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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 cubancigar11 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:07AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:07AM (#470085) Homepage Journal

    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

      by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:28AM (#470090)

      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

        by shrewdsheep (5215) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:40AM (#470115)

        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

          by Sourcery42 (6400) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:42PM (#470295)

          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

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:07PM (#470157) Journal
      Does it finally get the buttons in dialog boxes the correct way around, or does it still copy Windows? HCI documentation used to recommend that for left-to-right reading order locales you put the forward option on the right and the backwards option on the left, but the converse in right-to-left reading order locales. More recent research shows that it's actually independent of reading order and the proceed option should always be on the right. This is made even worse by the fact that pretty much every web browser has forward and back buttons that are the right way around, so you have a glaring inconsistency where back is left, forward is right, but okay is left and cancel is right.
      --
      sudo mod me up
    • (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.

      • (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.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:19PM

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:19PM (#470322) Homepage Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:48PM (#477121)

        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

      by KritonK (465) on Thursday February 23 2017, @11:05AM (#470665)

      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

        by cubancigar11 (330) on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:06PM (#470740) Homepage Journal

        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

          by KritonK (465) on Friday February 24 2017, @12:20PM (#471070)

          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: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:07AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:07AM (#470086) Homepage Journal

    I'm a pretty dedicated Linux user - except for gaming, it's my OS 99% of the time. However, I'm not a Linux configuration expert - I just use it to get work done.

    It's hard to describe, but the thing that bugs me most about Linux are the expected things that happen. Let's call it a problem with "predictability".

    Let me explain by giving an example: I was chasing an audio problem a couple of months ago. Google knows all, and I followed a recommendation to install some additional audio package or other. It was in Synaptic, so it wasn't anything too exotic. It didn't solve my problem, so I uninstalled it. From the moment I installed it: whenever I mount a new partition (for example, an external disk), my screen background changes back to the default. If I log out, and back in, I get my normal background back. Damned if I know why, and it's a bigger mystery why installing an audio package should affect the desktop in the first place.

    I run into inexplicable things like this every couple of months, and they accumulate. I am happy when the next Ubuntu LTS comes out, because it gives me a reason to nuke everything from orbit, and start over with a fresh install.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:15AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:15AM (#470087) Homepage Journal

      I meant: the un expected things that happen...

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:24AM

      by Aiwendil (531) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:24AM (#470110) Journal

      I agree, my main issue is it trying to do too much behind the scenes without clear and verbosive output.

      There is a reason why none of my desktop machines (excepting the RPi with kodi) boots into a gui, and why my normal desktop is free of icons - it is normally more timeeffecient to just read the complete documentation of a program than to piecemeal try to find how you turn off all the annoyances.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:19PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:19PM (#470245) Journal
      In FreeBSD-land, we have POLA: the Principle Of Least Astonishment. Any user-visible changes should minimise the degree to which users are surprised and changes are often rejected as POLA violations (or, at least, pushed to a major version bump and required to have some solid documentation and some scripts or similar for migration). Unfortunately, this doesn't always extend into third-party packages, such as desktop environments.
      --
      sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:51AM (#470620)

      I've had similar issues. My guess to you is part of your desktop manager is crashing. Underneath everything is an annoying web of cross application messaging running through everything that wants to listen to it. Likely the desktop sees the message of a new mount and wants to play a notification sound. Somehow that sound playback setting is corrupted or the sound file is missing thus the software crashes because most developers are too lazy to care about quality. Change your notification settings and the wallpaper might stick around.

      My biggest annoyance is the Eye of MATE image viewer (and all the other branded versions. Why the fuck does every distro need to re-brand the exact same software as something else?). It seems they all talk to each other. Open up a hundred different instances of the program, using --new-instance or not, and they all slow down whenever you do something in one of them such as opening another image or just moving to the next image in a sequence. They either broadcast their change out to each other or they're all sharing some pool in the background despite them claiming to be different instances. WTF software writers? Please stop ignoring scaling issues. Computers can handle so much more, the software they run can't.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:41AM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:41AM (#470095)

    I've been dabbling with linux for a little under 20 years now, pretty much exclusively linux for 9 years now. I have use red hat back around RH 5/6 before Advanced Server and fedora. I used Mandrake (during the change to Mandriva) for a while, a little SUSE too, followed by Ubuntu, and now Mint. I typically use CentOS when building a server though.

    My biggest problem is hardware compatibility... especially on laptops. I buy a new laptop every 2 years or so and each time I do it seems to be a crapshoot if all the hardware will work or not. It does seem to be better now, but having to deal with all the proprietary video cards, wireless network drivers, and others sure makes getting a new laptop hell.

    There used to be a bunch of linux laptop compatibility sites out there... but they are all outdated now with many not updated in 5-10 years. Manufacturers will not support linux still (with the exception of dell on a very few models, and linux only vendors... but even they generally only support Ubuntu.) While you may get lucky on a support forum for the manufacturer, you are more likely to get some idiot saying that "the system has windows, why would you want something different?" and an actual official support response is unheard of.

    Of course, right now, all the nightmares of the past are returning, as my current laptop is getting older and I will be replacing it in the next few weeks. I remember the *fun* I had with it due to the nVidia Optimus graphics card inside, which was new and had very poor support at the time I purchased it. What new "wonders" will the next laptop hold...

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:09AM

      by mmcmonster (401) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:09AM (#470103)

      Have you tried System76 laptops? Maybe check their forums and see if there's any issues with your preferred distribution.

      Another option is MacBooks (Air, Pro, Whatever). There's enough hands pounding away at them that if there's a problem, there's likely to be a quick fix.

      Again, check the forums before you buy. (But you already know that, I'm sure. :-))

      • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:34AM

        by stretch611 (6199) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:34AM (#470113)

        I have considered a System 76 laptop... But they are a little out of my budget. I do get a machine with decent specs, and I am willing to pay more than just bargain basement prices, but System 76 is a bit expensive in comparison.

        For example, I have been looking at prices lately... A 15.6" laptop with a quad core i7, 16gb ram, 256gb SSD, 1tb HD, nVidia 1060/3GB ram, 1920x1080 display... I can get it for $999 (after a $100 rebate), a different brand with the same specs and a 17" display for $1100 and no rebate... However a similar laptop on system 76 I just priced was $1593. Thats a 50% price increase which is a bit too steep for me... especially since I really don't want ubuntu at this time and will have to re-install the OS in either case.

        And lets just say I know without looking that the price for an apple notebook would be worse.

        --
        Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:22PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:22PM (#470215)

          https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200 [libiquity.com]

          If you want a free machine, this is your best bet at the moment.

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:14PM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:14PM (#470281) Journal

            Good concept, great price. But, isn't that just a little underpowered, for this day and age? Yeah, it's a laptop, and most people don't need real fast CPU, and truckloads of memory. But, still . . . with an i7 and 16 gig of memory, you can do more, and do it faster.

            Ehhh - I guess it depends on taste, budget, and personal preference. I prefer to have a lot more CPU and memory than I'll ever need, than to find that I just don't have quite enough power to do what I want to do.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:58PM (#470273)

      how do you expect hardware support to improve when you keep funding the enemy? you have the money to buy laptops every two years but you buy nvidia, etc? no wonder companies don't give a shit about what i want when i only buy laptops every ten years. You are the problem. Stop being a whore and buy the most free things you can.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:44AM (#470569)

        Was the single word "whore" what caused that?

        The questions and conclusion seem to be on the mark:
        It the MANUFACTURERS who provide device driver support.
        That's the way it works--no matter what OS you're using.

        Linux has an additional wedge with the Linux Driver Project, but if those guys can't even get a proper set of specs from the manufacturer, how are they expected to provide support for the item?
        Just keep shooting in the dark until they hit something??

        The question stands:
        Why are you giving bucks and mindshare to manufacturers who refuse to make the effort to support you?

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:11AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:11AM (#470105)

    I have been using Mint for about 5 years now. I was really happy with it, but...

    1. In the last three hardware installations in a row, I never managed to get graphics card drivers to work. One is a Dell laptop, one is a home build with some AMD card, one is an Intel NUC. That's okay, but I didn't figure out how to turn off compositing, and the software graphics emulator thing seems to leak memory every time I go into sleep mode.
    2. Miscellaneous problems:-
    ** the desktop on my main installation fell over a couple of weeks ago after I installed the kernel virtualization drivers. I can get to a desktop but the GUI is scrambled enough to make it unusable.
    ** My NUC install crashes on login 50 % of the time, perhaps for lack of resources (4 GB of RAM is not enough?).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:54AM (#470621)

      Ugh, I had a scrambled desktop too after updates. Somehow messing with a font package that doesn't get installed properly (isn't the package manager supposed to check that?) fixes it.

  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by cloud.pt on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:20AM

    by cloud.pt (5516) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:20AM (#470108)

    Now, before you go and bash me about distros being mostly non-commercial and can't spare cash for that, or also that marketing has no effect on usability, hear me out first.

    My main gripe with Linux in general is the (repetition necessary) generalized bad support. Bad support from developers (both the Linux devs and the hardware manufacturers), ranging from essential hardware drivers being flawed (usually open-sourced drivers) or flat-out non-existing, to the awful dependency hell as OP noted. But the big things aside, which I have actually learned to live with (read: getting most stuff working - the "setup marathon"), what annoys me the most in Linux are things like: there is no centralized strategy or branding; no coherent app to do one specific things (even that there might be many, all have their own excluding quirk). All in all, it's the fact commercial-grade apps and support don't make it to the platform. This is a big flaw in any book but we all know it's here.

    I keep going back to Macs and Nintendo to contrast this problem: Nintendo kinda seems to suck from a hardware and functionality standpoint. The Mac OS platform is similar in cost and closed environment. Yet both these companies have very interesting ways to go around their problems and make for some really interesting choices in their segments (read: gaming and productivity): Nintendo has that amazing 1st party software development which has been around since, you guessed it, the Atari era. There is nothing like it, they know this, they kept the strategy throughout 30-odd years of gaming industry, and everybody still loves them; Apple on the other hand, while keeping a very similar standard on hardware and reliability, simply engineer (or make use of) the most amazing business processes, development APIs, and their user-base numbers (and its professional-bias) to lure in 3rd party developers, and so they get to be top choice in the pro segments that matter to their profit margins (arts in general: design, audio, video).

    So when you look at it from perspective, what distinguishes a successful platform is their marketing strategy. Not marketing targeting solely a product but also marketing for internal use of "savoir faire". In other words, you could say it's not marketing but focus, or a roadmap, but to me, the focus of a company translates directly to their marketing since perception by the public is what actually generates for APPEAL for any given platform/product, by both users and developers. Nintendo supports their own development as core, and they make that known to the public via heavy commercials and bundling of 1st party software (and even hardware). Apple has tight connections with the entire production line, from a big leash on hardware OEMs they actually rely on, to the 3rd-party software makers their user-base expects the best of.

    Linux, what does it have? A fragmented community. The open nature, which should actually be its strength, ends up being its greatest weakness. Multiple distros wanting to support multiple hardware and multiple desktop environments, open source apps made with purpose and not form in mind because they must look and work average everywhere, the heavy reliance on system-agnostic platforms for productivity stuff (e.g. Java, that is closed by nature, and further induces in flawed open versions), and the best of all, competing package dependency/acquisition programs/shells that are the most confusing thing possible to a newcomer.

