Yes, but most distros do not re-do the desktop experience to make that work like the Ubuntu distro and there is the aspect of Gnome resisting changes/suggestions from Ubuntu.
I find this assertion very suspect, as the X220 I have has nearly identical hardware, and suspend/resume works perfectly. But I use Debian with a 2.3.39 kernel; not sure what version F15 is at.
That makes sense. Basically, when you buy new hardware, you have to be pretty diligent about kernel releases for a few months after the hardware is released.
If you want maximum compatibility with everything, go for hardware that's a generation old. (Pre-Sandy-Bridge processors are pretty good and they are still sold new. So it's not a huge compromise if you value your time more than you value having the absolute newest stuff.)
The latest Ubuntu version works so well with multiple monitors I almost can't imagine going back to standard Gnome. The interface has actually helped me become more productive.
I run NVIDIA graphics and have no problems .. I realise the latest and greatest takes a while to become fully supported on my platform of choice, and often solutions to problems require research and time - but I'd rather accept this compromise than use Windows.
Windows feels like Fisher Price, Linux feels more like Mechano - in the sense that it presents opportunities rather than fully packaged solutions
The upgrade to Natty was pretty painless for me .. and I like Unity. Like you, I was also pretty cautious about whether to make the jump, but I'm glad I did.
Unity isn't perfect yet, but I'm confident the UI team are heading in a decent direction.
Indeed, I am a Mac user, after using Linux and BSD from 1994 to ~2007. But I have a Linux machine for work that requires plenty of (affordable!) CPU power and memory. I recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 on that machine, and this is one of the very first times I thought "they get it". Unity is a fresh breath of air compared to the old 'let's hide applications deep in menus'-paradigm. Unity makes applications quickly accessible and manageable. It's not there yet, but it is going in the right direction.
The upgrade is easy, it is using it afterwards you may not like. Ubuntu used to have the slogan "Ubuntu: Linux for human beings." Now it should be, "Ubuntu: Linux for guinea pigs." I don't know how they manage to mess up the clock. I have to open it and close it twice for the date to refresh and show the correct date. Double clicking the sidebar icons doesn't always do the same thing. Sometimes I get a grid to select the window, other times it opens all windows in a stacked configuration. Still using it though.
It depends if you want it for desktop or laptop. If it's for laptop, check https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/760131 - new kernels use a lot more energy. Until this gets fixed, I don't think it's worth updating.
Regarding the upgrade itself, yes - it's as easy as usual (click, click, click, .... done).
It's a buggy mess IMO. I'm running 11.04 on recently purchased Lenovo X220 (replaced my 3 year old MBP) and I've had frequent hard locks in X, windowing glitches (windows doing weird things, scroll bars acting up), and issues with cleanly shutting down and rebooting.
I blame the lockup/windowing issues completely on Unity and I've had more success with the system since I've switched to the classic Ubuntu desktop. My current Linux desktop is running 10.10 and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future (perhaps until 11.10). I have a new sandy bridge desktop coming in next week and I'm undecided as to what I will be installing on that system.
I had similarly bad experience with my x220. If you try to boot with external screen connected, the screen blinks like a strobelight, you need to change resolution to make it work. X hangs up sometimes. Ditched unity, running xubuntu seems to be smoother and more sane.
Great post, I'll just add that besides the "technical" hassle, the linux desktop experience has been poor at providing a nice, beautiful and clean workspace. I just switched to OS X from years of using Linux as my primary desktop environment. So please if you have any time you can spend on open source software, don't create a new Linux distro, try to build a new clean Desktop, come on, you geeks, don't tell me you can't do it. And I'll be more than happy to switch back, and of course contribute, eventually. We don't need new Linux distros as much as we need a new Desktop environment. I guess Ubuntu got that, but they're still stuck with GTK..argh
I think the postscript is quite rude. Disregarding possible criticism because he's a Linux sysadmin and has contributed to the kernel. To be fair, he's doing something wrong even if he doesn't want to admit it: choosing the wrong hardware. His most direct and important complaints come down to that.
I bought a new computer past summer and all its hardware worked properly from day zero, ethernet, wifi, 3D acceleration, suspending, hibernating and dual-monitors included. I chose the right hardware. Flash support? The 64-bit flash plugin is not crashing here. I use flashblock to avoid possible security problems, but I use it in Windows too, to avoid annoying ads with sound. The quality of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is good enough for desktop users, in my humble opinion.
And the rest of the post is debatable at least. Linux and its software ecosystem are not to blame for poor Skype support, for example.
I would support his position if only because, in this day and age, should a Linux power user have to do hours and hours of research to avoid purchasing the 'wrong' hardware? To me, his opinion boils down to: bad support for cutting edge (or even just current day) tech. He mentioned at the beginning that he was a cutting edge guy.
Desktop Linux is really for people that can/will line up all their ducks in a row (and then sometimes debug those ducks) when upgrading hardware. Even as a technical person I can understand if you don't wish to continue to pour time into that sort of thing.
How much research can one really do? Perhaps things are better, but I got tired of looking at 'hardware compatibility' lists that were out of date and/or only referenced hardware that was not available for purchase within a hundred mile radius of my house.
I saw a reference in a list about a wireless card 'model644b' that worked, so I bought it, then found out that, hell no, you got 'model644br4', and only r1 and r3 really work, as r4 was manufactured in a different facility and they used a different process (BS like this). The box and listing doesn't show the hardware revision number to the public - you have to open it up to find that out. (I made up the model number, but had pretty much that same issue in 2005).
I took an ubuntu boot dvd to several stores wanting to test out compatibility before purchasing a laptop, and was ejected from a couple. TigerDirect staff basically ignored me, whether out of respect for my mad testing skillz or just apathy - I couldn't tell, but I bought a laptop there in 2008 because I think I verified the wireless worked out of the box.
When the answer to 'linux on the desktop' is 'go research loads of conflicting or hard to find info, the order from an online store and piece it together yourself or pay loads extra for a custom built laptop' to guarantee, no thanks. That sort of 'freedom' isn't for me.
Maybe there is room then for a short HOWTO on finding hardware. Not an extensive compatibility list, but some hardware that is known to work well to make the purchasing process easier.
Or perhaps the necessity of HCLs at all is indicative of a larger problem. This is not something end-users should be responsible for. Maybe 10+ years ago when the options were fewer and easier to sift through, but now? It's tedious to the point of maddening.
It is probably indicative of a larger problem, although one that is very hard for the community to solve. A big issue with hardware support is the lack of specifications and vendor participation. Vendors are getting better at that, but it's still an issue and the major vendors are less-than-stellar. For consumer components, Intel is about the only one that's all-in on Linux support; nVidia insists on binary drivers that are hard to install and have a checkered reliability history, and ATI provides specs but to my knowledge no engineering effort (although AMD/ATI may be improving on that front). Not sure how things are in the sound department w/ Creative, etc. these days.
If vendors provided and honestly advertised Linux support, that would be a much better world. Then compatibility can be checked at the store. It'd be bad, though, if they supported Linux like they do Windows - with a gig of userspace junkware.
I thought the same about the rudeness. I don't know why "try another distro" should not be acceptable when you are a kernel developer. The OS is more than just the kernel.
To be fair, the wide adoption of notebooks made it harder to "choose" the right hardware. With a desktop PC you could just (in the worst case) replace individual components lacking proper driver support whereas with a notebook you basically have to do all that "research" up front. I think this made it somewhat harder to use Linux as a desktop OS, though it's not the fault of Linux (or some particular distribution).
