a "choose the lesser evil" situation. For me it's a balance between:
A) Linux (Ubuntu)
- negatives. boring, super buggy desktop. Mainly weird/incompatible for entertainment purposes. Major hardware incompatibilities. Fixing bugs takes hours of Googling and compiling random things.
Q. My so and so doesn't work? A. It's a free product, don't complain!
- positives. Despite what people say I find package management wonderful. Awesome for developers, everything is one apt-get install away with the exception that you may have to add a PPA like the author mentions. Fast. Never bloated. No viruses. No spyware.
B) Windows
- negatives: Bloated. Slows down over time. Needs a yearly reinstall. Viruses galore. Spyware galore. Windows 10 has taken the Google approach of spying on you as much as possible and sending home every last drop of personal data for their own financial gains.
- positives: Most software works well. Pretty much every application ever made has a Windows exe for simple installation. Nice looking GUI.
C) Mac:
- Negatives: Pay double the money for half the hardware. What if I want a touch screen? Buy our other products too!
What if I want a 2 in 1? Buy our other products too!
What if I don't want to pay 2-3000$ for a laptop with a 1 inch bezel in 2016? Buy it anyway!
- Positives: Never used it, but it looks brilliant at first glance. Seems to be the perfect combination of Linux performance/capabilities with the good looks and refinement of having a multi-billion dollar company behind it.
- Mac hotkeys... slowly drives you insane, remapping doesn't work, 1/3 applications won't respect it or are broken by it.
- Finder / file manager is just awful. Awful. I could probably argue Win 3.1 file manager is better.
- not a Linux UNIX core...
It drives me nuts that desktop OS isn't a solved problem, given how many people use it and how much CPU horsepower exists to emulate the crufty old stuff. Why Google never grabbed Linux and made a genuinely usable desktop OS is beyond me.
It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience.
With a desktop PC, it's generally manageable, but every time I tried on a Laptop (and I have tried several brands) I have had various problems with display/bluetooth/sound/network/power/sleep/hibernation. It also seemed like everytime I did an upgrade, while it may fix one problem, something previously working would break. I even specifically researched and bought hardware that was "Linux friendly" (eg: was generally considered to be well supported).
I eventually realized that my desire to run an open source OS on my machine was consuming far more time than it was worth, and I'd rather be getting actual real work done than fixing my display not scaling properly with an external monitor plugged in, or having to reboot because it just came out of hibernation and now can't see any wifi networks. Since then, I've run Windows on my desktop, even when I am 100% working on code running on linux servers (and basically just spend my time in an SSH terminal, IDE or web browser).
Apple has the unique position of owning the hardware: they basically have a very, very limited set of platforms to test on, and as a result, it's pretty easy for them to ensure that everything works.
Microsoft builds an OS that is supposed to work on all kinds of random hardware from random manufacturers.. They largely take the position that it's up to vendors to implement drivers correctly, but even then Microsoft apparently runs an extensive hardware compatibility test lab and generally spends a lot of time and money making sure it "just works" as much as they can. I have no doubt that crash reports directly feed to this, and when necessary if they suspect some combination of specific hardware is leading to a crash, they likely test it.
Linux distros, on the other hand, seem to have none of this. Many of the drivers are open source, created by volunteers because they bought it and want it to work, and still not many vendors put effort into releasing their own drivers. No one tests even close to all the combinations possible, nor as far as I know, is there anyone monitoring crash reports and trying to deal with combinations of problems like Microsoft does.
Am I wrong in this? Is there some organization that is putting lots of effort into getting desktop linux into "just works" state?
Canonical has some hardware certification programs for Ubuntu Server, but I don't see anything for desktop. For what it's worth, Ubuntu Server from my experience DOES "just work", but they don't have to deal with some of the tricky things like recovering from sleep modes.
From experience, today, 2016, if I wanted to run linux on a new laptop and have it "just work" (meaning: zero issues with sleep, networking, plugging into multiple external displays/projectors, bluetooth), what are my options? Is zero issues a reasonable expectation?
For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
> It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience.
I know it's hard to believe but things have changed a huge amount for the better in 10yrs.
