Some Of The Grandest Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Over The Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Some Of The Grandest Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Over The Years

There are no April Fool's Day surprises on Phoronix, but considering the occasion and the otherwise slow Easter weekend, I figured it would be fun to discuss some of the grandest open-source/Linux letdowns or failures from over the years... Here's a trip back down memory lane for some once promising projects and goals...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Open-Source-Fails-2018

[tildearrow]

The biggest letdown for me is GNOME 3.
Giant title bars, air in the UIs, sometimes hard to understand icons (like the "New" icon in gedit), hard to minimize without enabling the icon in tweak tool, you need to jump into Activities to select a different window at times, CSD, extension breakage/slowdowns, etc.

[boxie]

For me the biggest let down so far is that those who make games do not have a really easy way to get Linux users their games.

Sure the major Engines have a "build for Linux" option, but something is holding them back. Either not knowing how to support the platform, or specific problems with porting or choosing to use and customise the DirectX engines for their games or something else.

I know that the devs are getting there and I hope that with Vulkan we have a path for it. It's just that this future is not here yet.

[dungeon]

Hm, there is no grandest letdowns here Actually there is quite a lot, but i just have culture to ditch whatever i don't like as possible

[awesz]

Where is GNOME 3™?

[k1e0x]

OpenSolaris is alive and well.. Just under a name change to Illumos. OpenIndiana (originally an OpenSolaris now Illumos desktop distro) had it's latest release at 17.10 and they have finished migrating Sun's Gnome 2 JDS shell to Mate.

A neat feature that this has, is it has all the container support for Solaris being Zones and Crossbow and it also has KVM. If LX-Branded Zones is working in OpenIndiana or not I'm not totally sure.. but in theory it can run Linux contaniers on native bare metal without a hypervisor. I believe PF is also being ported to it. This is what I'm waiting for.

(edit: OmniOS is probably want you want if you want to play with containers)

It's a fork really not a name change but is a fork a fork when there is no other branch anymore?

[mike44]

Kdenlive is great, seems you've never used it.

[Vasant1234]

Yes, both KDE and GNOME have turned out to be grand failures. But on the other hand open source desktop applications such as Liberoffice office suite, Firefox and Thunderbird are both cross platform and quiet successful.

Another project you failed to mention was Fedora on OLPC which was quiet sluggish. Fortunately Sugar software now also runs on Android.

[TemplarGR]

It seems i am in the minority but i don't think Gnome 3 was a let down. I have been using it day 1 and even though it had its issues i love it and won't change it for any other desktop. It is simple, elegant, and effective. People are just too stuborn and refuse to adapt it seems. They want to use their Windows 95-like DEs forever.

For me the most serious let down has been KDE in the last decade. Both KDE 4 and KDE 5 (ok ok "plasma") are trash. Even now they are unstable for me and don't really look that great, i hate that fisher price feeling their themes have. It is too plasticky. I vastly prefer Gnome 3 looks.

[ColinP]

Good, out-of-the-box prime functionality, especially for Nvidia, that doesn't involve a combination of 3rd party software, arcane configuration, the planets being in alignment and a whole heap of luck. And then no Vulkan.