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from the it's-already-perfect-is-not-the-right-answer dept.
We all know about Microsoft's latest OS, so I won't rehash. A lot of us intensely dislike it, to put it politely. Those of us who can, use other operating systems. This is Soylent, so let's focus on the one that is the most important to us: Linux.
I have been using Windows as my OS since right after Atari times. A few years ago I bought an ARM (ARMHF/ARMv7) netbook and put Lubuntu on it. I had problems with my first Linux experience, mainly in the area of installing software: missing packages in Synaptic, small dependency hells, installing a package at a time by hand, some broken stuff. I put it down mainly to the architecture I have been using, which can't be supported as well as x86-64.
Now, we all know that no software is perfect, and neither is Linux, even though it is now my main OS. We support it in spirit and financially, but there is always room for improvement.
So, the question is: What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them? How do we better it? Maybe it's filesystems, maybe it's the famous/infamous systemd. Let's have at it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:07AM
I am currently on latest ubuntu (zesty, one that will be released come 17.04). The version of KDE it ships with, is amazing! Finally, after so many years, I feel like it has caught up in usability to KDE3. I actually prefer the latest KDE over anything else.
My number one problem is the bad integration of external drives into a linux/unix user's workflow. In Windows you can have drives and in MAC, a drive is just another folder. But in linux I am still struggling mounting it in /mnt or /media or some place else. Design wise, I think, distros need to become more comfortable with single user machines.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:28AM
Definitely with you on KDE. I switched to it after I found Gnome Shell a bit too unstable, and while it had its own stability issues during the release of KDE 5, it's been worth the wait. I think my only complaints at this point are in KMail, where there are a couple of minor bugs that I'd like to see fixed. Other than that I'm pretty happy. I do have a System76 laptop as my main machine, but also run an Acer ultrabook, a Lenovo 520, and am Intel Atom based server (oh, and another couple of laptops as MythTV clients). These run a variety of Ubuntu based releases at this point and their stability is great. I think I should probably give the file server in the basement a restart to get its kernel patches up to date as I think it's been up for about 2 years now with one.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:40AM
Yeah, I'm pretty happy.
Good for you! I have been on KDE for 7 years now and I am unfortunately not as happy as you are. Admittedly I suffered through the pain of the early 4.x versions which taints my KDE experience. Unfortunately, the Gnome alternatives were even worse and I settled for a hybrid desktop (kwin, some KDE apps, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc...).
I still take issue with the bugginess of KDE and the arrogance of the community. Bug reports go unnoticed for years or get brushed of for non-pertinent reasons. At some point I decided to fix a bug myself (konsole) but the code was too convoluted (handling of defaults was handcoded per default) to be fixed.
Also usability regressions are still the order of the day (basic things like the application menu). There are some slow improvements but KDE has a long way to go as a community IMO.
(Score: 1) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:42PM
I hopped off the KDE bandwagon over a decade ago because it had gotten so resource hungry. Used Fluxbox, XFCE, and LXDE through the years because Gnome 3. Cinnamon is actually pretty darn good these days; for the most part it just stays out of the way and does what I want without a whole lot of care and feeding.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:07PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:14PM
That is based on the window style, which is customizable. Arguably the default still copies Windows, but it is more about continuing the KDE tradition nowadays. I hear you can use non-default style [kde.org] to switch the button locations.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:34PM
I really wish some of these developers/designers would go back and look at how networking UNC names operated in Windows For Workgroups and NT. That was very slick and very useful. For example you could open Paint, draw something, go to save the file, and then just type the name like "\\othercomputer\share\picture.bmp". No messy drive mounting at all, although many older Windows 3.1 and DOS programs did not like that and had to have drive letters mapped for them. You could open a really large file, such as a video, remotely an it would instantly open - no messy downloading/re-uploading required. And if editing, network locks would prevent conflicts. The whole "Network Neighborhood" introduced in 95/NT 4 made that even easier to use, putting all network objects visibly in one place, accessible even through open/save as dialogs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM
KDE has done this since version 2 iirc. Although many older GTK and console progrms did not like that and had to have filesystem paths mapped for them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:33AM
Like the AC said, KDE has had this, and much more, for a very long time under the name of "KIO"; I used it as far back as KDE 3.5, and it's one of the things that made me switch to KDE from WindowMaker, despite being happy with WM. It uses standard URI style naming, so any KDE application with an open or save dialog can accept things like "sftp://user@example.com/" in addition to normal files and have it bring up a password (or ssh key) dialog to complete the login.
Some are only useful for reading, some are good for reading or writing, but KDE uses the KIO abstraction everywhere. You've got all the obvious stuff like file transfer types (sftp, ftp, ftps, fish), compression formats (bzip, xz, gzip, zip, lzma), remote shares (nfs, smb), but also things like bookmarks:, fonts: (browse your fonts with a browser, file manager, etc.), recentdocuments:, finger:, audiocd:, and more.
