Linspire 10 Released - Claims Of "Most Meticulously Designed & Engineered FOSS Desktop"

[polarathene]

Because you seem to have a problem understanding what you read, allow me to explain to you in such a way that even a person like you can understand. Linux sucks for the following reasons:

1) Performance, especially I/O performance related to copying and encrypting large files, is atrocious, and it's especially more glaring when compared to Win 10.

Oh come on, I typed out a big detailed reply for you like you write for others.

At least give more details about this I/O perf issue. Especially with your boasting of how long you've been using linux for, one would think you'd know better by now.

[sophisticles]

Oh come on, I typed out a big detailed reply for you like you write for others.

At least give more details about this I/O perf issue. Especially with your boasting of how long you've been using linux for, one would think you'd know better by now.

I did already, a perfect example was moving 1GB of data from an 1tb internal EXT4 boot NVMe to a double encrypted folder on a 1tb internal SSD, and by double encrypted I mean LUKS + gocryptfs. The copying starts out like gangbusters and then tanks to under 100 mb/s as the copying goes on. On this same hardware, doing a similar task using Bitlocker whole disk encryption + Veracrypt, the copying flies. And before you say I can't compare the 2 encryption methods, using Veracrypt to create a 1TB encrypted partition on Linux took hours.

There is also the fact that Mate will freeze up during the copying process, spontaneously coming back to life at various intervals.

Not to mention the delay there is in getting a preview of a large partition's contents that has a lot of files or searching for anything specific, it takes forever.

Win 10 is way better from a practical stand point.

[f0rmat]

Oh come on, I typed out a big detailed reply for you like you write for others.

At least give more details about this I/O perf issue. Especially with your boasting of how long you've been using linux for, one would think you'd know better by now.

sophisticles

I concur with Guest ...linux may not be "perfect," but he is correct - give details - or how about this, file a bug report (and before you say it, it is tired trope, I know it - but it does work, albeit at times slowly depending on the devs interest and the difficulty). It may not get answered immediately, but it may help. Or ask if anybody has ideas - this is a forum, not a bonfire - at least most of the time. Linux is not perfect for me because of my use case, but it works for 95% of my personal use. My work use, I have very little control over what format my customers want - and when push comes to shove, they buy the product, my company bills them, and then I get paid - but that is not the point of this forum - my use case is my use case and I do not expect linux dev and/or everybody else here to drop everything to fix things to meet my use case.

And Guest your reply was thoughtful and insightful - as well as very polite.

[polarathene]

f0rmat thanks!

I did already, a perfect example was moving 1GB of data from an EXT4 boot NVMe to a double encrypted folder on a 1GB SSD, and by double encrypted I mean LUKS + gocryptfs. The copying starts out like gangbusters and then tanks to under 100 mb/s as the copying goes on. On this same hardware, doing a similar task using Bitlocker whole disk encryption + Veracrypt, the copying flies.

Ok... so the NVMe is internal right? What about the 1GB SSD? (this sounds like you're stating the capacity of the SSD is 1GB... which would likely mean it's not actually an SSD) Is this an internal SATA SSD or external via USB? What filesystem is on the SSD? (I'm assuming it's linux native one)

You were saying you were transferring large files before, but now you're saying 1GB of data which is a bit more vague, how big are these files? If you're going to complain about transfer speed throw encryption out of the mix first, and verify that the transfer alone is contributing to the issue and not just encryption What distro and release was this? What disk I/O scheduler was involved?

Were you doing the transfer via GUI or CLI? Some GUI apps have abstraction layers and those can notably reduce performance (so the problem isn't linux, it's the software a distro/DE defaults for users and they have to address their own bugs but it doesn't apply to linux as a whole). I know Dolphin on KDE Plasma was guilty of this, receiving fixes over the past few years, there were many cases where it was doing things inefficiently, along with KIO perf issues.

If you want to complain about disk I/O performance, run FIO benchmarks. Otherwise your actual issue is probably more nuanced as I've pointed out above. Linux comes in many different configurations via distros, unlike Windows, you can't equate your experience with a few of them and the particular way you used them to a single OS, since each distro is effectively it's own OS with common heritage among their peers using various versions of the linux kernel.

And before you say I can't compare the 2 encryption methods, using Veracrypt to create a 1GB encrypted partition on Linux took hours.

Actually, I was going to say that you didn't originally mention encryption involved. Just copying. It was only your 2nd mention that I complained about your lack of details that you added the encryption tidbit.

Encryption being involved does change things. I recall a recent article on here about linux encryption having a notable perf regression for some time due to mitigations (which I assume you have applied?). Probably had a good impact on that, especially with double encryption involved?

There is also the fact that Mate will freeze up during the copying process, spontaneously coming back to life at various intervals.