While not optimal, virtualization can be a solution in many cases: Using a 64 bit Linux server, a 32 bit Linux desktop (in regards to Linux I don't quite see the benefit of 64 bit at this point) and your host OS of choice is becoming encreasingly practical with memory prices getting lower. Better than throwing out Linux (with the many great hacker -friendly features it has) or having to select an older notebook just to run it.
(I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, just wanted to add another angle)
No, I actually agree with you. It's harder with laptops and notebooks. With Windows and OSX, the manufaturer does all that work for the user, while us Linux users are normally alone out there looking for compatible computers. It's not easy to get a laptop or notebook with Linux preinstalled, at least in some countries. You know, I could buy something like that from Dell, but the keyboard layout would be different and make it harder to input my native charset. Plus, many people trying Linux for the first time will try to run it in a computer they bought without Linux and compatibility could be horrible.
Thought the same thing. I have an additional windows machine at work now and over many years, I honestly forgot how annoying that system is in day-to-day work. Top of the annoyances:
- Unresponsive (in general... win7 on a serious "desktop replacement" class laptop with loads of resources)
- Rebooting almost every day (application updates)
- Microsoft applications constantly crashing (mostly outlook)
- Randomly failing to hibernate
- Third-party support/driver applications which I should never hear about spamming me with questions (you scheduled a backup, do you really want to make a backup now? you scheduled disk maintenance, do you really want to run it? hey, I'd like to update, can I? oh, actually there are no updates available, kthnxbye. look at me, I'm updating the virus database!)
Unfortunately these are exactly the same reasons why I stopped using windows over a decade ago...
Or stupid pieces of software installed with drivers that look like they were designed by a 12 year old (Let's make the interface surrounded by animated flames... then Evel Knievel can burst through the flames when the program loads... and then burst into flames! Yeah! Oh, yeah. We'll also throw in some hardware controls to turn on/off the bluetooth adapter that this is packaged with... ATI Catalyst, I'm looking at you...)
I tried and gave up on Linux half a dozen times over the years, and would have agreed with everything this article says. Then I tried Ubuntu, and never looked back. My house has been Microsoft-free since before Vista was released. Ubuntu does, indeed, Just Work. Despite the author's PS, I have to say: he's doing it wrong, and he should try Ubuntu.
Agree. I'm on OSX. I've used many different Linux distros but they don't have that 'just working' touch yet. I must admit, Ubuntu is pretty damn good though. It sucks trying to make stuff work that just should on Linux. I'm sure that one day though things will change.
It also needs better cohesion between design and code...
Strange. For me, Linux has Just Worked for the last 3 or 4 years. No hardware compatibility issues, no performance issues. I use it because it's easier.
I've also been using linux for only about three years. I have had some minor hardware compatibility issues- namely the "sleep" problem- which went away with subsequent updates.
I just can't see ever moving back to Windows because I couldn't stand to lose the shell. I could see myself moving to MacOS, but I don't understand how a sys admin could stomach doing so if I could not.
I've been using Linux for about six years full time. It's been three or four years since it's worked problem free out of the box on all my hardware (including laptops) with no proprietary drivers.
it sounds like the final straw was the intel drivers - the list later in the document seems to be from problems going back over the years.
and while i would like to say that opensuse these days does "just work", i too have had problems with the current intel driver (open bug report, no response; there is an older version in the X repo that works much better). this same problem was mentioned in the thread here on the new driver contributions from intel.
so what's happening with the intel driver? why is something so unstable being released as part of standard distros?
For me Linux offers the ultimate desktop experience: Tiling WMs.
Floating desktop environments like Gnome and KDE on the other hand feel like bad OS X copies and definitely are not on of Linux' strengths.
On hardware: You have to watch out what you buy. If you just want to run the most bleeding edge hardware then there will probably be some sort of driver fuckup with linux. Though you might not be able to avoid the mentioned Optimus technology in a months :(
On suspend/resume: I'm running Linux on an 2009 Macbook Pro and the suspend/resume works like a charm. It needs a few seconds more than OS X to wake up completely but it works. So I guess this is hardware dependent too and not a general problem with lx.
Desktop software: If you want to run typical desktop software like Office, Video Editing, etc. Then yeah - Linux is probably the wrong OS for you. I'm in the lucky position to be able to do most of my work in terminals and VIM and for that there's nothing better than a Linux box with a tiling WM.
I'd say Linux is not a general purpose desktop OS in its current state. But there are use cases where linux rocks. (Even on the desktop.)
as a now mac user who previously used xmonad + ubuntu, the tiling windows experience on osx is amazingly poor with divvy / sizeup compared to a a proper tiling wm like xmonad
Related to parent: It seems KDE's is a bit limited. Chrome does not get tiled. And it seems to be impossible to say make a 2x2 grid of tiles. Anyone know how to fix/do these?
Being one of the main VLC developers and the de-facto leader of the VideoLAN project, I hate to say it, but I am a bit in the same state of mind, lately (no, I haven't moved to Windows, though)... And yet, I am also a very strong open source advocate, and have been working on FLOSS on most Desktop Operating Systems (in my name and anonymously); and believing strongly in Computer freedom. I've been Linux users and sysadmin since 8 years now.
However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.
- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...
- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...
- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.
- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...
- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.
So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.
However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)
I remember the way PulseAudio was abruptly included in Ubuntu and the problems that this initially caused a lot of the applications that made use of audio as a result - but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history.
The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.
Decisions about where to go next re. Desktop paradigms are tricky ... but I think the main problem is lack of strong and decisive leadership; largely due to the problems inherent to an open development hierarchy. A paradigm shift often requires a leap of faith. Without that, any changes becomes a patchwork or amalgamation of multiple people's ideas - which in my mind isn't optimal.
I reckon Mark Shuttleworth is trying to create a paradigm shift with Ubuntu .. and I applaud him. There's so much life left in Linux as desktop platform. To state otherwise is shortsighted, and ultimately damaging to an incredibly vibrant and worthy platform.
> but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history
Believe me, they are not. They might be history for you, but not for everyone.
Many non-standard setups (using Jack, using pass-through, using bluetooth headsets) are still broken. Applications using Phonon have very different behaviors with or without PA.
KMix and pavucontrol still behave very differently from each other...
That is because I am using it those days, nothing more...
Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.
Gnome user here. PulseAudio is always screwing up the settings on/misbehaving with my SB Live 5.1, and there's no way to assign the rear or center/lfe outputs as headphone outputs instead, which is a piece of cake with plain ALSA (just use alsamixer to set the Wave Surround mixer to ~-16dB). Oh yeah, PulseAudio also ignores the decibel hints given by ALSA, and frequently sets the output gain to +12dB on some integrated sound cards, causing terrible distortion. Applications trying to work around the PulseAudio situation (Skype, Flash) by preventing me from selecting my hardware-mixed ALSA output have their own problems. I have many other complaints, but it's far easier to just uninstall PA and have a nice, clean audio system.
If you find a bug in actively maintained software like PulseAudio, please report it. The best thing to do here is not to work around a bug, but to participate in the community and help to improve the software.
That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations.
There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.
> The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.
I'm sorry, but the statement that linux improves over time, and thay's unique to linux has really no basis in reality. Both Windows and MacOS do improve over time, we could argue which of those three does the best job, but I don't really think linux would be the winner in that comparison either.
