Why Desktop Linux (Still) Sucks. And What We Can Do To Fix It.

But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?

I think Fedora has led on the bleeding edge of pulseaudio. Ubuntu apparently had a borked setup in one version of Ubuntu, but the same code was running well on Fedora.

Having said that, pulseaudio really seems to bring out the cranks and probably most of the issue is that it's become something that it's okay to complain about, rather than something that people get behind and fix.

It is however clearly the future and like many things in Linux ripping out mature half-solutions to replace them with newer full solutions is going to cause regressions for some. As long as Linux is making progress on average then it's all part of the game.

> You're not speaking about desktop applications / games

Those apps aren't hard to develop because libraries or the environment or whatever; they're hard to develop because their developers want them to be closed, so recompilation and putting them into the real package management system is impossible. Starting with such a handicap makes things complicated :)

> If you think there are better paradigms that should be explored, then jump in and show the world how right you are

The better paradigms have been known and used for 20 years (such as the Unix paradigm of connecting multiple programs, the CLI, and so on). That it doesn't appeal to some end users is not our problem.

(also username post combo, but just kidding :)

Then you need to try the following things: - vim or emacs - tmux or screen - tiling window managers - zsh

Each of these things result in a massive usability increase.

Lowercase f free.

He's saying most people use Linux not because it's $0.00, which includes your reason, that it's liberated.

Well, like Arch Linux's Pacman and AUR? :)

I found Pacman to be easy and simple--on the same level as APT, and when the binary package doesn't do what you want, packing your own package is really easy.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System

Apt has little to do with the underlying package format - there is an apt version for RPM.

Meh, from a source point of view, once I have a debian/ directory, with a properly set up rules file, building becomes trivial. Then it is matter of generating a package per-distro/version with the right environment. This could be very well done in an automated manner and a few vms.

Yes, suse build service is a very nice tool and much more interesting than a single package format, which wouldn't help much. And if the dream is to provide just a single binary package for any distro in the world, it won't work anyway. Well, maybe in theory, but if you mean it seriously, you need to compile and link against exactly the same binaries that the target system use. (Or static linking. Or just believe it will work. But serious commercial vendor who wants to provide a real user support cannot.) Which would mean that every Linux system would have to use the same binaries, which is, hm, nonsense.

I hear what you are saying, but we can reduce the differences between build systems while still using different targets.

I do a lot of work with OpenEmbedded, every distro image you create is for a different hardware platform, using different libraries, different tools, etc. But it is a unified build system. So I can say use this version of glibc and spit out the files in that folder, and with very minor tweaks I can use a completely different version of glibc and a different file structure for another image. If we had a unified dependency/build system across distros, we could have completely different contents while having relatively straightforward customization because if you knew one system, you'd know them all.

Might get something from the Mozilla Drmbeat project in a few years; maybe Google's speech recognition subtitles will be able to e port as transcript when it's properly live, too...

But everything packaged that way still demands to be installed as root, linked against their depgraph of ancient fucked-with libraries, and split apart into pointlessly separate packages.

Unfortunately this isn't used enough. It is not used by Firefox and Thunderbird. Instead they provide .tar.bz2 files.

I was pleasantly surprised by skype and chrome, who actually provide rpms and debs. Nice!

Open Office gave me a tarball with a myriad of debs. Not the nicest kind of packaging.

Unfortunately the distributions performs their own packaging of a lot of these applications which may give some people the idea that they should use the version packaged by the distribution. The distributions should really stop doing this and refer people to the official packages instead. Otherwise users will be stuck on old versions.

I also don't know how well this kind of delivery mechanism works with automatic updates. Do the external packages get updated in the same way as the packages delivered by the distribution or does anything like Sparkle exist for Linux?

What? Microsoft and OS X have rich libraries of cost-based applications and they don't require any licensing or DRM embedded in the OS. Why on earth would an operating system that hinges itself on openness take a more Draconian step than any other major OS distributer has (mobile OSes aside)?

What office software do you use btw? I've been looking for some linux-based powerpoint replacement (impress does not cut it)

I completely disagree. I use Linux because of how well it works and would gladly pay money for it, and I think most long term Linux users stick with it because of how well it works. In fact, most Linux users I know purchased a computer with Windows already on it, and completely wiped it off to put Linux on there. So they've already 'payed' for Windows, but use a different OS anyways.

I'm also not saying people should pay for bad software in hopes that it will become good. I'm saying that we need to make it easier to pay for software so that software that good that already exists can be purchased.

