Help me help Linux, tell me about Linux problems

[devius]

This! There were a few attempts here and there, but nothing usable ever materialised. And the proprietary ones usually don't support Linux as well as cost way into thousands of dollars.

Blender showed that it's possible to make a good alternative to proprietary 3D modelling programs, so a proper CAD tool should also be possible to create.

I'm getting tired of constantly repeating the same thing... there are two native linux programs that are 100% compatible with the DWG2010 specification and work in a way that is very familiar to AutoCAD users: BricsCAD and DraftSight. They are both closed source and BricsCAD is commercial, but still only costs about 1/10th of the price of AutoCAD. That said, an Open source equivalent would surely be very welcome!

[Alliancemd]

Thank you

Thank you Michael and Phoronix readers.

I've found some interesting projects on the Linux Foundation site(in the High Priority list), I'll see if my coordinator accepts them.
The one with "Automatic transcription" even seems very easy, except the fact that doesn't matter how much work will be put in it, it will never be perfect because of the complexity of Speech Recognition. It will always give wrong transcriptions like Youtube's caption does.

[darkcoder]

4) As with the package format just decide on one main toolkit. Offer the rest but have one single officially marketed and be the main toolkit for new developers to use. I don't even care which one it is as long as there is just one.

If you are talking about GUI toolkits, technically there are two: GTK and QT. Most desktops/windows managers out there use one or the other. There are also shell environmental variables which tells you which UI is up, and then execute an interface according to it.

But if you are talking about package format (the packaging itself)... That is not gonna happen.

Even PackageKit that was a nice (not my preferred implementation) way to provide a unified interface layer to package management failed miserably. The distributions that include it only use the GUI, while delegating command line packaging straight to the native one (apt, yum, etc). Most PackageKit back-ends were submitted by contributors more than people directly related to package managers in their target distributions. Like I said before, sadly companies don't care for standardization.

How badly packaging is on Linux:
1. RPM... wait, there is not 1 RPM, there are 2 RPMs lol. RPM 4.x and RPM 5, developed by independent groups.
2. DEB... only one format, but Ubuntu packages may or may not work in Debian.
3. TAR.GZ... used by some distributions (Arch, Slack), but again probably incompatible due to system differences.
Also used by sources. No way to know from outside for which distro is or if it contains source, binary or both.
4. ebuild... It's not even a binary, is a set of rules to compile a package ala BSD ports
5. PISI... Pardus format, probably made cause of the 2 RPMS mayhem, and DEB designed to required manual packaging
(read that somewhere... silly idea in an automated world), while xml are easy parsable automatically.

And commands to manage packages, only giving example of RPM distros:
yum, zypper, smart, apt (apt rpm), urpmi.

God bless the freedom of choice.

[ninez]

Linux has no software for sharing and processing video/frames between applications (at least not like the example below, Sython). If we had a framework like this for linux, many applications could utilize it, as well as new applications could be built around it. It would basically be Jack-audio-connectin-kit for video. Something that is DE agnostic would be ideal. there are obvious uses like VJing, but i think it could be used in other ways, such as video editing / post-processing, screencasting, video-monitoring systems, VoIP - if paired up with something like Opus. Syphon for MacOSX is like this, and there are examples of applications that are built around it, if you look on the right hand side;

http://syphon.v002.info/

Some of the apps using Syphon already have some interesting uses, take a look;

1. http://appologics.com/airbeam (many uses, but obviously works well as a remote monitoring system).

A couple of other uses too;

2. http://blendy.studioavante.com/ (provides a slick way of using multi-projector setups!)

3. http://www.arkaos.net/product/index....d=10031&iid=74 (software like this, obviously has many commercial
uses, but also has home uses too)

I think if we had some sort of Syphon-like framework for linux, that has decent documentation and a stable API) there would be a potential for lots of different types of applications to utilize, both in the home, mobile and working environments.

[energyman]

imho the biggest problem is printing. Compared to windows, linux printing sucks.

