Desktop Linux Problems and Major Shortcomings

[Richard Quirk]

All of the first point can be avoided if you do not buy hardware with
nvidia/ATI hardware. I was burned by this once in 2006 - ATI card too
old to be supported by the proprietary driver, incompatible with the
GPL drivers, so I couldn't update to the latest distro at the time -
and have avoided such graphics cards since.

Point 2... I don't have sound on my PC at work (currently runs Wheezy)
and can't figure out why. I'm not too bothered there as I don't need
sound at work, luckily at home I have no sound problems on 3 different
Ubuntu/Debian laptop/desktop machines.

Peripheral support is nowhere near as bad as it was. Most USB devices
are just "plug in and it works", though I admit to not using many
scanners/webcams. The built-in webcam on this laptop works fine, and
the way cups finds network printers seems like black magic.

Laptop buttons - no problems here. I remember once in 2005 that this
was a problem but nowadays these special buttons work all the time.

Kernel regressions: Before I updated my work PC from Squeeze to Wheezy
I tried out the 3.2 backports kernel. It wouldn't go a week without
hanging. There's not much I could do about this, but luckily the
current 3.16 wheezy kernel works fine and I usually have months of
uptime. A lot of the time, the regressions could be user-space tools
too. All software has bugs, sadly.

I can't compare battery time vs other OSes as I don't use them. It
could be true, but it depends a lot on what you are doing. On Windows
I bet the battery lasts longer as you are not able to actually use the
computer properly ;-)

The X issue sounds like FUD. The links are to slashdot stories and
wayland developer posts. The former are just opinions, the latter have
their own agendas. X will go away, but it's going to be a painful time
while the world transitions. And advocating an API like Win32 is just
crazy. I'll give the article the on-the-fly resolution switch


On 12/29/14, dimonik, dimonik <dimonik at letiko.com> wrote:
> I know, out of topic a bit, but still should be interesting:
>
> http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
>