Here's a somewhat philosophical article slash rant and a mother-of-all-lists of critical quality and professionalism problems in the Linux desktop user experience space, focusing on the boot sequence, hardware auto detection, media and language support, security, and more. Have fun. http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-more-professional-the-list.html Cheers, Mrk
Interesting article. I've always wished that Linux in general was as polished as Mac OS. It would attract so many more people I think.. But I'm sure that takes $$$ and a lot of dev time.
openSUSE doesn't display any messages, so does Ubuntu. At least for me. For a newbie, sure IMO Messages should only appear if they contain "error" of "failure". Agreed. Personally I like to actually install the OS in order to test it to it's full capacity, because using Live systems is never going to replicate actual disk usage, performance, and etc. And all distros I tested import configuration files from /home, so no problem there. Which is, in all honesty, their own problem. Linux doesn't have to bend itself because of proprietary multimedia codecs, or any proprietary software for that matter. Admittedly, codecs were a problem in openSUSE 13.2 and 42.1, but not anymore. As long as you install them from the Packman repo and actually know what to install (which isn't hard to find), they'll always work. Agreed. openSUSE could, upon finishing the installation or booting the livecd, ask if we want to add the Packman repo and to install all necessary codecs. Agreed. It seems Linux still have the mentality that everyone needs to be a geek to use it, and the worse part is that not many distros actually take care of these things for them. Actually, this kind of functionality on Windows has never worked for me. Windows can pretend it's looking for a solution to my problem all night, but at the end it will either not find the solution at all, or find a wrong solution. So these "smart" helpers, at least for me, are actually very dumb. I do understand we have a serious issue when it comes to developers not fixing all problems, but I also understand they're not my bitch. They don't owe me anything, they don't work for me, they don't have to care about my problems. If that was Microsoft, you could expect to demand a solution in the next update, but not on Linux. Which, sadly, won't happen anytime soon in Linux, unless people actually donate a cra* ton of money to developers. I disagree, because if something malicious makes a firewall call that doesn't get the attention of the user and the firewall just "allows", then it's very likely that the user's work can be compromised entirely. Trading a "yes" button for the integrity of the OS is trivial, be it on Linux or Windows (using UAC). "Just let the user do whatever the hell he/she wants" is actually a Windowsy mindset that has been proven to be insecure at it's core. It just doesn't work. Yes, many times. According to your experience, that is. But just because a distro has SEL or AppArmor doesn't mean the users will have problems with them. Take Ubuntu and openSUSE as examples. And if the user doesn't know how to configure them on a more advanced distro, than this distro isn't for this user, at least not until this user learn more. I completely agree. But note that most distros don't have a problem with Pulse or ALSA. Pulseaudio was NASTY back in the day, but now it actually works beautifully. Not perfectly, but not bad either. Yes. I say this every time I talk about how Linux does things. In most ways Linux is awesome and can't be beaten ; on other ways, developers still can't cooperate to unite forces and create good things. I guess that's one thing we lose with our "Freedom" to do whatever we want with the code. In parts, yes. The systemd guys are stepping up to the old-fashioned UNIX way of doing things and are actually making Linux better, so is VALVe with their SteamOS. I confess, though, that I'm afraid of the sheer power systemd has; it's become too big, too many funcionalities, and things are too dependent on it.
Great article ! Just during the last few days when I bought new hardware,adapters,etc I had to think/complain about a few of the things your article points out. For other points I already complained when I started using (Arch)Linux. One thing I would add though: Microsoft Office is a must have for professional usage.
Not really. Nothing else is FULLY compatible with MS Office. Yes it might be compatible with MS Office somewhat, but you don't want to use anything else other than MS Office in your work, considering the trouble caused by format change in alternative office suite. I tried Kingsoft WPS office, Softmaker Office, Libreoffice, etc. They all can open and read and edit MS Office document, but unfortunately, the format of the original MS Office document were all messed up afterwards. Our best bet on Linux is to use MS Office Online; or use a virtual machine with Windows 7/SP1 running MS Office 2013/2016.
