Why Desktop Linux Sucks and What We can Do About It

[deanjo]

So OSX works with a compatible subset of all available wireless hardware.
So does linux. It's not intended to work for hardware without open-source drivers. (though some 3rd-parties hack together support in proprietary drivers with varying degrees of success).
I don't understand your argument.

Even the fully open wifi chipsets (ralink comes to mind for example) out there still have many regressions and can be somewhat a pain in the ass to get going if ever and often breaks on updates. You will not see however an airport card become useless on a darwin update, and if it was to happen, you would see a fast update to fix the issue. Even 3rd party devices like ralink tend to have their drivers up to snuff on OS X and don't break with the frequency they do on linux.

[deanjo]

Macs can't be compared to linux (or even windows) for hardware support, since official mac hardware & software is provided/supported by the same vendor, while linux is expected to work with everything. Even given that, I really don't understand your argument here. I could equally say "Wifi generally works great across all distros with a fully open source driver stack". And any problem with buggy or non-existent closed source drivers is "a driver issue of the manufacturer".


Have you got any numbers on regressions in updates for Ubuntu (or any other distro) vs. Windows vs. OSX? Because I completely disagree with that last sentence.

I distinctly remember upgrading XP to Vista when the latter was released, and having a heap of hardware trouble. Even my old scanner (Canoscan lide 20) still doesn't work with vista x86_64 (no 64-bit version of the driver). It works perfectly with linux, and has done with all the latest versions since I've had it.

I haven't used nero much, so can't pick on that one

Again, I'm not saying that regressions don't happen in windows or osx. They do happen. Your regression that you are referring to with the XP to Vista is understandable. That was a major overhaul of the OS akin to a Linux 2.4 to Linux 2.6 upgrade of which a lot of stuff was broken in those early 2.6 kernels that worked fine in 2.4. A Win2k to XP upgrade was far less eventful as they for the most part were the same. Windows and OS X do many upgrades to their kernels through the products lifespan. Most of which do not result in breaking core functionality. The same cannot be said even on point releases on linux. This is what the video is more or less referring too. Even though for example Ubuntu 9.04 is what they consider a "major" upgrade the changes to it are relatively small then say a OS X 10.3 to 10.4 release or a XP to Vista release. I often think that linux would be much improved if they decided to draw the line somewhere as to what legacy hardware it supports. I'm not saying completely cut off that hardware from linux use but maybe have a legacy branch of the hardware (seriously do we really need ISA and support for products that have not been made for a better part of a decade in the mainline? Think how much easier maintenance would be without all that legacy code to worry about in the latest release ).

[kraftman]

You can't compare hackintoshes to linux when it comes to compatibility. OS X is designed for a specific set of controlled hardware. Apple does not cater to the hackintosh crowd. It does not develop for that crew so to compare the hackintosh issues is completely invalid. Your trying to compare a products capability using resources it was never intended to be used for. You might as well be trying to adapt a VCR to play through HDMI.

So don't compare preinstaled Macs to not preinstaled Linux distros (they're little like hackintoshes, but support far more hardware and work better).


I don't think legacy hardware support in Linux is something bad. Does core kernel devs care about it?

Even 3rd party devices like ralink tend to have their drivers up to snuff on OS X and don't break with the frequency they do on linux.

Numbers please (if they don't work they don't breake )

[89c51]

what i feel that has a great impact on linux desktop "suckiness" is the lack of some sort of leadership

i don't think there is something like a distribution consortium or whatever that can give "directions" to all the people that contribute to open source desktop

this leads in duplication of many apps, libraries etc and -as a consequence- wasted resources (ie developers) which in Open Source development are extremely valuable

of course noone can force people -especially hobbyists- to work on specific things but i believe something like that would make things better

anyway

[jeffro-tull]

I've been following Bryan for a while. Been listening to the Linux Action Show (and CastaBlasta) for over a year now. I never considered him "THE authority" in my Linux news, but he's never frustrated me as much as he has with this video.

Like others have said, Gstreamer is a pile. With Mplayer and Xine, I can watch 720p on my old AthlonXP rig. Using Gstreamer, I can't even watch DVD's because of so much frame-droppage. I'm all for standardizing on something, but why standardize on a pile of crap? That's not going to make us look any better.

