The Biggest Problem For A Linux PC Vendor

[asdx]

There are always badly written games and applications which don't work/can't be installed on Win7. But most (>75%) others still work. Even DirectX 6.0 games. From 1998. A shocker, right? Try running any binary game from that time under a modern Linux distro. Bad luck, huh?

I'm actually glad that Linux does not try to support every legacy app from 1995, I can't imagine how bloated and slow the system would get if it did. I mean, we probably would have a slow and bloated system with lots of legacy cruft underneath, similar to what Windows is today, but I'm glad we don't.

Instead, run your legacy app in a VM or upgrade your programs to the new API, so you don't get a crappy/bloated/slow system as the host OS with lots of legacy cruft underneath.

Heck, this is the reason we should drop X11 already and move to Wayland.

[uid313]

What kind of excuse is that?

What about desktop computers that doesn't have Optimus?
What about laptops without discreet graphics (AMD Fusion APU, Intel Sandy Bridge)?

Just offer the laptop on both Windows and Linux. If the user needs optimus or any other technology not offered by Linux, then they can get it with Windows instead.
Then at least people have a choice.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

You failed to spot the word "proper".

For Linux PC vendor who want to ship laptop with hybrid graphics this days there is no other option except Radeon.

Proprietary NVIDIA/AMD graphics drivers don't support KMS/VirtualFB and lag in features implementation (proper and full Randr support

Where is Catalyst and nVidia Rander support is not full? Tell me right now.

Unlike in Windows, sound in Linux often doesn't work for dozens of applications. And I don't want to Google why this or that application is muted. It's a major f* up. Fire up Quake 2 binaries under Linux. Can you hear anything? No. So, shut the f* up.

Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-fuck-blah.
Sound may be buggy in Windows too, especially in professional applications and with drivers for professional hardware (for example Linux drivers for E-Mu series is better - check e-mu threads on ixbt yourself).

Nothing is yet resolved.

Blah-blah. I check this myself few months ago and this bug is actually resolved.
So now you will prove your words.

Speak for yourself. I can stand for everything that's written there.

No, you can't, and I just prove it on three examples what I give.

it's not a place for pesky trolling

Why you still here then?

[Adarion]

Poor open-source drivers? ...
... none of these ...
... it all comes down to one feature at this time: NVIDIA Optimus.
...Under Linux, the level of NVIDIA Optimus support is a shit-wreck.

Ehm. Driver situation, none of these ... but then drivers for NV Optimus driver support doesn't work and that's the problem.
Huh?

Anyway. (regardless of me being a fan of "the other company") Who intends to use that Nvidia crap? Sorry but actually NV fooled especially the notebook vendors for years with their faulty chips (knowingly!) and now they present tech that doesn't have proper system wide support? Hell, why use that stuff? Just give NV the boot until they wake up and come with a better offer. Nvidia doesn't want to play with Tux so leave them alone. They can't leave it all to the nouveau devs to reverse engineer over 8 years another generation of chips.

[Tetractys]

I want to share my experience:

ASUS U36SD - i7 - GEForce GT520M
Xubuntu 64bit - 12.04
wine 1.5.3

bumblebee last version via PPA.

All this to say i can play Eve Online via bumblebee(optirun) -> wine perfectly. This is the command (i report it so everybody can see the complexity of the low level software activations that can run for hours very smoothly):

$ optirun wine explorer /desktop=EvE-Tranquility,1366x728 "C:\\Program Files\\CCP\\EVE\\eve.exe"

i can completely survive with optimus and the good work of bumblebee guys.

[Kano]

Pure Q1 was without opengl, do you really want to play those or a newer engine

[allquixotic]

Just Optimus?

Hell, no, Linux on the whole is a shit-wreck.

Even though this says it's the 2012 version, I think a tremendous number of these problems are already solved or are no longer applicable, for all intents and purposes. In other words they shouldn't even be "green"; they shouldn't be on the list at all.

1. Old sound apps -> In almost all cases, the response should be, "Who cares? Stop using them! Move on to something else!" If they're proprietary, time to ditch them! If they're open source, ask around if someone can help port the code to libpulse. If you will physically die or lose hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in revenue without them, then it's worth your time to install OSS Proxy, which uses Character Device in Userspace (CUSE) to provide a userspace implementation of /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer which re-routes the audio to pulseaudio. If you can't be bothered to follow instructions that take you 5 or 10 minutes to complete, when the benefit is that you won't die or you'll not lose hundreds of thousands of dollars then you have no business using a computer in the first place. For the remaining 999,999 / 1,000,000 users who don't need old sound apps, this bullet point is completely irrelevant and for historical purposes only.

2. Bug 12309 -- IMHO this is totally resolved, I haven't had this problem for years. I remember when I had it, and it was awful, but it's been fixed since at LEAST 2009 if I recall correctly. To the maintainer of that website: Stop drudging up old problems that only 0.0000001% of the people (if any) still have, and calling them "big problems" or reasons why Linux isn't ready. Every OS has its niggling flaws, but this is HARDLY a showstopper when almost no one experiences this anymore (the cgroup scheduling work largely fixed this; have you tried make -j40 while surfing the web lately? Yeah, it works fine with zero lag. So STFU.) Also, the site says "under some circumstances GUI becomes unresponsive". Well yeah, no shit sherlock. Show me an operating system with a GUI that has ever been made which is physically incapable of becoming "slow and unresponsive" under "some circumstances". EVERY algorithm, EVERY finite resource has corner cases where it will be pathetically slow and inefficient. It's the nature of the beast. For every slow case that I've seen on Linux, I can point out a dozen of them on each of the other major operating systems.

