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

[dwagner]

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

kdenlive indeed is great - but I am still using the 0.9.x release, which is more than 3 years old, because the whole "refactoring"-effort (with Qt5) that came thereafter so far did not result in any features I missed - but brought lots of instabilities and incompatibilities with the project files from 0.9.x, which is kind of a show-stopper for me.

[fabdiznec]

Well, I guess that just the impetus I needed to unsubscribe from the Phoronix feed.

This is just an absurd level of baiting and zero research.

[DanL]

Well, I guess that just the impetus I needed to unsubscribe from the Phoronix feed. This is just an absurd level of baiting and zero research.

You've been on Phoronix for four years and you think this article/thread is absurd? Interesting...

[norsetto]

opencl 1.2, I mean, am I really asking too much!?

[Mez']

I don't see how Ubuntu One was a letdown. To this day, I still regret its features, integration and ease of use.
Dropbox or Google Drive don't even come close to it. I had it installed on Windows at work and on my Android smartphone and it was working seamlessly and within a powerful workflow.

The only letdown I can see, and it is the same for Unity is that they abandoned the best product on the market.

[Mez']

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.

And you're very nice to it, as there are many more disappointments in Gnome 3. Good concept, good paradigm (same as Unity), terrible implementation (contrary to Unity).

[Mez']

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.

If you've ever used Unity, you can't possibly say Gnome 3 is effective.

[starshipeleven]

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.

Ah come on, even OpenBSD has higher install base than Illumos derivatives.

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.

Psst, FreeBSD has jails and bhyve and Xen, Linux kernel has KVM, Xen, docker, lxc, kubernetes and whatever the fuck else.

What's the point in waiting for OpenIndiana? what features it provides that you can't find in Linux or in FreeBSD already?

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

Yeah, an OS that is now on life support from what little community it had after their parent company has dropped the ball after 5 years? https://lists.omniti.com/pipermail/o...il/008699.html

Meanwhile FreeBSD ecosystem is thriving and fine, with profitable companies behind some of its (open) derivatives like Freenas or Pfsense, and Linux ecosystem is all over the place with tons of different companies with their offers and options.

[ferry]

My biggest disappointment was last year when Intel abandoned the Edison. This slightly larger than a SD card was a tiny headless PC which had the potential to add ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and compute power to any dumb device. It ran a rather old heavily patched U-Boot and Linux built by an old Yocto version. Currently mainline U-Boot and Linux have almost everything in and recipes for Yocto Rocko build the whole thing. But the devices will be gone soon when stocks are exhausted.

[Thpn]

One of my favorite disappointments was Larry Ellison's NIC, or New Internet Computer, which was a Net client. It used a Linux OS on CD-ROM and dial-up connection. It was conceptually the predecessor to today's Chromebooks. I'm glad someone also mentioned the Java Desktop System.