I don't have any experience with other OSes than those 3 mentioned, so somebody else can chip in.
With Windows, I've found that driver support often halts once a manufacturer has provided it's obligatory release. I think this is a limitation of the commercial closed source model that Windows (and OS X) follow.
I think an open source model encourages iterative improvement which isn't tied to commercial product releases.
I agree with you that open source model should (and often does) solves problems with hardware support, at least in theory. Then again, my bluetooth on linux simply refuses to work, no matter what I do (while on the same hardware windows never had any problems).
Your original comment was a little bit ambiguous: you were primarily thinking of legacy hardware support as in "legacy hardware support is often ongoing". I read the first part of the sentence "Problems are ironed out" as if that's only valid for linux, which I don't think it is.
You're right, there are examples, probably many where you will show linux supports hardware better than osx or windoze.
But hey, I use linux for the last two years for all my desktop computing (and more for servers). I love it and find it superior to windows. Except my bluetooth doesn't work: and it did with windows.
PulseAudio has been crap for ages, and its rate of improvement is lethargic at best. What frustrates me most about PA is that one of the big selling points was "network transparency" a la X; however X it would seem is to be deprecated with graphics network transparency along with it. So why do we stick with PA then? Audio on Linux has more layers than an onion. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktops at the moment, when I move to the next LTS I will be moving to Xubuntu and leave all the GNOME/Unity/Wayland crap behind. If a X extension comes along that allows remote compositing and local display (a la VNC) in a native window by window fashion I will be a truly happy boy.
I think all of the big selling points of PulseAudio had similar tragic flaws. Either they were totally useless even conceptually (network transparent audio? really?) or conceptually at least so-so, but implemented so badly that they were also practically useless. My favorite example of the latter was the per-application volume control (which I've never wanted, but maybe somebody does) which pretty much ended up with the system volume occasionally getting set to the maximum value.
What's so odd about this is that I have this on my macbook now but in a much more straightforward way. Each application running that outputs sound has a volume control embedded in it (itunes, vlc, flash video in youtube, etc). I go to each one and adjust the volume. Not that hard. I realize PA was trying to centralize and offer more, but it's a solution looking for a problem in most cases.
And I tried out 'airfoil' the other day (I think that was the name) that let me push out audio from different apps on my mac to 'foil speakers'? - basically other software running to capture and playback that audio. I can essentially run and manage just the audio portion of itunes on mac 1 from software on mac 2. And it 'just worked' (to reclaim the ubuntu mantra). Ahh - here: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
Per application volume is the feature of PA most people wanted. Windows 7 has this and it works great. In PA however... not so much. Linux does need something like pulseaudio, but pulseaudio does indeed suck :(
PulseAudio has been one of those love/hate things. Per application audio is great when you want to mute an application that you can't mute otherwise (like a flash application for school simply won't shut up).
I hate how it keeps touching the volume level for the system/hardware.
I hear you regarding Shuttleworth & Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers don't seem to want to play ball & have seen Unity as a rival to GNOME Shell rather than as complementary or something to build on.
"And yet, I am also a very strong open source advocate"
Having an opinion about the miserable state of the Linux desktop has nothing to do with open-source advocacy. The success of many open-source projects including Linux itself (on everything but the desktop) is proof that the model works, and can produce quality software, often better than the proprietary alternatives.
I too am an open-source advocate, and I've met insult and disdain when I rant about the desktop "holy cow". There's just something there that makes people blind to the issues, and it's the same thing that makes the issues pile up and not get fixed. It just doesn't happen very often now because I seldom give enough of a crap about this long-lost battle to even enter the discussion.
> The success of many open-source projects including Linux itself (on everything but the desktop) is proof that the model works, and can produce quality software, often better than the proprietary alternatives.
And a big part of the difference is the environment:
On the server you have a relatively homogeneous hardware platform, many deeply technical users who can and will fix things that are broken, and good connectivity of related environments so that useful innovations spread quickly and the people who made those innovations possible benefit from their spread.
On the desktop you have a much less uniform hardware environment, relatively sparse numbers of technically able users, multiple obstacles to connectivity, and almost no individual recognition for people who make important improvements.
And the problems that are being solved are different, desktop software usually has to put up with a lot of bureaucracy and rules; writing desktop applications requires that developers be aware of the conventions of the system they are operating in and play well with a host of other software for something as simple as drawing a dialog box for the user and capturing input from it. On the server it's relatively easy to partition processes from each other so that they don't interfere with each other; whereas on the desktop you have to support every conceivable action that someone could possibly take.
That said, Linux "winning the desktop" isn't necessarily a worthwhile goal. Don't get me wrong; having Linux desktops available is a good thing all around, it keeps Apple and Microsoft honest. And it's unfortunate that intellectual property concerns have hobbled the development of multimedia in open source to the extent that they have.
Do we really need more WIMP style desktop operating systems that are attempting to be familiar to both Mac and Windows users?
Shouldn't Open Source Desktops be a hotbed of innovation? A carnival of new ideas, metaphors, experimental interaction designs?
Shouldn't Open Source Desktops be a hotbed of innovation? A carnival of new ideas, metaphors, experimental interaction designs?
But if you look historically at most major open source projects, they aren't innovative. IMHO, most open source projects seem to stem from a desire to have a free (in both senses of the word) version of xyz proprietary/closed source software.
So we end up with lots and lots and lots of copies/equivalents to closed source software, only with a few esoteric additions for whatever itch the author needed to scratch and half the feature set gone.
Sometimes, the OSS version gets better over time, and even supplants the closed source version. But just as often, once the author scratched that itch, development stalls and very little innovation happens. Or alternately, we'll see dozens of entirely different reinventions of the wheel, where somebody didn't like the particular way the OSS version worked, and then just rewrote the whole thing again. I mean really, how many half baked personal finance software tools do we need?
In all of this, what doesn't tend to happen is novel innovation in desktop software. Open source games are rehashes of closed source favorites (I mean really, can anybody point me to a completely novel OSS game)? Desktop software tends to be free (as in beer) copies of expensive proprietary software (GIS tools, image editors, 3d modelers, laboratory tools) or non-user friendly academic research projects released into the wild. Taking gaming as an example, almost all of the innovation is happening in the closed source, indie gaming scene.
Basically, you can kit yourself out with less polished version of hundreds of thousands of dollars of proprietary software for free (that you can play with the code a bit), but that's about it.
OSS is sadly trapped in a cycle of non-innovation and has been for years.
That's true in some areas, but definitely not in others. I've used a variety of media players, and generally speaking the proprietary ones are inferior. VLC, while it is a bit of a resource hog, will play anything you throw at it. Mplayer and Media Player Classic are elegant, fast, and have damn good compatibility.
iTunes and WMP are bloated crap that force you to sit through DVD warnings. WMP has gotten a lot more stable since Windows 7, but that's actually a case where it has taken Microsoft years to come up with anything approaching the usability of VLC. (And their fealty to the MPAA prevents them from taking the final user-friendly step and allowing us to watch what we want to watch on the DVDs we've purchased.)
Chrome is widely regarded as the front-runner among browsers. And to be clear, Google didn't make Chrome because they wanted a free (in both senses of the word) browser. They built it because they wanted a browser that doesn't suck. (Though I guess you could make the argument that KHTML was just a me-too product.)