It is not enough to have a driver, that only can print one or two resolutions with bad colours.
We need GOOD printing. And we need good printing support throught the stack. With nice preview and everything.

Seriously, linux printing is a suckfest. Everything else is bearable or even great.

[89c51]

What do you think of DraftSight(Free but not Open-Source)?

Draftsight is only 2D and lacks simulation capabilities +its 32bits only and beta at the moment. There are things like Salome, Code aster, Open cascade but nothing is close enough to the commercial packages. Someone might say that something like this is extremely specialized etc. but IMO once people get easy access to cool tools awesome occurs.

A good cross platform FOSS 2d/3d CAD is needed.

[xchris]

I would say DRIVERS... as it seems that vendors don't take so seriously the Linux...
Also, another problem that I faced recently: I have an ASRock m/board (H67 chipset) and because some bug(*) of the BIOS , the system could not properly resume after suspend, the support insisted that there is no problem 'under windows' !!
Ridiculous but this is the reality ,most m/board vendors does not even give an f for Linux.

Another issue that I have is the NTFS implementation is poor, you cannot even defrag/repair NTFS volumes...
(for various reasons I have to work with external NTFS HDDs, so a lot of times I need a PC with windows to repair/defrag the MTFS filesystem)




(*) finally the bug fixed automagicaly, as they updated the BIOS and added Ivy Bridge support...

[0xBADCODE]

case in point being perennial snake-oil salesman / conman, Con Kolivas.

Kolivas is a quite competent programmer. He even coded his own bitcoin miner, quite popular in some circles and just a serious and opensource example of advanved OpenCL use and even more than that. He also known for BFS. While ideas behind BFS are debatable, some people seems to like these patches. And in fact his scheduler is better for 1-2 CPUs than Molnar's one. Sure, it wouldn't shine on 128-core CPUs but that would matter in future and/or only on some large servers. While he can have a point when it comes to desktop. It seems to be both a little faster and give a bit better latency on common desktops at the cost of ability to handle larger configurations adequately.

[0xBADCODE]

On a serious note...

As for what's bad in Linux I can admit that:
1) Graphic subsystem still needs improvement:
- GPU reclocking and powersaving should be as smooth as it happens for CPUs these days.
- OpenCL in open dirvers really needed to enable many acceleration techniques (like GPGPU video decoding and image processing, etc).
- OpenGL still not on par with proprietary drivers (which are horrible, troublesome and have low quality).

2) I can admit it could be nice to get btrfs on wheels. Fast file system with snapshots, flexible disk space management and so on could be really good thing to add up.

[0xBADCODE]

Not a snowball chance in the hell.

1) Instead of around a hundred package formats there should be one. Not two not three just one. Why is it so hard to reach a consensus on this.

2) Wayland can't come soon enough.

3) Be more tolerant to proprietary software and drivers. No "Don't Be negative In The Freedom Dimension" kind of behavior.

4) As with the package format just decide on one main toolkit. Offer the rest but have one single officially marketed and be the main toolkit for new developers to use. I don't even care which one it is as long as there is just one.

And why someone would need yet another windows?
1) You can't force free people to go One Microsoft Way, because freedom implies availability of choice.
2) Agree, good thing. Though xorg is more developed and mature and some ppl are using it's networking features, etc.
3) Wrong. Just use windows, they're perfectly tolerant to this. But nobody needs yet another windows. You see, I use Linux because it's opensource drivers are better than proprietary and their support not depends on some corporate decisions.
4) <sarcasm> Oh yeah, just after forcing people to talk only one "proper" language, enforcing only one "proper" religion, one "proper" culture, one "proper" government and one proper way to live. </sacrasm>

As for me, you will be far easier using Windows. It matches your way of thinking better. And it's pointless to make another one if there is no differences. You can see ReactOS but it lacks momentum. Guess why. Nobody needs "just another Windows, opensource edition".