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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:22AM
What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them?
1) The popular desktop UI/environments: every few years instead of continuing to make the popular stuff _stabler_ and better they throw everything away and start again.
Yes Microsoft does shit like this too (Vista, Metro) but they have marketshare.
How to fix it? Get experienced talented people who actually know UI stuff and stop letting the "Ooh Shiny!/Yay Wobbling Windows!" idiots control the direction. I've made bug reports pointing out obvious problems and the developers don't get it. Hypothetical example, say there's a problem where if you close an app and suddenly most of the icons representing different apps change positions, to me that's _obvious_ bad UI design. But to them "WORKSFORME"! I'm not going to spend weeks trying to explain to such retarded people why that's stupid.
2) Breaking ABI.
Yes I know the philosophy. But the fact is lots of hardware companies aren't going to give you the source code. They're going to build and update the driver once, twice, five times and that's it. If Linux breaks the ABI "just because", you now have hardware that you can't use.
Someone claimed there are hordes of kernel hardware developers queuing up to write hardware drivers. But in practice are there really?
And even if there are, so because of a kernel update that breaks ABI everyone around the world with affected hardware needs to update their drivers? That's a lot of extra cost and work. Or are you really going to include drivers for everyone's hardware in kernel updates? And that's not including all the work by developers of the affected hardware drivers to rebuild their drivers for the new ABI.
With Windows XP in most cases the same crappy buggy driver (or malware ;) ) could work for more than a decade. Even if the company that made the hardware is long gone. No additional work required from long nonexistent developers, or some grand aunt who doesn't know much about computers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:03PM
Yeah, part of what made Windows successful, back before Microsoft got incompetent, was their effort to keep old stuff working, up to emulating bugs of earlier versions just for the few old applications that rely on the wrong behaviour. Basically, you could be almost certain that if your software ever worked on any version of Windows (or DOS), it would work on the current version as well.
And the biggest issue with Gnome 3 was not the new user interface, but the fact that it basically made it impossible to install Gnome 2 programs on any computer running Gnome 3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:02AM
No, it was the user interface that had more buttons but less options.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:04AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:06PM
1) The popular desktop UI/environments: every few years instead of continuing to make the popular stuff _stabler_ and better they throw everything away and start again.
XFCE seems to be good at avoiding this, but I heard recently they're working on merging in GNOME code or something. Noooooooo
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:46PM
I think you are confusing GTK+ and GNOME. XFCE announced plans to move from GTK+ version 2 to GTK+ version 3. There are many benefits behind the move, but there was a fair amount of FUD when the decision was announced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:55PM
GTK2 was largely agnostic. But GTK3 have been dictated by Gnome wants from day one.
Thus GTK3 introduce way more Gnome-isms than GTK2 ever did.
For example, Gnome these days take UI cues from OSX/MacOS. One of those cues are to hide scrollbars by default.
This "little" detail passed the Firefox devs by when they moved Firefox from GTK2 to GTK3 recently, and they had to rush out a patch as people used the sidebar to judge page size and how much they had left to read etc.
Expect quite a bit of this to make GTK3 XFCE a bad experience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:04AM
XFCE is good in that that don't change anything for the worse. But bad in that they don't change anything period. I sometimes (every ~2 years) wonder if has been disbanded.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:54PM
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!! :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday February 24 2017, @11:05AM
There's a lot of truth in that, as most of us will admit. Although I suspect more aimed at businesses, the whole concept of LTS releases is, basically, if it isn't broken then don't fix it. :)
But the problem comes when a later revision of an application has some new feature that you've been waiting for or looks useful, so you install that and it needs a new library, that breaks something else, etc. This is why application containers have the potential to become more popular, so you can install a new version of something without buggering the rest of the system. Takes more disk space, of course, and I suspect more memory, but how many people need to run a lot of application containers at the same time? A hybrid version of that - something to tide people over between LTS releases - is probably how we'll end up; it could be as trivial as an extra repo for your package manager that has the newest versions of the LTS applications as individual containers.
Interesting times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:53PM
Funny thing is that the library problem is not really a problem with the libraries directly, but with how distros handle dependencies. You can have multiple versions of the same library installed, and expect the linker to sort them out at runtime based on something called sonames. But distros, in particular those based around RPM, are hung up on there being one canonical version for each package name. Thus if you want to have, say, two minor versions of GTK installed side by side, you have to play telephone with the package names to get the manager to play along.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:06AM
Seriously it feels as if the developers are _sabotaging_ Desktop Linux. Whenever Microsoft screws up (Vista, Metro), they make Desktop Linux even worse.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:33AM
Changing everything all the time because "ooh shiny!" also includes throwing out the baby with the bathwater that is Wayland. While at work we've migrated all the Windows apps to remote app servers, some linux desktop people want to remove that functionality because "X is broken". It is f'n not broken. It's working fine on hundreds of thousands of desktops right now. FFS.
/rant
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:58PM
Pretty much the arguments for X11 being "broken" is:
1. its remote operations ability was predicated on everyone using X11 primitives to draw their UIs. but all the major toolkits have moved to using either Cairo (or OpenGL, enter Wayland) to basically draw a bitmap and dump that into a window.
2. any program can grab the content and keystrokes of any other program. Except that this only applies as long as the programs share a root (as in root of the draw tree, not root the user account) window.
The whole thing feels like a "holding it wrong" moment...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:47PM
"How to fix it? Get experienced talented people who actually know UI stuff and stop letting the "Ooh Shiny!/Yay Wobbling Windows!" idiots control the direction."
Err, no. That is what Gnome right before they went off the rails, and pulled GTK down with them...