My current Thinkpad has no driver/hardware issues at all. Suspend/resume is solid, auto updating of display changes on the fly works fine etc - it works better than a lot of Windows laptops I've owned or borrowed over the years.
> For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
So you're using your stale decade old experience to presume the ideological "die-hards" can't get any work done?
I don't know enough about the Dells to comment sorry.
My current is an i5 T530 with a FHD display and 3rd party RAM/SSD upgrades. Works solidly with Ubuntu - the only time it boots are after I finally get around to installing kernel updates. It flawlessly suspends and resumes in between times.
The 15" models might be too heavy for you - mine spends most of it time docked with a 27" monitor. I didn't need much portability.
I've tried at least 20 distros over the past six months (osboxes.org is really amazing for trying a bunch in pre-installed, VM form). My picks for the best combination of aesthetic and works-out-of-the-box were:
- Fedora Cinnamon (I'm using the Cinnamon version of Korora, which is Fedora with some packages and themes preinstalled to make it a little more user-friendly)
- Linux Mint
- LMDE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition, if the whole security and package-breaking thing scared you off the regular version)
- Kubuntu (KDE Plasma is a really, really nice desktop. I fully admit that I'm sticking with Cinnamon because I spent 20 years on Windows only and it feels more "familiar")
I've also got Ubuntu Trusty + xfce on my Chromebook, but it's running in a chroot and piggybacking off of the Chromebook's native Linux support, so I don't quite consider it a full install and can't evaluate it's "out of the box" support for hardware, etc.
I'm personally thrilled with having found Korora (https://kororaproject.org/). Fedora's hardware support seems to be better than some of the other distros I've tried as far as getting stuff working out of the box, so being able to throw Cinnamon on top of that pretty much gives me everything I want, sans perhaps less native packaging availability than Debian/Ubuntu.
elementaryOS would be somewhere up there, as I do like it, but I'm mostly just interested in the Pantheon desktop, which has been nearly impossible to get working on anything other than Ubuntu.
For 16.04 it is hard to say, as it is only beta right now.
But I do have Ubuntu/Unity on my laptop and one desktop computer since 12.04, updated to each intermediate release about a week after its publication and encountered almost none of the problems that the author described in all the time. My laptop is a 4 year old Thinkpad W520, the successor to the W510, that the author referred to in his user story.
I use fulldisk encryption, have two graphic cards in the laptop and a Gefore 970 in the desktop system, I use the Lenovo dock and have multiple monitors connected to it. The desktop system is a dual boot with Win10. I use tons of software of different trades. So my setups are not completely trivial, but work absolutely flawless.
The mass of problems described by the author probably indicate a more general problem, either caused by the video setup or, considering the range and randomness, maybe a hardware defect (RAM?). Maybe the laptop is also a bit old, which, of course, should not be much of a problem for Ubuntu.
The things to take care of, in my experience, are:
1. setting up the proprietary drivers for the dedicated graphic card can cause trouble. Ubuntu offers the driver installation (Nvidia in my case) from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center but it is a matter of fact, that the installation cannot be done reliably from within a running X-Session. It is mandatory to boot into the terminal and do the installation manually with an apt-get command, then reboot the computer. If you know it, it is absolutely no problem, but Canocial does not give instructions for this procedure, probably because it contradicts their claim for usability. Users who fail on the graphics driver installation often start to hack in random commands they find in user forums, maybe go for the xorg-edgers drivers and eventually end up with a seriously messed system. But: the problem exists in other distributions as well (except, maybe, Arch ;-)
2. background light control per hotkeys did not work out of the box but needed a manual tweak.
3. I made bad experiences with the Unity Tweak Tool. Some of the author's description match my experiences when fiddling with it. Try not to touch it. System preferences and "Ubuntu Tweak" are completely sufficient for me.
Otherwise I am more than happy - the system is super fast, super stable, all major upgrades worked flawlessly so far, hardware-changes (graphics cards, hard disks) caused no trouble, incremental backup (backintime) works perfectly, and I cannot remember a crash, not even a crash of the X-environment. In my experience, nagging problems that require significant research and fixing are very common for me on Windows, much less so on Ubuntu and almost not existing on OSX. On the other side: I can almost always fix an existing problem on Ubuntu, for Windows I often need help from others or the problem ends in a fresh install and on OSX there is not much to fix at all ;-)
In conclusion, I cannot believe that the aggregation of problems described by the author is in any way typical for Ubuntu per se.
