Desktop Linux Problems and Major Shortcomings

Alan Shea Anderson-Priddy andersonpriddy at gmail.com
Tue Dec 30 23:14:34 UTC 2014


Okay, I read the article. All of those examples sound like legitiate
reasons to feel unhappy, but they provide little abstract thought and
they throw out separation of concerns. An operating system in general
has no concern for another organization's projects except to allow
those projects to adapt to their system.

For example, this includes having no concern for DRM and thus MTP.
This also includes entertainment such as video games or media players
such as Flash. A system only has to provide for its own requirements
via a sufficient design. Would I suggest my pickup truck unworthy for
travel for not having enough car seats to hold your whole family like
you can in the minivan? Do I get mad an my LEGO block for not
attaching to the kid's ninja turtle? Inconvenient yes, but welcome to
logic. (however, if someone does find a way around all of these, I
think we need to talk business and make some profit)

Free distros, such as gnu/linux/bsd/whatever work for those of use
concerned with free software. Windows works too, but it has its own
concerns. But the truth remains that they both have a set of concerns
that neither has concern for and those include (or disinclude hehe)
other projects that have a bad design.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Richard Quirk <richard.quirk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
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