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posted by janrinok on Friday December 23 2016, @08:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the try-another-distro? dept.

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.

Read more here.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Francis on Friday December 23 2016, @08:51PM

    by Francis (5544) on Friday December 23 2016, @08:51PM (#445211)

    I'd give mint a shot, it's got generally good software supporters and I haven't had much trouble with it.

    Except for Bluetooth which is still an unworkable mess if you want to use a headset for telephony.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @08:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @08:56PM (#445214)

      Mint has long been a security disaster and frankly I think people are batshit bonkers to keep recommending it.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:40AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:40AM (#445315)

        It is the same reason people recommended Macs back in the day, and Chromebooks and iPads today, they are seen as easy to use. For many people, that is the first and only concern they have. Hence why many basic steps companies could take to secure IoT devices aren't taken but the GUIs sure are shiny.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:57AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:57AM (#445327)

          Chromebooks run Linux.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:25AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:25AM (#445342)

            Even though I grant that, what does that have to do with my point? I was answering why people recommend Mint, which is its ease of use compared to setting up most distros, including its forefathers, Ubuntu and Debian.

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:09PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:09PM (#445219)

      Mint has a dependency on network-manager.

      I have now downloaded slackware for testing (but have not installed it yet).

      It is relatively free of Redhat software.

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM

        by butthurt (6141) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM (#445293) Journal

        Linux Mint has a few variants (Cinnamon, MATE, LMDE). Can't be arsed to check but perhaps not all of them have network-manager.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:54AM

          by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:54AM (#445463)

          XFCE does not have that dependency.

          Sorry, I guess I meant Cinnamon has the dependency.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:51AM

        by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:51AM (#445322)

        It's pretty much trivial to disable it. It's like two commands and it won't run anymore.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday December 23 2016, @09:33PM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:33PM (#445232) Homepage

      Mint choked hard during the install. If it can't even install itself, I can only imagine the horrors I'd have to deal with if it did install. Using Mint is like dating Oriental women, that is, those who recommend it have never tried it themselves.

      • (Score: 5, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 23 2016, @09:39PM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:39PM (#445236) Journal

        My girlfriend is Chinese by way of Malaysia and we're doing fine :) Sorry to mess up your data set. Of course we're both women so for all I know that isn't in your sample set so...

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:00AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:00AM (#445375)

        > like dating Oriental women, that is, those who recommend it have never tried it themselves.

        Your problems with "oriental women" are probably caused by whatever makes you think calling someone "oriental" is acceptable.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:41AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:41AM (#445488) Journal
          My partner is half English, half Hong-Kong Chinese. Her (Chinese) mother prefers 'oriental' to 'asian' because no one who isn't obsessive compulsive remembers that it's defining a region of the world based on its position in Europe, and it's a lot more specific than asian. Describing someone as asian is barely more specific than describing them as human: more than half the population of the world lives in Asia (or a bit less, depending on which continent model you use) and the region encompasses dozens of distinct ethnic groups.
          --
          sudo mod me up
          • (Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:12PM

            by purple_cobra (1435) on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:12PM (#445520)

            What do you mean, "words have meanings" [thefreedictionary.com]?
            Sarcasm aside, has any of the professionally offended class argued that she shouldn't prefer this word?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:32PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:32PM (#446469)

            Yeah. Referring to a people using the name of their continent can be construed as an insult.

            -A Canadian

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07PM (#445526) Journal

        I can't imagine why you would think dating oriental women is not to be recommended. I dated many asian women (and many other kinds of women, too) and wound up marrying one. We have two beautiful, intelligent kids now. And i dated them and her not because they were asian but because they were cute and intelligent. The girl i married's first words to me that the party we were at was like the bar scene from Mos Eisley; right then and there i knew she was a keeper.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:26PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:26PM (#445538)

          We have two beautiful, intelligent kids now. And i dated them

          Now there are some experiences I would'nt want to share...

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:46PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:46PM (#446491) Journal

      I use Fedora for my gaming/media rig. Fedora 23 was great; just upgraded to Fedora 25 this week and had some issues with Wayland, but I haven't had any problems since reverting back to X11.

      I had initially intended to install Ubuntu on that machine, but I couldn't even make it through the installer without the thing locking up and dying -- and even if it had worked, the installer is missing so many options it wouldn't have been configured right. Looked into it further, found those were well known bugs in the installer, and that Canonical was apparently more concerned with meeting the arbitrary release date than publishing functional software. Spent a week trying to get that working, gave up, had Fedora up and running and fully configured in two or three hours.

      And for a system like that, Mint compared to Ubuntu is all downsides. Sure, it's lightweight, but when you're putting it on a brand new gaming rig that doesn't really matter. The default UI is marginally less insane, but I've hated Gnome for decades so I don't particularly care which version of that Fischer-Price trash it's based on ;) And of course there's the security issues that others have already mentioned.

      So that's how I ended up on Fedora. IIRC, I also briefly tried OpenSUSE, but found Fedora to have better out of the box hardware/software support. I generally run Antegros on my main laptop, but didn't really want rolling release on a media/gaming PC.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jbernardo on Friday December 23 2016, @09:00PM

    by jbernardo (300) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:00PM (#445216)

    Use something more solid - antix or mx Linux are light, solid, and mostly systemd free. They have very recent kernels (licorix), so you might have more luck with it. I never bought apple kit, so can't help you any more.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:59AM (#445329)

      Hear, here! Antix rocks!

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @09:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @09:08PM (#445218)

    Start with the Ubuntu Gnome ISO, then install compiz, gnome-flashback, and all the recommends. What you'll get is the traditional Ubuntu desktop without the Unity crap. It still has systemd, but on all the PCs I've installed it on it hasn't been a problem. My only wish is that Ubuntu would make a flashback version that is standalone, instead of jumping through hoops to get it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @09:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @09:30PM (#445231)

      What you'll get is the traditional Ubuntu desktop without the Unity crap. It still has systemd, but on all the PCs I've installed it on it hasn't been a problem.