I don't think Inkscape has any competitors, open or closed. It's an intuitive, full-featured vector graphics editor. Adobe Illustrator by contrast is certainly superior, but it has a learning curve that makes it unusable for people who aren't graphics designers. Inkscape is extremely innovative.
"VLC, while it is a bit of a resource hog, will play anything you throw at it."
I'm not sure that is a victory of OSS as much as it is that they have more freedom to play fast and loose with patents than a commercial/closed source developer would have if directly selling their software (particularly in the US market).
Don't forget Firefox either; while Chrome has taken the lead in many areas, Firefox is still ahead in some (graphics acceleration and JavaScript language features for example), and more importantly, Firefox led the way in terms of innovation for years and years before Chrome was on the scene.
Other open source products I can think of with fantastic UX are Transmission (the BitTorrent client) and Colloquy.
After reading that last statement, I'm reminded about the days when http://www.osnews.com/ used to be full of stories about Open Source Desktops and more.
Shouldn't Open Source Desktops be a hotbed of innovation? A carnival of new ideas, metaphors, experimental interaction designs?
Last time the Linux desktop felt innovative was the release of enlightenment 0.16. I had 9x virtual desktops and a completely skinnable UI with a reasonably robust scripting language running on some POS Dell laptop, and it was speedy.
What's the replacement for PulseAudio for the average user? I personally have a sound card with hardware mixing, and I don't have anything playing sounds other than xmms2 and mplayer, so raw ALSA works for me. But if you want features like "move this audio stream to my Bluetooth headset", you need what PulseAudio offers.
(And yes, on my video-playing box, I use PulseAudio, and listen to stuff with Bluetooth headphones. Turn them on, audio switches to Bluetooth without the mplayer session even being affected. Turn them off, back to the TV's speakers. It just works. And I set this up by clicking pretty things in a GUI.)
I've been able to do similar things. Stream audio over the network from my HTPC to my laptop, and use my laptop headphones to listen to a movie that I'm watching (on the HTPC).
I regard Unity and Gnome shell as still being experimental, and not delivering a very comprehensive or polished experience. If you want to get serious work done then stick with Gnome 2.x (for example Mint 11).
Like it or not (and I'm ambivalent), what Ubuntu ships is, almost by definition, not experimental. They are desktop Linux in the minds of most.
And, to be honest, GNOME 2 is still pretty lacking. I know a lot of GNOME team members past and present, and I like and respect most of them for a lot of work put in on a pretty thankless project, but the results aren't there compared to Windows or OS X.
Thank you for this.
I have a personal peeve with the direction that KDE has been taking with the semantic desktop - the tremendous slowdown because of that and absolutely no focus on usability. Plus the desktop looks like an 80's Eurodance video (as compared to Gnome 2).
They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8.
Power management with linux on laptops has been going downhill since sometime and today I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 (maybe Phoronix is right with its power regression hullabaloo)
Suspend and resume still sucks (https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 presumably fixed in 2.6.38 but still gives me problems frequently).
Displayport/HDMI out on my laptop does not send out audio and until I used a custom PPA kernel, multi-monitor out on my laptop used to lockup frequently.
All of these things work seamlessly on Windows 7.
I am willing to pay good money for a seamless Linux desktop (~100$ for something that works seamlessly and timely updates) - if that's what it takes to get someone to focus on something of value, like TuxOnIce, rather than placement of close buttons on the left vs right.
$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply.
Apple does it and that's why their hardware mostly works. (But to be fair, I've had plenty of issues with Windows and OS X. Software sucks. Hardware sucks. That's why you get a supercomputer with 15 hours battery life for $500, though. If you wanted it to be perfect, it would cost you $100,000.)
>$100 is not what it will take. It will take a vendor that's willing to build the laptop out of supported hardware instead of whatever they can source most cheaply.
I imagine it's cheaper just to support the hardware you are using for other OSs though?
Dell were shipping Linux based laptops and presumably chose this route over the "create hardware specifically for Linux" route. Why did Dell fail in this respect?
Say you only support hardware from the last 5 years (Drop all pre-2001 compatibility.) - 5 major laptop makers,3-4 hardware/motherboard lines. Can a software player not raise 20K$ to buy hardware and build in full out-of-the-box compatibility ?
Diaspora raised 200K for vaporware - can this not be funded ?
Can't stress powertop enough. I have a N455 Atom netbook, with 11.01, just now installed it (I knew about it but always forget to install it after reformatting), and using powertop's suggestions, I brought idling down from an average 8.5 watts to 7.9 watts, giving me almost another 30 minutes of battery life.
> They continue to use konquerer and KJS (built into the core desktop) rather than webkit or V8.
FWIW, this is somewhat incorrect.
First of, Konqueror is an application, not a browser engine; you're thinking of KHTML.
Now, it's true that KDE is still developing KHTML and KJS (and it has to, considering KDE commits to ABI/API stability within a major release series and the Qt port of WebKit wasn't close to ready by the time KDE 4.0 was released).
However, Konqueror offers support for using either KHTML/KJS or QtWebkit/JavaScriptCore - technically, both are just KPart components, along with the Okular PDF viewer and various others Konqueror embeds to display documents of various sorts - and some other parts of the "core desktop" use WebKit exclusively (e.g. the Webview and Web Slice widgets).
If you were happy with the state of the Linux desktop four years ago, which I mostly was, then good news, it's still all there if you want it. You might need to abandon or downgrade Gnome, but it's all there. (Or in my case, go through the current KDE configuration and start unchecking a lot of boxes.) But absolutely yes, the latest attempts to chase Windows down have been a disaster. For how open source fundamentally works, there has been a shocking number of Architecture Astronauts running around lately. (And I do use that term in the fully original sense [1].) The pattern of:
1. Glorious design
2. Shitty first pass, released anyhow and made a standard
3. Laboriously fixing it over the period of years until it converges on "Slightly-but-only-slightly less sucky than what it replaced"
4. Goto 1
has become the standard operating procedure of the Linux desktop world.
I am not convinced that the Gnome and KDE projects are good organizational strategies. Replacing a lumbering behemoth accountable to its many customers with lumbering behemoths accountable to essentially nobody is not an improvement, no matter how "open" the latter may be.
(Oh, and I was happy only because I'm a professional programmer and I still prefer the command line over any "semantic desktop". I freely acknowledge this is not the common case.)
Linux was excellent on the desktop about 4 years ago. After that we had fedora turning to a big pile of broken packages, ubuntu adopting some seriously broken technologies (pulseaudio, compiz-beryl, tracker, unity, upstart, readahead, ... ).
My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this:
Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.
With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).
If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).
I'd be interested to know why you consider upstart "seriously broken". I've just used it in anger for the first time, and it seems like a big improvement on the old, arcane system of alphabetically named init scripts.
The technology is great! I love the launchd/upstart way of doing things. What is completely unacceptable for a core piece of system software is the pathetic level of documentation. I should NOT have to source dive to write an init script! Whoever let upstart out of the door with the piss poor documentation should be lashed repeatedly with a wet noodle.
The technology is great! I love the launchd/upstart way of doing things. What is completely unacceptable for a core piece of system software is the pathetic level of documentation. I should NOT have to source dive to write an init script! Whoever let upstart out of the door with the piss poor documentation should be lashed repeatedly with a wet noodle.
I migrated from Kubuntu to Xubuntu when Lucid came out, it runs greatly on older notebooks for that matter, even Xubuntu Natty today.
