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This is the truth and one of the main reasons why Linux will never really be a major player on the Desktop place. The most stable OS based on Linux is Android. And even then we know how quirky Android can be(I have no problems with it but people that pretend that nothing is wrong with it are just in denial) . As a general day to day os for me it presents no issue(Ubuntu, Debian) but yes there are a large number of quirks that we just cannot ignore.
But one thing is for sure. Not having to ctrl alt del every 5 mins on Linux sure is nice. -
@AleCx04 the thing I wrote about resetting gnome more often than I had to reset Windows 98 is true. And htop and ps -aux | grep something are on the tips of my fingers. I use them far, far more often than I'd ever did on Windows.
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What about macOS? And let's look past the prices for a second.
I'd love to use Linux for work, home, and everything in between, but your rant's point is exactly why I don't want to use it in that context. It's just all over the place.
Windows is great for home use, but lord help me if i had to work on it (rant covering similar reasons as mine: https://goo.gl/LLhZjP).
Here's where I think macOS shines. They take the power of Unix, and put an amazing and intuitive UI/UX on top of that. It's amazingly easy to use for home use, and also has all the tools needed to work on it. Seems to me like a worthy investment if usage would primarily be in the context of work. -
@AleCx04 @AndSoWeCode
1. DE environments. Except for cinnamon crashing once or twice due to me doing stupid shit, they've always worked fine for me so this isn't a fact, it's an experience/opinion. Bluetooth headphones have always worked fine for me, too badly it doesn't work for you right away :/
Tons of research for trying something new? Maybe some research as it's something NEW for someone and they'll have to learn - I don't get the point.
2. No clue about the differences so I'll shut up about that part. Audio quality has always been great for me so this isn't a fact.
3. I don't get your point here, I always have multiple DE's installed.
4. Although I block Google out of my entire network, when I still use it it was literally click click ready, on fedora/debian/arch/ubuntu/mint/elementary. Maybe you don't know about some package or something?
5. I don't know what in the living hell you're doing wrong, incompatible hardware maybe? I am a regular movie guy but never had an issue with this.
To be very clear, it genuinely sucks for you that loads of stuff doesn't work or gives you issues but say that an operating system is shit in general (I am interpreting this as you telling 'facts') or however you're calling it just because you have some issues with it is something I can't agree on.
My opinion on all systems is known here but as for functionality/crashes etc I'm not going to say that windows is shitty just because it crashes a lot for me while its stable for maybe 90 percent of the other windows users around the globe.
But thanks for this rant as I still wanted to make a rant about Linux and you just reminded me to do that :D (positive one though) -
@linuxxx not a clue why you tagged me for this tho
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@AleCx04 Your first comment ;)
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I love linux: for servers.
Linux could chain-up different programs carefully configured and perform really complicated automated stuffs that you simply can't accomplish on a gui-based os.
Do you want track some strange http connections? cat | egrep , >>
Now that log file is too big? logrotate
Do you want it as email daily? cron
Those are really basic stuffs that on windows are nearly impossible -
@linuxxx not related to anything that I said at all....nor does your personal experience with the system will somehow influence the overall fact that Linux will never be a majority in the desktop area. Regardless of how much I use it on my servers(which I do) or on my personal computers(which I also do)
Being critical of what we like is essential to making it better. Which btw as a software engineer I can and have. -
A video from 2014 that says similar things: https://youtu.be/5pOxlazS3zs
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@PhilWerman Not really tbh. I know many friends and colleagues who use Linux as their daily driver (also old classmates and teachers) and except for one friend having issue with WiFi drivers, I've never heard complaining.
My parents and sister are on elementary/ubuntu and it works great without issues.
Also all my servers (around 20-25) run ubuntu/debian/centos and it works stable/fast/great for years and years :) -
@AleCx04 In case it wasn't clear, my point is that just because one individual has problems with a system, doesn't mean that it is a shit system right away.
I interpreted this rant as saying that because one person has issues with a system, it's crappy by default.
Your comment was agreeing on the rant (which is fine, opinions are opinions after all!) so that's why I tagged you :) -
@stisch this is a fact, Linux sucks if you want an out of the box experience, and want to use an OS like the one you've used since 1998. Windows sucks if you don't want bloated OS with restrictive control (are you sure you want to run as admin?), Mac sucks if you don't want to buy into the apple echo system.
I just choose Linux because even thou there might be some down sides, for me personally there are more downsides with Windows or MacOS
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I run Linux distros in VMs. I’m not quite ready to run it as the primary OS. I find myself in the guests more than the host. I’m a little weird though. I actually, in the long run, enjoy the feeling of wanting to bang my head against the wall trying to repair something I broke or configure a new thing. That’s not sarcasm. I can’t put into words the epic shit ton of things I learn in the process. And if I win, I feel so ninja.
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@xprnio well in my opinion, Mac OS incorporates the worse of the 2. Its UI and desktop tools are as bad as most Linux GUIs, or worse. First off, there's very bad window management. You can't fill 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen by snapping windows to the edges for ex. It gets worse in multi-monitor set-ups where you start losing your windows somewhere beyond the edges each time you re-connect your external monitor(s). No calendar when you click on the time, and its file manager is just horrendous. Need anything more? Pay extra for every little thing!
