Thread: "Major Linux Problems on the Desktop"

Found this on Slashdot:
Main Linux problems on the desktop, 2016 edition

Not wanting to start a flame war or anything, but just wondering what people here have come across in terms of problems with Linux.

I've switched back and forth between Linux and Windows as my "main" OS several times. Longest stint on Linux was probably 3 years. Now I have Win 7 on my desktop with Lubuntu on VMware. I'd be all Linux if not for Steam games.

Most of the grievances listed are real, but it's a list of user-visible symptoms, not of the root causes.

I'm half tempted to go on a rant here, but it'd be a waste. There are two root causes for these issues: one is the lack of resources (or the unwillingness to commit resources to development), and the relatively low intelligence of even the smartest human.

Based on their resource use, the average desktop user and the average software developer do not want a robust and efficient desktop system, they want flashy, easy-to-sell bling, and move on. It's not just software, either. It's pervasive across most human cultures.

Earlier, systems were simple enough so that a single dedicated person could create one by themselves. Now, we're way beyond that point, and require the cooperation of a group of people to build any of the really interesting stuff, including Linux subsystems. Unfortunately, those dedicated persons are rare, and for one reason or another, they tend to not be the most social sort, so getting even a handful of well-above-average developers to work on a single project is in itself a huge task. That requires more resources than most are willing to spend. Thus, the maximum quality of the systems we can produce is suffering.

Fortunately, servers and computing platforms are not as severely afflicted as desktop systems, because there the resource usage better matches the actual needs. The quality is extremely poor compared to what we are (theoretically) capable of, but it is much better than on the desktop. (Just compare display drivers to RAID/SAS/iSCSI distributed storage drivers, for example.)

More importantly, there are much, much fewer software patents affecting the development of the server side and high-performance computing nodes. It would be really eye-opening, and funny in my opinion, to compare the software quality versus resources used for development on server/hpc to those used on desktop software.

I, myself, am a Linux user, because I have the resources to mold it to my needs, much more so than any other OS. I don't know of any better reason to select the OS one should use, even if the choice ends up being something other than Linux.

I've switched fully to Linux maybe a year (thereabouts) ago, though it feels way, way longer. Definitely took some getting used to at first, because of the common problem of things not always working out of the box. I've recently upgraded my Windows 7 to 10 to get that free upgrade, since it sits idly anyway. The rumors are true, 10's UI is ........e compared to 7; don't be tempted! Makes me doubly glad I moved away from it.

After trying various distros and desktop environments, I've returned to Xubuntu (Ubuntu for XFCE) and it really hits the sweet spot in almost every way for me. XFCE is lightweight and easy to customize and it's one of the few remaining "classic" desktops that the mainstream so desperately tries to get away from. The advantage of having Ubuntu under the hood is that the huge user and developer base will iron out most issues before they affect you, and fix them fast if they do. So ideological considerations aside, I would recommend it as the default for the common user.

Regarding DEs, LXDE is similar to XFCE in most regards, but seemed unpolished in comparison. KDE goes against universal UI principles, e.g. double clicks and right-clicks don't behave as expected. Who has a workflow that justifies breaking with the norm like this? Garbage. GNOME3 also desperately tries to innovate and reinvent, but I have to admit the whole environment has a very polished, integrated feel to it. The font rendering is perfect, OSX level. Diverging from proven methods makes it not my cup of tea, but what they're doing, they're doing really well imo. Look at this teaser, going all Apple/hipster.

Anyway, I think overall the article isn't wrong - there are tons of potential issues and the more niche your setup, the less help you can expect. I experience none of these though. At the same time, the author is exaggerating and several of the items on that list will have a short shelf life. I suspect that once Wayland and Vulkan take a foothold, many of the graphics-related problems will disappear. It should also make porting video games easier. Recently Mozilla has finally added full support for Media Source Extensions in Firefox (not a fan of Chromium myself), letting people enjoy both MP4 and WEBM video on YouTube natively without Flash Player; small stuff like that can add up for some users, and you can't blame 'em if they switch to something that "just works".

Overall, I see Linux on a clear upward trajectory, with some big changes right around the corner. OSX doesn't seem to get better (it shouldn't try to) and Windows is headed full throttle towards disaster, unless something drastic happens.

edit: The board censors words? I had no idea! Never talked much beyond code I guess.

Originally Posted by Guest

I've recently upgraded my Windows 7 to 10 to get that free upgrade, since it sits idly anyway. The rumors are true, 10's UI is ........e compared to 7; don't be tempted! Makes me doubly glad I moved away from it.

Of all the things you have a problem with in win10, it's the UI? It's a little flat, but clean, and I've gotten used to it.

