Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system
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> Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux.
No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-si... -- even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.
> Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi.
Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is _very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time).
In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy font rendering and obsolete packages.
And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the graphics. Same in 2015.
Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.
This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do.
> even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.
I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like myself.
> The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX
Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with crashing because of the graphics driver.
> My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs)
Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.
I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming".
> there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time
Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day.
> No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review
It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others.
But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.
Yet it isn't. It's absurd. The OSS framework has worked so well for almost every other facet, it's crazy that it hasn't worked for the kernel for games. Especially game developers: those are the guys you want when performance really matters. Gaming (and very slightly Visual Studio) is the reason I use Windows at home, if Linux became more competent at that I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver.
Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware.
And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL.
Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.
First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working). I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily.
Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing). And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam.
Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway.
So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.
The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.
Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken.
I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)
My work dev box is a CentOS 6 PoS and while it's serviceable and works OK for dev, I have a windows VM for a reason and my personal macbook comes out often.
Aside from that, applications like Skype have terrible support/interface for linux.
The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose.
Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between.
On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.).
For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM. Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me.
Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad.
That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine.
Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.
I have gone through any of nearly a dozen different distros in the last year, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, more I'm probably forgetting, and every single one of them failed within weeks. Most wouldn't even boot on my hardware, others had weird limitations, while still others just completely ate themselves during routine updates or version changes.
At this point I'd sooner use FreeBSD, or swallow my annoyance with PC-BSD's security model and give that another go.
This works.
other than that, everything is basically perfect.
I've not been able to reproduce it yet. He's still in there, it's been 2 months now for four hours each day. My wife says it's not good for him but the needs of OSS must come first!
- Hardware issues are major PITA, touchpads never work, when you have a convertible laptop, keyboard doesn't disable when turning it into a tablet mode and so on. Not to mention audio.
- No distro has nice fonts.
- In my case, Ubuntu took exactly an hour before throwing an error at me.
I use Linux every day and I prefer it to Windows or Mac OS X, but take your pink glasses off, please.
This is obviously not true. While it may be far from Windows or from Consoles the fact of the matter is that you can right now buy high end dedicated Linux gaming machines backed by the premiere game distribution eco-system in existence: http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/
That's not enough, it's not all the way, but to pretend that this didn't happen, or doesn't matter is stupid.
I agree on Hardware issues, I just installed openSUSE Leap, installed the nVidia drivers, and my desktop promptly stopped working entirely. While installing all Windows drivers on an empty box takes some time, too, it's a vastly more robust process.
I will not make the mistake of claiming that Linux has solved the problem, but this really isn't true. Even as recently as five years ago, if a game was published, Linux either couldn't run it, or required crazy emulation schemes. This list is far better than it used to be: http://store.steampowered.com/search/#sort_by=Reviews_DESC&t...
If Valve wanted to keep pushing Linux gaming, it could probably make it a real thing. My guess is that they won't, because the strategic point of their Linux support was to make Microsoft realizes there is indeed a viable alternative so the rent they can charge is not as much as they were threatening. Plus in the meantime Microsoft got a different CEO who has been much less belligerent. So, lest I sound like a fanboy, my prediction is that you are looking at the high point of Linux gaming right there in that link.
Still... who knows. Having done the work they've done, it may yet be in Valve's interest to keep the threat alive for SteamOS, and a lot of the latest engines are growing Linux support. (When you support all the consoles, all the phones, all the portable consoles, and Mac and Windows, Linux is hardly a huge additional platform to support anymore, especially when you're already supporting Android, which I know doesn't mean you support "linux" but isn't completely irrelevant either.)
But there is definitely stuff that works now, which means that it's a big improvement over 5 years ago. If you like this is far more about how the situation was utterly hopeless 5 years ago than how it's heaven-on-Earth now.
MS sucks money
OS X sucks VC money
OSX sucks money
MS sucks
(of course it's not the same experience for all printers, my 15 years old printer works perfectly on Windows and Linux, and I can't install a network Ricoh printer on Windows or Linux)
Setting up my home printer under Windows takes me the best part of 30 minutes every single time I need to do it. Under Linux its detected automatically, and works first time.
On the topic of supported platforms, when I bought a new laptop, I went with Toshiba because, at least with the Japanese models, every single one supports Linux.
The fact that I can buy new, off the shelf equipment and have it work on Linux with no issues is really what is new for me. You still have to do your homework, but I remember the days of having to look around for used equipment to make sure that it would work with Linux. Those days seems to be over.
I wish all OSes were that easy wrt printing setup.
It's all mostly irrelevant these days, though, as I simply run an LXDE-based Linux VM on my Windows desktop.
