Why Desktop Linux Sucks and What We can Do About It

[deanjo]

2. How about Wi-Fi issues - Macos have Wi-Fi issues too and my Atheros card works perfectly on Linux.

What Mac exhibits the level of "brokeness" that linux does when it comes to wifi when used with it's airport card? I have a strong feeling that you are referring to a "hackintosh" setup. Wifi generally works great across all macs with their included wifi. (Many of which use an Atheros based airport). If your referring to 3rd party usb cards (which again is not really needed option at all with maybe the exception of the MacPro but it also has an airport available) then that really isn't an issue of OS X's wifi stack but a driver issue of the manufacturer of the device.

3. Maybe updates that broke core functionality - maybe sometimes on rolling release distros, the same on Windows and Macos.

He does say that it's not limited to Linux. It's just on linux it does happen far more often then Win/OS X. His point is here that the linux community if it wants to brag and truthfully say that linux is more stable then Win / OS X then it has to greatly improve on watching it's releases going out with known regressions. Sometimes this may call for hanging onto that older kernel / xorg / etc. for another distro point release until issues are ironed out. Regressions like those, in general does happen far less on their OS counterparts.

Everyone can point out instances on every OS where something has been broken in a update, I don't think anyone sane can say that everything works 100% all of the time in their OS. The breakages do happen though far more frequent on linux with reguarding to core functionality.

(Nero derivate, *not* on par regarding features with the Windows version and buggy!)

Yes Nero doesn't have the same feature bloat that it does in Windows and frankly I applaud that, nero in windows has become stupidly bloated. When it comes to the actual burning app though it is nearly identical to what it is in windows. As far as reliability goes, having used both Nero and K3B for a long long time I can honestly say Nero, in my experience, is far more reliable then K3B. Dual Layer media, bluray burning, hybrid, I have always found to be a real 50/50 crap shoot with k3b (not to mention usually a quicker burn). Granted this is not necessarily k3b's entire fault with a lot of the breakages that do happen with it are from breakages in it's supporting libraries like wodim, cdrecord, etc vs nero's internal engine. As far as bugs go I've really only been hit with one using nero and that was actually a GTK bug.

[L33F3R]

is it just me or is the first lady speaking way to old to know what shes talking about.

BUT.... I dont like how no guy at this presentation had the courtesy to offer her their seat. Shes sitting on the floor for Christ sakes.

[Ex-Cyber]

BUT.... I dont like how no guy at this presentation had the courtesy to offer her their seat. Shes sitting on the floor for Christ sakes.

It could very well be that someone offered and she declined. Sitting on the floor generally isn't some kind of unbearable ordeal; some people even prefer it to chairs.

[deanjo]

is it just me or is the first lady speaking way to old to know what shes talking about.

BUT.... I dont like how no guy at this presentation had the courtesy to offer her their seat. Shes sitting on the floor for Christ sakes.

Heh, I don't think she was much of a linux die hard either even though she runs a linux lab. Anyone else catch her "for example openSUSE runs NTFS and Fedora runs Ext3" comment?

[kraftman]

What Mac exhibits the level of "brokeness" that linux does when it comes to wifi when used with it's airport card? I have a strong feeling that you are referring to a "hackintosh" setup. Wifi generally works great across all macs with their included wifi. (Many of which use an Atheros based airport). If your referring to 3rd party usb cards (which again is not really needed option at all with maybe the exception of the MacPro but it also has an airport available) then that really isn't an issue of OS X's wifi stack but a driver issue of the manufacturer of the device.

It's possible those problems concern mainly hackintoshes, but if we want fair comparison we should compare hackintoshes and Linux or Macs and preinstaled Linux distros. IMO nero is needles on Linux.

[deanjo]

It's possible those problems concern mainly hackintoshes, but if we want fair comparison we should compare hackintoshes and Linux or Macs and preinstaled Linux distros. IMO nero is needles on Linux.

You can't compare hackintoshes to linux when it comes to compatibility. OS X is designed for a specific set of controlled hardware. Apple does not cater to the hackintosh crowd. It does not develop for that crew so to compare the hackintosh issues is completely invalid. Your trying to compare a products capability using resources it was never intended to be used for. You might as well be trying to adapt a VCR to play through HDMI.

