SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I've been using MacOSX as my primary desktop since the days of Rhapsody. But I always had Linux virtual machines running on occasions. A dwindling number of machines at home were running Linux, most notably a couple of Raspberry Pi and a Synology Diskstation. And when I installed Linux, I usually went for Ubuntu, which did a good job polishing the user experience. The build ring for Tao3D includes a number of virtual machines running several major distros for testing purpose, but it's been quite inactive for a while, and repairing it is on my short-term to-do list.
Working for Red Hat, I thought I had to use Fedora as my primary desktop. And the experience has been a bit underwhelming so far, unfortunately. In just three days, I managed to render a Mac Book Pro unbootable in OSX, had several different issues with skippy or laggy mouse cursors and even non-responsive keyboards, had a driver crash attempting to access my home Wi-Fi, found out the hard way that NFS performance is just horrible, and had to use Google for trivial things way too often.
I complained several times on this blog about what I perceived as a degradation of OSX software quality since 10.6, but this experience with Linux puts all this in some serious perspective.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by novak on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM
Condemning linux based on Fedora is like trying windows ME and reporting that the entire OS is unusable. (Though personally I'd take ME over 10 any day)
I think the broader point stands though, in general linux (and every other major OS) has experienced an overall degradation in software quality. Look at Gnome and KDE, or look at firefox. In general software on linux has tended towards bloated, modern UIs and poor, often reduced, functionality. Or look at systemd. The trend is toward large, integrated, binary components that are becoming increasingly monolithic. However, free software in general is still alive and well, I just don't use as many of the more common distros, or common DEs. My one concession is firefox, which I still claim to need because of its broad support, though I do try to use smaller browsers as much as possible.
I generally try not to complain though, because as linux has gotten more mainstream, it has more support than ever. So while I may hate $average_desktop_distro, using my own rather niche distro (crux) is working better than ever.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:26AM
If you truly prefer ME over 10, you've either never had to use ME for more than a few hours (beyond that it would crash on me about 99% of the time) or you have a weird S&M fetish.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:10PM
I prefer S&M to exposing myself in public, which is why almost anything is better than Win10.
(Score: 2) by novak on Sunday December 25 2016, @08:46AM
I guess it's the S&M one then. My parents had PIII with ME for a while when I was in high school and I used it quite a bit for about five years. It was buggy as hell but actually not as bad as it is famous for being (out of a sample size of one computer). It crashed more often than anything should, but still not on the order of hours. More like every several days it would have a random bug that could only be resolved by restarting it, or every few weeks or so it would lock up. When they first got it I was not surprised at how often it wanted rebooting, compared to windows 95 and 98.
And it's not like 10 isn't buggy, or more accurately, defective by design. Numerous forced or deceitful installations of it were unwanted. And how are those forced reboots going for you when your machine auto-updates? Auto-updates, by the way, that I hope didn't break your drivers.
It was also not blatantly spyware- spyware that installs without asking. ME may be horrific crap, but windows 10 quite literally fits the description of a virus.
novak