      What I am getting from this is that you are more concerned with the GUI than you are with the OS, and probably do not understand the difference, like most Windows and Mac users. You would probably get along just find with the whining newbie author of the article who should just RTFM. If you do not find systemd to be a problem, you are part of the problem.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday December 23 2016, @10:55PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:55PM (#445270)

        If you're just a desktop user, systemd isn't a problem until it suddenly is. The latest version of Mint runs on systemd now and so far my install hasn't killed itself in the last couple months (knock on wood).

        I would counter that you telling people they aren't enjoying their OS the right way makes *you* a part of the problem.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:52AM

          by Reziac (2489) on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:52AM (#445372) Homepage

          My Mint install managed to kill itself inside of a few days -- I tried to adjust a video setting through the provided GUI, and this somehow nuked GRUB. Repairable but between that and numerous small holes in functionality, it got itself knocked off my possible-keepers list. The people surrounding Mint are rather more helpful than average, tho.

          --
          And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:16AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:16AM (#445379)

          tangomargerine, you are the problem! But this has been evident for some time an everyone already knows it. But this:

          The latest version of Mint runs on systemd now and so far my install hasn't killed itself in the last couple months (knock on wood).

          Yeah, go ahead and knock on that woodie! For all the good that is going to do ya! Nobody every complains, until systemd comes in the night to kill them! You think you are safe with your pansy desktop and complete ignorance of the backend? That is what they always say, except when the truth becomes apparent and systemd has them by the throat as the drown in their own dependencies and realize there is no way out and the Lernhart is their true lord and master who must be obeyed. I only say this to warn you! I run Mint, it is too late for me! But save yourself, while you can! Slackware can be your savior!

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 23 2016, @10:51PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:51PM (#445268)

      My only wish is that Ubuntu would make a flashback version that is standalone, instead of jumping through hoops to get it.

      Yeah, but that would involve admitting that maybe not everybody loves Unity and may not want to use it. And that's not a message they want to send.

      Although they do KDE and XFCE versions as well. So I guess I'm not really familiar with what non-Unity GNOME would get me over XFCE. Haven't used GNOME since that whole Unity thing dropped...6 and a half years ago? Dang.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by el_oscuro on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:46PM

      by el_oscuro (1711) on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:46PM (#445615)

      Try Ubuntu 16.04 Mate edition. I just installed it on 2 laptops. Very sweet, no Gnome/Unity crap at all.

      --
      SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
  • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Friday December 23 2016, @09:11PM

    by pvanhoof (4638) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:11PM (#445221) Homepage

    The main user interaction I have with my workstation nowadays are things like apt-get or yum, make, a whole lot of UNIX tools like find, make, tar, vim, cp, etc. And things like qtcreator, but that's because I got spoiled at some point.

    For that, the Linux thing is awesome.

    In the end, most of the software I work on using that workstation (for which the Linux thing is awesome) ends up being deployed (with a UI, true) on a machine or appliance of which the user has no clue that underneath it all it's a Linux (desktop). And it's good that way. Computers were only during an interim period (the nineties) desktops for the big target audience. The users of most of our software don't want to know that the thing is a computer anyway. They call it a smartphone, a tablet, a in-vehicle-infotainment system, a TV or a digibox, glasses and tomorrow their shoos, jacket, fridge, microwave oven, etc.

    For that, for making those things, the Linux thing is awesome.

    And I'm sure it was and still is awesome for those server stuffz 'n thingz too.

    But desktop? Desktop? I guess not. No. Meh ... but gdb on a xterm on a desktop works quite good..

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday December 23 2016, @09:58PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:58PM (#445244) Homepage

      The irony of course is that Linux was originally designed for a desktop OS, and now desktop is the ONLY area where Linux isn't dominating, all other areas are dominated by Linux (smartphone, embedded, supercomputer, server, appliance, etc.).

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
      • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:09AM

        by pvanhoof (4638) on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:09AM (#445303) Homepage

        Originally whatever. Linux is right now what Linux right now is. Here and now. Like the mindfullness quatch. Exactly like that. Here, now.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:33AM

        by ledow (5567) on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:33AM (#445313) Homepage

        Linux is fine on the desktop.

        As we move towards web interfaces and even virtualistion, the OS barely matters any more.

        The "problem" of Linux desktops is tradition and people perpetuating myths (like the people who still defrag every week because they think they are doing something useful).

        I ran a Linux desktop for 10 years. I did so while managing Windows networks for a living. Yes, my own PC was Linux and OpenOffice (of course, now that's LibreOffice) while I was helping people run Windows and Microsoft Office.

        I manage school networks, and my standard Windows image is getting simpler every time I make one. It used to be a huge complex of software with difficult-to-install pre-installed software, pushed network packages, specific drivers for different models and architectures, and a ton of manual tweaks. Nowadays, it's Windows, Office, Chrome and a bunch of freeware. Seriously. All the "big stuff" is database front-ends that could be written in anything, and web-based interfaces that work on everything. There are more iPads than PC's in my school, as many Chromebooks, and PC's are mainly back-office things for staff and the IT rooms rather than the ubiquitous devices staff and pupils carry (iPads, Chromebooks, smartphones, etc.). All the main services are web-accessible, even printing.

        As we go forward with things like Windows 10, people are shifting to things like Chromebooks. Their "office" is now just a subscription to 365 or even Google Apps. Everyone you know I guarantee you owns at least one non-Windows machine, whether it's iOS, Android, or Chromebook. And so we've trained a generation of kids that what matters is releasing software that works on all platforms, not using a mono-culture OS that has to work a particular way you're familiar with (MS had their chance with this, and regularly blew it by making Windows and Office work differently in every version).

