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posted by on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:56AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:34PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:34PM (#470222)

    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.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM (#470252)

    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

    by Marand (1081) on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:33AM (#470597) Journal

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:43PM (#477118)

    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.