3. "Linux security/permissions management is a bloody mess: PAM, SeLinux, Udev, HAL (replaced with udisk/upower/libudev), PolicyKit, ConsoleKit and usual Unix permission (/etc/passwd, /etc/group) all have their separate incompatible permissions management systems spread all over the file system. Quite often people cannot use their digital devices unless they switch to a super user." This is not practically a problem on modern distros. The only time you get tangled up in the security mess is if you go dicking around with it, break something and have to figure out how to fix it. If you don't mess with it, you'll be fine. BTW, you can unleash similarly awful problems on Windows if you randomly change registry settings or mess with file ACLs or disable services or...

There are some points on that list which I totally agree with, but they are few:

1. No high quality open source NVIDIA and AMD drivers - Yep, exactly. This is the biggest one for me. By "high quality" I mean every piece of the GPU works, all of its acceleration capabilities are unlocked and integrated into the OpenGL and OpenCL runtimes, and typical workloads can utilize a large percentage of the available compute / rendering power.

2. The complete OpenGL stack cannot be legally implemented in/imported into Linux because many OpenGL features (like S3TC texture compression and floating point textures) are patented. -- Yep, exactly. This isn't our fault at all, but it is a problem we have to deal with.

3. Incomplete or missing support for many power saving features modern laptops employ (like e.g. PCIe ASPM, proper video decoding acceleration, deep power saving states, etc.) thus under Linux you won't get the same battery life as under Windows or MacOS and you laptop will run a lot hotter. -- Yep, exactly.

4. "No unified... blah blah" (related to distros) -- Yep, exactly.

5. "A very bad backwards and forward compatibility." -- A problem we can and should address!


Overall that list has a few cherry-picked valid points, but I don't think any of them are nearly as relevant as the fact that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because no one knows about it. Its lack of popularity / the public's lack of awareness (or the general perception that "Linux is hard to use") is its major reason for low adoption rates. Basically, you have to be known to be known -- you have to have money to make money -- it's one of those chicken and the egg / catch 22 problems. The majority naturally tends to remain the majority, and the minority naturally tends to remain the minority, simply because word of mouth and human nature's "monkey see monkey do" tendencies prevent us from thinking outside the box.

[pingufunkybeat]

1. Old sound apps -> In almost all cases, the response should be, "Who cares? Stop using them! Move on to something else!" If they're proprietary, time to ditch them! If they're open source, ask around if someone can help port the code to libpulse.

Either that, or uninstall pulseaudio.

Whichever is easier.

[Kano]

Well pa is not that bad when you need oss support, then you can use "padsp app". Often apps ship with a very old openal lib, in many cases not with the default name. You can compile a new one or symlink and you hear something. That's usally better than using padsp. Of course you need a 32 bit lib for 32 bit apps...

[crazycheese]

1) This tiny webpage has nothing to do with this SLOR mess.

Aha, good, but the problem is - it looks like SLOR mess. Sorry, but these are words from someone who never saw you page. It has something with quality of information there.

2) Would this page look more respectable if its author afforded a second level .com domain? Hardly so. Do you want to pay for it? Hell, no. So stop pointing to petty details which have nothing to do with the fact that ...

Yes, a bit. But it is more a combination. Lets see:

Cheap spam-host + wrong provocative content + SLOR style.

It combines.

3) if Linux cannot run the hardware for which you've shelled out your hard earned dough, will it fucking matter for its target audience? F*, no. "Linux doesn't work", will say a punter and he's right, because the Average Joe just won't give a flying f* who's to blame for this ugly snafu.

TRY HARD to understand this for the last time. I even write it in bigger letters.

BECAUSE COMPANY REFUSES TO SUPPORT ITS DEVICE ON LINUX, DOES NOT MEAN LINUX IS NOT CAPABLE OF RUNNING IT.
IT MEANS - A COMPANY IS NOT CAPABLE TO SUPPORT LINUX. IT IS PROBLEM OF THE COMPANY, NOT OF LINUX.

Think: Windows Does Not Write Drivers!!! Guess who does it for them? Following your logic, WINDOWS IS NOT CAPABLE TO USE ANY DEVICE!

At this point I'm ceasing my presence in this thread because it has drifted in the direction I'm not interested to discuss.

Well, feel free to come back and comment. Btw, which "direction"? Direction that I explained above?

Quake 2, oh, sh*t! even the original Quake 1 binaries work just fine under Win7. But that's beside the point. I'm not going to argue with the people who don't really use the computer.

Oh, sh*t, I haven´t commented on this one.
Quake 1 RUNS perfectly on DarkPlaces! And how it runs! And btw, DarkPlaces runs Quake1 on Loose7! Opensource ftw?!

I'm done with trolls.

So, you correct or remove your trolling webpage?