While the issues mentioned in the article are valid, it's still so much easier for me to maintain all family (and several friends) pc/laptops around, after I migrated them from Windows to Kubuntu/Xubuntu. The desktops just work and don't break, which is not something you can say about the Windows tamagotchi thing - you need to care about this one, or keep it restricted.
GNOME and KDE are monolithic and encourage everything under their umbrellas to depend on everything else. The Linux desktop has fallen into the same pitfall that so many enterprises do: reaction against integration issues in a chaotic environment has led to monolithic approaches that provide uniformity and integration but prevent the mix-and-match flexibility that allows individual projects to fail and succeed on their merits. The monolithic approach, the architecture astronaut approach, means high commitment to each project and leads to projects like PulseAudio becoming "too big to fail" even if they fail at their technical objectives. The next step in evolution is supposed to be a loosely coupled services architecture that provides the best of those two worlds. I won't venture to guess where it goes after that.
however, I've noticed that striving for loosely coupled architecture has often fostered its own brand of, if you like, architectural astronomy, as the architects try to design the ultimate meta-framework that will make it easy to integrate disparate components without the components knowing anything about how they can be used.
I think part of the problem these days is that the most creative and innovative efforts are going towards the browser. And, indeed, if browsers keep growing and start to provide an credible, sandboxed, near-native-app equivalent(e.g. pNaCl + local caching, low-level input, sound and video APIs and full network capabilities) the desktop could potentially be stripped all the way back to the programmer-and-sysadmin-centric environments we had in the mid-80s, and usability focus could be on supporting the browser experience instead, as ChromeOS is attempting.
As it is, the Linux desktop is still working towards "yesterday's experience," since we don't have good enough browsers and there are tons and tons of legacy apps. Unfortunately, supporting yesterday's experience is harder for usability since it's conceptually richer, and most of these concepts are dueling at the bits-and-bytes level, where they're hard to reason about and present in digestible ways. The browser can blackbox a lot of stuff behind the standard APIs, something which the OS does not enjoy.
Another problem, just as large, is that there continues to be lots of new hardware, and correspondingly new drivers to support and specs to reverse engineer(since many manufacturers remain unwilling to assist). This is a problem that can only be solved by maintaining a hardware taskforce roughly proportional to the amount of new hardware released, but it's not particularly interesting or sexy, and it's not a core goal of most of the Linux ecosystem to create premium-grade drivers for all hardware.
You know, I think part of the problem is that a lot of the leaders of the Linux desktop experience are building these large, complex structures and applications where they are not needed. The best Linux desktop wouldn't be the one that solves all of our problems by specifically considering them, it'd be one that solves them by obviating them.
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.
As a firm Linux user, who has got no windows influence in my household, entire family gone Linux in some shape or form, I can't see as a power user how he is prepared to make this switch.
I know that Linux so often makes you put up with compromises and so often it is at the graphics card hurdle that it starts to annoy, but I think the 3 things he'll miss is the things which will eventually drive him back.
Firstly, the shell is one thing that seems irreplaceable, yes you could use cygwin or equivalent but nothing will fill the void of a shell that is so beautifully incorporated into the OS, more than OSX in my mind, despite them being the same shell, Linux makes no excuses and is proud of its Shell.
Transparency, Yes this is important, but something I know I could live without, as he mentions he doesnt do this as often as before and really its main purpose was for fixes with drivers.
Package Management and I would stretch further to even open source and free software will drive him back. I had a stint where I could only use Vista for about 7 days, the reminder of the horrors of "shareware" software and 30 day trials had me looking forward to getting back to "apt-get install"
I agree that a switch to Windows does not make sense. I fled to OS X because I'm a Unix biggot and don't want a system that doesn't ship with zsh or bash. Apparently darwin's posix API sucks and is different from Linux but I'm not affected by that directly so don't really care.
Cinch, SizeUp, and Divvy provide all the tiling things I need for window management and they unobtrusively just enhance my normal environment, it's great. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore. I miss dpkg and apt but homebrew is good enough and I regularly fire up Linux VMs if I just need to, vagrant is awesome for this. (vagrantup.com)
I the follow comment sums up my opinion on the matter:
>8 years of experience and you didn't know that you should look for compatibility issues BEFORE buying? Seriously?
I for one gave up hope of "The Year of Desktop Linux", a very long time ago and can agree with the majority of your points. But really now? :| That's something you should well be used to dealing with by now
I made the same decision just some months ago. I don't blame it on the "desktop experience" as much as on the driver experience. My Dell M4500 laptop has poor touchpad support, non-working hibernate / suspend and with the latest OpenSuse also non-stable graphics, not so good wireless drivers, non working SD-card support, non-working microphone, etc etc. I am a Linux user since Slackware 3.0 and will continue to run Linux, but now virtualized on Windows, for those tools on Linux that I love. But I will probably spend more time in Windows. I can run accelerated graphics on VirtualBox so I think it will work good enough for me. But on cheaper hardware it might not be as easy.
My experience over the years brings me to the conclusion that the driver experience will always be lacking. While many experiences on Linux have improved, the driver experience has reached some kind of steady-state. Every time I upgrade my distribution, something improves and something else breaks.
What is more annoying is that instead of fixing things that are really useful (e.g. printing, graphics drivers, hibernation, power management) they keep adding lame eyecandy to all desktop enviroments, have you seen KDE lately, or ubuntu unity? And they keep hiding the terminal! Who needs this crap that make it look like a chinese mac-knockoff? I am sticking to xfce4 and ubuntu which works adequately on thinkpads (but not without annoying problems) because i need to use linux and i cannot go with mac's limitations. It's a shame that an otherwise quite solid system gets so bad in the frontend.
I suspect this is a symptom of the author getting older, not desktop Linux getting worse.
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!
But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).
When you are getting older, your time gets more valuable. You earn more money, but you also realize your time on earth is limited. It is no fun tweaking the same config files for the umpteenth time after installing software on a new piece of hardware.
That's why I keep a Dropbox folder called "linux_tweaking" with some of the config files. If I need to install arch on a new machine I can do it without hassle.
Also, it's true that as you grow older you value time more. And that's why I use linux in the first place. I am faster with it at pretty much anything. The only thing that really drives me mad is skype but my wife has problems with skype also on her windows and mac computers so it's not linux to blame.
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
That's why there's a control panel for this. Or you can type "xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --left-of LVDS1". As long as you don't buy AMD GPUs, it all Just Works :)
In my experience this is not the case. I am using the new AMD drivers (I belive) on Ubuntu 11.04 and the performance is terrible. Alt-tabbing to switch between windows even incurs a second+ delay. I reverted back to the open source one and it at least functions.
I had this problem until I disabled vertical refresh. Based on posts in the ubuntu forums this appears to solve most people's problems with the AMD drivers.
I think 11.04 is just slow. I installed this on my nvidia ion-based desktop (that I use for watching TV, etc.), and it's much slower than the previous revision. Everything is glacial. I think I'm just going to replace Ubuntu with my Usual Setup (Debian), because all I do is run wget and mplayer anyway.
The control panel works well... until it suddenly doesn't (which has happened at least twice on my Ubuntu 10.10 install).
And in 9.04 I had to keep a piece of paper with the commands to reinstall the closed-source NVidia drivers every time the kernel got patched. Apparently I shouldn't have needed to do this, and yet every single update for months would drop me back to the shell after X failed to start.
When I was younger I'd have tried to work out what was wrong. Now I just sigh and are grateful I wrote down the package I needed, and the flag to get it to work from a non-X environment.