I didn't look hard at the article. But I've been using Linux since I think I was about 20 - 21 and now I'm 25. Maybe I'm not Linux'ing hard enough but I've never had major issues with something like Ubuntu. I only really use a web browser, music player and IDE though.

@Nominal: Agree, seems like the big drawback about OSS development is the lack of focus and organization. People just work on what they want to work on, as much or as little as they want to work on it.
@Guest: I'm the opposite, I liked LXDE better, or rather I like Lubuntu better than Xubuntu because it's even more lightweight. Phoronix did a comparison and LXDE uses less resources than Xfce.
@whiteflags: Agreed, I haven't switched on any computer, work or personal, because of all that I've heard of the multitude of things sent back to Microsoft. Not that I'm worried about people seeing what I'm doing, just the consensus makes it sound like a spyware operating system.

As to the problems I've had on Linux Desktop:

• HP Pavilion 11 (n000e0) laptop lacked a working touchscreen Linux driver.
  One semi-working one was included in Android, and a RFC patch posted to LKML, but not for this exact laptop. Its BIOS/EFI initializes the I2C descriptors incorrectly, and it requires a bit of patching to get to work.
  Got it to work (I'm a non-affiliated bug-fixer of opportunity, after all), but it needed more tender love and care than I had time or energy for, and lacking external pressure, I didn't push it upstream.
  I waged it's a common laptop, and someone else will do the (quite straightforward) work anyway.
• Keeping a full display stack (kernel drivers, Mesa, other OpenGL stuff, and video players with latest features) near the bleeding edge is getting a bit annoying.
  Even with Intel open source drivers I'm occasionally getting tearing on playback, and OpenGL framesync stutters. Then again, I want latest stuff, OpenCL and everything, so I can only blame myself.
• Using Gnome DE when I prefer XKCD.. no, XFCE, or LXDE. Semi-annoying.
  I do this because I try to help new students with similarly configured laptops.
• Miscellaneous stuff with general stupidity.
  Things like POSIX/glibc not allowing per-thread credentials, pthread_self() versus gettid(), the entire kdbus mess, systemd still being pushed even though it is worse than the problems it cures, and so on.
• A ton of stuff I don't even remember, because the problems I encounter seem to be easy to fix.

Originally Posted by Epy

@whiteflags: Agreed, I haven't switched on any computer, work or personal, because of all that I've heard of the multitude of things sent back to Microsoft. Not that I'm worried about people seeing what I'm doing, just the consensus makes it sound like a spyware operating system.

Well, I wouldn't force anyone to go to win10. I dunno what you may have heard, but if you ignore Cortana then like 90% of that goes away: no keylogging for better autocomplete or spelling suggestions, which you don't need, for instance. You also have the opportunity to not accept the express settings when you switch (which is absolutely what you should do) and control the data sent out, such as your location. The rest of it really seems like telemetry that personally doesn't concern me. There is also a lot of connecting to bing, since you can search from the start bar now.

The one good thing about the release I think is actually the EULA. Microsoft at least spelled out everything they're doing in a legal document.

The point I'm trying to make is there's probably some FUD about it. Since I'm online all the time anyway, I doubt aspects of my life are very private. I do what I can, but frankly if connecting to Bing is the scariest thing, then I can't care. We've been in the ........ty "search engines are ad supported; put your armor on" era a long time. I feel like I know what I'm doing.

To be honest, the biggest problem I've had (and have) with Linux is the font rendering. Yes there is infinality (which makes a huge improvement after tweaking it to suit) but it's no longer maintained probably because Werner (of FreeType) did not, and does not, accept patches based on infinality because he deems them inefficient and not necessary (he's obviously blind or something) so I guess the infinality author lost motivation. It's a pity because infinality finally made font rendering readable and legible on Linux without it looking like a train wreck. There is nothing else even close to what infinality can (for the moment until it comes completely incompatible) achieve in terms of readability. FreeType (even with the all the previously patent encumbered stuff enabled during compilation) renders text that is not acceptable. It's ugly. It causes eye strain. It's not nice to look at and read. There is no way to make it acceptable. It's just plain horrible.

This might seem like a petty complaint but, for me (and many others), it makes a huge impact. I can't stand FreeType's rendering. No matter what you tweak it remains subpar. So, yeah, that's my biggest gripe and has been my biggest gripe for a long, long time.