I never encountered most of his complaints on 14.04. I still have other occasional problems, though.
The most annoying one is that WiFi auto-connect happens on the login screen, but it apparently can't access the WiFi password until I log in, so it pops up a WiFi password prompt that steals focus while I'm half-finished typing my login password.
I converted to Ubuntu 9 years ago and it has been my Home desktop ever since. I cannot be more satisfied. Yes, I have tried the filth that is Win XP, Vista, 7 and what not, during these years only to go back to Ubuntu. I am currently in 14.04. I wonder how much better it can get in 16.04?!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadOriginally left it to upgrade overnight, only to come in the morning (this is on my work machine) to see that it hanged somewhere in the process and wouldn't move on without user input. So I proceeded with clicking through all the prompts, and when 14.04 first loads, it's SO SLOW. Long story short, it took me 4-6 hours to finally get it usable. The whole time I was thinking, "how could they mess this up so badly?"
The host OS for the VM is Windows 7, and I have to agree with the author, it is much better to use. I only run the VM for the command line, but may upgrade to Windows 10 when Ubuntu on Linux comes out of beta this summer.
Though, to be fair, even as a Windows user and relatively firm fan of Windows, that happens for me routinely on Windows. Windows Update in particular is confusing with its many error messages that either magically resolve themselves if you retry enough times or require significant and arcane manual resolution. Managing home network file systems and printers with Windows in 2016 seems basically unchanged from 1998. Microsoft added "HomeGroups" to make this a bit easier for lay people, but they have more or less abandoned to its Windows 7 iteration, with virtually no evolution since. Now they channel their efforts toward integrating their cloud storage services.
Generally speaking, this is the trouble with general purpose computing and general purpose operating systems—there are rough edges and a huge number of corner cases that get ugly. In several decades of evolving these systems, we've not buffed those rough edges down as much as we'd like. It's similarly the reason mobile operating systems are popular for primary computing devices for a growing segment of the population. (Although, I will add that mobile operating systems are picking up the same rough edges as their capabilities expand to encompass more of the terrain typically associated with general purpose systems.)
And that's true across most operating systems. I recently upgraded my Dell tablet to Windows 10. Oh the humanity. And with every OS X version, problems with my 2009 Macbook are increasing, especially in the first few iterations.
Apple's post-90s hardware selection scarcity is a boon for them, as you don't really need to check that many configurations. Similarly, running Linux on slightly older Thinkpads is usually a very good bet. Doubleplus that if the wifi card is either libre enough or is replaced with one that is.
But as I'm not doing the hyper-mobile thing (I don't work from a beach or cafe and don't even like conferences), a desktop is usually the best choice for me. Cheap, fast and you can build one with fewer faulty components.
At the end of the day, I just don't recommend people switch to Linux.
It's basically because of Mageia that my linux hand-editing config know-how has atrophied down to nothing.
Seems Ubuntu and desktop Linux is seriously regressing, with the newer kernels my laptop won't suspend any more (Thinkpad T530 w/ Ivy Bridge and Intel graphics), after 4+ years of flawless usage. Seriously, nothing went wrong for years and now there's some horrible regression that has fucked up the whole experience and I can't suspend my laptop. WTF (and I have checked mailing lists, it is an upstream bug of some sort though some blame the kernel, others blame systemd).
My procedure was to boot the Live version, then standby and wake multiple times and see which would reliably work. I had been on Ubuntu for a while but it didn't work, neither did (maybe unsurprisingly) Mint, but Fedora just worked. I've stuck with Fedora for a while and have gone for good stretches where standby + resume would work for weeks... and then fail inexplicably.
But with Fedora it's the best it has been in the 6 years I've had this machine.
I tried to use arch, but I ended up fiddling with dwm and other stuff instead of working on what I should and I don't really like any of the linux DE's other than unity. So I don't really see any good alternatives for a distro to use with as little hassle/configuration as possible.
Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?
The fix is to ditch Ubuntu's "third party" support and just install it directly from the nVidia website instead. This is a bit of a hassle (you have to shut down X on the first install), but it fixes the breakage on every kernel update and gets you a far more modern driver.
I find Ubuntu's insistence on maintaining bug comparability on LTS releases to be pretty baffling. mplayer's GUI doesn't work out of the box, and the fix is easy, but they refuse to do it because it's an LTS release. nVidia drivers are broken but again, you can't fix it because it's LTS. Zsh manpages don't get installed, but that can't be fixed because it's LTS. Whatever happened to being the distro where everything just works out of the box?
There are two products here, for two kinds of people:
LTS is a product for people who want security updates but absolutely no other changes.
The next release is a product for people who want bug fixes and new features, in addition to security updates.
Your comment is essentially asking "but why didn't they make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor?". They didn't make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor because it's the spicy flavor, not the mild flavor.
Ubuntu doesn't really have a good middle ground distribution. Something like the old -STABLE release track on BSD where you get fixes and reasonable support but no ABI changes or major OS changes.
Honestly, these posts have been around since the dawn of Linux. Unless the author actually decides to get involved with the effort, I don't see how relevant this is. Making a complete operating system is hard and requires a lot of work, which is why the desktop still is Linux's biggest challenge. There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are still around, because it does a lot of very hard things right, and it's easier when you're paying people and forcing them to do the boring grunt work that makes a completely OS.
For me it is Unity.
For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
For me it is Unity.
For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
You might not know about a bug until it is reported because your particular configuration doesn't trigger it. Or should everyone run your "blessed" configuration?
This software is released under the premise that it is free, and the assumption that it is an actual working operating system.
Unless you're the master of everything, then I'm assuming you've never been a critic of any movie or your favorite sports team. Right?
So yes, complaints from people who aren't in the business are pretty much absolutely irrelevant.
According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 700+ employees.
The post was actionable feedback. Ubuntu can use this to improve.
The alternative is that they release something, there's complete silence, and no-one uses it. Which is much, much worse than people criticising it.
Updating a Ubuntu install has been a "surprise", some things start working, some others stop working
It seems there are two types of packages, the "base system" (kernel, libs, etc) which is rock-solid but anything that gives "user friendliness" is a crapshoot
In the end I think I'll probably end up using a chromebook for Linux if I want to escape from BSD Mac. Or just stick with Mac on the laptop and Linux on the server.
Other that those things osX is pretty stable but it does get slow over time, I have 16GB of ram in my 2011 Core-i7 MBP, I see a lot of beach-balls even though I reinstalled last year.
Here tools to fix your issues:
- Time Machine only support HFS+ filesystem but you can use the excellent: Carbon Copy Cloner
- For mounting SFTP, FTP and any cloud drive use: ExpanDrive
- It's actually not the mouse curve, it's the rendering buffer, most people don't notice it but a windows user should, fixable with: Smoothmouse
- If it's slow you probably don't have an SSD drive in that computer, so while it's indexing all hundreds of thousands of files it will be slow while using it.
This is the reason why chromebook sate starting to looking appealing. The hardware already comes totally supported but I can also get a root shell.
We will see. I expect things to slowly get better over time.
My experience with Ubuntu has been really similar to his, 10.04 was the peak, I had a great setup with gnome 2, everything was fast and responsive, things worked, crashes happened very infrequently. Every release after it has seemed significantly worse than the previous ones. And I put the blame on Unity and Canonical forking every Gnome application to work with it.
Anecdotally, I play around with two VMs, a Debian one running Gnome, and an Ubuntu 14.04 one. The Debian VM has half the ram and processing power as the Ubuntu one, and still runs significantly faster. Gnome 3 is great, and if I were still running linux full time I'd use it as my DM.
That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm.
I had that one too. From memory it was fixed in 15.04.
Gentoo + i3 has been great for me. I occasionally had hibernate issues, but I've had that with Windows and Mac laptops in the past as well. Basic acpi suspends I never seemed to have an issue with. Networking reconnects too.