> I’ve spent a lot of time with Fedora, Gentoo and Arch Linux.
So this guy has tried two advanced distros (Gentoo and Arch), plus one "beginner" distro which (from my experience) has provided nothing but frustration, and he's giving up on Linux because it's "too hard"?
How can you claim Linux to be "too hard" when you haven't even tried Ubuntu?
So, the straw that broke the camels back was woeful Nvidia Optimus.
To look at things another way, hardware vendors (Lenovo included) build and test their systems for Windows because 95%+ of their customers will only ever run Windows.
If you plan to run a Linux desktop you simply must research the hardware before you buy, because your vendor certainly has not. Nvidia Optimus is just one big, sad, ugly example of this.
I've not had a single major problem with Linux since adopting the following strategy: a) check whether your hardware is compatible before buying b) don't install a distro hot off the press.
It should be obvious to anyone who's been using Linux for a while that a new dual intel/nvidia gpu mobile card is not going to be sorted out until quite a while after release. If he was a newbie I'd feel some sympathy but he's not. The rest of his rant is about the past.
There is TuxMobil (http://tuxmobil.org/), which is trying to be a repository of installation & configuration guides for various mobile devices. It was very useful to me in the past, but it doesn't seem to be up-to-date anymore.
LinuxCertified.com sells laptops preinstalled and tested with Linux. In former days, they were rebrands of generally-cheap machines (e.g. rebranded eMachines), but now they're selling a variety of unbranded machine as well as certified Lenovo laptops.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadSo? Use Ubuntu. Problem solved. Who cares what "most distros" are doing?
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Release_N...
If you want maximum compatibility with everything, go for hardware that's a generation old. (Pre-Sandy-Bridge processors are pretty good and they are still sold new. So it's not a huge compromise if you value your time more than you value having the absolute newest stuff.)
I run NVIDIA graphics and have no problems .. I realise the latest and greatest takes a while to become fully supported on my platform of choice, and often solutions to problems require research and time - but I'd rather accept this compromise than use Windows.
Windows feels like Fisher Price, Linux feels more like Mechano - in the sense that it presents opportunities rather than fully packaged solutions
Unity isn't perfect yet, but I'm confident the UI team are heading in a decent direction.
Regarding the upgrade itself, yes - it's as easy as usual (click, click, click, .... done).
I blame the lockup/windowing issues completely on Unity and I've had more success with the system since I've switched to the classic Ubuntu desktop. My current Linux desktop is running 10.10 and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future (perhaps until 11.10). I have a new sandy bridge desktop coming in next week and I'm undecided as to what I will be installing on that system.
I don't think so. Unity is not GTK. They mainly use OpenGL code, that they could show using a little GTK or Qt code.
I bought a new computer past summer and all its hardware worked properly from day zero, ethernet, wifi, 3D acceleration, suspending, hibernating and dual-monitors included. I chose the right hardware. Flash support? The 64-bit flash plugin is not crashing here. I use flashblock to avoid possible security problems, but I use it in Windows too, to avoid annoying ads with sound. The quality of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is good enough for desktop users, in my humble opinion.
And the rest of the post is debatable at least. Linux and its software ecosystem are not to blame for poor Skype support, for example.
Desktop Linux is really for people that can/will line up all their ducks in a row (and then sometimes debug those ducks) when upgrading hardware. Even as a technical person I can understand if you don't wish to continue to pour time into that sort of thing.
I saw a reference in a list about a wireless card 'model644b' that worked, so I bought it, then found out that, hell no, you got 'model644br4', and only r1 and r3 really work, as r4 was manufactured in a different facility and they used a different process (BS like this). The box and listing doesn't show the hardware revision number to the public - you have to open it up to find that out. (I made up the model number, but had pretty much that same issue in 2005).
I took an ubuntu boot dvd to several stores wanting to test out compatibility before purchasing a laptop, and was ejected from a couple. TigerDirect staff basically ignored me, whether out of respect for my mad testing skillz or just apathy - I couldn't tell, but I bought a laptop there in 2008 because I think I verified the wireless worked out of the box.
When the answer to 'linux on the desktop' is 'go research loads of conflicting or hard to find info, the order from an online store and piece it together yourself or pay loads extra for a custom built laptop' to guarantee, no thanks. That sort of 'freedom' isn't for me.
If vendors provided and honestly advertised Linux support, that would be a much better world. Then compatibility can be checked at the store. It'd be bad, though, if they supported Linux like they do Windows - with a gig of userspace junkware.
While not optimal, virtualization can be a solution in many cases: Using a 64 bit Linux server, a 32 bit Linux desktop (in regards to Linux I don't quite see the benefit of 64 bit at this point) and your host OS of choice is becoming encreasingly practical with memory prices getting lower. Better than throwing out Linux (with the many great hacker -friendly features it has) or having to select an older notebook just to run it.
(I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, just wanted to add another angle)
- Unresponsive (in general... win7 on a serious "desktop replacement" class laptop with loads of resources)
- Rebooting almost every day (application updates)
- Microsoft applications constantly crashing (mostly outlook)
- Randomly failing to hibernate
- Third-party support/driver applications which I should never hear about spamming me with questions (you scheduled a backup, do you really want to make a backup now? you scheduled disk maintenance, do you really want to run it? hey, I'd like to update, can I? oh, actually there are no updates available, kthnxbye. look at me, I'm updating the virus database!)
Unfortunately these are exactly the same reasons why I stopped using windows over a decade ago...
It also needs better cohesion between design and code...
What Linux still lacks in my opinion is a coherent and usable design. KDE4 and Unity/Gnome3 are trying, but I think they are not there yet.
I just can't see ever moving back to Windows because I couldn't stand to lose the shell. I could see myself moving to MacOS, but I don't understand how a sys admin could stomach doing so if I could not.
and while i would like to say that opensuse these days does "just work", i too have had problems with the current intel driver (open bug report, no response; there is an older version in the X repo that works much better). this same problem was mentioned in the thread here on the new driver contributions from intel.
so what's happening with the intel driver? why is something so unstable being released as part of standard distros?
Floating desktop environments like Gnome and KDE on the other hand feel like bad OS X copies and definitely are not on of Linux' strengths.
On hardware: You have to watch out what you buy. If you just want to run the most bleeding edge hardware then there will probably be some sort of driver fuckup with linux. Though you might not be able to avoid the mentioned Optimus technology in a months :(
On suspend/resume: I'm running Linux on an 2009 Macbook Pro and the suspend/resume works like a charm. It needs a few seconds more than OS X to wake up completely but it works. So I guess this is hardware dependent too and not a general problem with lx.
Desktop software: If you want to run typical desktop software like Office, Video Editing, etc. Then yeah - Linux is probably the wrong OS for you. I'm in the lucky position to be able to do most of my work in terminals and VIM and for that there's nothing better than a Linux box with a tiling WM.
I'd say Linux is not a general purpose desktop OS in its current state. But there are use cases where linux rocks. (Even on the desktop.)
http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/ https://github.com/ZaneA/HashTWM http://windawesome.codeplex.com/
OSX:
http://mizage.com/divvy/ http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.
- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...
- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...
- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.
- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...
- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.
So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.
However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)
The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.
Decisions about where to go next re. Desktop paradigms are tricky ... but I think the main problem is lack of strong and decisive leadership; largely due to the problems inherent to an open development hierarchy. A paradigm shift often requires a leap of faith. Without that, any changes becomes a patchwork or amalgamation of multiple people's ideas - which in my mind isn't optimal.