[krazy]

What Mac exhibits the level of "brokeness" that linux does when it comes to wifi when used with it's airport card? I have a strong feeling that you are referring to a "hackintosh" setup. Wifi generally works great across all macs with their included wifi. (Many of which use an Atheros based airport). If your referring to 3rd party usb cards (which again is not really needed option at all with maybe the exception of the MacPro but it also has an airport available) then that really isn't an issue of OS X's wifi stack but a driver issue of the manufacturer of the device.

Macs can't be compared to linux (or even windows) for hardware support, since official mac hardware & software is provided/supported by the same vendor, while linux is expected to work with everything. Even given that, I really don't understand your argument here. I could equally say "Wifi generally works great across all distros with a fully open source driver stack". And any problem with buggy or non-existent closed source drivers is "a driver issue of the manufacturer".

He does say that it's not limited to Linux. It's just on linux it does happen far more often then Win/OS X. His point is here that the linux community if it wants to brag and truthfully say that linux is more stable then Win / OS X then it has to greatly improve on watching it's releases going out with known regressions. Sometimes this may call for hanging onto that older kernel / xorg / etc. for another distro point release until issues are ironed out. Regressions like those, in general does happen far less on their OS counterparts.

Everyone can point out instances on every OS where something has been broken in a update, I don't think anyone sane can say that everything works 100% all of the time in their OS. The breakages do happen though far more frequent on linux with reguarding to core functionality.

Have you got any numbers on regressions in updates for Ubuntu (or any other distro) vs. Windows vs. OSX? Because I completely disagree with that last sentence.

I distinctly remember upgrading XP to Vista when the latter was released, and having a heap of hardware trouble. Even my old scanner (Canoscan lide 20) still doesn't work with vista x86_64 (no 64-bit version of the driver). It works perfectly with linux, and has done with all the latest versions since I've had it.

I haven't used nero much, so can't pick on that one

[krazy]

You can't compare hackintoshes to linux when it comes to compatibility. OS X is designed for a specific set of controlled hardware. Apple does not cater to the hackintosh crowd. It does not develop for that crew so to compare the hackintosh issues is completely invalid. Your trying to compare a products capability using resources it was never intended to be used for. You might as well be trying to adapt a VCR to play through HDMI.

So OSX works with a compatible subset of all available wireless hardware.
So does linux. It's not intended to work for hardware without open-source drivers. (though some 3rd-parties hack together support in proprietary drivers with varying degrees of success).
I don't understand your argument.

[Craig73]

The choice of gstreamer isn't significant, it's that a choice is made. If everyone agreed on a single solution, instead of re-inventing the wheel, then it's problems would be dealt with, and people would know what to program to. The not-invented-here and yet-another-incomplete-solution is quite a waste of time...

Part of distributions problems are created by themselves... since they try to do too much - delivering absolutely everything a user could want, they are not completely polished, and force users to break their system (with new drivers/frameworks) when all they wanted was an updated version of Open Office.

I would argue that if Ubuntu delivered and supported current versions of the top 10-20 apps on older versions Ubuntu, people would be less inclined to upgrade. There just isn't enough value otherwise in the latest release for a significant portion of users. Those who want bleeding edge can get it, those who want stability can get it.

Then if they start thinking of the core OS as separate from the applications, they might start implementing things that benefit 3rd party developers like a more consistent delivery model for non-core software (PPAs, vendor sites, backports, new distributions, compile your own, the variety of packaging "solutions"... it's all very inconsistent from a users perspective)

[Craig73]

I distinctly remember upgrading XP to Vista when the latter was released, and having a heap of hardware trouble. Even my old scanner (Canoscan lide 20) still doesn't work with vista x86_64 (no 64-bit version of the driver). It works perfectly with linux, and has done with all the latest versions since I've had it.

You are lucky... an my Canoscan doesn't work at all on Linux. Plus Vista was a new driver model from Microsoft... the difference in Linux is that the driver developers are the ones creating the new model (or not) so old stuff will largely keep working (because someone keeps fixing it when the new kernel breaks it)