        We're training the next generation that OS doesn't matter so long as they have a web browser. That's perfect for a Linux desktop.
        We're training them to use Windows, iOS and Linux. Even if that's just on a Raspberry Pi or an iPad instead of a full-blown PC.
        We're training them to expect applications to be web-accessible and cross-platform.
        We're even training them out of my job - there won't be much need for IT departments in a cloud-based future, once we manage to do that properly - look at Chromebook management. Everything in a web gui via Google Admin, everything customisable and able to be locked-down, and you just press a key on first boot to tie a device into your domain. There's no need for huge on-site LDAP / SQL setups except as a backup, and you could easily make them one-click deployments with web-management. Hell, I have a bunch of cloud-managed switches and wireless points. Any fool could manage them from anywhere in the world with the right credentials.

        Linux won't take over the desktop as it's not necessary any more. You can use it as a desktop any time you like. Novice or experienced. But by the time you get decent figures on desktop penetration, desktops will be a thing of the past.

        Already, I'm seriously considering running Linux personally next time my laptop dies, virtualising Windows only for work, but even there I'm actually thinking that renting a desktop server (something quite common nowadays - literally, just rent the equivalent of what I provide to my users over RDP from a dedicated server host) would suffice.

        While everyone was pondering this question, the world moved on and made it moot.

        I honestly use my PC in work for admin tasks (AD, etc.), Office, Chrome and email. That's it. And I run the network. And there's no reason at all that my user's need the admin tools, so they can happily live on any OS.

        The only problem is culture and convincing them of that. Which is infinitely easier since all their stuff is web-based or via Google apps now. I'm honestly going down the road of talking to the bursar about removing Microsoft-based desktop services within a few years. So long as users have a browser, an office suite of any kind, and a way to store files and check emails, they can do everything they do now. Literally EVERY other function they perform is available online.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by chromas on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:22AM

          by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:22AM (#445384) Journal

          We're training them to expect applications to be web-accessible

          This prospect disgusts me. But on the other hand, history implies thin clients are just a fad and we'll soon be back to full applications again. Perhaps Qt and GTK software will replace them, with their XML+javascript (and other script language) support. Applications could be run off the web but with native widgets.

          Webapps suck, though. I'm using Google Docs right now to tweak a spreadsheet for someone and it's sloooow and has far fewer features than Quattro on DOS.

          • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:44AM

            by TheRaven (270) on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:44AM (#445501) Journal
            Between Canvas, WebGL, WebCL and WebAssembly, web applications are gradually becoming a mechanism for delivering sandboxed thick client applications.
            --
            sudo mod me up
        • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:51PM

          by LoRdTAW (3755) on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:51PM (#445592) Journal

          (Score:3, Depressing)

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:19PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:19PM (#445630) Journal

          No. The problem with Linux on the desktop is devices and programs that were designed for a different OS and don't see any reason to be more flexible. I kept a MSWind95 machine around for over a decade because it had some applications that wouldn't run on anything else. This is why dominant platforms that depend on selling new versions feature PLANNED obsolescence. They need to make the transition to the next version desirable and easy. When it's not desirable you don't sell upgrades. When it's not easy you don't sell upgrades.

          But even with careful planning, lots of times the upgrade is going to be resisted, sometimes for good reason. One of the companies that built software for MSWind95 went out of business, and thus never upgraded it. So I couldn't run it even under MSWind98. So I kept the MSWind95 computer without upgrading, and was careful to ensure it didn't get attached to the net. (I hadupgraded it to MSWind95B.)

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Friday December 23 2016, @09:22PM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:22PM (#445227) Homepage Journal

    I'm on Fedora right now, and it's generally very stable for me.
    If I'm blunt honest, I think a large part of it is that you're on a Mac. Jumpy cursors is not something I've had before unless the system
    was running out of RAM and swapping like mad.
    Try it on a PC, even a new PC, should perform FAR better. Apple and their proprietary shit...
    That said, Linux isn't blameless, there should be better support for Apple stuff.
    But yeah, being on Mac is probably what's doing 90% of what you described.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:30PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:30PM (#445230)

      Using the VESA rather than accelerated video modes can conceivably cause jumpy cursors.

      • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:14AM

        by Subsentient (1111) on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:14AM (#445705) Homepage Journal

        Yeah, but in my experience you don't have that, just window tearing during dragging.

        --
        "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Friday December 23 2016, @09:52PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:52PM (#445241)

      Just commented below very much in line with this. Macs haven't been Linux friendly for a few iterations. Apple does not play well with others. It's not just the software that is going downhill.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:23AM (#445385)

      That'd be fine and all, but in the article...

      Red Hat provided me with a 15″ Mac Book Pro. Since this was one of their choices of machine for developers, I assumed it was well supported by Fedora.

      ...and that's a pretty reasonable assumption.

      Mind you, I've got Fedora running pretty okay on one of my machines, other than the very likely possibility that AMD video under Linux is ridiculously garbage vs on Windows, since I'm getting drastically lower graphics performance on the machine
      There's more than a fair share of genuine issues that aren't specific to Linux on Macs there, like the fact that multiple display support on Linux is miserably poor.
      and wifi is an eternal issue, but that's more on the hardware manufacturer's end with not providing proper docs about the chipset

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by t-3 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:29PM

    by t-3 (4907) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:29PM (#445229)

    There are a few distros that have GUIs, programs, and all the necessary drivers to work well on Apple hardware out of the box. They're all relatively usable, but standard UI and standard configurations just won't compare to an OS that is designed specifically for that hardware. Honestly, I just don't understand why people look to linux for an easy replacement for consumer OSs. If you're not going to put in the effort to make your system work the way you want it to work, don't use linux, there's no point. If you want a "just works", idiot-proof OS, stick with OSX or windows.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:40AM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:40AM (#445368) Journal

      If you're not going to put in the effort to make your system work the way you want it to work, don't use linux, there's no point.

      That's a little thin, and a lot elitist.

      There are many distos that are easily better out of the box than Windows or OSX as far a completeness and usability and stability.