I reckon Mark Shuttleworth is trying to create a paradigm shift with Ubuntu .. and I applaud him. There's so much life left in Linux as desktop platform. To state otherwise is shortsighted, and ultimately damaging to an incredibly vibrant and worthy platform.
Believe me, they are not. They might be history for you, but not for everyone.
Many non-standard setups (using Jack, using pass-through, using bluetooth headsets) are still broken. Applications using Phonon have very different behaviors with or without PA. KMix and pavucontrol still behave very differently from each other...
Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.
There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.
I'm sorry, but the statement that linux improves over time, and thay's unique to linux has really no basis in reality. Both Windows and MacOS do improve over time, we could argue which of those three does the best job, but I don't really think linux would be the winner in that comparison either.
I don't have any experience with other OSes than those 3 mentioned, so somebody else can chip in.
I think an open source model encourages iterative improvement which isn't tied to commercial product releases.
This was the basis for my comment.
Your original comment was a little bit ambiguous: you were primarily thinking of legacy hardware support as in "legacy hardware support is often ongoing". I read the first part of the sentence "Problems are ironed out" as if that's only valid for linux, which I don't think it is.
Now try running Linux 3.0rc on, let's say, an aging SPARC 5 workstation. Just Works.
But hey, I use linux for the last two years for all my desktop computing (and more for servers). I love it and find it superior to windows. Except my bluetooth doesn't work: and it did with windows.
C'est la vie, I guess...
And I tried out 'airfoil' the other day (I think that was the name) that let me push out audio from different apps on my mac to 'foil speakers'? - basically other software running to capture and playback that audio. I can essentially run and manage just the audio portion of itunes on mac 1 from software on mac 2. And it 'just worked' (to reclaim the ubuntu mantra). Ahh - here: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
I hate how it keeps touching the volume level for the system/hardware.
Having an opinion about the miserable state of the Linux desktop has nothing to do with open-source advocacy. The success of many open-source projects including Linux itself (on everything but the desktop) is proof that the model works, and can produce quality software, often better than the proprietary alternatives.
I too am an open-source advocate, and I've met insult and disdain when I rant about the desktop "holy cow". There's just something there that makes people blind to the issues, and it's the same thing that makes the issues pile up and not get fixed. It just doesn't happen very often now because I seldom give enough of a crap about this long-lost battle to even enter the discussion.
You are right, and my comment wasn't very clear on this part.
It was just to avoid the comments saying that I am an open-source hater.
And a big part of the difference is the environment:
On the server you have a relatively homogeneous hardware platform, many deeply technical users who can and will fix things that are broken, and good connectivity of related environments so that useful innovations spread quickly and the people who made those innovations possible benefit from their spread.
On the desktop you have a much less uniform hardware environment, relatively sparse numbers of technically able users, multiple obstacles to connectivity, and almost no individual recognition for people who make important improvements.
And the problems that are being solved are different, desktop software usually has to put up with a lot of bureaucracy and rules; writing desktop applications requires that developers be aware of the conventions of the system they are operating in and play well with a host of other software for something as simple as drawing a dialog box for the user and capturing input from it. On the server it's relatively easy to partition processes from each other so that they don't interfere with each other; whereas on the desktop you have to support every conceivable action that someone could possibly take.
That said, Linux "winning the desktop" isn't necessarily a worthwhile goal. Don't get me wrong; having Linux desktops available is a good thing all around, it keeps Apple and Microsoft honest. And it's unfortunate that intellectual property concerns have hobbled the development of multimedia in open source to the extent that they have.
Do we really need more WIMP style desktop operating systems that are attempting to be familiar to both Mac and Windows users?
Shouldn't Open Source Desktops be a hotbed of innovation? A carnival of new ideas, metaphors, experimental interaction designs?
But if you look historically at most major open source projects, they aren't innovative. IMHO, most open source projects seem to stem from a desire to have a free (in both senses of the word) version of xyz proprietary/closed source software.
So we end up with lots and lots and lots of copies/equivalents to closed source software, only with a few esoteric additions for whatever itch the author needed to scratch and half the feature set gone.
Sometimes, the OSS version gets better over time, and even supplants the closed source version. But just as often, once the author scratched that itch, development stalls and very little innovation happens. Or alternately, we'll see dozens of entirely different reinventions of the wheel, where somebody didn't like the particular way the OSS version worked, and then just rewrote the whole thing again. I mean really, how many half baked personal finance software tools do we need?
In all of this, what doesn't tend to happen is novel innovation in desktop software. Open source games are rehashes of closed source favorites (I mean really, can anybody point me to a completely novel OSS game)? Desktop software tends to be free (as in beer) copies of expensive proprietary software (GIS tools, image editors, 3d modelers, laboratory tools) or non-user friendly academic research projects released into the wild. Taking gaming as an example, almost all of the innovation is happening in the closed source, indie gaming scene.
Basically, you can kit yourself out with less polished version of hundreds of thousands of dollars of proprietary software for free (that you can play with the code a bit), but that's about it.
OSS is sadly trapped in a cycle of non-innovation and has been for years.
iTunes and WMP are bloated crap that force you to sit through DVD warnings. WMP has gotten a lot more stable since Windows 7, but that's actually a case where it has taken Microsoft years to come up with anything approaching the usability of VLC. (And their fealty to the MPAA prevents them from taking the final user-friendly step and allowing us to watch what we want to watch on the DVDs we've purchased.)
Chrome is widely regarded as the front-runner among browsers. And to be clear, Google didn't make Chrome because they wanted a free (in both senses of the word) browser. They built it because they wanted a browser that doesn't suck. (Though I guess you could make the argument that KHTML was just a me-too product.)
I don't think Inkscape has any competitors, open or closed. It's an intuitive, full-featured vector graphics editor. Adobe Illustrator by contrast is certainly superior, but it has a learning curve that makes it unusable for people who aren't graphics designers. Inkscape is extremely innovative.
I'm not sure that is a victory of OSS as much as it is that they have more freedom to play fast and loose with patents than a commercial/closed source developer would have if directly selling their software (particularly in the US market).
Other open source products I can think of with fantastic UX are Transmission (the BitTorrent client) and Colloquy.
Most software isn't innovative, and open source samples from the same intellectual gene pool.
Only if you don't want them to be used. Which is totally okay, but it'll keep most people (myself included) far, far away.
EDIT: This is more like what I used to look for back in the day: http://www.osnews.com/topics/1 There's a list of available topics at http://www.osnews.com/topics/
Last time the Linux desktop felt innovative was the release of enlightenment 0.16. I had 9x virtual desktops and a completely skinnable UI with a reasonably robust scripting language running on some POS Dell laptop, and it was speedy.
(And yes, on my video-playing box, I use PulseAudio, and listen to stuff with Bluetooth headphones. Turn them on, audio switches to Bluetooth without the mplayer session even being affected. Turn them off, back to the TV's speakers. It just works. And I set this up by clicking pretty things in a GUI.)
http://www.thechromesource.com/netflix-plug-in-for-chrome-an...
And, to be honest, GNOME 2 is still pretty lacking. I know a lot of GNOME team members past and present, and I like and respect most of them for a lot of work put in on a pretty thankless project, but the results aren't there compared to Windows or OS X.