    Ways to solve this? You tell me. Some say figuring out the problem is the hardest part but I actually think this specific problem is like cancer: it has no foreseeable cure. But at least it's not as bad as one might think. I (and likely most here) actually like the hardships Linux provides me, they're kinda like a hobby, unfortunately one that also ends up in my professional line though.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:09PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:09PM (#470121)

      If you think choice is a weakness, perhaps you should stick with Macs and Nintendo. That works out great until they make a choice you don't like. I'm also not sure about this "setup marathon" you speak of. This is just one anecdote, but I did a fresh setup on a friend's machine where I re-installed Windows 7 for her, and then did a multi-boot with Ubuntu. I did it on a 2 years old Sony Viao laptop, which should theoretically be well supported by both. To install Windows and run the updates took about 2.5 hours. An extra 10 minutes was required to install networking, as neither the wired nor the wireless networking worked. I needed to download the drivers on my Linux machine them and install them via USB. The Linux install too just under 30 minutes and everything worked perfectly. Keep in mind that the Linux install also includes a full office suite, etc.

      Like I said, just one anecdote, but I've had other Windows installs that were quite similar. The only real problems I've had in the last 5 years running Linux mostly revolve around RTLink wireless cards, although I've found screwing around with some o the machines that have both an NVidia card and a integrated Intel graphics card can be a minor pain as well.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by cloud.pt on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:33PM

        by cloud.pt (5516) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:33PM (#470126)

        I think choice is a weakness if and only if there's no better choice directly due to the fact there's too much choice. Take that aside and I think choice is the best thing in the world (literally THE best thing, as in free will), but my personal feelings towards "choice" don't really make it perfect.

        Setting up Linux obviously varies. I've had problems with Atheros, Broadcom, Killer, Synaptics, Nvidia, ATI/AMD, ASUS... I've also had straight-forward installs in systems where hardware from that list is present. Sometimes the marathon is a sprint, and older and business segment PCs usually get luckier, from my own experience, but YMMV. But also from experience, I have come to feel more often than not you get problems, and unlike MS platforms, sometimes you do hit some stone walls where you simply have to drop specific hardware if you want to use Linux (some notable examples, LAN, WIFI, mouses, keyboards, BT adapters, IR receivers, capacitive keys, LEDs, media keys, usb ports, usb hubs, card readers, pcmcia readers, RAID controllers, ieee 1394 ports, list goes on and on and on. Hell I even got an old PCI landline RDIS modem fail on me way back in Debian Woody days. thankfully DSL came soon after).

        Do note that driver support is part of the problem, but the problem is much larger. I think I went into fair detail. On a flame note: I never bought a mac myself nor have I used one consistently since the 2000's, and I only purchase Nintendo devices for my sister, because it's that much a better system and environment for sub-10yo than a PS4, an XBO or a PC. I'll probably get her a Mac when she grows up and dual-boot Linux so she gets a choice, but that's as far as steering her choice I'll go, it's not like she's my daughter.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:52PM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:52PM (#470151)

          As a warning, macs no longer play very nicely with Linux. You're probably better running a hackintosh to do what you plan, plus you can save some money.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:18AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:18AM (#470578)

          I think choice is a weakness if and only if there's no better choice directly due to the fact there's too much choice.

          1) More choices is not a significant weakness if the _defaults_ are mostly good choices. Then most people can stick to the defaults and have a reasonably well working system.

          2) More choices is good if most of the choices are good choices. Not if most of the choices are bad choices or pointless choices.

          So the problem is when the system defaults are stupid and so by actual default everyone has to make new choices of their own.
          Then if most of the choices are bad choices, it means by default most people are more likely to screw up and make the wrong choice.

          Picking good defaults is hard and most Desktop Linux developers in charge of various areas don't appear to know what a bad default is even if it bit them and everyone else.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:54PM (#470130)

      open source apps made with purpose and not form in mind

      You see that as a disadvantage? I certainly prefer a program that gets stuff done to a program that's shiny but sucks.

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:04PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:04PM (#470198)

      A strength is almost always a weakness as well.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:46PM (#470229)

      The distros are the products. Linux, the kernel, or GNU, the base userland, or X11 (and omg Wayland run for the hills, not!, works fine for me and any day now Nvidia will play nice and I'll switch from X to Wayland and be done with it but no hardware accel won't fly for me), the display manager, or Gnome (fuck Mir)/KDE (Wayland?)/XFCE (yay Wayland!)/Mate (Wayland?)/IceWM/WindowMaker/Enlightenment (yay Wayland!)/RatPoison/XMonad/whathaveyou, the desktop environment, or whatever else are not "products" the way you're talking about a product.

      I consider that a feature. I would never want to use a "product." "Products" fit somebody else's needs and solve somebody else's problems. That's fine for most people since as far as I can tell the masses are just being simulated by the Matrix--and not a very detailed simulation at that!--so they have everyman's problems and everyman's needs and want everyman's product.

      You're possibly looking for Ubuntu, tho as we've seen Ubuntu exists to address Canonical's concerns first and foremost ($$$$$$$$$). I haven't tried Mint but I see it recommended regularly. Those are products. Those have marketing. Those are aimed at being complete without being bloated (lol not bloated and Ubuntu in the same paragraph!) While those offer alternative apps, if you install Ubuntu at least, what does it give you? Totem? You'll use Totem to play DVDs and you'll like it. Want to browse the web? If they chose Chromium for you, you'll use Chromium and like it. You won't have the consternation of deciding whether Firefox, Vivaldi, Palemoon, Midori, eLinks, Konqueror (is that still around as a web browser?), etc fit your needs better than Chromium.

      And yeah, I've seen systemd boot blazing fast tho it'll never be install on my box. But Ubuntu's decided you want systemd and it makes their product work, so whatever. I've read the horror stories but that's their product. You'll have Mir and you'll like it. You won't even need to worry about Totem having support for X11 or Wayland "just in case", because Mir is part of the product.

      (I have no idea how Ubuntu is put together these days so Im not trying to be 100% technical accurate about what ldd /usr/bin/totem is going to spit out.)

      One coherent whole.

      That does what somebody else wants it to do.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:24PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:24PM (#470289) Journal

        ""Products" fit somebody else's needs and solve somebody else's problems." "That does what somebody else wants it to do."

        Interesting point of view. One I've never really considered. Sure, I've danced all around that point of view. And, yes, that's a very large part of why I don't like Windows. But, I've never thought it through to those terms. Modding up for visibility.

      • (Score: 2) by joshuajon on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:57PM

        by joshuajon (807) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:57PM (#470389)
        And that's good enough for most people. I think you're right that the issues GP was talking about with respect to branding and integration is traditionally handled by distros. Two very different distros that exemplify this to me are BunsenLabs Linux [bunsenlabs.org] (formerly CrunchBang), and elementary OS [elementary.io]. Very different distros, wildly different branding, and yet they both have a dedicated userbase.

        Sure, some people would prefer to roll their own. And some people build cars from parts. For most people it's ok to pick one from a major manufacturer.
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:16PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:16PM (#470243) Journal

      Apple on the other hand, while keeping a very similar standard on hardware and reliability, simply engineer (or make use of) the most amazing business processes, development APIs

      It's less true of modern Apple than it was shortly after the NeXT takeover, but one of NeXT's key advantages was realising that APIs are user interfaces and should be subject to the same level of care. This is really rare in open source projects (it's also rare in commercial projects, but open source tends to favour code reuse more, so it's more noticeable). Clear and consistent abstractions, naming conventions, and so on, are very important.

      --
      sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:00PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:00PM (#470768) Journal

      The problem is you're looking at Linux as a single software package like Windows or a friggin' Wii OS. It isn't. It's an ecosystem, like "console gaming". Is the fact that the Playstation won't play XBox games really a community fragmentation problem? Or are they just different platforms with different goals? The great thing about Linux is it's like a Playstation that *does* let you play Xbox games, or at least attempt to. But they don't always work, and there's no real reason to expect that they would! You can try a lot of things, you can try anything you want, but that also has to mean that it's up to you to make sure it'll work. The best thing about Linux is it doesn't try to figure out what you're doing, it doesn't change what you typed on the fly into what it thinks you really meant, it just does what you tell it.

      And the biggest problem with Linux today is too many people trying to "fix" the fragmentation "problem", resulting in a less powerful, less flexible system that's more prone to bugs and viruses and hacking. I *want* to see stuff like "Pick which of the following packages you'd like to install to meet the 'Java' dependency" when I'm installing something. Yes, it means more fragmentation. Yes, it means the program might fail if I make a different choice than what the devs have tested on. It also means if there's a bug in one, I can try another. It also means that a security flaw in one can't do as much damage because there aren't as many users, and those users can easily switch if a flaw is found. And it also means I can, for example, more easily avoid Oracle if I just don't like Oracle.

      If you want someone else to make the choices for you and to keep the third parties in line, you already have numerous options, the most well known (but certainly not only) choices being Mac or Windows. But PLEASE keep that attitude out of Linux, it really doesn't belong there. For many of us, fragmentation is not a bug but a feature, and that feature is the very reason we use Linux in the first place.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:22AM (#470109)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:03PM (#470135)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:02AM (#470526)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:04AM (#470572)
          No, the biggest problem is that there are so many big problems that it gets hard to decide which ones are the biggest :).
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:06PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:06PM (#470238)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:46PM (#470268)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:55PM (#477127)

          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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:04AM (#470527)

        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

          by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:54PM (#470737)

          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

            by purple_cobra (1435) on Friday February 24 2017, @11:05AM (#471056)

            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

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:53PM (#473418)

              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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:06AM (#470574)
        That's because it's getting popular enough to screw up.

        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

      by gawdonblue (412) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:33AM (#470615)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:58PM (#473422)

        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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:47PM (#473415)

      "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...

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:36AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:36AM (#470114) Homepage Journal

    I've been a long time Linux (RHL 4.5) user, and before that FreeBSD (2.2 I think). Honestly, and it pains me to say this, I find usability on the whole to be backsliding rather than going forward to the point that my new laptop has been running Windows for the time being. I'd also like to think of myself as not being stuck in the past. While I find Windows 7/Server 2008 to be superior in terms of UI, I never had serious issues with Win 8, 8.1, or 10 as far as user experience went (I mostly ignored Metro). It did its job and got out of the way.

    From a desktop experience, Linux desktop environments on the whole have tried very hard to make life miserable. GNOME3, and Xfce have steadily gotten worse in past years. I've experimented with MATE and Cinnamon, but I find the entire experience to be just lackluster on the whole. Right now, my primary desktop (perdition) is chugging along with LXDE and Ubuntu 14.04, and my previously laptop was previously running Debian 7 with Cinnamon after switching from XMonad. My testing of Ubuntu 16.04 has turned me off that distribution entirely, combined with a lot of NIH that Canonical has been pushing. A lot of the problems I've found is that I'm fighting a battle to do anything with the system, or it just doesn't integrate cleanly. Using LibreOffice can grind my system to a halt. A perfect example of this pain is that I use an actual HID bluetooth mouse with my laptop, and I constantly am fighting with BlueZ on newer Linux's to get it to work. On Windows, I click "Enable Bluetooth", and within five seconds, my mouse is connected and I don't have to fiddle or fight with it.

    A fun litmus test you can try is loading up an older Debian release, or older Ubuntu, and comparing it to the current "cutting edge". It's depressing. I once used to advocate fairly hard for Linux adaption, now I just go "meh". You can't advocate for something if you don't believe in the product. There's just no care for quality assurance any more. Now I feel like I get a heap of parts, and some assembly required.

    On the flip side of the coin, I find the KDE experience to be all over the map; it reminds me unfavorably of using OS/2 and how it did seamless mode with Windows 3.1 applications. Non-KDE applications sorely stick out, and just don't integrate cleanly; Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice, and Visual Studio Code (as well as Atom) all scream to me I'm running foreign applications in a "pure" KDE experience. The K-version of apps such as KOffice and KDevelop always feel clunky and unrefined. While the situation may have gotten better, last time I tried KDE, notifications often had hiccups with KDE integration, and the UI felt very rough. While I can piss on GNOME for removing settings and hiding them away, the problem is KDE's system preferences is (or at least was) on par with the space shuttle in terms of switches and complexity.