      This idea that you have to take control of everything and make changes (mostly ill thought out hacks) to make it truly yours is about as valid the idea that stunning wall paper somehow makes window or some dog-distro into something wonderful.

      The first problem is confusing a Linux with the Desktop Environment. Just about any Linux is the same as any other Linux.
      What sets them apart is the DE, which is all you see. The truth about those is you can install 2 or 5 DEs on the same installed distro and they all can get along.

      The number and size of the packages on the DVD doesn't matter to anything other than disk space (which is dirt cheap these days). Starting with something thin like Slackware and building it yourself doesn't make it special or better. It just means you run linux to run linux, and you don't really have anything to do with your computer besides the act of running linux. Trimming a few unneeded packages out of the install doesn't make you a hero.

      Its easy to find any number of distros that will install complete and competent systems ready to do any office work, engineering tasks, or serve as a development platform. Fucking around tweaking and tuning to "put in the effort" is largely a waste of time. Just change the wall paper and get on with your job.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:01AM

        by t-3 (4907) on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:01AM (#445425)

        Did you read the summary? I know that there are distros that are usable out of the box, but if you want to use them on strange hardware, you shouldn't expect them to work perfectly from the gate. If you want an Apple computer to run linux well, you're either gonna have to use one of the few distros (ubuntu, mint, elementary IIRC) that include the proprietary drivers in their install, and be prepared to get your hands a little dirty making stuff work right or be willing to put up with some stuff not working as well as in OSX. Just because 9/10 distros can be used out of the box doesn't mean they work BETTER out of the box. For most people, running linux on an Apple box is counterproductive, because a standard amd64 install of *nix doesn't have the same functionality or ease of use as OSX. With a little bit of work, you can have a better system, but saying that a standard linux is more useable than OSX on Apple hardware is ignoring reality.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Friday December 23 2016, @09:49PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:49PM (#445238)

    You should probably start with a better piece of hardware. MacBooks used to be nice, and were well supported, but the last few iterations have had various hardware incompatibilities. You don't need to spend a lot of money to get something supported, you just can't spend it at Apple. I believe most of the stuff can be worked through, but it must be worked through. Try a Dell, or pretty much any other mainstream piece of hardware.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Friday December 23 2016, @09:52PM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:52PM (#445240)

    So from what I gather, the original poster is a Red Hat employee who uses MacOS as their main desktop OS for a number of years. With a reasonable familiarity of Linux desktops, he installs one and is running into issues.

    This is truly a failure of Linux on the desktop. Why should he have to tinker with the OS? Why should he have to Google a result for a glitch in the desktop experience?

    The distribution should just work.

    Also, why should he look for Linux Mint or a more niche desktop? He works for Red Hat and Fedora is one of the better known desktops. Of course he should be using Fedora. The popular desktop environments should have fairly bulletproof installations on common hardware. And yes, I would consider Apple hardware as common. After all, it's not like you can configure a lot of options on it. ;-)

    BTW: I've been running solely Linux desktop distributions as my home OS for 10+ years.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday December 23 2016, @10:00PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:00PM (#445245) Homepage

      Apple doesn't exactly make it easy to install other OSes on their hardware. I suspect the author would have had a much better time using more commonly supported hardware, like a Thinkpad or Dell.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
      • (Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday December 23 2016, @11:50PM

        by RedGreen (888) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:50PM (#445296)

        Doubt it I use OSX on PC hardware and I got to tell you I gave more than a few distros a try month or so ago and they still have the BS problems that led me to dump it nearly a decade ago after decade of use of Linux at that time. Same old same old every thing is fragmented to hell got to chase the new shinny all the time never finishing off the stuff that is so close to working it is a joke. Now for a server only thing I will use but the desktop if you only want to surf the web check some email well can work got anything advanced like use your extra mouse buttons then good luck you are back to shit that most times sort of works if you spends days/weeks at getting it going. Although got to say seems like they have managed to get a dual monitor setup working without having to troll X logs and edit the files manually in the hope you can get it going who knows in another decade or three they might get the rest right. That is if they can ever figure they have to work together on a common goal for a desktop that just works.

        --
        "I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:03PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:03PM (#445564)

          I just bought a Thinkpad x260 (Christmas sale, and all) and put Devuan on it. Only thing that didn't work right from the start was the wireless, which required a driver blob download, and I expected that going in since, you know, I actually did the research before buying.

          Linux isn't the best choice for laptops, since there's too much proprietary bullshit, especially in the wirelesss/bluetooth realms, so you do need to do some research first. Mac is one of the worst for that kind of thing, so I'm not surprised he had problems, it seems to be what he was after so he could have his story. He wouldn't have had any better luck trying to install WIndows 10 on it.

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:21PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:21PM (#445282)

      Redhat is not the same a Linux either (Linux is just the kernel).

      Redhat has an incentive to make Linux on the Desktop slightly awkward in order to sell support. (But not so awkward that people want MS Windows back).

      It has gotten to the point that I do not trust their (or more specifically Lennart Poettering's) code.

      But yes, there is such thing as "Eating your own dogfood."

      Maybe we should encourage Redhat employees to use Redhat products.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:43AM (#445460)

      Part of the problem is that he's trying to install it on a Mac, which is becoming more and more like a glorified iPad with an attached keyboard instead of a real computer. I will grant that's the computer that Redhat issued to him, but that's more of a gripe against Redhat than it is for Linux. If I was him I'd try a Thinkpad or even a Dell. Not only would it work better, if you spend Macbook-level amounts of money on one it would also be a more powerful machine.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:46PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:46PM (#446503) Journal

      This is truly a failure of Linux on the desktop. Why should he have to tinker with the OS? Why should he have to Google a result for a glitch in the desktop experience?

      You're setting impossible standards. Apple isn't that easy. Windows isn't that easy. Hell, I get asked by fellow *software developers* to help them install Windows on their personal systems, because they can't get it to work out of the box. I'm not talking twenty years ago on Win95 either, I'm talking about a guy installing Windows 7 about six months ago.

