Why Desktop Linux Sucks and What We can Do About It

[RobbieAB]

Because that is EXACTLY what the video talks about. It is referring to hardware that used to work but no longer does.

Power G3?

Power of any type in 10.6?

I think in terms of "not working on working hardware", MacOS and Windows are always going to lose, as I would rate losing a CPU as far worse than losing any other component...

[krazy]

No it is not fair at all to compare to a hackintosh. You compare a hackintosh then I should be able to compare a linux system with blobs. Same thing. By the same reason you scream blobs fuck up linux, I can scream 3rd party screws up OS X. BTW, OS X's driver model is very well documented and opensource.

The links kraftman provided mostly seemed to refer to problems with OSX, itunes or safari.

How are those 3rd party?

[kraftman]

Could anyone tell me which distro doesnt have pulseaudio or gstreamer enabled? Or the way to disable it on Ubuntu 9.04? Seems like every major distro these days has pulseaudio enabled by default.

Kubuntu doesn't have them. There's probably way to disable PulseAudio in Ubuntu (Gstreamer is part of Gnome, so you probably can't disable it), but you will loose notification sounds I think. Look here:

http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/ubuntu-904-jaunty-keeping-the-beast-pulseaudio-at-bay/

The links kraftman provided mostly seemed to refer to problems with OSX, itunes or safari.

How are those 3rd party?

And it's worth to mention OS X doesn't exist without 3rd party drivers :>

[Craig73]

{details of phonon's portability and developer benefits and clarification that it is the another layer possibly using gstreamer as an backend... }

Thanks for the clarification of Phonon.

[Svartalf]

Power G3?

Power of any type in 10.6?

Alpha/Mips/PPC on NT versus XP?

[deanjo]

I completely disagree. My ralink-based USB wireless stick (RT2501USB) has worked out-of-the-box with zero issues since Ubuntu 8.04 (when I bought it). Do you have any kind of evidence for the problems you describe?

http://www.google.ca/search?q=rt61+linux+stopped+working&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Power G3?
Power of any type in 10.6?
I think in terms of "not working on working hardware", MacOS and Windows are always going to lose, as I would rate losing a CPU as far worse than losing any other component...

RobbieAB, how many distro's out there will not run on a 486 with 32 megs of ram and a 4 Gig HD out there with a fully featured desktop? The answer, A LOT if not most. Not because it's not "technically" capable but because for practicality wise it doesn't meet a certian set of minimum requirements to effectively run the software. Would you attempt to use KDE 4 or the newest Gnome on such a machine? How many distro's have also dropped PPC, Alpha, Sparc, etc support as well? FYI Darwin will continue to work on PPC's as well, but darwin isn't a desktop now is it? Apple with 10.6 draws the line @ PPC's. With 10.5 that line was drawn on G3's. Many distro's draw the line at packaging any less then a i586. There comes a time where capability and practicality means stopping support somewhere. Recently I did fire up an old 386 system and tried getting linux going on it. Well that was no longer feasible if you were planning to use it for anything other then relatively slow router. Next to none of the devices in it worked properly with a new release. Even ALSA failed to get the Gravis Ultrasound going and the Trident card puked and upchucked when trying to run a desktop with Debian 5.0. To get any kind of actual desktop experience out of it had to be reverted to SuSE 8.0 and even then it was a painfully slow desktop experience. Even the mighty Debian was of no help there. At that point you might as well say support was dropped from a desktop usage point of view. While the kernel may "support" these devices they are so old that nobody really bothers to check to see if they still work.

The links kraftman provided mostly seemed to refer to problems with OSX, itunes or safari.

How are those 3rd party?

Shall we do a google on reproducable kernel panics? Lets make it fun shall we?

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php...ics+%22os+x%22

How about segfaults?

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=segfaults+linux&word2=segfaults+%22os+x%22

And it's worth to mention OS X doesn't exist without 3rd party drivers :>

You know damn well what I'm referring too. OOB experience. What comes with the OS distribution and tested by the vender of the OS.

[jeffro-tull]

I know, I ragged on the video earlier, and this is something of an about-face. But the feud in here is getting borderline ridiculous.

In their own ways, every operating system sucks. Windows, OS X, Linux - all of them. To get better market penetration (and to ease our own pain), Linux has to suck noticeably less than its competitors. Because Windows sucks, but everyone is familiar with the ways in which it does and help is just about everywhere. Same deal with OS X. The problems for desktop Linux may be directly comparable to those on its competitors in severity and quantity, but the solutions are different.

People will gloss over problems if they a) know the solutions, or b) have quick, easy access to someone else who can solve them (Geek Squad, computer shop, vendor tech support, whatever). Even if our problems are essentially the same, people will be ruthless toward them until they (or their convenient computer-fixer-upper) develop familiarity.

So you can say "Well, $OTHER_OPERATING_SYSTEM has this problem, too!" until you're blue in the face. The rest of the world won't care. Unless we're better, and markedly so, most people won't bother with Linux.

[deanjo]

Unless we're better, and markedly so, most people won't bother with Linux.

Bingo. Which also was said in the video. And to do that it has to be readily seen by the "non-tech joe".

[krazy]

http://www.google.ca/search?q=rt61+l...ient=firefox-a

The first link in that page is a bug in a beta version of Ubuntu 8.10. Though it hasn't been marked fixed, there have been no comments since the day the bug was first reported, and there are no similar bugs on launchpad.

The second refers to a kernel which doesn't support RT61. Instead the forum thread discusses the loading of some in-development driver modules from a 3rd party development project.

The rest of the links similarly refer to kernels which didn't support that hardware, where people were asking for help compiling and running incomplete, in-development driver modules. The driver was only merged to the kernel in 2.6.24, and none of those links refer to problems with that kernel version or later.

So how does that show hardware support regressions?

RobbieAB, how many distro's out there will not run on a 486 with 32 megs of ram and a 4 Gig HD out there with a fully featured desktop? The answer, A LOT if not most. Not because it's not "technically" capable but because for practicality wise it doesn't meet a certian set of minimum requirements to effectively run the software. Would you attempt to use KDE 4 or the newest Gnome on such a machine?

What would be the point? It would be unuseable. However, you do have the option of a minimal installation - so that HW is still supported.

While the kernel may "support" these devices they are so old that nobody really bothers to check to see if they still work.

How do you know this?

Shall we do a google on reproducable kernel panics? Lets make it fun shall we?

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php...ics+%22os+x%22

How about segfaults?

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php...lts+%22os+x%22

Okay, so not only did you completely ignore my question, but you then set up a straw man and try to tear it down with googlefight.com? Really??

The fact that there are orders of magnitude more online forums, mailing-lists and IRC logs devoted to linux development than OSX development has nothing to do with the googlefight results I'm sure.

[kraftman]

@Deanjo

You're comparing Mac to hackintoshes Linux installs all time. So, links which you gave are meaningless. If 486 doesn't work on i.e. Ubuntu you can take another distro. You can't take another OS X to run Power G3 etc.

"LMAO thank you for 100% validating my point. Not 1 of those issues is preinstalled Linux distro related."

The fact that there are orders of magnitude more online forums, mailing-lists and IRC logs devoted to linux development than OSX development has nothing to do with the googlefight results I'm sure.

Yes, Linux just allows people to do what they want with it - run hardware on experimental drivers, modify any part of it, compile their own kernels and that's why people report many issues.