    There was a serious point where I felt a sane distribution (Ubuntu around 12.04-ish) could have seriously taken on Microsoft on their home turf and crossed the gap so to speak. Perhaps another distribution could take up that mantle and begin pushing for change, but the entirety of corporate-backed distros (Canonical, Red Hat) have more or less taken leave of their senses. I still find Linux for the most part to be a better platform for embedded, specialist, or creating appliance like devices, but for general usage?

    I think I rather install CDE and use that. At least I can depend on that not changing every week.

    --
    Still always moving
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:49AM (#470118)

      I gave Linux over 20 years to get its desktop act together. If it hasn't by now, it never will.
      Linux has found its niche: as the no-GUI server OS. Nothing will ever change that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:35PM (#470144)

      Last I check, you can still install Debian 3.0, stable kernel 2.6 ABI :)

    • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:22PM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:22PM (#470402) Journal

      I agree partially regarding Linux desktop distributions degenerating. But unfortunately I still have to log in to Windows once in a while, and it still is a far worse pain in the ass. Maybe some products like a bluetooth mouse work out of the box, but I'm working in test-automation on a cross-platform product, and still I see issues with

      • Path length restriction (in 2017! Path name limitation! Nowadays!)
      • File handles not released after application crashes (next run on same machine fails, because it can't clean the environment; only reboot helps to mitigate the situation)
      • GUI required to install most tools
      • Confusion in case there is one folder named "Data", another named "data"
      • Bad support for standard development tools like repo, ccache, distcc, etc., instead inferior products like Incredibuild for insane prices
      • CPU frequency-scaling often off, low load and still high frequency + noisy fan
      • Often excruciating slow machine, with allegedly CPU load at 10%, memory usage 20%, nearly no IO, no obvious root-cause
      • Forced updates in inconvenient times (especially after the laptop was off for half a year and is required for a meeting...), often the update process gets so messed up a re-install is required
      • External monitor for my Laptop worked entirely different depending if I used HDMI or VGA

      I really hate any work I have to do for that platform. Current linux desktops are often a pain in the ass as well, but usually can be fixed. By Xfce also slightly degenerated, the "switch user" feature doesn't work (but "alt-ctrl-F2, text terminal login., startx" works), sometimes I have to disable wifi and enable it again to get it working because it is somehow stuck, recently the computer often doesn't wake up properly from hibernate and needs to be restarted, and all that is quite annoying. But still much easier than more stable than Windows 7/8/10. Even our on-site-support finally told me 2014 to just banish Windows 8 into a VM, take snapshots once in a while and recover from there, when the system breaks. They were not able to get MS Office running again without a full wipe/re-install...

      --
      Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:38PM (#470520)

        Two notes for people who run into similar situations. The path length limit can be avoided by prepending \\?\ to the path. UNC doesn't have the same limit. I, sadly, have to use that workaround in Explorer a little too often, usually to delete files put there by some program or another.

        Also, I think that case-preserving file systems make more sense. The prevent situations of having two items in the same directory with the same name except for the case. They also prevent typos from causing weird issues. I can't really see the use case for two things with the same name but different capitalization in a folder.

        • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:07AM

          by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:07AM (#470528) Journal

          The path length limit can be avoided by prepending \\?\ to the path.

          Thanks, we saw that as well. But I don't think Jenkins [jenkins-ci.org] supports this mechanism.

          I can't really see the use case for two things with the same name but different capitalization in a folder.

          Compatibility to other relevant systems (Android, Linux, iOS, QNX to name some we work with). We use repo with manifest files, teams add their git repositories there, and are not always checking for similar names. Also I just expect software to distinguish different names, it's just common in any programming language I used for the past decade, iirc. So why should bash or bat act differently?

          --
          Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
        • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:19AM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:19AM (#470579) Homepage Journal

          This only works if you're directly passing UNC paths to OpenFile()/etc, and you still have an upper limit of 32k kilobytes to command line arguments (a hardcoded constrain on CreateProcess as far as I can tell) which causes headaches when compiling extremely large software packages. As for case-sensitive vs not, I personally agree with you, but the problem is when you have to work with a system that does preserve case, you're going to be in for a world of hurt (the Linux kernel has several files that only vary in case). Fortunately, it IS possible to get case-sensitive behavior on Windows if you enable it, but your application has to specifically be enabled to use it (it has to do CreateFile with POSIX_ACCESS_ATTRIBUTE, else its undefined which file you'll get). You can however tell cygwin to wrap all API calls with that flag and get a case-preserving cygwin environment.

          A bigger issue is the fact that symlinks are badly borked on Windows since UAC became a thing. SymLinks by default require admin permissions to create on Windows, but this can be changed with a GPO/registry tweak. So far so good. However, when logged in as an Administrator, UAC will drop the symlink permission unconditionally, so you get the absurd situation where you have to "Run As Administrator" if you're an admin, or you can just make symlinks if you're an unprivileged user. As far as I can tell, there's no way to change the security profiles used by UAC.

          --
          Still always moving
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:13PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:13PM (#470802) Journal

      I've definitely got some very similar feelings. Although I think you've got a few years on me (I started with Mandrake 9.) Just wanted to say, since I didn't see you mention it, that I've recently found great joy in using the Enlightenment window manager on an Antergos system. It's a bit buggy sometimes -- between being bleeding edge and using less popular packages, I occasionally hit minor issues like when desktop compositing or suspend stops working for a week. I'm trying to remember to NOT update every other day if nothing is broken yet :) So on that front you might have better luck with a distro like Bhodi. But Enlightenment is so easy to configure and has so many options...I can't find anything that I want to change and can't, and found SO MANY things I never knew I wanted to change because the option just never existed.

      Even with a System76 Bonobo (a 17" beast of a gaming laptop) KDE lately is bloated and just feels...claustrophobic. I mean I've always been a fan of more minimalist interfaces, spent a lot of time on Openbox and IceWM and even WindowMaker. For a while I'd install KDE when I got a new system, then a year or two later switch to OpenBox or something as it aged. But lately I'm finding that more system resources just means more for KDE to waste on crap like search indexing that I don't even use! Enlightenment just gives me a wallpaper and a program menu then gets the hell out of my way :)

      • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday February 24 2017, @01:24AM

        by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday February 24 2017, @01:24AM (#470983) Homepage Journal

        I've been debating jumping on the E17 ship and see how it is. As far as full DEs go, I'm fairly tempted to stay with LXDE or switch to Cinnamon, but I could be convinced to go to E17 if focus-follows-mouse works respectably. I recently went to WindowMaker for awhile, but I couldn't get the dock to work respectably; it's mostly bitrotten out of most distributions.

        I used E16 for a very long time so going to E17 does have some appeal in that regard.

        --
        Still always moving
        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 24 2017, @03:41PM

          by urza9814 (3954) on Friday February 24 2017, @03:41PM (#471135) Journal

          Yeah, I use focus follows mouse (one of the settings I discovered I liked only after switching to Enlightenment -- I think it may be their default) and it works pretty well. The only issue I've ever noticed is that every once in a while when switching virtual desktops the initial focus won't match the mouse location. For example, my first desktop has a browser and a terminal side-by-side, and sometimes when flipping to that desktop focus will be on Firefox when the mouse is over the Terminal. I think it has something to do with the way it moves the mouse pointer when you change desktops to try to keep focus on the window you were using last time you were on that desktop. But it's rare enough that I haven't bothered to really try to figure out what's going on, I just move the mouse over and back and it corrects itself.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:40PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:40PM (#471242)

          The Bodhi team became disillusioned with the way E18 development was going[1] so they forked E17 to produce Moksha.
          If you are going to try a newer version of the Enlightenment desktop environment, you may find some extra tweaks which you appreciate in that fork.

          [1] We've seen a similar thing with early releases of new version numbers of some notable DEs.

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:42AM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:42AM (#470116)

    1) The desktop environments keep getting "overhauled" and "improved" every few years, to the point where I've given up on KDE/Gnome/Unity/etc and gone back to WindowMaker. New and shinier != better. Needless to say, Linux isn't the only platform suffering this particular disease. As for WindowMaker, it'd be just about perfect if it had just a tiny bit more modern features, such as easy built-in multi-monitor setup, but it's certainly only a nice-to-have.

    2) Speaking of multi-monitor setups, the nouveau driver is the second most prolific system hoser for me, and I've lost countless hours to fixing my X after an update decided to reinstall nouveau for whatever reason (these days I blacklist it very early in the installation process, thank-you-very-much). I really wish Nvidia would relent and open up their drivers enough that distros don't default to nouveau. This is not to belittle the nouveau developers, they're probably doing a great job considering the lack of docs, it's just that on my systems that driver has never worked properly.

    3) Aaaaand the primary system-hoser award goes to... *drumroll*... SystemD! While I oppose SystemD on a philosophical level, it has truly earned my ire through simply fucking up previously working systems, and introducing dependency-hell through the entire package base.

    Oh, and a nice-to-have: better & default ZFS support would be great.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:08PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:08PM (#470120) Journal

    I like my Linux laptop and the servers I maintain, I hardly use anything else. But most distributions I see on other laptops are terrible, by implementing the same shit I abandoned Windows for ~15 years ago. (Well, I say abandoned. I do have a Windows-VM on my work-laptop for some office-stuff, which I might need every half a year or so if I deal with someone insisting on MS-Office. I had to use Windows at work for Visual Studio for some time, until 10 years ago, etc. My wife has a Windows laptop for some of her work, and I help her sometimes. Our CI infrastructure needs to support Windows builds as well, and sometimes the build node template needs to be updated. For the past 3 years, I see a Windows UI on average approximately every 3 weeks for a couple of hours.)

    Following things terrible in some distributions sprang to my mind first:

    • evince-thumbnailer created thumbnails for connected USB drives. Took ages to disconnect the drive, and is a huge privacy risk: I don't want anyone to find thumbnails in my home folder just because I once had an USB drive attached.
    • gnome3 - no further comment needed, methinks. XFCE rules.
    • PackageKitCommandNotFound [fedoraproject.org] - Not sure how it works internally, but if I accidentally paste a line of a confidential document to the terminal (text marked, careless middle-click on terminal), I don't want to automatically start an online-search for "furryporn" or "molotow receipe".
    • systemd - One of the biggest advantages of Linux was IMO that you can get nearly everywhere using grep and find in /var/log and /etc. Having a binary format for logfiles is IMO the most stupid idea for a long time
    • Ubuntu Privacy - click here for more [fixubuntu.com]
    • lack of command line tools - Maybe I'm just incompetent, but I find it hard to find instructions to configure network or printer on command-line without being overruled by NetworkManager in Ubuntu desktop. I do need to support my dad once in a while, and being able to do stuff via ssh on command line is essential.
    • hiding root-causes - I know there is a rule that the user shouldn't be bothered with error messages he can't comprehend anyway. But it makes debugging so much harder for those who do know a bit more.
    • dialogs with mouse-select for text disabled - Why the fuck in 2017 do I still have to re-type error messages displayed on the screen to google them?
    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:09PM

      by eravnrekaree (555) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:09PM (#470158)

      I agree except for systemd. When you are dealing with a huge log file, having the log in a database can be a big advantage since it becomes much easier to be able to query certain fields and so on without having to parse the file. I do agree that you should be able to configure it to use the log file of your choice, such as text or sqlite.

      systemd's init files are also easier to deal with, because its a declarative format, there is less wheel reinventing to do simple things. You can always write a shell script if you need to, but often systemds init files have the feature you need, its much easier to write a declaration rather than have to write complex shell code. Shell code is not easier to deal with than the delcarative file format.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM

        by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM (#470253) Journal

        I believe in the approach of small, dedicated tools for certain tasks, cobbling them together for big tasks. In this context I would expect a tool which ingests the existing log files and imports them into a database.