Again, sounds specific to that distro/DE configuration. I remember something like that years ago, when I switched to Manjaro and it's default of BFQ for the disk I/O scheduler (before BFQ was upstreamed and the 5.0 kernel switched to multi-queue schedulers, deprecating the single-queue ones which BFQ was initially on), this helped resolve the freezing up issue you're describing. I wouldn't be surprised that one of the disks involved is using something like deadline or whatever to prioritize throughput (or attempt to) and not care about responsiveness/latency which a scheduler like BFQ prided itself in balancing well.

Are you on a laptop or a desktop? I asked this before too, you may also be impacted by power profiles that try to extend battery life. Those may very well contribute to the issue if applicable.

I assume that you had plenty of free memory available on the system too? Otherwise the file buffer may contribute to some thrashing, you can reduce/avoid the issue via some vm tunables, which unrelated to available memory made a huge difference for me when transferring 1GB to a flash stick (as in matched windows perf instead of 7 hours), by flushing the buffer contents to target destination sooner.

Not to mention the delay there is in getting a preview of a large partition's contents that has a lot of files or searching for anything specific, it takes forever.

Yeah... sounds like another DE/GUI specific issue. How fast is `ls -la <file path>` via terminal? I bet it's much faster. That means your GUI app is doing something poorly, complain to the devs about it and hopefully it'll get fixed, but that doesn't make it apply to everyone who runs a linux distro.

Win 10 is way better from a practical stand point.

Yes, in your experience and opinion that may very well be true. Personally I prefer linux and find it more practical for my needs. Windows has caused it's own grief for me multiple times in the past, from when updates were forced on Windows 10 killing 2 weeks of 24/7 processing at work, to it's defaults in Win 8.1 (and perhaps relevant in Win 10) having a rare chance of corrupting the bootloader when rebooting (I was just unlucky), I'm pretty technical and good at troubleshooting but it took 3 days to figure out the cause and how to repair it (usual solutions didn't work). macOS is no better, and linux isn't without it's own faults either. Out of all three though, I'll take linux.

[f0rmat]

Desktop Linux these days.. Even Scammers couldn’t be bothered to skin a KDE desktop so it looks like microwaved Windows. They just pick GNOME like the rest of us.

I did not pick Gnome. I am happy that it works for you. It does not work for me - but I am sure that I do not have the same workflow as you. I am also sure that I am not as skilled a developer as you - being that I am not one - at least anymore. I am also certain that I do not look like you - which, believe me - is VERY good for you. You definitely do not want to look like me.

[DanL]

Desktop Linux these days.. Even Scammers couldn’t be bothered to skin a KDE desktop so it looks like microwaved Windows. They just pick GNOME like the rest of us.

Fsck off.

[tuxd3v]

The MacOs of the Linux's?
Oh wait, that's Elemeretardy OS

I believe that title belongs to Elive..

https://www.elivecd.org

[Paradigm Shifter]

I use Windows for precisely three things: games, Microsoft Office and Endnote.

Steam Proton is good, but not perfect, and I can't be bothered to faff around when I want to play a game (even consoles are a faff now, with not allowing me to play until the firmware is updated to the latest, then the game is updated to the latest... the advantages of console gaming died with the PS2...)

If Microsoft released Office for Linux, I'd use that. Hell, I did use that, quite successfully, with CrossOver Office with Office 2010. They've released Office for Mac, Office for Android... why not Linux (even just officially supporting Ubuntu would be a start, given how eager they seem to push Ubuntu with WSL/WSL2)?

There is already a native Linux-supporting competitor to Endnote (Mendeley) but it drives me up the wall because every time it syncs my library, it "corrects" some reference "errors" regarding several textbooks I have manually added. It always "corrects" them to totally incorrect information. I have no idea why, and I have been unable to stop it. So I gave up, and went back to Endnote, which has its own irritations, but they are less severe.

At work I use Microsoft Office and Endnote in a VM, which serves purpose but is troublesome in its own way.

Windows 10 has some good features, but these regular updates are a pain in the arse. One update (1703?), updated the SATA controller driver to one which didn't like the firmware in my SSD, so Windows would soft-lock for 30 seconds for every 5-10 usable seconds as the controller tried to negotiate, failed and reset. Fixing that was a massive pain. Another time it decided that a critical piece of software was no longer supported, so removed it. Downloading a patch and reinstalling it solved it, but rather than telling me a patch was necessary, Microsoft in their infinite (ha-bloody-ha) wisdom uninstalled it instead. A debugger I've grown familiar with, Microsoft keeps deciding is a "PUP" and quarantining it (but hey, at least it doesn't just delete it outright!) Another update made one PC go into a boot loop that it wouldn't recover from, and I had to do a clean install to fix it. Another update (1811?) didn't like my Intel NIC and/or network setup on my gaming box, and Windows would take nearly five minutes upon booting to finally negotiate a network connection. The next Windows release (1903?) fixed that, but I spent six months cursing whoever was responsible for that one. I'm wondering whether commenting again will stir the hornets nest once more, but I greatly enjoyed having a day off yesterday (national holiday here) until I got a panicked phone call from my mother, half way around the world, because the recent update to 20H2 for Windows 10 made it decide to remove her printer. I know this to be the case because the recent update did the same thing to me on my laptop with one of the office printers at work. She hadn't noticed until now because she prints stuff fairly rarely - the printer does more service as a photocopier than an actual printer - but this was a critical document that needed to be printed that day. Let me tell you, I hate telephone tech support from either direction at the best of times, but that really got on my wick. Yes, I did get it fixed, but I don't know whether to blame Microsoft, HP or both for that one.