      If you buy a computer and use the software that came preinstalled on that hardware, it's easy. Windows, Mac, Linux, doesn't matter, the end result is just about the same no matter what. But when you're doing a fresh install on any random hardware? ANY OS is going to have problems; Linux in my experience usually has fewer. Grab any random PC off the shelf at Best Buy and do a clean install, not from OEM media. OSX most likely won't install at all; Windows often installs with no wifi, no ethernet, no bluetooth, limited audio, etc. Linux these days may not install fully optimized, but it's usually at least usable.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by tfried on Friday December 23 2016, @09:54PM

    by tfried (5534) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:54PM (#445243)

    Phoenix666 writes:

    [...]

    Read more here.

    Is this Phoenix666 writing the cited article? I assume no, but this format makes it awfully hard to tell.

    Please. I'm not going to be pedantic on citation format, but do make it something that is not downright misleading, at least. If you can't be bothered to identify the original author, at least provide clear indication that it is somebody else. E.g. "Phoenix666 found this on the intertubes", "Phoenix666 thought the following an interesting read", whatever.

    Thanks.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Friday December 23 2016, @10:06PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:06PM (#445249)

      I thought it was Phoenix666 writing the article as well. It's not. It's an employee of RedHat trash talking Linux support (mostly from his own company). What the fuck is Redhat doing not running Linux in-house, and what are they doing rewarding Apple, whose hardware they don't even support well? Hasn't RedHat done enough damage to Linux with systemd (says he who spent hours recently fighting systemd/NetworkManager/DNS problems in VPNs).

      I'd swear they're being paid to do bad things.

      • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:03AM

        by butthurt (6141) on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:03AM (#445301) Journal

        > I thought it was Phoenix666 writing the article as well.

        You must be new here. This happens all the time.

    • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday December 23 2016, @10:08PM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:08PM (#445251) Journal

      Some person named "Christophe de Dinechin" actually wrote the words. I think.

      • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday December 23 2016, @11:14PM

        by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:14PM (#445281) Homepage

        I'm not sure that's altogether helpful in clarifying authorship, as I believe it's considered de rigueur to give oneself a pseudonym on the internet these days, and Phoenix666 might just be one...

        --
        systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 1, Redundant) by tangomargarine on Friday December 23 2016, @10:42PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:42PM (#445263)

      The last several times I actually checked the article, the byline would most accurately be given as,

      Phoenix666 quotes verbatim the first three paragraphs from

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:34AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:34AM (#445364) Journal

        That would be most accurate. I cite verbatim because it's fast, and because it adds little value to re-summarize what most articles have already summarized. Also, it's more error-prone to do that as well, especially when the story covers something you're not expert on. Since nearly all research is highly specialized anymore, that would actually apply to most people. If in summarizing you do it too quickly or make an innocent mistake, the conversation gets sidetracked from the topic of the submission to what an idiot you are. Lastly, when you venture to write anything in a submission, there are frequent complaints about bias or that you're politicizing the story or that your composition sucks.

        So my general thought on the matter is, i do what i can, how i can, for the SN community, and i look forward with anticipation to other Soylentils raising the bar and making the community even more excellent than it is.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:46AM

          by tfried (5534) on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:46AM (#445471)

          Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with simply posting a quick quote and essentially nothing else. In fact, I like that style, and I appreciate your work. But I've stumbled over this before, I honestly got confused, again, this time. Naturally, my criticism is off-topic, but I do hope you'll be able to take it as constructive criticism.

          Again: Your particular form of quoting in this and the next few submissions ismisleading. Not intentionally misleading, but misleading. This can be fixed, easily, by adding very few words. In fact, you could even save two characters and remove ambiguity at the same time, using "Phoenix666 read: [...]". Whatever, really. There are hundreds of options better than the current.

          Thanks.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:28AM (#445312)

      Nitpicking. The quote block was clearly marked. Besides regs here know that Phoenix666 posts in such volume that he wouldn't have time to hand-compose each summary, unless this was his full time job (as it may be for editors on the green site).

      • (Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:53AM

        by tfried (5534) on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:53AM (#445473)

        I'm not asking Phoenix666 or anybody else to hand-compose the summary. I'm asking him and/or other submitters and the editors to use a less confusing template in the case that the summary consists of a quote, only (which is where the ambiguity arises). I made several suggestions in my post, but perhaps the most elegant wording is the one used in a different story, same day:

        $submitter has found the following story

        It even gives you a convenient place to insert a link, so it even saves you adding "Read more here."

        No, this is not an end-of-the-world-severity problem, but it's rampant, and easily fixed.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Friday December 23 2016, @10:16PM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:16PM (#445252) Journal

    I didn't read the whole article in detail, but read enough to come away thinking: this is a guy with very specific, very complex, and probably unique needs. I'm not sure that any OS would make all of his stuff work happily without issues.

    For an average user without specific needs like gaming or Photoshop, any mainstream Linux distro an any mainstream hardware should be a twenty minute install.

    Also, gotta wonder at someone who decides to install Linux because they're unhappy with OS X.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:10AM (#445360)

      well i aint read the whole article either, but...

      >this is a guy with very specific, very complex, and probably unique needs.

      before we even get to his "unique needs" he was having problems with the _installer_

      >average user without specific needs like gaming

      dude you can not get more average than gaming.

      >Also, gotta wonder at someone who decides to install Linux because they're unhappy with OS X.

      well on that we can agree, osx is sweet af.

      ok now my own horror story which finally made me give up on linux.

      been using linux since the late 90's, 4years ago i had some kit (macpro) lying around at work, needed to run some java automated tests, decided to install ubuntu (cos i'd never used that flavour before) on it, worked fine, left it for 2 years, just running tests, didnt update it or do anything to it, it just set there compiling and running tests. 2 years later i need to install the latest version of java on it, was expecting to just apt-get update (or whatever the hell the command is) and go, but no, nononononnonononono, you already know the story, version hell, it just would not do it, posted to forums, hand edit this file, rm that file, use this specific repo, or that one, or this one over there, blahblahblah geez the same fucken story i've been getting for decades, ITS ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS! MAKE IT STOP!