        Systemd as an init system is imo broken because it requires adaptation of other sw to work --> not modular.

        --
        Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
      • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:11AM

        by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:11AM (#470575) Homepage Journal

        My biggest issue with the binary log format is I can't easily glue syslogd to it. At a previous job, I would have syslog send all logs to a central source so I could easily check any machine in the cluster. The *sane* thing would be to do is make journald output to syslogd, and then provide a binary backend to syslogd to get the advantages you listed. Log files could also be written in plain text to /var/log for times when journalctl can't read its own database. That way you get all three, remote logging, text logging, *and* binary logging. Instead, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and made it extremely difficult for the two to interact in a sane way.

        Unit files are an improvement (this was something upstart also did), but systemd's implementation is badly flawed. The first one is that a typo is not a critical failure; you put Userr=nobody, and you'll get your program running as root without error. Upstart comparatively would refuse to load the file until it parsed successfully. The second (and IMHO fatal) error is its all or nothing. I can't define a custom variable and load it from another location. A couple of daemons (most notably varnish) requires command line arguments to be set at run time to load the right VCL files. The only way to do this with systemd is edit the unit file, and then have it merge it by hand when dpkg upgrades varnish (fortunately it will let you drop to a shell to do this. RPM will just override it without a message).

        --
        Still always moving
    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:13PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:13PM (#470208)

      It is possible to disable network manager [ubuntu.com].

      But I generally agree: it seems that much brokenness comes from trying to emulate Microsoft's mistakes.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM (#470254) Journal

      evince-thumbnailer

      It's actually worse, because thumb drives contain untrusted data and the image parsing libraries that are used to produce these thumbnails have a pretty poor security record (lots of arbitrary code execution from malformed images). This isn't such a problem if it's properly sandboxed, but I don't believe that this one is.

      One of the biggest advantages of Linux was IMO that you can get nearly everywhere using grep and find in /var/log and /etc. Having a binary format for logfiles is IMO the most stupid idea for a long time

      There are lots of things I don't like about systemd, but this isn't a criticism I understand. Binary-only logs let you do things like use block chain or Merkel tree ideas, so that you can validate an append-only structure. For any file on disk, you need some program to be able to parse it and a structured format can give better searches than a simple grep. As long as you have statically linked tools for doing the inspection on your root partition, this shouldn't be a problem.

      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:24AM

        by gawdonblue (412) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:24AM (#470611)

        As long as you have statically linked tools for doing the inspection on your root partition, this shouldn't be a problem.

        And therein lies my main problem with SystemD: it all works as long as you have all the dependencies all in a row. It is a terrible design due to its complex web of dependencies, and inherently fragile.

        People! Don't build dependencies into fundamentally independent processes. This makes sense, it always has made sense. It always will make sense (no matter what Windows developers think).

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:28AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:28AM (#470580) Homepage Journal

      On the topic of network mangler, simply define the interface in /etc/network/interfaces on Ubuntu, and NM will mark it as "disabled" in the UI and will not try to change it. I do this with the ethernet adapter on my desktop, while leaving NM control wifi because dealing with WPA on the command line makes me sad. This is noted in the NM documentation but easy to overlook.

      One gotcha with this: make sure you have an ethernet adapter that has a persistent MAC address. This *usually* isn't a problem on x86 machines, but some ARM boards randomize MACs on boot. udev has a rule to make sure that a given mac always gets the same ethX number so the above works. If it sees a new MAC, it assigns a new number. I found a kernel bug that way when we overflowed an integer :).

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 23 2017, @10:19AM

        by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday February 23 2017, @10:19AM (#470655) Journal

        On the topic of network mangler, simply define the interface in /etc/network/interfaces on Ubuntu, and NM will mark it as "disabled" in the UI and will not try to change it. I do this with the ethernet adapter on my desktop, while leaving NM control wifi because dealing with WPA on the command line makes me sad. This is noted in the NM documentation but easy to overlook.

        Thanks, that is helpful. Unfortunately this didn't work on Fedora. I found some other documentation [qacafe.com].

        --
        Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:17PM (#470124)

    My main issue, and the only one I still run a windows OS at home is games. Everything else Linux is good enough or better + it doesn't want to spy on me. If the games I like would work on linux I wouldn't even think about getting Windows. (And I mean native, I don't want to fiddle around with wine and ...)
    There are some good games on linux now, several open source games I like and I see a good increase in the last years. So it looks like my next computer could be Linux only.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:29PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:29PM (#470141) Journal

      Lately, the NES homebrew scene of all things has been coming up with enough games that one can just sudo apt install fceux and then just visit NESdev and PDRoms.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:28PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:28PM (#470256)

      I use computers for CADCAM and gaming. If I were to run Linux I'd have to put Windows in a VM and run everything in that, so it would just add another layer of headache.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:26PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:26PM (#470125) Journal

    I've used Linux since 2000ish:

    I'm on Arch now with xfce and i3wm, and am happy. Is Linux perfect? No.

    Do I find it better than windows? Hell yes. Windows just feels clunky to me. The work windows is locked down to unusability, the software (Office mostly) can fuck up files between releases because they want to fuck with Libre office compatibility (hey, let's fuck the user in order to keep market share).

    I plug a Linux/windows compatible printer into my Linux box and I am printing in seconds: plug it into Windows and you reboot and reboot and reboot......

    No thanks. But yes, coordination of efforts is needed.... I was hoping Ubuntu was that effort, but it has gotten derailed a bit.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:11PM (#470137)

      You can use LibreOffice with Microsoft Windows. I do, and have for years. As for printing, I haven't had to had to reboot after adding a printer since Windows XP.

      There are certainly many valid criticisms of both Microsoft and Windows, but those two aren't it.

  • (Score: 2) by rufty on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:36PM

    by rufty (381) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:36PM (#470127)

    What's screwed up networking this time? Network manager? connman? openresolv/resolvconf? dhcpcd5? rfkill? udev?

  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:57PM

    by Rich (945) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:57PM (#470131) Journal

    I run Mint/Mate as "standard" distro on my (non-Mac) boxes and laptops, and Elementary on an experimental one, to test the waters. Generally, all that stuff is way good enough for everyday use (though Elementary regularly gets me with its single-click file manager logic...). Nothing much to improve here, I didn't even bother to upgrade the Mint 17 boxes so far. One Thinkpad was tested from a live system on 18, and it looks and feels marvellous. Once again I repeat my theory that we've had "peak desktop" in 2010, and while the commercial offerings have gone downhill from there, the Linux desktops I use remain faithful enough to that original.

    The software supply is a bit awkward, but with the PPA system, there's a solution that works reasonably well. In fact better than everything else, if one considers a seamless global update process part of the job. It could use some polish, but the basics are sound.

    What bugs me is little things, like how the Elementary guys couldn't get screen flicker on T-Thinkpads away. Or the "use two finger scroll" button in Mate remains dimmed, despite 2FS working great after a little command line magic. Or cursor hopping, probably because of the trackpad static compensation settings. So energy to improve stuff is probably best spent fixing low level bugs.

    The system aside, if I had my say, all applications would need to religiously conform to the classic Macintosh Human Interface guidelines. The revised version, ISBN 978-0201622164, is fine. This simply nails the most universal way of desktop workflow.

    Oh, that, and please put in working HiDPI support. As in 12pt Text at 100% is precisely as big as it's printed. Thank you :)

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:33PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:33PM (#470142) Journal

      Oh, that, and please put in working HiDPI support. As in 12pt Text at 100% is precisely as big as it's printed.

      There's a reason it isn't. Because a desktop screen sits farther away from the eyes than a piece of paper, it needs to display things bigger in order to subtend the same angle at the eyes and thereby look subjectively the same size.

      • (Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:20PM

        by Rich (945) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:20PM (#470161) Journal

        That's what the bloody zoom setting is for, because neither you, nor I, nor the computer have the slightest idea about where that friggin' piece of paper is right now. In fact, as I type this, there are two sheets of A4 paper next to my (laptop) computer: one is closer than the screen, the other further away. Global geometry setting in the "Monitors" control panel .Look how the Mac does it since Retina day 1, and we're set.

        Some days I wish Mac-Ki-Do back, with its fanatical postings about doing things in the correct, and of course Mac, way. Alas, he had to resign when Apple stabbed him in the back with OS X (with OS X being unfaithful to the pure spirit!).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:00PM (#470134)

    linux is damn f#cking awesome. until it is not. but that's still better then winblows : )

    example: sometimes you have to configure some network device that came straight from the box.
    it has a default IP you connect to via (mostly) IExplorer.exe (bleh) and you cahnge the ip address of the winblows box.
    after config, you connect the device to the overall network-lan and then you go about changing the ip of the winblows back.
    sometimes you are not happy, reset the device (for example). do this "ip-of-windows-changing" thing a few times without a
    reboot in between and it just craps out. no more ping, no more loading of the config-webpage of the device. only a reboot will "fix" it.

    with linux i can tell it a new ip-address and it swallows it with a big gulp and a smile. it can do this all day long : )

    • (Score: 2) by J053 on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:19AM

      by J053 (3532) <dakineNO@SPAMshangri-la.cx> on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:19AM (#470563) Homepage
      A neat trick for this use case:
      • Connect the new device to your LAN (supposing, of course, that your LAN doesn't have the same network as the new device - that could get confusing if you already have a 192.168.2.10 or 10.10.0.1 or whatever).
      • On your Linux box, use "ip addr add" to just add an address on that net to your Ethernet device:ip addr add 192.168.2.100/24 dev eth0, for example.
      • Use Chrome or Firefox to get into the new device and set up its networking correctly.
      • Use "ip addr del" to get rid of the temporary address from the Linux box.

      Viola!

  • (Score: 2) by DBCubix on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:44PM

    by DBCubix (553) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:44PM (#470148)

    I just transitioned from Windows to Linux and most everything went smoothly with the exception of OverGrive eating my Google Drive files until I found rclone.

    One thing that is missing is VBA macro support in Libre Calc. I used to have my gradebook in Excel and upon exiting it would automatically update the grades on an external server that students could access. I dearly miss that.

    My other nit is MLB.TV not playing nice with Mint. I found a virtualbox Debian install that works, but it slightly annoys me.

    Other than that I have been pleasantly surprised at the transition. This isn't like the Linux of the early 1990s where I had to compile my own custom kernels and plug and play 1.0 was a nightmare.

  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:53PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:53PM (#470152) Journal

    Way back I started with a Commodore PET 2001, later went to Amiga and Atari (for fun), then MSDOS and Windows (for business).

    I became a Windows refugee only about a year ago when I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition, on a new disk. I kept my Windows 7 disk intact, but haven't booted it since last March. Instead I run Windows in a virtual machine whenever I need to. I couldn't get copy/paste to work between Linux and virtual machines. None of the hundreds of solutions work so I gave up and instead copy files back and forth through a shared directory. Same with USB, I couldn't get USB through to the VM either. I learned to live with it. The thing that bothers me most is the poor graphics performance in VM's, because everything is done in software. Hardware acceleration won't work either, so my expensive graphics card doesn't get to do much when inside a VM. Scrolling is a pain. Early on I spent days trying to get things to work, but now I just give up and find another way or live with it.

    What still really annoys me is the fact that when a password window pops up and the mouse isn't located on that window, the password gets typed into the window that happens to be under the mouse, even if it's a VM. I get that this behavior can be handy, but please don't do this with password windows.

    But I still prefer my Linux over any Windows version and don't think I'll ever go back (nor to Apple).

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:19PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:19PM (#470213)

      There is probably a setting in your window manager called "focus follows mouse". "Click to focus" is also common (and what Windows generally uses).

      • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:18PM

        by inertnet (4071) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:18PM (#470363) Journal

        There is probably a setting in your window manager called "focus follows mouse".

        Could be. It must be well hidden though. I tried to get the settings as best I could, but some texts are logically backwards and English is not my first language. I get lost with things like "Disable focus stealing prevention for XV", because it's a triple negative to me without explanation what "XV" is, so I don't even know if it's relevant here.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:54PM

          by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:54PM (#470385)

          Xv would be X video. Probably only relevant for media players.

          "focus stealing prevention" presumably prevents other applications from drawing on top of a video, but am not sure myself.

          • (Score: 4, Informative) by WillR on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:46PM

            by WillR (2012) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:46PM (#470441)
            It's been a while since video output didn't "just work", but from memory... Xv is a hardware overlay - it's always on top of everything, so if you drag another window on top of a media player that's using Xv, it will appear to be between the player UI and the video. Some media players tried to preserve the illusion that the video and the player UI were in the same layer by bumping themselves to the top of the window stack whenever that happens, which would be blocked by "prevent focus stealing" if there weren't a special case for Xv windows.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:34PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:34PM (#470169)

    The problem is lack of agreement combined with stupidity combined with bad judgment.

    The first problem is I want a unix like OS with human editable config files and lack of suprise and high productivity for, well, there's no nice way to put it, higher functioning, higher IQ people. I don't want a fisher price toy that makes easy things easier for dumb people and harder things impossible even for smart people. Its like arguing about wheelchairs, I'm sure they need engineering improvements, but I don't need one, don't want one, aren't going to sit in one, aren't going to dogfood one. Please will all you "gnome bootloader people" stop trying to turn my nice new aeron chair into their weird idea of what wheelchair users want while I'm sitting in it. Yes yes I'm sure those features are very important to people who need wheelchairs unlike myself. I don't need to be squashed into that productivity hell of LARPing that we're all sitting in wheelchairs and nobody isn't handicapped. I don't want GUIs for network and sound that don't really work but if they did work at least sometimes between crashes they'd let dumb people do things in five minutes that take me 30 seconds in emacs. I don't want an "environment" I live in a perfectly good meatspace environment and all I need is urxvt, emacs, and chrome browser go away with your shitty LARPy fake copy of macOS from 1987 I actively don't want that. The arrogance is so annoying, a SN car analogy would be we need to bulldoze the Autozone store because it sells stuff that low IQ morons can't use so to make it fair we'll have to bulldoze it and make it impossible for the general public to work on their cars and we can hire nice expensive mechanics to do all the work. "everyone knows" that "everyone knows" that "everyone needs" a whole stinking pile of manure no one actually wants, a scene right out of the emperor has no clothes.

    The stupidity angle is in all organizations you can always replace working system A with expensive complete overhaul paid system B like new versions of office or MS software that are a complete mystery to past users, but you can't replace with system C thats free that also is a complete mystery to past users. When MS scraps the UI and replaces it with mysterious junk thats the best thing ever, but you can't use open office unless its bug for bug compatible with the current version of Word. How stupid.

    The bad judgment issue is you'll end up with cascading support contract requirements. We have to use Oracle because only pay software provided adequate performance on 90s hardware and we can't switch to Debian on a rasp pi which is powerful enough but too much of a forklift upgrade and Oracle insists on Redhat only or just steaming piles of dependency hell like that. Furthermore we need support contacts because ... we don't know, we've never used them and there's no point in asking a script reader in India if I should reboot my PC. But supposedly they're required for ... something, although nobody ever uses support.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:10PM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:10PM (#470311) Journal

      But...you can HAVE that with Linux. You want Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, or some minimal Debian install, then just {emerge|pacman|apt-get|bloody well do it yourself} your packages.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:22PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:22PM (#470323)

        But looping the argument back around to the original topic, now we got systemd instead and any time someone whips out the linux desktop meme the handwringing over KDE and gnome begin, despite my desktops having nothing to do with and no interest at all in either.

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:30PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:30PM (#470329) Journal

          Arch has a non-systemd package set in the AUR if i remember right. Gentoo/Funtoo are OpenRC by default. Not sure what Slack does but I'm told it's not systemd. And BSD is its own thing entirely, something like Gentoo's British cousin with a surprisingly high IQ.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:31AM

            by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:31AM (#470581) Homepage Journal

            Slack is still using sysvinit, but hasn't committed to not including it in a future release. Slack is notoriously slow on updating its core; it only got pulse a version or two ago because its too tangled in the stack these days.

            --
            Still always moving
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by higuita on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:34PM

    by higuita (2465) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:34PM (#470171)

    >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 stuf

    So the old: missing software-> search the web-> download something-> try to install-> result

    This is usually very wrong way of thinking in linux and usually the result is "fail"

    This is a problem with almost all users coming from windows, they are used to fetch software from the net and install it. On linux, due to all distros, versions and archs this do not work and requires a change of mind.
    People should stick to their distro repos and if really need something, use external repos for the distro and version. Trying to install debian .deb in ubuntu will generate a dependency hell, using a fedora repo on centos will break the system, installing a .rpm on a deb based disto is plain wrong. All this is possible, but a newbie should never go near this, as he have no knowledge to understand it and will be overwhelmed by it. It is just like trying to install windows 95 software or drivers on windows 10... it may be possible, but hard and requires knowledge

    Linux gives you power, but you have to learn how to use it. What distros could do is after searching for some software on their package manager and fail, warn the user to not randomly install software from the internet and redirect the users to forums to ask for the software or special repos (like the ubuntu ppa)

    ubuntu may have several problems, but this is one of the reasons it is recommended to newbies, the ppa repos teach the user to use then instead of installing random packaged. ubuntu could do the next step and catch the missing software searches and list the possible PPA (but warn against using then and tell that they are not supported in any way) or alternative softwares (maybe via the alternative.net)

    Another problem i see many times, again taken from windows, is running software as root. When new users hit a permission problem, many switch to root and problem solved. Most software needs to be blocked from running as root. Also create a "fix permissions problems", a simple script that will use strace or something similar that is preloaded to the program to catch where the "permissions denied" may exist and show the user where the wrong permissions is and suggest a fix (usually "chown user file")

    but all resumes to one thing: users have bad thinking habits, distros should try to catch then and teach the correct way

    Finally, most distros have problems with file association when users start to install software. Some distros and/or desktop environment do it better than others, but usually all in different ways. freedesktop.org and the major Desktop environments need to give users one way, the SAME way to check and change this.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:25PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:25PM (#470726) Homepage Journal

      What *is* file association?

      • (Score: 1) by higuita on Saturday February 25 2017, @02:01AM

        by higuita (2465) on Saturday February 25 2017, @02:01AM (#471400)

        file type ABC is always open by program XYZ

        when everything is fine, great, but if for some reason it is trying to open the wrong program, users have usually some difficulty to fix it

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:51PM (#470734)

      Sigh.. If I had a nickle for every time I found some tool, game or other program I wanted to use and found out it was not in the distro repo so it had to be manually installed... then I would have a lot of nickles.

      Adding alternative repo sources to the list is often pretty much mandatory if you still want to get some of the more popular-but-not-in-repo software and the developers just happen to run one of those repos for your distro. Doing this is in theory much safer than downloading random installer executables, but of course still a security risk. So the setting is buried in some hard to find configuration file which needs hand editing, which is a great user experience! /s
      Also being in a repo should, but does not actually indicate anything about quality. There are a lot of broken packages in there which can and will irreversibly mess up your system upon install.

      My point is, the usefulness of a repository is directly related to its contents and in its reliability. If half the software I need is not in the repo, and the other half can still break my audio or X or whatever, then there is not much point to a repo. With a package management situation like that, even the 'download random installer' alternative is better. Because that alternative allows getting things done.

      These issues are symptoms of the real problem with Linux. Too much fragmentation. Yes choice is good. Too much choice is detrimental. Debian and Ubuntu, and Mint and Redhat and Suse, and Arch and all others simply need to get their shit together once and for all and designate one package management system as The One, and focus all their efforts on it. Then with a few more changes, maybe we can also start seeing some more commercial software on linux because developers will no longer need to compile/package/test for a dozen different systems all with their own quirks.

      Of course, I'm dreaming. None of that will ever happen.

  • (Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:48PM

    by eravnrekaree (555) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:48PM (#470185)

    1. Stop making stupid radical GUI changes
    By far the worst Linux useability regression is the asinine user interface experiments such as with Gnome 3 and Unity. There was widespread outrage over Unity and how it took what was once one of the most useable Linux distros and made it into a confounding mess that confuses everyone. We need to revert back to the desktop/taskbar/start menu model and stop making these radical changes to the user interface. Few people like Unity, yet Canonical doesnt care, a totally arrogant company.

    2. Hardware compatability
    The continuing problems with hardware compatability are a major blocker. I think what Linux needs to do is develop a stable hardware driver ABI, which could sit above the core kernel ABI, and that Ubuntu, instead of helping Microsoft and messing up the UI, should work with hardware vendors to get hardware drivers using vendor code into Linux as quickly as possible. If we really wanted to do the state of the art here, the Linux distros should jointly support an effort to implement the Windows hardware ABI in a compatability layer above the Linux ABI, so all Windows drivers could run unmodified on Linux. This would really make Linux a serious alternative for most users.

    3. Compatability with Windows Apps via WINE
    Another improvement would be to bring Wine to where it could run 99% of Windows applications. Instead of helping Microsoft by helping Linux programs run on Windows, Ubuntu should be helping to get Windows programs to run on Linux which would be what would help Linux become more useable. Being able to bring their applications with them, often these can be custom applications that have no Linux equivalent, can be a big argument to get people to move to Linux. Yes for general applications there are sometimes alterntives such as LibreOffice, however, Windows is often used for custom applications or lesser known in house applications in commercial settings. Sometimes the Linux alternative is far inferior, such as compare Adobe tools to the Linux equivalents. Yes, sometimes you can get the same thing done with Gimp or Inkscape but the workflow is much worse, its not just being able to do something but being able to have a fast workflow. You ask how to do something that takes 3 steps in Adobe and the Linux equivalent has it taking 20 steps and they act like this is suitable . Time is money and the reason Adobe products are so useable is not just that there is a way to do it, but that it has a fast workflow that makes it possible to get it done quickly.

    4: Systemd is an improvement!

    One of the things which has been a benefit is systemd. Most of the arguments against it are nonsense. The declarative file format is much easier to read and write than shell scripts since it requires less wheel reinventing. shell scripts can be convoluted and obfuscated, systemd often has a simple declaration which would require many lines of shell script dealing with PIDs and so on.

    The idea that it is monolithic is a lie. The system is highly modular consisting of dozens of components. A message bus based model for init makes sense and preserves the ability to have a traditional SysV facility at the same time. A bus based design for the init system is far more flexible and modular, since you can write an init daemon that watches for the event you are listening to on the bus, and then launch a task when you receive the event message, you can also generate your own event message when you launch the task. This makes it possible to start a task on a wide variety of system events. One of the misnomers is that systemd is "taking over" things like cron. Actually, a seperate cron daemon can still be used, the cron daemon being connected to a message bus does not mean that it is no longer a seperate process, though it can interact with the message bus by generating event messages on it .

    You can always run processes using the older SysV method and shell scipts if that is what you want, so the idea that systemd has taken something away from you is also false. I have set up SysV scripts in systemd with no issues.

    Database log files are a benefit when you have to deal with massive log files since it makes querying the file much faster and more precise. If you can store log files into an SQL database you can query certain fields in the table for what you are looking for without having to parse the file. Trying to use grep for this is much more imprecise. I think the log system should allow people to choose the log format of their choice, a text based format, sqlite, mysql, etc. This should keep everyone happy.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:06PM

      by MadTinfoilHatter (4635) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:06PM (#470392)

      4: Systemd is an improvement!