I will say that my draw to Gentoo and Linux is that I'm a developer and I don't really mind working on these problems. It takes a little longer to get stuff working for me, but I gain knowledge about how my system works and how the full stack operates. That's not for everyone and it's been years since I advocated Linux on regular peoples' (non-developers/tech people) laptops.
Ubuntu was suppose to be that golden distro back in the mid 2000s that finally made Linux accessible on the Desktop. After trying to get some friends to use it, almost all of them went back to XP at some point. I still think Linux distros are great developer operating systems and if you do any web Java/Scala/Ruby/Python, you should really look at trying to work natively in Linux with a tiling window manager. Ubuntu might be good for people who just want to browse the web and check e-mail, but Google Chromebook seems to do that pretty well without sucking at it.
Developers can install debian, ubuntu, etc. in a chroot, which all benefit from the kernel and driver stability.
Gad, personally, the amount of time I've saved never having to troubleshoot my chromebook quite a contrast to other laptops.
https://ubuntugnome.org/
The reason I still suggest an Ubuntu derivative is because it's really easy to find instructions on how to do something, and their still mostly the same. I don't know if the same is true for Fedora just because I haven't used it before and encountered the same googling problems.
Of course, this may be a bad thing, because the number of wrong answers, or unanswered questions out there.
Redhat is the largest Linux company out there and the only thing it probably does is ensure software is well supported.
I ran Ubuntu for 10 years before switching to Fedora on my laptop. And I have been blown away.
Right now what i am seeing is them locking Linux to their way of doing things, and you either adopt to that or is shown the highway.
Linux used to be flexible, allowing different people to shape it to do different tasks.
But more and more you are met with "why would you do that?!" and "you are doing/holding it wrong!" when you present your use case.
I am a consumer who wants an OSX experience in the Linux world. And there are millions out there like me.
Am I forcing you to buy in ? not at all - the beauty of Linux is that you can use LFS, Gentoo or Arch which allows you to customize and play with your particular set of philosophies.
Not all opinionated software is malicious - at the end of the day, software is merely an expression of the person and their beliefs. And sometimes they just want to believe in one thing.
And frankly recent history at both LFS and Gentoo shows how nasty systemd is.
Gentoo forked udev to eudev, and LFS later adopted eudev, because after udev got merged with systemd every systemd release changed how to extract udev from the larger code blob.
Heck, LFS now have effectively split in two. They are maintaining one document for "classic" Linux, and one for systemd Linux.
Plus its one less step, and if I'm trying to get someone to switch to linux, I don't want to let them even try to use Unity because, despite how pretty it is, it's just so slow.
The lack of even giving it a try just seems weird to me, given the amount of kvetching and problems the author encountered.
My complaint about the linux desktop experience is the amount of research necessary. If you are careful to purchase hardware that is well supported, everything will go swimmingly. This isn't really different with other OSs, but that information seems a little more difficult to discover (especially with bleeding edge hardware).
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
(Beware of the Dell's though...their last iteration of the XPS 13 had a rough start since many of their drivers were patched for kernel 3.19 and they shipped with 14.04 (kernel 3.13) Should be more stable now, but I was right mad when I got my XPS 13 and the touchpad, keyboard, AND WiFi were all bugged out of the box.)
I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/>.
It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.
For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time.
If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.
Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night.
So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.
Despite that, I find Arch is the least disruptive distro to daily work because it doesn't meddle. Canonical is full of people who think they are Steve Jobs and decide they're going to overhaul System Y with some super-special never-before-seen invented-here components this release because it's the visionary way to do things (and that other competing revitalization effort that's seeing widespread adoption, well, it's not). The result is 2-3 Ubuntu releases that are bug-ridden and really not production ready until the new system can stabilize. It seems as soon as one major userspace component begins to mature they decide to rip out another core component (Gnome->Unity; X->Mir).
Source: Arch and Ubuntu user for the last 10+ years
I mostly use ubuntu on the server, but jump between Debian, CoreOS and Ubuntu, and mostly have had a pretty good experience with ubuntu on the server.
My main machine has been a Macbook Pro for the last 4 years, and as long as I don't need to be using Photoshop or Coda, I'd rather be using Xubuntu on a system with even half the specs.