Android is an example of how Linux and payments can work. An open source operating system with many free pieces of software, but an App store where products can still be purchased.

the key differentiating factor for most people is free _as in freedom_.whether they came to linux because their hard-drive crashed and they dont have permission to re_install the OS they payed for that came with their machine, or they are a geek who enjoys the power that comes from the freedom to tinker and benefit from others` tinkering.

no one is aware of the cost of their operating system anyway.

The differentiating factor for me is that it's just what I've used for 12 years and what I'm most productive in.

Serious Linux users use it because it's the only thing that fits the way they work. Linux has all the interface and programs I'm used to, so of course I'd be more likely to buy software for it than any other OS. What holds me back is that there isn't any software I need that I don't have...

> The open question is why anyone would buy software for Linux.

Well, I'd be interested in one of the following apps: a desktop wiki, an email client, a contact management app, a feed reader, a music player, a scalable image editor, a layout app, a recording app, a guitar effect app, a GIT client, and probably some more.

Of course, for each of these, there's some free app somewhere. But each of these free ones have something I don't like.

I admit, my willingness-to-pay is quite low. That's partially due to some free apps being available. The better reason, however, is that installing proprietary apps sucks under Linux. I also fear, the regular distro updates will break apps I've payed for.

In other words: If there's a way to conveniently download an app from a store or homepage, and to get security and "distro upgrade" updates (maybe, by registering the app automatically with APT during installation), my willingness-to-pay would be quite a bit higher!

> The key differentiating factor for _most_ people who use it is that it's free (as in beer).

How do you know? Any empirical studies I'm not aware of? Or just the Biased Sample fallacy?

> It's hard to see how you can ask people to pay for software now in the hope that it will eventually be good.

Dunno. There's a lot of applications that were not 'good' when they were first released. People still bought it.

Depends. Most apps don't link against X, but the toolkits. If the toolkits can be modified to support a cleaner network protocol (something primarily vector based rather than bitmap based).

I don't think the parent poster is saying that X is related to GNOME and KDE's start menu clones, other than they both need changing.

You say advanced as if that's a good thing. I think a lighter system that considers hardware acceleration and multiple monitors from the ground up may be a good investment in the long run. Not to mention audio, and vector graphics and so on.

Multiple X sessions (one for each monitor + one for each vnc session + virtual X sessions for whatever reason) has to be combined with Xinemera and with graphic drives and with a KDE/Gnome desktop environment... and all the parts have to fit together perfectly for the system to work. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

The whole concept of X clients and X servers... it's just too much. X was created back in the 80s, and it still doesn't get the basic usecases right. The requirements for desktop computers have shifted a lot in the last 30 years, so this kind of thing is to be expected.

Starting over every 30 years? I think that's reasonable, especially when it's holding Linux back. We've learned a lot since, and X isn't going to last until 2030... so why not throw it out now?

The problem might be that the parent doesn't know the difference between X.org and XFree86.

X.org is just another implementation of X11. Re-implementing it isn't what I'm talking about. No, I don't expect it to be replaced, which I consider a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Limitations_and... Here's the issue: why did Apple not just use X? Important question.

There isn't a relationship between X and the start menu in my statement.

Yes, listened to the talk. Audio frameworks aren't why the universe isn't using Linux.

Some package management (apt) would be better if it would be easier for 3rd party vendors to get into the sources.list. For now you either have to get users to edit that file by hand (for which they might not even have the rights) or you have to use another installation mechanism which avoids the package management to which they are used and lose the advantages of stuff like upgrade. Maybe there should be a sources.list per user which allows normal users also to install software and distros could be set-up to work with a certain file-type in a way that if you click it on the web, then a default installer goes up which guides you all the way through the installation.

Right now the situation is that if you want anything that's not in the "official" package repositories (probably the majority of software ...) you are getting into a world where installation is harder than in any other OS. And that is true as well for open-source applications (you want newest blender or one that is months behind?) as closed-source applications (which simply don't get into official repositories anyway).

I also tried using one of the binary installers for a while, but when it stopped working with newer distros (my application still worked) I guessed that tar.gz and zip are for the moment simply the best I can really offer and that's still what I'm using for now.

That is pretty much the problem. The only software that installs easy (in most cases) is the "distribution supported software" (in the version(s) currently used by the distribution that is).

I guess one of the questions to answer about ease of installation is what makes Linux software different from the majority of OS X software.

[note] OS X does have a package format for more complicated stuff

it will always "soon" be ready for large-scale adoption.

But it never will.