      One of the things which has been a benefit is systemd. Most of the arguments against it are nonsense.

      Actually I find a large portion of the arguments to be well reasoned, and thought out - at least far more well thought out than the "Hey, let's abandon everything we know about good design, because, you know, FASTER BOOT TIMES!!!11 one one" that is what the systemd-camp so often offers. Granted, your argument is a notch above that, but all you say has been debunked long ago. Here is a fairly comprehensive list of anti-systemd arguments, [without-systemd.org] and while I admit that not all the arguments are top notch, some of them are golden.

      The declarative file format is much easier to read and write than shell scripts since it requires less wheel reinventing. shell scripts can be convoluted and obfuscated, systemd often has a simple declaration which would require many lines of shell script dealing with PIDs and so on.

      Superficially, this is true, but it's really just shuffling the complexity around. What's really going on, though, is that the complexity has been moved from the logic into the language.

      In stark contrast to Bourne shell, so many of systemd's unit directives are highly specialised building blocks which aren't easily reusable. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that because systemd units aren't real programs, there's no way to escape to more basic primitives as required. Inevitably, what this means is that more and more directives will be added over time as more and more use cases are discovered. See Steven McDonald's page for more details. [steven-mcdonald.id.au]

      Add to this fact that every sysadmin on the planet knows at least some shell scripting - what's going to be easier to fix when a bug is found? The shell script or the systemd C code?

      The idea that it is monolithic is a lie. The system is highly modular consisting of dozens of components.

      The claim that systemd is modular is pure sophistry. In fact it's Fallacy #1 [blogspot.cz] on Jude Nelson's list of systemd proponent fallacies.

      Lennart Poettering claims that systemd is not monolithic by pointing out that it is made of upwards of 69 separate binaries. This is a non sequitur, because "modular" and "monolithic" are not mutually exclusive terms.

      A piece of software is modular if it is decomposable into distinct functional units such that each unit addresses a specific concern. Systemd, the Linux kernel, and X.org are all examples of modular software. Systemd addresses its concerns with its binaries, the Linux kernel with loadable kernel modules, and X.org with its drivers and extensions.

      Now, a piece of software is monolithic if its components (if it has any at all) are tightly coupled--that is, components logically depend on one another to the point where using them in different contexts requires re-implementing the missing ones. Examples include Linux and X.org--in Linux's case, you can't use a kernel module without the kernel, the kernel can't run without the requisite kernel modules to interface with the hardware, and you can't use a Linux kernel module with other kernels or as a stand-alone program. Similarly, you can't use an X video driver without the X server, you can't use the X server without at least one video driver, and you can't use X's video drivers with other graphics managers or as stand-alone programs.

      Under these definitions, systemd qualifies as both modular and monolithic. You cannot run journald without systemd, and cannot run systemd without journald (at least, not without losing logging for systemd-supervised programs). None of the *ctl programs work without systemd, nor do its collection of systemd-*d daemons. It used to be possible to run logind separately, but not anymore. According to the systemd developers, udev will likely be next to hard-depend on systemd. The point is, despite the fact that systemd is comprised of multiple binaries, the hierarchical logical coupling between them means that it is more accurate to think of them as extensions to systemd-PID-1 that just happen to run in separate address spaces. They are not truly independent, composable programs.

      You can always run processes using the older SysV method and shell scipts if that is what you want, so the idea that systemd has taken something away from you is also false. I have set up SysV scripts in systemd with no issues.

      The fact that it worked for you in some cases doesn't mean that it works anywhere near as well as SysV did. I haven't had personal problems, but that's mostly because I've been shunning systemd like the plague. But since it's anecdote time, a buddy of mine however began channeling Samuel Jackson after trying systemd for a couple of months... "I've had it with this motherf***** systemd on this motherf****** machine!" He switched to Devuan and was happy.

      Database log files are a benefit when you have to deal with massive log files since it makes querying the file much faster and more precise. If you can store log files into an SQL database you can query certain fields in the table for what you are looking for without having to parse the file.

      Okay, I really don't get what you're talking about here. I've been on one single project where the devs decided that cramming all the log files into a mysql database would be a good idea. It was the slowest and most horrible cludge I've ever seen. Something that would take grep seconds took the relational DB a minute or more. You had to search for stuff in one hour blocks, or the DB would grind to a complete halt. After 3 days the sysadmins put their foot down and we were back to normal text logs. Wanting logs in binary format sounds like the ramblings of a lunatic - even more so if the binary logs can fuck themselves up so that they're unrecoverable, [freedesktop.org] and troubleshooting therefore becomes a nightmare.

      Finally I would like to close with this link [landley.net], which is one of the more insightful explanations about the philosophical problems that many of us have with what is probably the worst thing to hit the Linux world since the SCO lawsuits: systemd.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:35AM

        by Marand (1081) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:35AM (#470616) Journal

        In stark contrast to Bourne shell, so many of systemd's unit directives are highly specialised building blocks which aren't easily reusable. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that because systemd units aren't real programs, there's no way to escape to more basic primitives as required. Inevitably, what this means is that more and more directives will be added over time as more and more use cases are discovered.

        There was another way that could have given us the best of both worlds, but it wasn't taken. Bourne shell isn't required for init scripts; it's fully possible to implement an interpreter for a systemd-style declarative init format and use it where convenient, and then fall back to writing programs when you need something "low level" that it can't do. I explain this in more detail in my other comment. [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 1) by WillR on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:44PM

      by WillR (2012) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:44PM (#470415)

      4: Systemd is an improvement! One of the things which has been a benefit is systemd. Most of the arguments against it are nonsense. The declarative file format is much easier to read and write than shell scripts since it requires less wheel reinventing. shell scripts can be convoluted and obfuscated, systemd often has a simple declaration which would require many lines of shell script dealing with PIDs and so on.

      Systemd-the-init-system has some good ideas (making cgroups easy to use and not spinning up yet another goddamn bash instance for every service). It's a pity there's no way to use just the init component without drinking the whole pitcher of "forget 'everything is a file', now everything is a dbus endpoint" kool-aid, because dbus is still an inscrutable, user-hostile mess.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:36PM (#470434)

      4: Systemd is an improvement!

      No thanks, I'll continue running GNU/Linux you can keep your "improved" Lennartix.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:24AM

      by Marand (1081) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:24AM (#470612) Journal

      One of the things which has been a benefit is systemd. Most of the arguments against it are nonsense. The declarative file format is much easier to read and write than shell scripts since it requires less wheel reinventing. shell scripts can be convoluted and obfuscated, systemd often has a simple declaration which would require many lines of shell script dealing with PIDs and so on.

      You've repeated this a few times here, so I wanted to correct this misconception about the sysv-style init. I'm probably wasting my time writing this, since you already like systemd and likely won't care, but it's an anti-sysv argument that keeps coming up and it's just wrong. Despite what you and others seem to think, init scripts do not have to be in sh, or be scripts at all. It's not an inherent requirement of sysv init and should not be used as an argument for the abandonment of it.

      Bourne-style shell scripts are what distros generally use, but it's not a requirement of the init system. At its simplest, all that's required is a program that accepts command line arguments of "stop" and "start", and can be anything that does those two things. If you want to get fancy, you can make it follow the LSB init script requirements and also accept "restart" "force-reload" and "status". There is one LSB requirement that makes it appear that you need shell scripts: LSB inits currently require a very specific type of comment block that documents dependency information that can be used by fancier inits that can do parallel booting. The expected comment block's lines start with "### BEGIN INIT INFO", end with "### END INIT INFO", and contain "# key: value" lines in between, and was chosen because # is a sh comment, so it's understandable that someone might assume sh is the only option to comply, but that's not the case.

      All that is really needed is to have a multi-line text block inside your "init script" that can be parsed. I've made init scripts in Scheme by doing something like this, for example:


      (define init-block "
      ### BEGIN INIT INFO
      # Provides: foo
      # Description: Foo
      ### END INIT INFO
      ")

      Never used the init-block symbol for anything in the script itself, it was just there for the benefit of the parser. It seems to just do something like use the "strings" command to pull out the strings, so you can even do this with binary files! Out of curiosity I tested by writing a simple init script in C, putting a multi-line string in the file that contained the init info block. It parsed it just fine.

      ---

      At this point, you might be thinking this doesn't address your argument that systemd's unit files are declarative and that's superior to having to write programs, regardless of the language. That's the thing, though: since it respects the #!/path/to/interpreter shebang format for text files (scripts), there's no reason you can't use a declarative parser with sysv-style init. You could make an interpreter that reads a systemd-esque unit file and write all your unit files in the same declarative language, just with a shebang and some LSB init headers at the top. All the boilerplate start/stop/etc. code could be handled by the interpreter itself, removing the "wheel reinventing" for inits that fit within the declarative unit file use-case.

      Advantages to this approach would be that you could easily fall back to normal init scripts if you need to do something that's beyond the scope of your declarative interpreter, you wouldn't have to keep tacking on new features to support every possible use case because you have the scripting as a fallback, it would be a lot easier to implement than rewriting everything, and you still have a tiny, battle-tested init that does very little and has a small attack surface.

      The declarative format argument is a red herring that has been used by the systemd folks to convince people that are ignorant of how init works that they need systemd to get rid of shell scripts, but that's never been the case. If that were the goal it could have been done a lot easier with a custom interpreter.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by aim on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:11PM

    by aim (6322) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:11PM (#470206)

    disclaimer: I've used Linux on the desktop since around 1995, starting with Slackware and writing my own damn modelines for X Window. I went back to OS/2 for a short while before getting hooked for good on SuSE, later Debian, still later (K)Ubuntu, and in between using quite a lot of different distributions including RHEL and SLES. I'm still using Kubuntu on my Laptop, but FreeBSD on my personal server. I suffer through Windows 10 at the office.

    - dependency hell: hardly ever saw that. My worst experience that way was an attempt to upgrade a Gentoo system that had been without update for too long, with me finally reinstalling from scratch. And yes, I've used different architectures including i386, x86_64, alpha, sparc, sparc64. I guess it helped that my non-x86 platforms were practically all on Debian.

    - Desktop: maybe I'm just getting old, but I just don't get the more recent GNOME or Unity desktops, which seem to get in the way of productivity, hiding too much from the user. KDE seems ok, as are XFCE or some of the classic WindowManagers.

    The UI should enable people to do what they want to get done, without getting in the way. That simple truth is unfortunately lost on too many people who go for "idiot-proof, shiny".

    - My main gripe would be too many levels of abstraction. NetworkManager, PulseAudio, more recently systemd... and some of the management tools of the distributions. Even going back to the basic config files for certain services won't always simply work, as they might be overwritten by other actions.

    KISS, people. Classic Linux is user-friendly, only maybe more choosy than others about who it considers a friend.

    - hardware issues: Well, the classic is of course vendor support. USB Scanners come to mind, or way back Winmodems. You need to be careful what you buy if you want it working on Linux. For most stuff it's a non-issue, but it still might bite. Current challenges, while at least partially solved: decent synchro with a smartphone, idem with a sports watch. I find it particularly disappointing when Linux-based products don't offer decent solutions for working with Linux.

    - software issues: there's always specialized software just not available, or not available in a recent version, on Linux. For my hobby of astrophotography, there's quite some applications for Windows where I don't know of decent equivalents (e.g. fitswork). Depending on your profession, it might be hard to find something for your specific field(s) of endeavour, or fulfilling legal requirements. WINE is not always helpful, and you'll end up dual-booting, running a VM, or just plain stay on RedmontOS or bitten Apple.