I always use CentOS on my servers, and have been very happy with it. It's rock solid. I haven't even upgraded to CentOS 7 yet. I just moved to a new server in March and decided to stick with CentOS 6 until systemd becomes a bit more stable.
The only recommendation I have is to never run Ubuntu with an AMD card with their proprietary drivers.
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
Everything Just Works (TM). I don't care if Linux is a wee bit more performant or supports a wider range of hardware. Truth be told, I simply want to do my thing & not think about the computer as such. I'm way past that age when "they say it's free, if you get it to run; the geeks say hey - that's half the fun!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8) was a viable approach to computing.
I've run Ubuntu on a desktop machine for years and generally things have worked quite well. But I make sure that Linux will support it before I upgrade my video card.
I really prefer Linux but I wouldn't install it on a random laptop.
1. significantly faster vioscsi(4) driver for VirtIO SCSI adapters -- I can live with vioscsi being up to 2x slower than Ubuntu or FreeBSD, but 5x - 10x slower is probably a deal breaker for some other folks that would like to use OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, Linode, etc.
2. binpatches directly from OpenBSD, similar to the way a third-party is providing them at https://stable.mtier.org/
Other than that, really love OpenBSD and even their man pages are awesome.
I do use Linux at work by way of Vagrant, and it's great for that. It's Linux on the desktop that appears to be unsuitable for everyday use.
You don't have that concern with Windows because mainstream PC manufacturers need to support Windows to be profitable, but there's the exact same problem with OS X. It feels a little different because the OS comes preinstalled, but you're still choosing the hardware for the OS.
If you buy a machine that is reputed to work well with linux, it works well with linux. If you don't bother to check that, you might end up with a bit of homework.
Never. In fact, my laptop connects to wireless networks even before I can unlock my screen.
But then again, I'm on a ThinkPad (with an Intel 7265 Wi-Fi card), and these things are well-designed hardware that try to stick to standards and are well supported on Linux.
On the other hand, "cheapo refurb" is also indicative of my desire to minimize the expense of purchasing an additional computer.
I'm thinking of getting another just to have the parts on-hand if I need to replace anything else.
I didn't give it as long as the OP, but it just took way too much time fiddling to get to a stable, working place and even then things weren't as nice as on OS X with very little to no tweaking. HiDPI in particular is a mess, with support all over the place. OS X nails it. Plus there are some really great apps I use every day on OS X that there is no substitute for (Sketch, Tweetbot, Reeder, Alfred, and Photoshop come to mind.)
Even "little" things like font rendering is kind of a mess on Linux and really is a big deal if you are a developer staring at them all day or are a web developer and need to see what things look like with proper fonts installed.
I hope OS X sticks around for awhile or a worthy competitor appears. I'd think there is an opportunity for someone to create a great portable, a great desktop, and a great OS for both but I'm sure it pales in comparison to the tablet and mobile ecosystem.
I finally got tired of Ubuntu's far-but-not-far-enough, our-way-or-the-highway nature. Now I use Debian, with everything tuned and tweaked for the way I develop and use software. It's modular enough, it's good enough, it's stable enough. I couldn't be happier (although some days I think I'll give Arch a shot …).
All of my hardware worked immediately after install on Linux whereas Windows required hunting down drivers.
Most impressive was that the suspend/resume feature works perfectly in Ubuntu (and the suspend/resume completes in 2-3 seconds) whereas in Windows, it goes into suspend after a good bit of crunching but never finishes the resume process (I hear the system fans/drive wake but nothing else happens and requires a hard reset).
Using Intel for wifi/ethernet etc is also a good (but less important) choice.
I've experienced the majority of the bugs that the author is talking about and a lot of them do happen on a daily basis. Somehow, I just learned to live with it. It's kind of like a chronic disease.
For me operating systems are a "choose the lesser evil" situation. For me it's a balance between:
A) Linux (Ubuntu) - negatives. boring, super buggy desktop. Mainly weird/incompatible for entertainment purposes. Major hardware incompatibilities. Fixing bugs takes hours of Googling and compiling random things. Q. My so and so doesn't work? A. It's a free product, don't complain!