Power management with linux on laptops has been going downhill since sometime and today I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7 (maybe Phoronix is right with its power regression hullabaloo)
Suspend and resume still sucks (https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=28739 presumably fixed in 2.6.38 but still gives me problems frequently). Displayport/HDMI out on my laptop does not send out audio and until I used a custom PPA kernel, multi-monitor out on my laptop used to lockup frequently.
All of these things work seamlessly on Windows 7.
I am willing to pay good money for a seamless Linux desktop (~100$ for something that works seamlessly and timely updates) - if that's what it takes to get someone to focus on something of value, like TuxOnIce, rather than placement of close buttons on the left vs right.
Apple does it and that's why their hardware mostly works. (But to be fair, I've had plenty of issues with Windows and OS X. Software sucks. Hardware sucks. That's why you get a supercomputer with 15 hours battery life for $500, though. If you wanted it to be perfect, it would cost you $100,000.)
I imagine it's cheaper just to support the hardware you are using for other OSs though?
Dell were shipping Linux based laptops and presumably chose this route over the "create hardware specifically for Linux" route. Why did Dell fail in this respect?
Say you only support hardware from the last 5 years (Drop all pre-2001 compatibility.) - 5 major laptop makers,3-4 hardware/motherboard lines. Can a software player not raise 20K$ to buy hardware and build in full out-of-the-box compatibility ?
Diaspora raised 200K for vaporware - can this not be funded ?
oh, oh.. jumps around excitedly. I know this one!
Express mild surprise to find that npviewer.bin is using a huge amount of power Yay for flash!!P.S. I dont completely trust Phoronix, but I'm beginning to think that the power regression thing is real http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...
FWIW, this is somewhat incorrect.
First of, Konqueror is an application, not a browser engine; you're thinking of KHTML.
Now, it's true that KDE is still developing KHTML and KJS (and it has to, considering KDE commits to ABI/API stability within a major release series and the Qt port of WebKit wasn't close to ready by the time KDE 4.0 was released).
However, Konqueror offers support for using either KHTML/KJS or QtWebkit/JavaScriptCore - technically, both are just KPart components, along with the Okular PDF viewer and various others Konqueror embeds to display documents of various sorts - and some other parts of the "core desktop" use WebKit exclusively (e.g. the Webview and Web Slice widgets).
1. Glorious design
2. Shitty first pass, released anyhow and made a standard
3. Laboriously fixing it over the period of years until it converges on "Slightly-but-only-slightly less sucky than what it replaced"
4. Goto 1
has become the standard operating procedure of the Linux desktop world.
I am not convinced that the Gnome and KDE projects are good organizational strategies. Replacing a lumbering behemoth accountable to its many customers with lumbering behemoths accountable to essentially nobody is not an improvement, no matter how "open" the latter may be.
(Oh, and I was happy only because I'm a professional programmer and I still prefer the command line over any "semantic desktop". I freely acknowledge this is not the common case.)
[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this: Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.
With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).
If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).
Patrick's emphasis on pragmatism & performance means that he simply wouldn't have incorporated stuff that didn't work if he could avoid it.
While the issues mentioned in the article are valid, it's still so much easier for me to maintain all family (and several friends) pc/laptops around, after I migrated them from Windows to Kubuntu/Xubuntu. The desktops just work and don't break, which is not something you can say about the Windows tamagotchi thing - you need to care about this one, or keep it restricted.
Also, 2-4 cores are standard these days. 8 - 24 cores would be high end.
As it is, the Linux desktop is still working towards "yesterday's experience," since we don't have good enough browsers and there are tons and tons of legacy apps. Unfortunately, supporting yesterday's experience is harder for usability since it's conceptually richer, and most of these concepts are dueling at the bits-and-bytes level, where they're hard to reason about and present in digestible ways. The browser can blackbox a lot of stuff behind the standard APIs, something which the OS does not enjoy.
Another problem, just as large, is that there continues to be lots of new hardware, and correspondingly new drivers to support and specs to reverse engineer(since many manufacturers remain unwilling to assist). This is a problem that can only be solved by maintaining a hardware taskforce roughly proportional to the amount of new hardware released, but it's not particularly interesting or sexy, and it's not a core goal of most of the Linux ecosystem to create premium-grade drivers for all hardware.
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.
I found I simply have better things to do than debug and write drivers (yes, I did write drivers as well). I'd much rather expend my energy elsewhere.
Since the switch I never looked back.
I know that Linux so often makes you put up with compromises and so often it is at the graphics card hurdle that it starts to annoy, but I think the 3 things he'll miss is the things which will eventually drive him back.
Firstly, the shell is one thing that seems irreplaceable, yes you could use cygwin or equivalent but nothing will fill the void of a shell that is so beautifully incorporated into the OS, more than OSX in my mind, despite them being the same shell, Linux makes no excuses and is proud of its Shell.
Transparency, Yes this is important, but something I know I could live without, as he mentions he doesnt do this as often as before and really its main purpose was for fixes with drivers.
Package Management and I would stretch further to even open source and free software will drive him back. I had a stint where I could only use Vista for about 7 days, the reminder of the horrors of "shareware" software and 30 day trials had me looking forward to getting back to "apt-get install"
Cinch, SizeUp, and Divvy provide all the tiling things I need for window management and they unobtrusively just enhance my normal environment, it's great. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore. I miss dpkg and apt but homebrew is good enough and I regularly fire up Linux VMs if I just need to, vagrant is awesome for this. (vagrantup.com)
>8 years of experience and you didn't know that you should look for compatibility issues BEFORE buying? Seriously?
I for one gave up hope of "The Year of Desktop Linux", a very long time ago and can agree with the majority of your points. But really now? :| That's something you should well be used to dealing with by now
My experience over the years brings me to the conclusion that the driver experience will always be lacking. While many experiences on Linux have improved, the driver experience has reached some kind of steady-state. Every time I upgrade my distribution, something improves and something else breaks.
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!
But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).
Also, it's true that as you grow older you value time more. And that's why I use linux in the first place. I am faster with it at pretty much anything. The only thing that really drives me mad is skype but my wife has problems with skype also on her windows and mac computers so it's not linux to blame.
That's why there's a control panel for this. Or you can type "xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --left-of LVDS1". As long as you don't buy AMD GPUs, it all Just Works :)
And in 9.04 I had to keep a piece of paper with the commands to reinstall the closed-source NVidia drivers every time the kernel got patched. Apparently I shouldn't have needed to do this, and yet every single update for months would drop me back to the shell after X failed to start.
When I was younger I'd have tried to work out what was wrong. Now I just sigh and are grateful I wrote down the package I needed, and the flag to get it to work from a non-X environment.
But yes, your point is noted.
But there's nothing wrong with that.
So this guy has tried two advanced distros (Gentoo and Arch), plus one "beginner" distro which (from my experience) has provided nothing but frustration, and he's giving up on Linux because it's "too hard"?
How can you claim Linux to be "too hard" when you haven't even tried Ubuntu?
To look at things another way, hardware vendors (Lenovo included) build and test their systems for Windows because 95%+ of their customers will only ever run Windows.
If you plan to run a Linux desktop you simply must research the hardware before you buy, because your vendor certainly has not. Nvidia Optimus is just one big, sad, ugly example of this.
It should be obvious to anyone who's been using Linux for a while that a new dual intel/nvidia gpu mobile card is not going to be sorted out until quite a while after release. If he was a newbie I'd feel some sympathy but he's not. The rest of his rant is about the past.