    - on the plus: it's still exceedingly rare to see malware on Linux, so no real need to waste CPU cycles on an antivirus or similar. Your classic distro won't phone home, at least not without asking you. Your data remain yours, unless you do something utterly silly. You, or your IT guy, can look under the hood to fix issues. Not much need to battle with licensing issues. It's your OS, you do what you want.

  • (Score: 1) by leftover on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:16PM

    by leftover (2448) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:16PM (#470242)

    While much is made of the 'choice' offered by the Linux development community, merely shouting "Choices!" repeatedly does not outweigh all other concerns.

    My first Linux distro was Slackware '96 and since then, well, more than I can remember offhand: Mandrake, Red Hat (pre-Fedora), Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. After Slack, I forced myself to use a GUI desktop because I was looking for something I could recommend to friends and family as an alternative to Microsoft and Apple. Still looking now and still tempted to abandon GUI desktops because I spend FAR too much time fixing things I really don't want anyway. I use mechanical and electrical CAD and I get neither income nor kicks from fumbling around in admin land. Yikes this stage-setting has gone too long ... This comment is focused on the interface between code libraries and application developers.

    My observation is that the Linux development community sorely lacks API configuration management self-discipline. This is the technology dual of the earlier marketing comment (#470108). There is no good reason for every minor version change of a math library to break API compatibility, for example. There is no good reason why each math library needs its own unique API, incompatible with the API's of the seven other libraries available to do the identically same functions. More importantly, the need to modify source to accommodate a library change is an impediment to choice among those libraries.

    And why might I want to change math libraries when math doesn't change? Because none of the math libraries are actually completed. All are in some state of development, some making more progress than others. Some going dormant before being completed. Most of the C++ libraries don't work multicore because the Standard Template Library routines are not thread-safe. Analogous situations abound in many other areas: graphics at the OpenGL level, the entire nightmarish sound junkpile, crypto, networking.

    Developers, I do 'get it'. The last 10% of a project has all the grunt work and none of the glory. Perhaps we need to change that?

    In the meantime, stop dis'ing the APIs!

    --
    Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
  • (Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:21PM

    by Refugee from beyond (2699) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:21PM (#470250)

    It kind of works for me. The only thing that annoys at the moment is the fact that some game developers stick to making 32-bit only games.

    --
    Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:21PM (#470283)

    I was going to say that I hate the way Linux handles groups on files vs the BSDs. It makes so much more sense to me the way BSDs handle them (like SGID is always set). The alternative has created numerous problems for me due to the multiple users that can fiddle with things on some of our servers. If Linux were BSD, those problems wouldn't exist.

    But then, reading the comments made me realize that I have had other problems over the years. I've either had to fix the problem myself, someone else makes it disappear, or I get used to it. When we first started using some servers that had systemd I would rail against it with the best of them; but now the problems have either been fixed, disappeared, or I'm used to by now, so it isn't worth the effort. When I started using ARM, I hated uBoot's dichotomy between super simple setups and God-awful complexity; but now the boot stuff is mostly set up so I no longer have to fight it.

    The one thing I constantly fight though is the way they seem to handle bug reports. I have a problem, give a detailed bug report, crash dumps/tracebacks, etc. and then someone closes it 30 minutes later with "WORKSFORME." Uh, ok but what about my problem? Any insight or way to help? Hell, even an "I can't reproduce this because it seems dependent on the OS/libraries/etc" would provide some modicum of help.

    Or, they sit there completely untouched. Days, even months, pass and no one seems to even acknowledge a bug has been filed. Even worse is when multiple users do a "me too" or you see notices of "bug was closed as duplicate of this one" but no one from the actual project even commented on the original bug. At least change the default priority or something.

    Another peeve of mine are inactive or dead bugs. There will be a flurry of activity and then the bug just sits there, completely untouched for months (except, maybe, the occasional "ping"). The problem with that is the longer you wait to fix or deal with a bug the harder it gets. At least have a timeout that automatically closes them after a period of inactivity, if that is your implicit policy. Even better is what we do here, which is rank all the bugs by priority from 1 to the number of open bugs and move bugs up and down the ranking based on activity. Beyond manually adjusting priority, it also changes based on classification (security always rank highest, FRs from non-whales default to lowest) and activity. You are also expected to claim bugs and make some progress on them by priority and move them around as necessary. At least that tells you what sort of movement is being done.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:05PM (#470308)

    Too much dependencies preventing simply just installing the latest versions of a given software. Granted os updates are free, but a 14 year old linux distro is not like a 14 year old windows (xp) that can still manage to run modern things.

    And then there's the complications of audio routing. I wanted to learn a DAW in linux some time ago. but getting sound output was already too much pain. So i just ditched it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:38PM (#470411)

      Oh Linux audio. Such a great example of kludges on kludges on kludges. OSS, ALSA, aRTs, Phonon, EsounD, JACK, pulseaudio, NAS, NMM, and there is probably some I missed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:24PM (#470701)

      Would have been less painful if they maintained a consistent user interface across OS upgrades. Also knowing that you're OS will soon be obsolete in a few years, and OS upgrades mean something might be broken or you might have to start from scratch again with your customizations is somewhat discouraging.

      The system audio confusion hell is a pity, given that there appears to be more better free DAWs for Linux than for Windows. Makes me wonder how the developers keep up with so many audio standards.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:48PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:48PM (#470344) Journal

    In particular, I'd like to be able to run some applications that depend on Linux version 2.2 (approx. ... around 1999) without dropping into qemu. I think that for my particular problem the problem was with some glibc changes, though I never bothered to find out the details, since virtualization was the only answer. It's got its points, but it's quite a bother. I'd rather be able to run it as easily as wine, though ideally with a lot better reliability.

    An attached problem is that when I'm running in virtualization, either the virtual environment must not have sound, or there must be NO sounds from the base system...otherwise I get horrendous static.

    Another attached problem is making is feasible to save files from the virtualized environment in a way that can be read from the underlying environment.

    Now just how much of this is strictly Linux is a question. You could claim that it's all properly the domain of, say, qemu. But it's a problem in the Linux environment.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:42PM (#470414)

      For one of your problems, as you mentioned using QEMU I assume you also use KVM: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/9p_virtio [linux-kvm.org]

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:40AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:40AM (#470583) Homepage Journal

      Generally the problem is library skew. It's possible to side-by-side install older ABIs and get them all to work if you're dedicated (I've managed to get a.out binaries going on Ubuntu 14.04 as a shit and giggles moment).

      Easiest thing to do is if you're running a debian derivative is simply debootstrap a release from that era. Something like "debootstrap --arch i386 potato /my-chroot-path http://archive.debian.org/debian/" [debian.org] should do the trick.

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:01PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:01PM (#470826) Journal

        That was definitely the problem. (I'm running, I think, Red Hat 5.2 in the virtualized environment.) But the request was for "what would make Linux better to use", and for me that's the problem...and by now the only problem, though I have a few MSWind95 games I'd like to play, I've never felt the need sufficiently to get the virtualization working...but wine doesn't really handle them.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:47PM (#470379)

    I have been on Linux for almost a decade - various flavours, mostly Ubuntu and Mint. With the last "big" upgrade I found some new-kids-on-the-block devs have "decided" to make apps more "flat". Let me pick on just one glaring example. gThumb, which was getting close to being a Swiss Army Knife equivalent for Irfanview, suddenly behaves stupid, mouse-click responses are different and no longer per gThumb's own documentation.

    Sadly gThumb is not alone - gEdit and other G-tools are all affected. Are we seeing another Gnome3 disaster and users-devs disconnect? Look, I will never go back to Windows in any shape form or manner, nor allow an Apple into my home, ever. But I can distro-hop if I have to. The problem is when these kiddies get influenced by the "latest design fashion" and recode perfectly working applications into the ground. You have to wonder if these devs ever actually use their own applications, because for those of us who rely on them daily for workflow, many programs are now nearly unusable. This could kill Linux. Hey devs, stop doing MS's sabotage for them, improve, don't degrade.

    This is my view, my gripes, my world. Linux usability was super until Ubuntu 16.10 / Mint 18.0 came along. It now has a case of acute regression and this must be addressed. Problem is "they" decide, and much like MS forcing Win10 down your gullet, they shove their latest G-nome idiocy on users. And unlike MS/Apple, you cannot FIRE them!

  • (Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:49PM

    by Veyrdite (6386) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:49PM (#470483)

    Program names - user vs developer expectations

    What is the purpose of a program name? Take evince for example. It's a PDF viewer that had its interface completely replaced by something else. The only similarity new version had was that it was a PDF viewer -- but so are zathura, xpdf, katarakt, epdfview and the like -- so why was it called by the same name as the old program? And why does it being called the same name mean that everyone's installation of it had to be replaced with this new program?

    "But they're not different -- they both have the same name!"

    The reason is that users have a different understanding to what names mean to the developers. Developers see a name and a project as something they own. Users see it as a particular implementation. Package maintainers will follow whatever naming system the devs do, except in very rare circumstances.

    There is no correct answer, but from my perspective there is nothing good about finding applications replaced on my system with different ones that go by the same name. I fear the day my Seamonkey/Firefox install will be replaced by Chrome after an update, but of course it would still be called Seamonkey/Firefox, so what am I complaining about?

    Oh wait, that probably is going to happen.

    I'd love to see distros maintain different versions of packages. Not small releases. Major ones. Ones large enough that if they were assigned a different name then package maintainers would automatically maintain them as a separate package without thought or question. evince-gtk2 and evince-gtk3, for example. Thankfully the MATE project has done this, but you have to know about them or their new package names (which I am sure most people are not aware of).

    Other examples of where I've been bitten by 'same name different program': file-roller (GNOME extraction utility), canto (console feed reader) and thunar (file manager). Does anyone here have similar stories?

    GTK file open/save dialogs

    The GTK2 file open/save dialog is easily my favorite file/save dialog ever. It's resizable, allows keyboard navigation and has a bookmarking system. But it and its successor are not without complaints.

    (1) Choosing a folder in the folder select (not file select) dialog is difficult . Sometimes the 'OK' button has been transiently renamed to 'Open' because you accidentally selected a folder in the file list view. How do you deselect it?

    Good question.

    For years I closed the dialog and started again, or tried to navigate up folders and then back down again. It turns out the solution is to click into the path bar so that your cursor flashes there, then click on 'OK'. Makes sense, right?

    (2) The new gtk3 dialog box "searches" as you type. Traditionally (gtk2) this would navigate you around much like a console experience. You type 'avo' and a folder called 'avocado' would be selected. You can hit enter on your keyboard to enter it. I liked this, it was a very fast way to navigate.

    Now when you type, it does a full search of either the current folder or your entire home folder. It's slow and I'm sure it makes sense for many people, but it should be a labelled 'search' function or box, not just happen when you try to type. Both systems are valid, but making people use one over the other is silly, and searches in every other piece of software are explicity named so with their own GUI elements.

    (3) Adding/removing bookmarks by drag and drop in gtk2filechooser. They always seem to end up in the wrong spot, different to where you dragged them. Am I the only person in the last ten years that has ever used this functionality?

    Proliferation of dependencies and services: paper, soft and hard

    Hmm, my latest update has yet again installed adwaita-icon-theme and replaced my mouse cursor. Why, which package requires it this time?

    Today's culprit: 'darktable'. But, as it turns out, if you forcefully uninstall adwaita-icon-theme, darktable runs just fine. It didn't have any sort of dependency on it. Just one on paper.

    Rather than fighting my package manager, I uninstalled darktable and then logged out and back in again.

    Another favorite of mine is dbus. It likes to start and then just hang around. How many other programs do that? Why does dbus get special permissions to be always hanging around and running on people's computers? How can I get the application I write to do this on everyone's computer? I'd love to know, lots of money and brand presence to be made here.