A Linux desktop is a lot easier to install now, and software support isn't as much of an issue as it used to be, largely because so much has moved to the web. I wouldn't say it's more robust though. I ran an Xubuntu laptop for several years. Even though it was the LTS version, a few times a year, something major like sound or video would break on a system update, and I'd spend a few hours getting it working again. This isn't something I'd recommend to people who want something that just works.
My Chromebook has been very reliable. I would say it's robust, but then again, I can't run Steam or GOG games on it, as mentioned in the article.
The truth is all OSes suck, period. Well each one in their own unique ways at least.
Where I work(software house) 99% of people have Macs. Most of them are one release behind because of stability issues, in newer versions.
My primary OS for the past 15 years is Linux. I've used most of the distros. My feeling is that 10 years ago things were more stable. On the other hand it wasn't that supported by vendors so... you had less features to worry about.
Now I use Fedora. As an example, I never had a problem with bluetooth or hibernation. After the latest kernel update I can't use my bluetooth keyboard because it causes a kernel panic. Hibernation stopped working.
I bought my mother a new Dell laptop with Windows 8.1. When I plug my, perfectly fine, external USB HD, sometimes it runs into amok and it takes around 5 minutes for the system to become operational again.
Life is fun. OSes are not :(
Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years.
When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.
PPA's are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.
Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on the desktop.
As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub main branches.
You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date, and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.
Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared with tracking Debian stable.
Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with your own needs.
I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it, nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely close to what it will eventually look like in the future.
Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.
Isn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration from.
I believe that the author means that vendors have been saying for a very long time that there is no cross-distribution place to keep config files, or set of environment variables, etc. What the Linux Standard Base was invented to address.
In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.
Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.
After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.
I tried it for a week to see if I could live with it as my primary environment.
Unfortunately not quite yet, at least for me, will try again in 5 years.
That said, while Linux on the Laptop keeps getting better, so also does OS X. Ignoring complaints about privacy for a minute, Windows 10 is also very nice to use.
I am resigned to mostly just using Linux just on my servers.
Edit: that is, my Linux experience is now SSH shells on remote servers, which is still good.
- NetworkManager has to be restarted regularly because it breaks after too many suspend cycles - and I have an intel wlan card. The last bug I've seen is NetworkManager killing my ipv4 routes without reason - ipv6 keeps working correctly. Wat?
- The more we go forward, the more things get convoluted. Features get removed because "streamlining" an so on, but at the same time the entire system gets more opaque, layer upon layer upon layer.
- Third party app support is still pretty bad. See spotify for a shining example.
- the 3D graphic stack is pretty horrible. No, absolutely horrible. There was a MESA "revision" going on to fix some of the issues, but it's been a long time since I've seen anything.
.. and I can go forward. I'm sorry, but Linux has not matured on the desktop. It's usable, with a lot of warts all around, but is not "mature". And the costant focus on building new shiny thingies instead of improving internals is a problem. All in all, I've been using linux on my desktop/laptops for years, and the older I get the less time I have to report bugs and find workaround or write patches, maybe to be told by some nice welcoming community that since I'm not a developer I'm not an user.
Admittedly my system is PulseAudio-free with only one exception, that being Skype. I should consider using a compatibility layer like apulse that just multiplexes ALSA calls under the hood.
To get my last monitor to work properly, I had to manually enter modelines in xorg.conf. If the monitor goes in powersave mode, the full resolution won't be available until I restart X. (It's a Seiki 4K TV, not standard by any means, but hardly "exotic")
Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't recommend desktop Linux to anyone normal, I just tell them to get an Apple computer.
I'll agree PulseAudio is esoteric, but thankfully not that many client applications have a hard dependency on it, though it is popular with integrated DEs.
But the fact that I need a tip on HN to know which config files to edit to get Skype working is precisely why Linux on the Desktop isn't quite there yet :)
(the fault may very well lie with Skype, but from a user experience standpoint, that's irrelevant)
even skype (!) worked out of the box (both speakers and microphones).
- Viable Gaming Platform: Viable does not mean good.
- Hardware: Things have improved massively, I'll give the author that much, but is nowhere near where Windows is.
- Software: The grade of commercial software for linux is laughable. Sure, you can get plenty of free tools that are also available on other operating systems as well. But you'll be in trouble if you want something as good as Camtasia or Screenflow. Microsoft and Apple both have plenty of high grade commercial apps that work on their platforms.
This highly depends on the industry. Camtasia and Screenflow are one thing, but many high-priced CAD / specialist / niche products are offering Linux versions nowadays, which helps Linux adoption in the enterprise.
We develop for Linux, in a virtualbox.
Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only programs that are written by your friends.
X11, although at least Xorg doesn't run as root in modern distros any more. Wayland is the replacement but isn't there yet.
Linus hates security people and refuses patches that improve security within the Linux kernel. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/11/05/net-of-...