Just stating that Windows is better is... being rather selective. Spending five minutes floating around Windows support forums demonstrates that Windows has just as many weird issues, many of which are not PEBKAC. I wholeheartedly agree that no other office suite compares to Microsoft Office (and even suggesting LibreOffice does is a joke) but they will serve a purpose for either a) someone who just needs to do some basic word processing or similar or b) anyone working at an institution which has gone "all in" on FOSS and refuses to use anything else. If you ever communicate with anyone who uses anything else, though, it's torturous. I use GNU Octave as I refuse to pay for MATLAB, which I use for data analysis (or Python, never learned R). Excel I use just for quick charts. Powerpoint has no equal, although there are still weird issues converting from Windows Powerpoint to Mac Powerpoint. For other software, several previous colleagues used to spend vast sums on Adobe software, until I and another colleague demonstrated that Inkscape was actually pretty good and you could do some neat things with it, similarly for The GIMP and/or Krita... and I'm not exactly an expert with them. Same with Blender, which I understand several major movie studios use. I'm no audio pro, but find Audacity and Musescore usable. I don't do video editing, so can't comment there.

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TL;DR: yes, Linux has issues, which can depend on distribution or desktop environment. Windows has issues too. Use what you know that works best for the task, but don't be afraid to learn something new either.

[andyprough]

Because you seem to have a problem understanding what you read, allow me to explain to you in such a way that even a person like you can understand. Linux sucks for the following reasons:

1) Performance, especially I/O performance related to copying and encrypting large files, is atrocious, and it's especially more glaring when compared to Win 10.

2) Even natively compile proprietary apps, such as the Linux build of Davinci Resolve, suffer from numerous problems, such as being unreliable in getting them to even work on all distros.

3) This is one is my biggest complaints and really shows how substandard Linux is: scaling of text within an apps GUI. If you take cross platform open source applications, such as Shotcut, Avidemux, Open/Libre Office, etc, and use on the exact same hardware, in both any Linux distro you can name or Windows, you will find that running one Windows text scaling is perfect if you manually set a font size, under Windows the app GUI will display perfectly. With Linux the exact same apps, running in either their native Linux build or a Windows build via WINE, will not scale properly, the text will either be so small that you can't read what anything says or so big that half the GUI will disappear through the bottom of the screen. This also happens with various distros built in package manager, set a default font of 14 instead of 11 and many distros, like Fedora 33, the bottom of the package manager disappears and if you want to use it you manually have to make the fonts smaller.

4) MS Office has no open source equal. I do a lot of data analysis, and Excel is invaluable, as is Power Point. You just can't do the same type of work with Open/Libre/Apache or other Office Suite.

For the record, I have been using Linux since before some of you were probably born, I have been using it since back when you could walk into a CompUSA and buy Suse in a box with a book for $80; I have been using it before Ximian Gnome was around, and I was making and using Knoppix remasters as soon as they were a thing.

Basically my experiences with Linux over the years mirror Dedoimedo's reviews, where he complains about all the "paper cuts" associated with Linux distros. Every once in a while you see something that makes you thing maybe Linux is finally coming of age and then you realize that it's still a half baked product that can't even be given away for free, judging by how low an adoption rate it has.

I don't have a problem copying or encrypting large files - perhaps there is a faster way to do what you are trying to do from the command line? I wouldn't be surprised if you are having trouble with those operations on a Gnome desktop. I haven't tried Gnome in quite a few years, but it was slow at quite a few things last time I did try.

Regarding MS Office - I've found in recent years that Softmaker Office is almost perfectly compatible with MS docx files, and greatly reduces my need to spin up a Windows vm. I don't do anything with audio recording so I don't have any ideas for you in that department. I ran into a problem just once with the font size of Libreoffice, but I installed the libreoffice-gtk2 or -gtk3 package and it was immediately solved.

Haven't used Fedora for quite a few years, but I did not have a good experience with Gnome on it and am not surprised at any trouble you had. I've been using antiX, Artix, Devuan, and MX recently, and spend most of my time either on the XFCE desktop or in a DWM window manager that I've customized for my needs.

I think my first version of SuSE was about 6.2. I can't recall if it was being sold at CompUSA by then, but I did eventually buy a few of the $80 box sets there. I think my last purchase was either the 9.2 or 9.3 boxed set. I used SuSE and opensuse Tumbleweed almost exclusively from about 1999 through 2018, but I don't think I'd go back to it at this point. Many of its defaults just don't fit my needs any longer, and the distros I do use seem more customized for the way I work.