    As an experiment I replaced dbus-launch and dbus-daemon with a couple of stub shell scripts. I used my computer for a week and only one thing had an issue (admittedly I'm not in a DE): the GIMP. It could not longer communicate between running copies, so if you opened an image file with the gimp whilst another copy was running, you would end up with two copies. I'm amazed. How many lines of code are in dbus, just to be used for something like this? Sureley there is a more efficient way.

    Separation of users and developers

    Whenever I see devs putting people into categories like 'developers' or 'users' it's often accompanying their reason for certain project changes.

    In reality 'users' and 'developers' are two extremely vast and diverse groups. And they overlap. We're talking about humans, not robots. If you take a room full of them them then only a small proportion will fit into the 'user' and 'developer' categories that you imagine, but if you ask them what they think they are you will get a myriad of answers.

    What is the truth? There is no such thing as a 'user' or a 'developer'. There are only people, and people sometimes act a bit like what you call a 'user' and sometimes a bit like what you call a 'developer', but mostly everything else and in between.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:14AM (#470623)

      dbus is an inter-application messaging service. Some programs never use it and some over use it. As a service, it auto-starts when the computer boots up like every other service. To stop it, simply edit your service settings. To have your program do the same thing, add it as a service. Windows and every OS I know of has services too.

  • (Score: 1) by Ramze on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:16AM

    by Ramze (6029) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:16AM (#470608)

    Preface for the TL/DR crowd: No focus on individual, desktop/laptop/gaming/media/ use. Lack of marketing, lack of support from major hardware and software developers for individual users, lack of caring about features the general public wants, fragmentation of design, and no general app store for purchasing supported, well-designed apps for personal use. (This last one is why Android is so popular -- one store where people can get all their apps free or purchased. I know we have "repositories," but those have dependency hells and are NOT all the same.)

    My experience with Linux flaws

    Linux is largely developed for business consumers for their paid support. REDHAT especially, but Ubuntu also. Because it is GPL'd, there's little reason for anyone else to pay for it or its support, and there's little reason for developers to care for the people who aren't paying for it. This means there's no market incentive to cater to their needs. Android was created to serve Java-style applets on smartphones to compete with Apple's Iphone. Google's incentive for using Android is to make money from apps in the store and in data-mining people's personal info for better marketing... without having to pay anyone other than their own developers for the OS. Linux is successful in Android, but also inside of so much other hardware. Why? Because it's essentially free to use and saves those companies a significant cost. So, why does it suck on the Desktop? Well, Windows isn't very expensive relative to the cost of PC hardware, and it is already filling that niche. It costs more for PC manufacturers to install Linux instead of Windows -- because it's a support nightmare. Or, they can sell the hardware without an OS and let you deal with it, but their profit off of that is slim to nothing... especially when they're paid to put crapware on your PC before you buy it. Why would most people want to wipe a perfectly good Windows OS off of their laptop and pray that Linux Distro X is going to support their webcam, trackpad, randomhardware Z, etc.

    OK, specifics about what isn't "there yet": (My experience is mostly with Ubuntu and its derivatives, Red Had, SUSE, Arch, and a few others... but especially Ubuntu)

    Hardware -- Hardware has come a long way, but graphics drivers are still a huge issue... even in virtual machines! There's little to no direct support from card makers or chip makers, and the open-source drivers are lacking compared to the binary blobs. In most tests, OpenGL is still better on Windows than Linux. Hopefully Vulkan and Mir/Wayland will help narrow the gap

    Software -- very little polished, user-ready, supported by phone software and almost no mainstream proprietary cross-platform non-free software (including games, office productivity suites, database interfaces, CAD tools, etc.). (It MUST be cross-platform to work with the other 95% of the install base!) I know, yay... it's all free, but no. I can't get production non-free software easily on Linux... and most of the exceptions are run through Wine which is just another way of saying "it's not supported, but you can try it." Why won't developers write for Desktop Linux? (as opposed to server Linux) Partially because they see it as a freebie Desktop OS, and anyone running it likely has an open-source free software movement mentality and wouldn't bother to purchase anything if they made it, but mostly because it has low market share, so it's not cost-effective to support it. Chrome, Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice make a Linux machine VERY usable for everyday tasks... but, what about my friend that wants to use AutoCAD's model studio for their course work? She has to either try an open-source alternative that isn't fully compatible, run what she has in Wine (if it will work), run Windows in a VM which is dog slow for GPU-intense 3D rendering, or reboot into Windows. 3 of those 4 solutions involve running or emulating a different OS. Tons of other niche programs are Windows and/or Mac only. That means Linux is relegated to a limited role for desktop/laptop use which is only slightly more useful than a Chromebook. (Chromebooks are designed to embrace this limited role, not because people asked for it, but because Google knew it couldn't support its own Linux distro, and its functionality ties well into their user tracking and services model.) STEAM/VALVE has recognized it can create a niche gaming machine/OS from linux, but again -- no dice with the full OS support.

    OS under the hood -- ok, so we've talked about drivers (especially graphics drivers), but also Xwindows is ancient -- Mir and Wayland are potential fixes for issues with screen tearing and security of various open applications. SystemD is a band-aid to a bigger issue... users and their typical workflow are not a priority to the design of Linux. Want to plug in and unplug various USB devices and switch between audio streams? Why do I have to manually click to turn my ethernet connection ON when I plug in an ethernet cable? Why does Windows know what to do, but Linux doesn't? How about just the way Linux chooses to cache data? Windows will intelligently cache recently used programs into RAM so they can be re-opened quickly, but my understanding is that Linux will often wipe its cache and replace it with stupid things -- like if you copied a bunch of files from HOME to USB FLASH... the cache is now full of those files instead of whatever you were most recently working on. Architecture -- fragmentation of where things should go, fragmentation of package management systems, fragmentation of repositories, and very little in the way of a standard, stable system that absolutely will not change and break an app. Why should devs write anything for that? It's a minefield for breaking things, and a pain to have to re-write for different flavors of linux and support. SNAP packages are supposed to help with this, but the SNAP solution is to bundle everything an app uses together into one big blob to eliminate all dependency issues. A SNAP package can easily be 10 to 20 times the size of a regular download. UBUNTU says its goal is to move to ALL snap packages within the next year. Yay for fewer repository/dependency issues (less work for everyone!), but boo for me if a Linux + Apps setup is now 20 times the size it used to be and every app I add is another 200 to 400 MB.

    GUI -- omg... I swear, I bet people have killed over GUI/Window manager wars. I like Windows XP / Windows 7 look and feel. Others despise it and prefer OSX. Others want to see the world burn and use some crazy new thing -- like Unity. I get that there should be lots of options, but when the OS with the largest market share has a certain look and feel, if you wish to cut into their market share, you need to provide an interface that is THE SAME or BETTER. There's a cost of switching which includes re-training for a new OS. Making it look identical and act identically goes a long way towards helping with that shift. GNOME and KDE forgot this for a while. MATE and Cinnamon were a bit smarter about this. Even if you can make a DE look like Windows, it takes a while to move things around to make it look like that. I think Zorin OS and some others make an effort to get there. Unity is great -- for a tablet.... especially if you like to have everything you do written to a zeigeist log file whether it's to help you with suggestions or alternatively to send your info off to Amazon, Canonical, or wherever to be analyzed and sold to the highest bidder. Anyway... point is -- I agree with the "to each their own for GUIs," but only AFTER there is a standard, agreed upon windows-clone GUI that everyone can use as a beginner to help ease the shift to the new OS. One that looks and behaves exactly like Windows, and perhaps another for OSX (after the windows gui is completed)

    Content Provider Support -- This is kind of a software support issue, but not really. NetFlix supports viewing through Chrome, but not at 1080p like on the Windows 10 Edge browser or Win10 App. Netflix won't work on Firefox on Linux unless you use the USER AGENT SWITCHER to tell it you're using Chrome on Linux instead. Why? It's great that Netflix works on Linux, but it's mostly due to Chrome being cross platform and using HTML5 standards and nothing to do with love for Linux. There is no native Linux Netflix app... but there is an Android one! Why is there no "app store" for such things on Linux like there is on Windows and OSX? Why isn't there an architecture in place for content providers to package an app just for Linux... or maybe a simple Android emulator for Linux to play those apps that already exist in the andriod app store? (all the emulators I saw are memory hogs and don't play ARM compiled apps on amd64 anyway). Why doesn't Time Warner / Charter Cable 's Spectrum website play Live TV under Linux? It works fine under Windows, yet Chrome won't load it under Linux. It loads the interface, but not the video stream. Why aren't these web services using standardized HTML5 encryptions and codecs to where they're browser and OS agnostic? Why is there a Windows 10 Netflix App, but not a Linux Netflix App? One can pass the buck on this, but it's a problem for Linux users, so the blame is with Linux proponents for not marketing to these agents and lobbying for their support.

    BUT, I love Linux!
    I use Linux in VMs and on a desktop as file servers, web servers, and for generic web browsing, local media playing, and Netflix streaming. My setup is usually Ubuntu with Cinnamon, and I love Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, VLC, Apache, virtualbox, and a ton of other programs -- many of which are cross-platform. But, the only reason I'm running Linux on bare metal on one machine instead of in a VM as a test box is because the machine used to run Vista and there was no upgrade path to Windows 10. If I had a Win10 license, you bet It'd be running that instead... because test after test shows the Win10 video card drivers work better than the Linux ones - open source and binary blobs for NVidia. I use the machine mostly for local and streaming media... and H.265 HEVC media is CPU and GPU intensive. Windows just works better on the same hardware. Windows also supports 1080p Netflix through an app and the Edge browser. Windows 10 home license is $120... may as well buy a new laptop that comes with Win10 if I'm going to spend over a hundred dollars... So, Linux is the rational solution for getting the Core 2 Duo low-end GPU machine working for now. Of course, I HOPE that Linux will evolve into a better solution, so I want to get my feet wet now and prepare to move ALL of my families' machines to Linux. But... that won't happen anytime soon. Maybe after Ubuntu is finished moving everything to SNAPs companies will make/support SNAPs if that makes developing for Linux easier. We shall see.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:26PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:26PM (#470757) Journal

    Well...there's fixes and there's "fixes".

    Package management has improved a huge amount since I first started using Linux (Mandrake 9). Wifi too. You can even game on it -- and not just Frozen Bubble. Steam, a Steam controller, and a Linux box makes a better gaming system than any Windows PC or console that I've ever used. And it does that without losing any power -- Linux still handles massive amounts of network traffic far better than Windows; ffmpeg still transcodes video faster than most Windows software; and it still never locks up -- sure, you might crash a program, but my Windows 7 system at work still sometimes requires a hard reboot if the mail client fails.

    On the other hand, you've got the people who think being able to use a terminal is a "problem" that needs to be "fixed". Most software is significantly harder to configure these days, with configuration strewn through a dozen separate files in multiple directories and occasionally binaries. Logfiles...I almost don't even use logs at all on my Linux systems anymore, I've only got useful logs on the BSD ones. I *try* to use them on my Linux systems, but stuff either doesn't log anything or logs in binary formats and refuses to give you the info you need. What I used to solve by reading logs, I now solve by restarting the service in verbose mode and piping the output to a file. And that is NOT an improvement.

    The biggest usability issue in Linux today is the idea that knowing how my software works and what it does is itself a usability issue. Which brings with it a lack of choice -- it used to be that you'd install a package and get a choice of a half dozen different dependencies any of which would provide some necessary service. Now the assumption is that I don't know any better so that choice is made for me.

    It's a great time for people switching from Windows to Linux, but there ARE a lot of downsides for people who figured out a while ago that Linux was powerful and flexible enough to be worth the learning curve. But thankfully the BSDs seem to be making some good progress too...