For some more examples, you can enter "man:foo" in konqueror and get the manpage for foo, HTML formatted. Or type "man:" in kwrite or kate's open dialog and you can browse man pages and open one and see the HTML. Also works for info pages (info:) and KDE's help docs (help:). It also lets you open remote URLs in a program directly, such as opening http://ddg.gg [ddg.gg] directly in kate, or loading an image in gwenview by putting https://soylentnews.org/images/logo_grayscale.png [soylentnews.org] into its file open dialog. Also means you can still use gopher, since there's a gopher IOslave.
Additionally, the file dialogs also allow you to bookmark "places", which takes full advantage of KIO to allow you to save both local and remote locations with no discrimination. I have saved places for multiple machines and can browse, view, and edit files like they're local, it's awesome. You can even choose whether a saved place is only visible to a specific application, or visible globally, to avoid cluttering applications with irrelevant places.
KDE Connect [kde.org], which lets you link your phone or tablet with your KDE system, also uses KIO for some of its magic, allowing you to access files on linked devices by adding kdeconnect: ioslaves to your places menu. Browse through your phone's filesystem and view, edit, or download files like they're local.
This isn't a KDE-only thing; GNOME does something similar with gvfs [wikipedia.org], but I can't say much about it because I purged all my GNOME applications around when GNOME 3 happened. (Gtk is fine, but I try to avoid GNOME dependencies where possible) In addition, you can use AVFS [sourceforge.net] if you want something not linked to a DE. It uses FUSE, and you either run avfsd [mount point] or the mountavfs script (on Debian, at least) that mounts it to ~/.avfs for you. When active, it mirrors your filesystem inside ~/.avfs/, except that you can do things like ls file.zip#/ or cat '#http:www.google.com' while inside it. It's not as extensive as KIO, and is mostly useful for http grabbing or archive traversal, but it works with anything, so it still has its uses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:43PM
If they do they will likely find an excuse to make it tightly integrated with systemd.
Thats the thing going on with Linux right now. The Freedesktop goal of defining cross-DE/WM standards have morphed into developing THE Linux userland under the systemd banner.
That said, the SMB stuff in Windows, while lovely to look at, seems to break down under even the most moderate of loads.
SMB is a very very chatty protocol.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:19PM
My number one problem is the bad integration of external drives into a linux/unix user's workflow. In Windows you can have drives and in MAC, a drive is just another folder. But in linux I am still struggling mounting it in /mnt or /media or some place else. Design wise, I think, distros need to become more comfortable with single user machines.
Automount/autofs are your friends, friend:
https://linux.die.net/man/8/automount [die.net]
https://linux.die.net/man/8/autofs [die.net]
https://linuxconfig.org/automatically-mount-usb-external-drive-with-autofs [linuxconfig.org]
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24731/automounting-usb-sticks-on-debian [stackexchange.com]
There's lots more info out there which will likely address your use case.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:48PM
That seems to be fine for devices he plugs and unplugs often.
The problem seems more to be with when someone brings over a pendrive or similar with some files they want to share, then things quickly get fiddly unless things like dbus and polkit are configured just right.
The basic problem is the amount of churn, both in APIs and code, involved with the various Freedesktop projects that are supposed to act as a common middle layer for all this. Thus all but the biggest DEs have given up on keeping up, and even KDE seems to just rubber stamp whatever Gnome dreams up these days.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday February 23 2017, @11:05AM
Fixed?
You must be using KDE 4.
KDE 5 crashes, freezes and/or displays weird behavior all the time, at least in Fedora. Certain notifications (e.g., deleting a note from the desktop) will consistently freeze plasma, others (e.g., network connection established) may or may not, while others, such as the all too frequent notifications that some component or other has crashed, work fine. Keyboard layouts may work fine on one machine, while on another, similarly configured, will not work when plasma starts, and I have to turn them off and on again before they work.
Basically, my main complaint about Linux as my everyday environment is the same that I have with just about every piece of modern software: they've taken something good that works well, and changed it to something that is less stable, less usable, and, quite often, ugly.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:06PM
I am thinking the difference is our versions. I haven't used Fedora but Ubuntu has been very stable for me. I am currently on KDE 5.9.2 and I like the direction they are going in.
As per your complaint in 2nd paragraph, my solution was to bite the bullet and go the anti-debian way. I don't use Kate anymore, I use sublime text. I use IntelliJ's CLion for development. These two programs are more stable that linux kernel imho. Same reason why I use ubuntu. I gotta work, man :)
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday February 24 2017, @12:20PM
Could very well be.
I have plasma 5.8.5, so perhaps version 5.9 is more stable.
Oddly enough, 5.9.2 (or even 5.8.6 LTS) is not even available in the testing repository yet. Oddly, because the Fedora packages are maintained by one of the KDE people, and usually become available soon after each release.
What did you say you're using? Ubuntu? Hm... Perhaps I should take the plunge, even though apt-land looks like an alien planet to someone used to rpm and yum.
As for where they're going with KDE 5, they seem to be trying to catch up with KDE 4, which had become quite good, despite its shaky start. Given that KDE 4 was a rewrite that was supposed to allow them to move forward, I can't help feeling that the KDE 5 re-rewrite was a step backwards, that had no reason to be taken.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday February 24 2017, @01:38PM
Rewrite is indeed a very bad habit of KDE land. Rudeness and lack of help are secondary bad habits.