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @10:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @10:30PM (#445257)

    Tim Cook, the Grand Master LGBTQ+, says "All your data and dough [money] are belong to us."

  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday December 23 2016, @10:35PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:35PM (#445260)

    My work gave me a mac-pro - I upgraded to sierra, installed docker, vms etc for development, but I'm still using my cheap dell xps11 as kubuntu desktop.

    Why?

    KDE tools plus kdeconnect and just as many cheesy ads for software I couldn't care about.

    Nice hardware, really weak GPU (intel is terrible), but I quite like siri....

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday December 23 2016, @11:32PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:32PM (#445287) Journal

    Ask Leonart, I'm sure he'll make it awesome. /sarc

    As an aside, I was temporarily incapable of remembering his name. For me, this search brought up his name in position number 3: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=systemd+asshole [duckduckgo.com]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by novak on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM

    by novak (4683) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM (#445292) Homepage

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:26AM (#445494)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:10PM (#445528)

        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

        by novak (4683) on Sunday December 25 2016, @08:46AM (#445758) Homepage

        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
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @11:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @11:55PM (#445299)

    Honestly, after about 20 years of if this I feel I can safely say it all sucks...everything, the whole industry. I abandoned Windows 14 years ago and a few months ago I tried to move to Mac but now I'm back on Linux (and still unhappy). I'm sick of watching communities fracture as asshole devs insist on rewriting everything and stripping away features in the name of progress. I hate that my modern systems running Linux now crash as often as older versions of Windows once did. I hate what Microsoft and Apple have done to the industry and what the top communities did to Linux and its users. I hate how every fucking device is now a government spy tool. There's nothing exciting about this shit anymore. Seriously, walk through a computer store sometime and really look at the crap that's on sale. It's all garbage. Maybe I'm just getting older and somewhat jaded but I want less technology in my life. I want a dumb phone, a dumb car, dumb house, dumb TV... I'm sick of fighting with EVERYTHING for hours just to make it work. I'm tired of having to do research to determine if the thing I'm buying is spying on me. I used to tell myself that there is a threshold and people will eventually push back, but I no longer believe that line. People are fucking stupid and will continue to accept this shit.

    Fuck you systemd, gnome3, kde4+, unity, Red Hat, every PC manufacturer, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle (on principle), Google, every government, and all the dipshits who can't seem to quit enabling bad behavior.

    Happy holidays or whatever...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:05AM (#445426)

      It's your fault. YOU are the one who refused to pay for content (*) and kept insisting that "information wanted to be free", and that laws that forbid piracy were "behind the times".

      What did you expect. Large corporations have huge expenses and even huger demands from shareholders, so they need to make lots and lots of money. They adapted to the new realities. But where are those profits going to come from? Ultimately, one way or another, it's going to come from you.

      (*) - yes, this is a rhetorical device

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:00AM (#445465)

      I wish there were more people like you.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:06AM (#445478)

      I'm sick of fighting with EVERYTHING for hours just to make it work.

      Yeah, well, welcome to life.

      People are fucking stupid and will continue to accept this shit.

      People are fucking stupid, period. Just look at the demagogues that are getting elected now. As for UI, it's no longer designed by developers. It's designed by special "UI designers", which is why it is so much different from Windows 3.1, DOS and fluxbox days, because it's not designed by developers.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:18AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:18AM (#445484) Homepage Journal

      "...asshole devs insist on rewriting everything and stripping away features in the name of progress"

      This. Computers are tools, and tools are best when they have a standard interface that does not change. The crying need that devs have - changing something just because it's been around a few years - is idiotic. Menus! Tiles! Ribbons! 2D buttons with a border, then 3D buttons, then 2D buttons without a border.

      Required car analogy: This year's cars have a steering wheel, but next year we're moving to joysticks, and after that we will go to a track balls.

      "I'm sick of fighting with EVERYTHING for hours just to make it work."

      Yep. And now, with IoT, we get to fight with *everything*, all the way down to our light bulbs. In an earlier thread on Soylent someone was bemoaning users who didn't update the firmware on their devices. Do you have any idea how many devices in your house have firmware? My food processor boots Linux! What about those WLAN light bulbs - if you don't let them onto your network, they will build an ad hoc network with the bulbs in your neighbor's house. Billy-Joe and Betty-Mae are not up to this. I am up to it, but there are other things I'd rather be doing with my life.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:38AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:38AM (#445487)

      . I abandoned Windows 14

      How could you have done this, since Windows 10 only just came out? ["The Horror, the horror, . . . the horror."]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:01PM (#445563)

      Here, Here.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:11PM

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:11PM (#445625)

      It started sucking when dial-up modems became cheap and ubiquitous; maybe around 1997 when free disks turned into CDs you couldn't overwrite. That is when the eternal september started, about that time. That is the time corporations learned they can profit from it.

      My house is full of dumb things I have made an effort to get working smartly together--but that effort is no different than what I did in the late 90s and during the 2000s -- it's just that people find it to be more amazing because modern hardware is sold with most of that localized option all stripped out of it. Some of it is still the results of those original efforts, but I have added on and replaced things -- and some things are very hard to do nowadays due to the whole requiring an account somewhere in another country issue, to control what is in my hand or next to me on the counter.

      My family when visiting will all laugh at the old OSes and harware, and ask why do I have a 1000 page book on networking when the wizard got them online at home? Do I really not understand any of this to the extent I needed a big picture book? and then ask how to do it after they start to see how the internet is faster, there are no ads, the wifi signal is strong, the gigabit wired connection isn't running at 10 megabits with a green 1000 light, etc.