- positives. Despite what people say I find package management wonderful. Awesome for developers, everything is one apt-get install away with the exception that you may have to add a PPA like the author mentions. Fast. Never bloated. No viruses. No spyware.
B) Windows - negatives: Bloated. Slows down over time. Needs a yearly reinstall. Viruses galore. Spyware galore. Windows 10 has taken the Google approach of spying on you as much as possible and sending home every last drop of personal data for their own financial gains. - positives: Most software works well. Pretty much every application ever made has a Windows exe for simple installation. Nice looking GUI.
C) Mac: - Negatives: Pay double the money for half the hardware. What if I want a touch screen? Buy our other products too! What if I want a 2 in 1? Buy our other products too! What if I don't want to pay 2-3000$ for a laptop with a 1 inch bezel in 2016? Buy it anyway!
- Positives: Never used it, but it looks brilliant at first glance. Seems to be the perfect combination of Linux performance/capabilities with the good looks and refinement of having a multi-billion dollar company behind it.
- searching... sweet sweet searching magic
- reloading your state after reboot magic
Mac negatives:
- Mac hotkeys... slowly drives you insane, remapping doesn't work, 1/3 applications won't respect it or are broken by it.
- Finder / file manager is just awful. Awful. I could probably argue Win 3.1 file manager is better.
- not a Linux UNIX core...
It drives me nuts that desktop OS isn't a solved problem, given how many people use it and how much CPU horsepower exists to emulate the crufty old stuff. Why Google never grabbed Linux and made a genuinely usable desktop OS is beyond me.
With a desktop PC, it's generally manageable, but every time I tried on a Laptop (and I have tried several brands) I have had various problems with display/bluetooth/sound/network/power/sleep/hibernation. It also seemed like everytime I did an upgrade, while it may fix one problem, something previously working would break. I even specifically researched and bought hardware that was "Linux friendly" (eg: was generally considered to be well supported).
I eventually realized that my desire to run an open source OS on my machine was consuming far more time than it was worth, and I'd rather be getting actual real work done than fixing my display not scaling properly with an external monitor plugged in, or having to reboot because it just came out of hibernation and now can't see any wifi networks. Since then, I've run Windows on my desktop, even when I am 100% working on code running on linux servers (and basically just spend my time in an SSH terminal, IDE or web browser).
Apple has the unique position of owning the hardware: they basically have a very, very limited set of platforms to test on, and as a result, it's pretty easy for them to ensure that everything works.
Microsoft builds an OS that is supposed to work on all kinds of random hardware from random manufacturers.. They largely take the position that it's up to vendors to implement drivers correctly, but even then Microsoft apparently runs an extensive hardware compatibility test lab and generally spends a lot of time and money making sure it "just works" as much as they can. I have no doubt that crash reports directly feed to this, and when necessary if they suspect some combination of specific hardware is leading to a crash, they likely test it.
Linux distros, on the other hand, seem to have none of this. Many of the drivers are open source, created by volunteers because they bought it and want it to work, and still not many vendors put effort into releasing their own drivers. No one tests even close to all the combinations possible, nor as far as I know, is there anyone monitoring crash reports and trying to deal with combinations of problems like Microsoft does.
Am I wrong in this? Is there some organization that is putting lots of effort into getting desktop linux into "just works" state?
Canonical has some hardware certification programs for Ubuntu Server, but I don't see anything for desktop. For what it's worth, Ubuntu Server from my experience DOES "just work", but they don't have to deal with some of the tricky things like recovering from sleep modes.
From experience, today, 2016, if I wanted to run linux on a new laptop and have it "just work" (meaning: zero issues with sleep, networking, plugging into multiple external displays/projectors, bluetooth), what are my options? Is zero issues a reasonable expectation?
For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
I know it's hard to believe but things have changed a huge amount for the better in 10yrs.
My current Thinkpad has no driver/hardware issues at all. Suspend/resume is solid, auto updating of display changes on the fly works fine etc - it works better than a lot of Windows laptops I've owned or borrowed over the years.
> For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
So you're using your stale decade old experience to presume the ideological "die-hards" can't get any work done?
