Major Linux Problems on the Desktop or Why Linux is not (yet) Ready for the Desktop, 2016 edition

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by lotuseclat79, Dec 30, 2015.

  1. lotuseclat79

    lotuseclat79 Registered Member

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    Major Linux Problems on the Desktop or Why Linux is not (yet) Ready for the Desktop,
    2016 edition


    -- Tom
     
  2. fblais

    fblais Registered Member

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    Great reading, thanks!
     
  3. marzametal

    marzametal Registered Member

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  4. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    If by "most recent" you mean "more than a year and a half old", then yes. Nowadays Radeon drivers are pretty darn good!

    Wrong. It is, though not completely. Boinc client already supports it, and there are a few developers working on OpenSource OpenCL ATM.

    Well, duh??

    And all blame goes to NVIDIA/AMD.

    Kernel developers must NOT bend themselves to make proprietary driver developers happy. NVIDIA/AMD must work with what Linux (the Kernel) has to offer, not the other way around.

    That really depends on the distro, I think. Many make it easy to install and configure proprietary drivers, much like on Windows.

    I never had problems with pulse+alsa with Ardour, Audacity, Hydrogen, etc. I'm nearly certain that these problems listed happen because of poorly coded programs, not from the Linux side of things.

    Yup. Too many audio thingies, we need less standards.

    People that need old and unmaintained apps need to hire developers to make that work. It's how the world works, sometimes.

    This is a sad reality. Wayland should be getting more support than what currently is there. If only Canonical would actually do some work for the Linux community and stop Mir altogether.

    This has it's advantages. For example, a malware that worked on Windows 95 might just as well work on Windows 10. Microsoft's backwards compatibility is both a good and a bad thing at the same time, and the same can be said for Linux's not-so-backwards-compatible: a malware that works on Ubuntu 12.10 might not work on Ubuntu 13.04 or whenever they decide to change all their libraries again.

    Can anyone confirm this?

    Yes it does. At least for me, I neve had problems, even since 2012 when VALVe ported a few games to Linux.

    So it's not a problem.

    Whoa, I just realized the size of this article. I'm not going to refute all poits that might be wrong.

    My final word: It's not a well made article, in a way that it only points the flaws. Brian Lunduke, on the other hand, makes good points about the flaws in "Linux" (the general term that everybody uses) but he also points out the solutions to these problems.
     
  5. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    I read this article a few days ago following a link from the same author's article about Windows 10. He has a lot of interesting things to say but really doesn't like anything in the world of OSes.

    In 2006, I felt that way about Linux, at least for Laptops due to poor ACPI implementation, but these days that has changed and I find Linux to be more than adequate for desktop use and, for any given system, there is going to be at least one Linux desktop distro that will work with it, if not many. I've been quite impressed with how well most of the Linux distros I've tried have worked after not using Linux these last 10 years. I've got 2 computers triple booting Windows 7, Windows 10 and Linux. I've had more driver issues with the Windows 10 update than either Ubuntu or Mint and both outperform Windows in the use of system resources, security and general responsiveness. Windows is a bad habit like smoking and drinking and for those of us who have used it for many years, just as hard to give up as cigarettes and alcohol.
     
  6. wat0114

    wat0114 Registered Member

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    From the article:

    This has been a continual nightmare for me on my one dual-boot Windows/Linux machine, lately with recent Manjaro release obliterating the mbr after a system update. Thank goodness for backup images with the option to restore the mbr.
     
  7. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    If I may suggest.

    Backing up and restoring the mbr is quite easy and you don't need a full disk image for that, if I understand you correctly.

    First, let's assume the mbr you want to backup is located at "sda". You back it up:
    # dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/your-user/mbr bs=512 count=1

    Then to restore it:
    # dd if=/home/your-user/mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

    More: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MBR#Backup_and_restoration

    I do this everytime and it works like a charm, and it only takes 512 bytes of data and 10 seconds to do. One of the payware aircraft I have for the flight simulator X-Plane requires activation, and the activation checks my MBR checksum to see if I'm still me. So far I had no problem restoring my old MBR.

    Remember: The MBR contains the partition table, so if you edit the partitions and later restore an older MBR that doesn't have those changes, you won't be able to boot until you restore the correct MBR.
     
  8. dogbite

    dogbite Registered Member

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    Going to the link of the first post I get the attached warning. Is this normal?
     

    Attached Files:

  9. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    I generally install Grub in the Linux system partition rather than the mbr. Even though it isn't recommended and requires the --force option in some distros like Ubuntu. That limits any update problems to the Linux partition. I generally do symmetrical multibooting where Windows can boot Linux and Linux can boot Windows and whatever partition is set active does the booting.

    I use the dd command as Amarildojr showed to make a copy of the Linux boot sector which is loaded by the Windows boot loader to boot Linux from Windows. You can also use it to backup the mbr, install grub in the mbr, make a copy of the mbr with grub installed and then restore the original mbr. You then can load the grub mbr in the Windows boot loader to boot Linux.
     
  10. lodore

    lodore Registered Member

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    the webpage was just blocked by eset.

    I do think that one of the problems with linux is also what makes it what it is.

    it is nice that people can create their own distro and different parts but I feel that some of the forks are really not needed as they are almost the same.
     
  11. inka

    inka Registered Member

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    For me, that point of criticism in the article rings true.
    Case in point: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8618
    Can't blame "a poorly coded program(s)" here. Far too many pitfalls and gotchas exist; an application developer can't reasonably expect that his application's sound output "will just work" consistently across the userbase, even if all users have a (one, xfce in this case) specific desktop environment.
     
  12. inka

    inka Registered Member

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    While skimming the article, I quickly realized that I've previously visited that page.
    I'm not motivated to critique/rank the points he covered. Instead, I just appreciate that he's raising awareness, he's conveying what he percieves to be significant "pain points" and thereby provoking discussion and, hopefully, positive changes.
     
  13. wat0114

    wat0114 Registered Member

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    @MisterB and @amarildojr,

    thanks for the tips. I'll probably just end up installing GRUB to the Linux system partition instead, as I've done in years past. The backup option of the mbr looks good, too. Thanks again to both of you!
     
  14. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    You're welcome! :D Have a nice night and a HNY.
     
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