The Leading Linux Desktop Platform Issues Of 2018

[dungeon]

The leading linux desktop platform issues of 2018. are the same as in year 2004.

So move on, there is no issues - if you want install it, if you don't want then don't Really there is nothing to do there, other than maybe to push people to use it

The greatest known pushing metaphor of all time is some company to pushing it together with the hardware, so that is it - make it sexy enough, so that people don't complain so much and push it



He, he, if click it does not work then just push it - maybe it will work that way. Otherwise find your brain somewhere and type in something

There is no what to invent on that point really Microsoft, Apple, Google... these all are where they are because they push software together with hardware

While Linux as Linux of course nope, that just pushes software but not hardware

[agge]

I also see a large number of packages in a distributions repository as a strength. Run one update command, be it dnf -y update or apt-get update and everything's updated. Similarly, as good as everything I want installed can be with basically the same command. If I have to go to 50 different websites and check if there is a new version and download a file from each and install that to update then... why not just use Windows?

I don't know what are you talking about, nowadays most windows apps(that I use, and I'm a developer) or they automatically update(downloading by themselves the latest version and installing it automatically) or provide a notification of a new update with a convenient link to the download page(so there's no need to keep in mind to check for updates and search for the download link).

[agge]

Talking like a racist, more DE's is better, people have a choice, even if the main focus is gnome right now

I would like to choose his approach, but can't because of X, Y and Z pointed out by him. Tell me again people have a choice?

[GI_Jack]

The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" is a myth that needs to die. It is true, in years past I bought into this, but there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". It was nice to believe that if we got more people interested in Linux desktops, it would get more attention from developers. These days, with great advances in drivers, official support of GNU and Linux desktops, even from major vendors, the question standards "What do we have to gain from getting mass adoption of Linux Desktops". The answer is nothing.

We already have Linux Desktops. They already work great. They do what people who like Linux Desktops want to. There are even ones friendly for the non-technical users. But there will never be mass adoption of a Linux desktop, and that really isn't a bad thing. It remains usable for anyone who wants.

A lot of the "weaknesses" are in fact strengths to the people who do in fact use linux. Making Linux more like windows would alienate the existing install base. Most of which are tinkerers, programmers, engineers, professional users. I guess we can be frank and state "there is no Linux Desktop, only Linux Workstations".

lets see:

Multiple WMs/DEs - this is good. as a GNOME user I can frankly state that if we'd be forced to all use the same DE we'd kill eachother. Oh. I also don't just use GNOME. GNOME doesn't run on everything. While GNOME and KDE have a great feature set, a consistent UI, they are heavy weight and won't run on everything. get this: I also use XFCE as a fallback where I can't run gnome. It plays nicely as a backup gnome. It complements gnome. I've also used OpenBox as a second backup where XFCE is still too heavy and intrusive. See where I am going with this? right tool for the right job? Then there are a various myriad of DEs for people with different preferences. getting rid of the smaller ones isn't going to make the others better.

Is there a compatibility issue? Fuck no. They all conform to the FreeDesktop.org standard. They all use the GTK toolkit.

Also, some people like KDE which also uses FreeDeskop.org standards. Even though there are some KDE specific apps, I have no issues running Krita on gnome. Sure it installs a few extra libs, but like, modern system? still less than windows.

Lotso distros - There is a giant misconception about fragmentation. There are only a handful of viable distros. There are only two major distros, Redhat and Debian, and most others are derivatives. There are only real four production distros that you'd target for a "professional" app that would be Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and RHEL.

The rest of them are either development distros like Gentoo, power user distros like Arch, or research distros like the popstar name OSes and Clear OS. Many of development/research distros aren't great for production usage, but they can fork off, and do experimental tweaks and try new things without breaking stable distros. its great we have people that can simply play around, try new things and perhaps discover better ways of doing things without breaking what people depend on. That is a strength. Although no one uses Plan 9, still, many features got back ported to UNIX, making it worthwhile.

As for the DE/WMs, all the ones you'd actually use are FreeDesktop.org compliant, so as long as you target XDG you can be cross compatible.

Then we have the issue of libraries - This is actually far better than the three zillion versions of the VB and VC++ run time you have to install on Windows. These days, its generally handled gracefully with name changes and sym-links. Fixing this problem with a Free software app is generally as easy as changing a few lines and recompile everytime there is a lib version bump. Stable releases do not bump major compatibility breaking changes within a release. Rolling releases like Arch do a damn fine job at recompiles and getting everything dress-right-dress.

Which gets back to the last, and only "real" issue "Third party binaries that come without source". That's funny man. No one fucking cares.

[oiaohm]

This is a Linux ecosystem feature.
If this "problem" is to be solved, I hope the "winning" desktop is not GNOME... Otherwise that would only pave the way to the "Year of the Possibly Horrible Linux Desktop"...

Here is my proposed solution to the problem (split userspace in 2 parts: a system one and a user one).