So, yeah, not sure why he rags on Phonon. KDE built an API that works, so that application developers don't have to care about what's going on underneath. And that API hooks into whatever the system has (gstreamer, Xine, Mplayer, Quicktime, Direct Show). I don't see what the problem is.

I don't agree with the packaging concerns. I agree that it's getting kind of ridiculous, but it's not nearly as simple as he makes it sound. I don't think the Gentoo or SourceMage guys will be happy using RPM or deb.

What really pissed me off is his rant about the openSUSE Build Service. I'm not a developer, but I don't doubt that the service isn't perfect. The complaints about having to manually create build scripts for each package are probably perfectly valid. BUT:

1) You only have to do that once per distro package. Any time you need to rebuild, the scripts are still there, and they still work.

2) That situation could change. It's not like Novell brought the OBS online and was like "all right, we're done. It's working and we're not tweaking it again. Ever."

3) He doesn't look at it from a user's perspective. Combine the openSUSE Build Service with software.opensuse.org/search and it's pretty sweet. You can find pretty much anything, your package management system will watch the repos for changes, and you can make your system as bleeding edge as you want in between release cycles.

4) This is the big one. He doesn't compare it to anything. I'm not an Ubuntu user, so I could be wrong on this. But isn't Launchpad (and it's PPA's) fairly similar to the openSUSE Build Service?

All he did was bitch about where the OBS wasn't perfect. No praise for what it does right, no ideas for where it could be improved, no comparison to other, similar services. Just "oh, this is kind of a pain in some respects, write it off as a lost cause".

[Craig73]

what i feel that has a great impact on linux desktop "suckiness" is the lack of some sort of leadership

Well I think there is leadership in various areas, and expressed in various ways, part of which has contributed to the mess we're in, so I would express it more of a lack of cohesive vision as to what Desktop Linux is.

[Craig73]

Like others have said, Gstreamer is a pile....

...

All he did was bitch about where the OBS wasn't perfect. No praise for what it does right, no ideas for where it could be improved, no comparison to other, similar services. Just "oh, this is kind of a pain in some respects, write it off as a lost cause".

You guys seem to contradict yourself
- gstreamer sucks
- phonon is great
- phonon uses gstreamer

What???? (Someone either has facts or opinions wrong because those statements don't align)

And I agree - OBS isn't perfect and is a good direction / even if as a intermediary measure.

That being said - it's a presentation, meant to promote discussion... like what is happening here. Could he have been more graceful - sure - could he have not mentioned any examples - no because that would get him ranged on / just like his choices of examples get ranged on. Nothing pleases finicky FOSS users...

------------------------

The discussion shouldn't be why his examples suck... it should what can we do to improve Desktop Linux. And it has been stated more than once that the multitude of options is painful - and when the "solution" is yet-another-option it can be frustrating (even if it is a quality solution in the making)

[deanjo]

So don't compare preinstaled Macs to not preinstaled Linux distros (they're little like hackintoshes, but support far more hardware and work better).

Have you even been following the Ubuntu 8.04 ---> 9.04 upgrade fiasco on netbooks? Perfect example right there. Stuff used to work, now it doesn't meanwhile systems that meet the minimum requirements of 10.5 still have working wifi out of the box.

[deanjo]

You guys seem to contradict yourself
- gstreamer sucks
- phonon is great
- phonon uses gstreamer

Na I think we take issue with his pointing blame to two totally different aspects of the audio layers in linux. He should have really been pitting xine-lib vs gstreamer instead of gstreamer vs phonon. In which case he is still wrong in which he supports. xine-lib kicks the snot out of gstreamer.

If you actually listen to his comments on OBS it's not so much the service that he has a beef with but the lack of a unified packaging solution for linux which again is not really a OBS issue. Another misdirected rant. He basically wants OBS to have the capability of a reliable "checkinstall" type of scenario where you drop the source in and it creates a valid package.

[kraftman]

Have you even been following the Ubuntu 8.04 ---> 9.04 upgrade fiasco on netbooks? Perfect example right there. Stuff used to work, now it doesn't meanwhile systems that meet the minimum requirements of 10.5 still have working wifi out of the box.

You said before

Again, I'm not saying that regressions don't happen in windows or osx. They do happen.

So what's the point in your response? I can give you examples where Macos don't work after upgrade. I said compare preinstaled Linux distros to Macoses. Did you forget about Macos version of Blue Screen of Death? Why wifi should stop working on Macs if it's suited for them?