And the CLI is also bad. I had to spend time to research just how to make my terminal show colors. And then I find out that it's case insensitive, and then it has a weird name duality where in the GUI you see a different name than in the terminal. Its toolset is old, Unix era, without the GNU additions, which makes it harder to work with. And calling GUI apps from the terminal is just horrible. -
@linuxxx the point is cleae and as I actually have said in other occassions I do not think it is a shit system, else I would not be using it as my main for servers or my pcs. But it does certainly suck in the area of compatibility with most machines. Even the docs for most major distributions need to have lists of systems in which it is known to work fine or without tuning. Heck even Torvalds hates it and uses distributions that require minimal modification since what he wants to do is work, not spend hours configuring system files to get basic functionality going. This is fine for all of us that love the system, we learn from it, but wouldn't it be nice that the average computer user could just plug and play? This is something that not even the major distros can really do some times.
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@linuxxx like I said before, desktop environments mostly work fine. Except when they don't.
Why, when connecting 2 external screens, my vertical xfce4-panel is only able to reserve space on the leftmost monitor, even if it's situated on the middle monitor, above a full screen window? Many such examples actually. I could learn to live with them, which I did, or I had to research how to solve them, which I didn't have to do on other OS.
For Bluetooth - just how do I think I know what A2dp is? https://askubuntu.com/questions/... and many such topics are a testament of how flimsy the infrastructure is.
Simply search for this "a2dp-sink profile connect failed" and be amazed at how many topics you'll find. All have different causes. Trust me, I had to research something specific to my headphone model (Bose QC35 II).
Everywhere else, it just works. Not on Debian, nor Ubuntu (had different solutions even btw) -
@linuxxx 3. The point in multiple display managers is that there shouldn't be such a situation.
X is old and slow.
Wayland is new but buggy.
Newest Ubuntu is scheduled to come out, with X as default. Try to search how to connect to L2TP VPN from a server. Good luck! I found people explaining that you need network-manager and network-manager-l2tp and network-manager-l2tp-gnome (if I remember correctly), but then I don't need Gnome stuff, and I found a guide that shows how to do it from the CLI, without the Gnome stuff. When I wanted to configure it on the server, it wanted to install DISPLAY MANAGERS and ICON THEMES. Isn't that supposed to be exclusive to the network-manager-*-gnome? And why would it install toolkits for the dead Mir?
My point is that it's a complete mess.
About gdrive - I needed google-drive-ocamlfuse, which can only be added to Ubuntu.
5. Default install on 4 different machines, all had severe screen tearing. -
@enen "For point 4) - use symlinks" - yeah, that's what I eventually did. I also created AppImage for software that used incompatible libraries, and then deleted what I didn't need from the system, just to have it nice and clean.
It's just too much effort for something that should've been simple. And I know it's Spotify who are the assholes in this case (one of the troublesome apps), but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of the time on Linux is spent just trying to make something work, that works out of the box on other OS.
It's good for learning and for control and all, and very interesting, but sometimes you just don't have time for this shit. -
@Lahsen2016 my colleague had to spend 2 days researching why on Ubuntu 16.04 pip and python were installed in a weird way that impeded them from working out something. Nothing on the internet. They had to answer their own questions, wrote a guide, shared it with several other companies that use that guide.
I also had issues on Windows, that had no solutions, true. But I could at least avoid them. Or I could re-install the system and it would work again. For those problems, re-installing Linux wouldn't help, as the problems would consistently return. -
@Noob surprisingly those were the easy-to-solve issues for me. I only had it with a Mac, plugged in my phone over USB, with tethering, installed some packages and it worked.
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@AndSoWeCode To make it entirely clear, I wasn't talking about multiple display managers but about multiple desktop environments!
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@AndSoWeCode Yup I know A2DP. It worked great for me from the start, too bad it doesn't for you :/
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@Kreoss the Bose qc35 eventually worked. You just need to install an app, chown+chmod pulseaudio so that only you can launch it (or move to lightdm), and change the Bluetooth config.
That's it. It works most of the time now. -
@MastaRyze even IF that were the case, I as an end user, or my parents, or any person to whom I might recommend an OS, WILL NOT CARE. They want to use it not as a toy that demands attention, but as a means to run the programs they really want to run, on the hardware that they have chosen.
This rant is not about blame assignment, except for blaming the toxic community that have lead to the death of Unity and Mir, that result in constant, decade-long fights that just contribute to further delays and instabilities. But that was but a tiny portion (maybe 1 phrase) in the entire rant.
The rest was just highlighting how stupidly complicated some simple tasks can be on Linux, as a response to a multitude of people that clearly never used it heavily, that show it as a sort of fashion statement, like "hey look at me! I'm using Linux! #fuckoffbillgates", and a ton of people deciding that without knowing anything they should just switch immediately because #windowssucks and #fuckupdates. -
@xprnio is also frikkin expensive. And not just as a one time investment. Everything that follows is expensive.
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Linux on desktop is not a toy...
Linux on desktop is a hobby or a game.
It's fun, we love it, we can personalize it, but nothing is easy. It's a puzzle game. Escape the Linux room.
It's a hobby. We practice, we get skills, we get better than others, but there is always something difficult to deal ahead. You never know the next step.
I love it, but it demands attention. Plenty of attention if you keep changing, installing things.
Windows is just a tool. Can I do that? Yes. Can I do this other thing? No. And if I use it upside down with this hammer? Oh, now I can do that. Not good, but works. Ooops, it broke Windows. Let me reinstall.
But it's a vulnerable tool. And most people use it in a way you cannot just replace it. I have lots of Excel files from work that I cannot open on Libre office. I need a virtual machine with windows and office just to use them.
Another dev on my team just got a new machine. Before he came in today I made two separate USB installers and ...
Linux sucks.
Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:
1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.
2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.
3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?
4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).
5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!
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Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.
I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.
But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.
rant
linux