My current is an i5 T530 with a FHD display and 3rd party RAM/SSD upgrades. Works solidly with Ubuntu - the only time it boots are after I finally get around to installing kernel updates. It flawlessly suspends and resumes in between times.
The 15" models might be too heavy for you - mine spends most of it time docked with a 27" monitor. I didn't need much portability.
- Fedora Cinnamon (I'm using the Cinnamon version of Korora, which is Fedora with some packages and themes preinstalled to make it a little more user-friendly)
- Linux Mint
- LMDE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition, if the whole security and package-breaking thing scared you off the regular version)
- Kubuntu (KDE Plasma is a really, really nice desktop. I fully admit that I'm sticking with Cinnamon because I spent 20 years on Windows only and it feels more "familiar")
I've also got Ubuntu Trusty + xfce on my Chromebook, but it's running in a chroot and piggybacking off of the Chromebook's native Linux support, so I don't quite consider it a full install and can't evaluate it's "out of the box" support for hardware, etc.
I'm personally thrilled with having found Korora (https://kororaproject.org/). Fedora's hardware support seems to be better than some of the other distros I've tried as far as getting stuff working out of the box, so being able to throw Cinnamon on top of that pretty much gives me everything I want, sans perhaps less native packaging availability than Debian/Ubuntu.
elementaryOS would be somewhere up there, as I do like it, but I'm mostly just interested in the Pantheon desktop, which has been nearly impossible to get working on anything other than Ubuntu.
I recently installed it for a friend of mine and it's his first time using linux. So far so good but the problems listed in the article worries me...
But I do have Ubuntu/Unity on my laptop and one desktop computer since 12.04, updated to each intermediate release about a week after its publication and encountered almost none of the problems that the author described in all the time. My laptop is a 4 year old Thinkpad W520, the successor to the W510, that the author referred to in his user story.
I use fulldisk encryption, have two graphic cards in the laptop and a Gefore 970 in the desktop system, I use the Lenovo dock and have multiple monitors connected to it. The desktop system is a dual boot with Win10. I use tons of software of different trades. So my setups are not completely trivial, but work absolutely flawless.
The mass of problems described by the author probably indicate a more general problem, either caused by the video setup or, considering the range and randomness, maybe a hardware defect (RAM?). Maybe the laptop is also a bit old, which, of course, should not be much of a problem for Ubuntu.
The things to take care of, in my experience, are:
1. setting up the proprietary drivers for the dedicated graphic card can cause trouble. Ubuntu offers the driver installation (Nvidia in my case) from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center but it is a matter of fact, that the installation cannot be done reliably from within a running X-Session. It is mandatory to boot into the terminal and do the installation manually with an apt-get command, then reboot the computer. If you know it, it is absolutely no problem, but Canocial does not give instructions for this procedure, probably because it contradicts their claim for usability. Users who fail on the graphics driver installation often start to hack in random commands they find in user forums, maybe go for the xorg-edgers drivers and eventually end up with a seriously messed system. But: the problem exists in other distributions as well (except, maybe, Arch ;-)
2. background light control per hotkeys did not work out of the box but needed a manual tweak.
3. I made bad experiences with the Unity Tweak Tool. Some of the author's description match my experiences when fiddling with it. Try not to touch it. System preferences and "Ubuntu Tweak" are completely sufficient for me.
Otherwise I am more than happy - the system is super fast, super stable, all major upgrades worked flawlessly so far, hardware-changes (graphics cards, hard disks) caused no trouble, incremental backup (backintime) works perfectly, and I cannot remember a crash, not even a crash of the X-environment. In my experience, nagging problems that require significant research and fixing are very common for me on Windows, much less so on Ubuntu and almost not existing on OSX. On the other side: I can almost always fix an existing problem on Ubuntu, for Windows I often need help from others or the problem ends in a fresh install and on OSX there is not much to fix at all ;-)
In conclusion, I cannot believe that the aggregation of problems described by the author is in any way typical for Ubuntu per se.
The most annoying one is that WiFi auto-connect happens on the login screen, but it apparently can't access the WiFi password until I log in, so it pops up a WiFi password prompt that steals focus while I'm half-finished typing my login password.