Will not exactly work because you cannot split user space fully into two parts. Flatpak tries and lead to issues with host opengl drivers and the like not matching runtime.

The appimage developer keeps on missing the problem.

https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2018-173-libcapsule

Lets start with something basic lets look at windows. Visual studio runtime on windows of all things contains the C and C++ libraries the application use but that is not the same libc the host system uses. This requires you to be careful and free stuff the right way or stuff goes to hell under windows. Libcapsule is looking at ways of doing this without having this memory nightmare. But the reality is splitting userspace into host and user one does not work and application need to match host versions.

Same with the stupid idea that host must stay release a library like glibc with no new functions because new function could clash with functions in old applications. Instead you really need to make a valid work around to this problem.

Now is there a correct solution to all these problems. The answer is shim like libcapsule is doing. The shim lists the functions the application code expects to see. The shim hides all the newer versions so they no longer exist to the application also shim gets to hide the difference between host version of some library and the version the application wants. A shim over glibc could make new glibc functionally match old versions perfectly. Shims could include all the information about library name changes.

So instead of attempting to make complete platform what you need is a set of shims to hide the distribution platform differences. Yes shims could choose between what the host provides and what a runtime provided based on what version the host distribution has and what version the application needs.

At this stage libcapsule is not 100 percent ready for prime time. flatpak is a good option at this stage. Yes libcapsule could be used with flatpak in time to remove need of having to ship like nvidia libraries and use the host ones instead.

Flatpak is not using a sandbox for no reason because mixing libraries depending on incompatible library versions is the path to hell without something like libcapsule to split dependency trees.

Once we have functional shim solution things will get interesting for the Linux desktop. Remember you don't want to install lots of old versions of glibc and the like due to security issues. Now being able to make a shim to make new versions of libraries pretend to be old versions without the old version security problems that sounds good right.

[dungeon]

The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" is a myth that needs to die. It is true, in years past I bought into this, but there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". It was nice to believe that if we got more people interested in Linux desktops, it would get more attention from developers. These days, with great advances in drivers, official support of GNU and Linux desktops, even from major vendors, the question standards "What do we have to gain from getting mass adoption of Linux Desktops". The answer is nothing.

Exactly, and there is nothing to do on that matter.

It is just desire of these on one side who wanna produce blobies *one time* easier and on another side these who have desire to run these blobies relatively *forever*.

But at least maybe we can redesign simpliest back door for these . Go back there, there you have everything for your desired fun like third party casino, 120% alcohol, blobs, drugs, brothel full of transvestit aliens, 22 century WC, exact jail per your choice, all variants of CoC fatamorganas... who cares

Problem we currently have is that someone allowed these CoC fatamorganas in our house nowdays, so Coup d'état might be as near as The Last Year Of The Linux Desktop

That is what we should be afraid of nowdays, so that The Last Year Of The Linux Desktop does not happen

[TemplarGR]

I guess thats not what he means. A certain level of choice (distro, DE..) is nice and makes sense. BUT: There (see https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity) are over 300 distros available - AND some of them have DE-flavors, which are not even counted, (Letter-of-choice)Ubuntu-like, as independent distros (Manjaro f.i. is one distro, but it has 4 official DEs plus 9 community DE-variants). Boy oh boy, isn't that really a bit too much?

And why is that an issue? The vast majority of distros are based on a few key base distros: Red Hat, Suse, Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware. Those are the main distros and have been for decades. Other than those, there are derivatives based on them like : Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Sabayon, CentOS, Manjaro, etc. And last but not list, there are "mods" of the derivative distros like the various Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro flavours, which just switch the DE, a few settings perhaps, etc.

So in a sense, from a support standpoint, there is a rather small target for developers to hit, despite the seemingly "huge" number of distros on the surface. People who use the excuse that there are 300 distros in order to avoid supporting Linux are idiots.

[boxie]

From what I saw in that presentation - he raised a some legit problems.

As an app developer - Distributing your latest version and knowing it is going to "just work"
As a user, not being able to "run the binary" (not sure how wide scope this is, seems like an easy DE fix though)
App Portability - something that AppImage allows that is not a bad idea
"Being able to download and run securely"

Flatpak can solve all of these things I am sure, and that would be enough for a desktop system.

[brrrrttttt]

I keep hearing on here how good flatpak is, yet I've never heard of anyone actually using it, nor seen any tools like linuxdeployqt[1] to make it easy for me to package. It makes AppImage much more attractive to me as a developer. What gives?

[1] https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt

[brrrrttttt]

I don't know what are you talking about, nowadays most windows apps(that I use, and I'm a developer) or they automatically update(downloading by themselves the latest version and installing it automatically) or provide a notification of a new update with a convenient link to the download page(so there's no need to keep in mind to check for updates and search for the download link).

That is exactly the problem with Windows. Every application needs to be managed separately, and every application implements it's own gimped upgrade mechanism which annoys me every time I run it.