      Why save to the cloud at 10mb/s (1.2MB/s) upload speed when you can to local disk on a cheap server at 125MB/s? (1000mb/s) Buy some good drives and they last for years; buy green ones and maybe they won't. Copy stuff to an external drive and store it somewhere else if you are worried about the house burning down. Or buy insurance. Some of the protestation I get because of the desire of others to do nothing hard and that I shouldn't do anything hard too because of reasons they have that they won't do it... ok do it your way, right? But for lots of people, that means doing nothing and complaining about what they have.

      I never accepted the shit you mention -- but I have been given shit here and elsewhere because of it... it does wear a guy down! Looks like it wore you down, too. Many many people like the shit they get, because to get something else, they have to shovel their way out or get used to the taste of some other shit (the shit of learning something new). Most people... they just don't give a shit themselves, so they are primed to take the shit of others.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:19AM (#445307)

    I love using linux, on servers and on desktops. I am quite happy with my primary workstation running debian unstable. But I am fully cognizant of the fact that it's an operating system for tinkerers by tinkerers. Some cars can be great fun but require a driver with some mechanical mojo to fix issues that pop up, Linux is like that for operating systems. If you don't spend time understanding how the system works so you can fix it when it inevitably breaks, you're not going to have a good time. And yes, you absolutely will have to google problems that spring up on any distro, no matter how polished. If you're not familiar with the command line, you're never going to have a great Linux experience.

    But, off the top of my head: Using a Mac is going to give you trouble. It's mostly a PC but it's not quite a PC, it has a custom Apple EFI "BIOS" and it was never really designed to run other operating systems. And yeah, NFS is terrible. I actually use SMB for high throughput NAS activities, with Samba on the server side and mount -o smbfs on the client end. NFS was developed in the dark ages of Unix and never quite modernized itself enough to be seamlessly usable like ssh (works fine, is moderately slow, doesn't require a special server aside from the standard ssh server you are probably running anyway) or Samba.

    Linux also has bloat issues with some desktop environments - I use XFCE locally and LXDE on most of my remote (x2go) sessions, both of which haven't been updated in the last couple of years, which at this point I kind of look at as a positive feature since the software treadmill seems to continually get worse on every operating system and nowadays everyone wants some bling ass composited wobbly windows, which is not my thing at all.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM (#445333)

      Enlightenment 17 on top of a decent GPU (Anything HD2600+ or 8400GT+ should work!) is smooth as butter for me. I don't 100 percent like the built in file manager, but as a 'windows-ish' interface to get people on Linux, and gaining the benefits of compositing, a build in frame rate viewer and stable with good crash recovery, I have found it excellent.

      Where E17 is too heavy, WindowMaker+a file manager is quite good as well, but its UI designs and default hotkeys are not conducive to making linux seem 'polished' to a Windows/OSX convert.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:31AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:31AM (#445433)

    Why am I not shocked that RedHat is handing an employee a Mac? Why am I not shocked that they don't have an image / kickstart for the company issued laptop ready to deploy? I'm not shocked because of systemd, it is proof they aren't a competent IT shop anymore.

    Linux on a laptop is always a risky job because they are poorly documented and temperamental beasties on good days. More than a few aren't even entirely stable with the Windows preload and that is with the vendor having access to knowledge they deny to their customers. Now combine with the crap WiFi many ship with and whitelists that won't allow you to swap in a reliable chipset and things go downhill. But if one sticks with reliable vendors, doesn't insist on buying the absolute newest model, does a little presales Internet searching, you can usually get a reliable laptop running Linux without going insane. Or you can spend a little more and buy from one of the vendors who sell preloads.

    Would suck to be working at RH where you pretty much have to dogfood either Fedora or RHEL. Used to swear by RH and RPM, but this desktop I'm typing on is the last machine I control still using Fedora. Laptop is now Devuan from Fedora earlier in the year, MythTV is Debian (getting Devuan on next upgrade), the servers at work are Devuan or Debian heading to Devuan next upgrade with only a couple of the oldest still running RH based tech and those are all retiring or getting migrated away. 2017 should almost see the last RH based tech I touch on a daily basis go away and with a little luck same for Debian. The lone exception is the Mrs. has Centos on her laptop and I ain't migrating it until support ends or the hardware croaks; she doesn't like it when things change and I like domestic tranquility too much to upgrade it just to kill the last RH install off.

    When you lay down the law and say "My way or the highway" like has happened with systemd, it helps to make sure the highway isn't more attractive.

    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:17PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:17PM (#445674)

      The situation you just described was one of the reasons I jumped ship to a MBP. I kind of feel like every OS got unusable in the last 10 years, and the big shots are getting laughably bad in other ways.

      Windows 10 - Explorer crashes on wake from sleep. When it doesn't crash, all windows are shifted to the left hand monitor. Mail program crashes without warning. That's not even mentioning Microsoft's creepy touching issues.

      Linux - Fuck systemd. Gnome3 is insane. KDE has always been insane. "Oh, but try x". Yeah, well, I tried $x, but the only distros that supports $x out of the box are Ubuntu based ones, which choke the moment they hit the UI on my desktop, probably due to the NVIDIA 1060 and fact that I'm using displayport for my monitors and they always try to load the free NVIDIA driver. Yes, I could fix it. I could roll my own. I don't really have time for either. Girlfriend, family, and a big-boy job cut down on free time after all.

      OSX - Sure, OSX sucks too. They get uptight about who can build and release software. They've probably got their fingers rammed up my computer as much as MS does, though I haven't seen nearly as much proof of it. At least I have a consistent outcome every time I start programs. Their mail program is nicer than Thunderbird. The monitor supports a resolution greater than 1280x764, and their keyboard and touchpad are actually not unpleasant to use. I don't have my UI crash every time I upgrade. Intel GFX sucks, but it's at least usable on low quality settings. Alas, it looks like they're sucking continually more and more with each iteration. The newest MBP base model looks identical to mine, except it's $400 more than I got it for. The one with the gimmick bar is even more expensive. They don't actually provide any benefit that I'd care about, and I'd probably need to buy another couple hundred dollars worth of dongles to maintain my current functionality if I were to get another.