Originally Posted by Hodor

To be honest, the biggest problem I've had (and have) with Linux is the font rendering. Yes there is infinality (which makes a huge improvement after tweaking it to suit) but it's no longer maintained probably because Werner (of FreeType) did not, and does not, accept patches based on infinality because he deems them inefficient and not necessary (he's obviously blind or something) so I guess the infinality author lost motivation. It's a pity because infinality finally made font rendering readable and legible on Linux without it looking like a train wreck. There is nothing else even close to what infinality can (for the moment until it comes completely incompatible) achieve in terms of readability. FreeType (even with the all the previously patent encumbered stuff enabled during compilation) renders text that is not acceptable. It's ugly. It causes eye strain. It's not nice to look at and read. There is no way to make it acceptable. It's just plain horrible.

This might seem like a petty complaint but, for me (and many others), it makes a huge impact. I can't stand FreeType's rendering. No matter what you tweak it remains subpar. So, yeah, that's my biggest gripe and has been my biggest gripe for a long, long time.

Can't tell if this a joke, trolling, or what. I've always found the default GNOME font (don't know the name) to be pleasing....

A lot of the things mentioned in the article are exactly what stopped me from switching to Linux for over 10 years, until last year when I finally did (Kubuntu 14.04). For me the biggest issues in the past were hardware support and 3rd party software installation.

For hardware, rarely was my hardware supported right out of the box. Being an overclocker in the early 2000s meant I was often changing hardware and it was always an enormous pain trying to get it all working, ESPECIALLY video. Getting networking working was always a hair pulling experience. Video drivers were just frustrating because either they were a pain to install or they just didn't work worth a damn. Sound was a nightmare too, and even then, my sound card was already 3 or 4 years old, so it's not like it was new.

For software my annoyance was, as the article mentioned, the lack of being able to just download the equivalent of setup.exe, double click, and 'next' my way through it. There still is no such thing, but at least centralized package managers make it easier these days. On the one hand I can just 'apt-get install' just about anything. On the other hand, like the article mentions stuff installed this way tends to be a little older, and if you download the source and build it yourself, you run the risk of it not working properly because it comes from outside the system; setting aside that it rarely automatically integrates itself into the launchers (start menu).

I'd always been a power user, but I liked being one when it was optional. Using Linux back then made it a requirement, so I really hated having to be a l33t h4xor just to get an OS up and running with my basic needs installed on it, with hardware fully working and stable.

Getting into programming some years back and recently becoming a developer means that I 'get' Linux a lot more on a lower level, especially because I work with it daily on the embedded side of things. So I'm ok with all the crap I have to do these days to get it running and keep it running, but for the average user, there's no way. For them, the lack of standards that permeate all distros is going to stop the average every-day windows user from being able to use Linux daily. Different package managers, different desktop environments (and trying to get people to understand desktop environment != Linux), new hardware support, old binary compatibility all kill it. Those things are great for those of us that are fluent around computers and software and don't mind having to do what needs to be done, but the average user will get frustrated and quit in less than 5 minutes. The enormous fragmentation in every part of the Linux world just makes a lot of these important things nearly impossible to deal with.

The biggest obstacle to these things is everyone wanting to be different because you can and because it's encouraged; and as someone said, the lack of enough quality people working on it because they don't get paid, so they don't have enough time to devote to getting things as squared away as they need to be for the everyday user.

But then, maybe the everyday user isn't the goal of Linux in general or most distros in particular.

Originally Posted by Sorin

The biggest obstacle to these things is everyone wanting to be different because you can

That claim makes me angry.

Look. Computers are tools. If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.

Linux, and basically all user/developer-driven software development, is about making tools that work, that can be adapted to be optimal to the task at hand, to the workflow. There is no specific way that a tool is supposed to be used, really; you're free to modify it to fit your needs. That is what makes it powerful.

It's not about some frigging hipsterish desire to be "different". It is about getting stuff done, without having someone dictate how you are allowed to go about it.

I'm again tempted to go on a rant, this time about how we're losing our delicious bananas because they're all the same...

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

That claim makes me angry.

Look. Computers are tools. If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.

Linux, and basically all user/developer-driven software development, is about making tools that work, that can be adapted to be optimal to the task at hand, to the workflow. There is no specific way that a tool is supposed to be used, really; you're free to modify it to fit your needs. That is what makes it powerful.

It's not about some frigging hipsterish desire to be "different". It is about getting stuff done, without having someone dictate how you are allowed to go about it.

I'm again tempted to go on a rant, this time about how we're losing our delicious bananas because they're all the same...

Yes, and I agree. I didn't say I didn't like it or didn't agree, I'm just saying it gets in the way of the average Windows user trying to go to Linux, like the article was mentioning. And what I meant was being different because you're allowed to be different; there is no mandatory standard to adhere to and face rejection for not complying to (Windows, Mac). But it is still not untrue that there are plenty or projects out there that do things differently simply because they can.