      I suppose my next upgrade path will be to a full-time raspberry pi desktop, but that still doesn't cure the systemd problem. At least then I'm shelling out $35 for a new computer that sucks rather than a $1000+ one, though I'm a little nervous about this whole Pixel thing. Haven't had time to look at it yet.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:23PM

        by dyingtolive (952) on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:23PM (#445676)

        I suppose I should mention BSD also. I actually don't have any real complaints about it other than the fact that there's not a lot of software that works natively in it. I keep a 'server' that I run it on with basic SMB/SFTP/NFS access, and a small VM farm. I'd like to migrate everything to it, but I don't know how well that would work. PC-BSD is pretty good about handling a lot of Windows games/programs out of the box through whatever they've done to wine, so there's at least that, but it was pretty schizophrenic about using the command line package manager vs their dodgy ui one. Maybe it's gotten better in the last year or so.

        --
        Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Monday December 26 2016, @02:48AM

        by cafebabe (894) on Monday December 26 2016, @02:48AM (#445941) Journal

        I suppose my next upgrade path will be to a full-time raspberry pi desktop, but that still doesn't cure the systemd problem.

        You might be interested in simple-init with configuration for Raspbian [soylentnews.org].

        --
        1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 26 2016, @08:56AM

          by dyingtolive (952) on Monday December 26 2016, @08:56AM (#446008)

          Good find. Thank you for that.

          Also, I could really use the hair regrowth. One thing I'm a little unsure of however is that this mentions it will inhibit the shitting of rainbow-glitter unicorns. Have you tried it? I ask because I've been recently shitting rainbow unicorns that DON'T sparkle with glitter. I'm eager to fix that, but I'm a little unsure of whether it will correct my specific issue.

          But seriously, I missed this one. Thanks for the link.

          --
          Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:44AM (#445440)

    maybe his electrical supply is dodgy as there seem to be alot of hardware error mentioned too?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:41AM (#445489)

    And this is why it's so important to emphasize freedom rather than technical quality: People like this will fail to see what's really important. If you emphasize technical quality, then as soon as proprietary software that does things better comes along (no matter what other abusive anti-features it contains, like spying and DRM), users will flock to it. If you educate people about the value of freedom, they are less likely to be swayed by the superficial aspects of some software, less likely to accept being dependent upon a particular software developer, less likely to accept being abused (DRM, spying, backdoors, etc.), and less likely willing to accept software that does not respect their freedoms in general.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:59AM (#445512)

      This is an excellent point. Free software isn't a product but an opportunity. Open source is something diluted and wholly uninteresting.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:01PM (#445533)

    There is your problem.

    Aside from clearly not understanding what "linux" actually is, you picked a poor distribution to make your judgments from.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:20PM (#445656)

      Funny anecdot: I heard Linus Torvalds uses Fedora. I guess he didn't understand what Linux is.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @12:16AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @12:16AM (#445690)

        You're a special one aren't you? That's like saying a brain surgeon is terrible at heart surgery because she likes icecream.

  • (Score: 1) by What planet is this on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:19PM

    by What planet is this (5031) on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:19PM (#445552)

    Well it's early in the morning and after reading a lot of these comments made me want get my gripe in too. I wanted a tablet to read the morning news from anywhere in the house while I drink my coffee. My first choice would have been some Linux powered one but the only one available (that I can find) has reviews saying the browser sucks so that's out. I wanted to get away from windows and the wife loves her Fire tablet but wait... I've always wondered what the big deal was about with Apple. Having never tried anything from them I thought this would be a good opportunity to find out. Maybe I've been missing out on something. I thought it would be a polished operating system with easy to use intuitive menus that I could easily customize the way I like. Reviews say it's the holy grail of operating systems. So like a dumbass I lay out $800 for a 12 inch iPad. What a mistake. It's basically a giant phone operating system without the phone. How do I find or use anything on this thing? Fuck if I know. Do I want spend every minute of the next week googling or reading a war and peace size manual to find out? Uh, no. While I'm ranting like a lunatic, I wanted to have a stand alone computer that I could easily make backups to from all the other computers I have in my house. Also, one place I could store and access music, movies, pictures, etc. I tried windows server. Endless nags to do this or that, constantly needing to log in to this or that. Tried some form of nfs with Linux. Could never get it to work in spite of "simple" instructions from blogs etc. Once I get something close to working the next time I try to access it all my settings magically disappear and the search is on to find out why. Simple load and go software for this task that you log into once and it exchanges keys or whatever the hell it needs so I can just access it like any drive on my computer without nags to do this or that would be nice but seems to be against software development law. yaaaaaah! Whew. OK, I'm done now. (Smokes cigarret)

    • (Score: 2) by quixote on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:58PM

      by quixote (4355) on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:58PM (#445562)

      This was way back when, mid-1990s?, I needed to use some program written by a professor for my work and it only ran on a Mac. Off to the Uni computer lab which had Macs, that old kind that stood up like a little box.

      The consumer press was gushing about them. They were Sooo Easy To Use! Sooo Cute! Cutecutecute!

      Well, they were kind of cute, definitely when compared to the beige blob desktop PC boxes I used with their little green A> prompt. (Not a C> prompt. Gives you some idea how long ago and far away this was.)

      So there I am, coming at this from Unix and MS-DOS, faced with a screen with little pictures on it and zero, zip, nada, no indication of how you do anything. Double-clicking on an icon is not obvious if you've never heard of doing such a thing before.

      It was an interesting lesson in usability, user interfaces, and discoverability.

      (All further complicated by the fact that what I needed to do on that thing was access a command line. Bwahaha. Several trips to the Uni's one Mac expert later....)