Returning to Linux, not impressed
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grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com
This was a depressing read.
He also did a good job at the start of the article of acknowledging that Ubuntu gives a good desktop experience yet then goes on to rant about how bad Linux is in general after using one other, unrelated, distro.
The whole article reads incredibly ignorantly which I wouldn't have expected given his credentials. I can only assume he approached the exercise with an axe to grind so continued his tasks in a unintentionally negative way. In my experience, if someone is impatient when using unfamiliar platforms and/or wants to find problems with it, then they will find a way to expose problems regardless of the platform.
Why blame someone for wanting to install linux on apple hardware (which btw is often better supported than other hardware)?
Why blame someone developing 3D acceleration for virtual machines for wanting to have a GUI on the server that contains test VMs?
Why blame someone for being annoyed having to know the difference between 3 package manager programs?
Why blame someone for talking about the usability of command line options, of which command length certainly is a part?
He's installing the mac mini server in order to run jenkins, redmine and backup. Why would you need a GUI for that?Fortunately he doesn't say anywhere he's going to run VMs on that 4GB ram machine.
I blame laziness. I blame not trying to understand why new programs were written instead of merging new features in old ones. Or failing to appreciate an OS that at least has a package manager which is not a third party one.
But then well, you know what they say. Unix IS user friendly, it just chooses its friends. And I like Linux like that.
whats the point in having a gui installed on a machine that by definition has no keyboard mouse or moniter (Aka a server)
they arent 3 "package managers". yum is a package manager, rpm is a package installer and dnf is a proposed replacement for yum. fyi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
nearly all linux commands can be completed with around 4 key presses. e.g. aptTAB should give you apt-get
In fact I often set aliases for apt-get and apt-cache because of apt breaking the 4 key press / tab rule you raised.
- If he has a recent model Macbook its KNOWN to be problematic. Searching "2016 macbook linux" most of the top results are about how it doesn't work well. He specifically says he assumed because redhat offered it that it worked with linux. When you can't spend 30 seconds researching your development machine it might be your fault.
- Server guis are known to be limited, hard to automate and just generally inefficient desiring a gui for your server is normally a sign that you just aren't very good.
- Users don't have to use ANY command line package managers there is in fact a gui for that if they prefer. If they choose wholly of their own accord to use a command line package manager they probably ought to read the relevant help document https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_management_system which makes the usage of the relevant tools pretty clear.
I don't think its untoward that red hat employees that wish to set up Fedora servers be expected to read documentation.
Another attack on users, this time pretty direct. I won't discuss the other points as it's again just shifting blame. The reality is that with Desktop Linux there's nobody taking responsibility that things actually work.
Fedora is first of all an unstable test bed for a commercial product running on hardware known to be problematic and the user is a red hat developer.
I realized I had more useful things to do than beta test rhel in 2011 and I started buying hardware that works well with linux in 2003.
Not knowing to how do this is certainly a forgivable thing in joe random business user but it becomes ridiculous when we are talking about a red hat dev. If a device doesn't work with its target platform be it windows, Linux, or mac you blame the oem.
In this case whose job do you imagine is it to donate free labor to a multi billion dollar juggernaut to ensure their machines work well with Linux?
Given the benefit Apple has derived from open source software it would be nice if they would help but they certainly have no real obligation nor do open source devs whose time is inherently a limited resource.
In the end Linux has plenty of room for improvement but supporting everyone's hardware for free with finite dev resources just isn't a rational or achievable goal and lampooning linux as a whole because fedora doesn't work on your mac isn't even useful dialogue.
Rational actors will react to this by reasonably picking hardware that is known to be well supported. Irrational actors will continue to complain on the Internet.
Why should OEMs work on supporting Linux when they sell their machines with other operating systems? That's just passing the blame.
The problem is that Linux is touted all the time as an alternative that is supposed to be even better, when the reality is that lots of things are broken and don't work out of the box. Not even on the most sold laptop models, which are macbooks.
> Rational actors will react to this by reasonably picking hardware that is known to be well supported. Irrational actors will continue to complain on the Internet.
People that want to actually get work done and do not want to or can not fiddle around will not use Linux.
And finding a fix can be elusive, when often times the answer is "your distro sucks, use $OTHER_DISTRO" or "use Google."
> Rational actors will react to this by reasonably picking hardware that is known to be well supported.
But what about when you pick hardware that is supposedly well supported and you still have problems? Run into that more times than I care to remember.
Nobody said linux or open source software was perfect.
Yes, do not inform potential users that they might be taken for a ride, don't mention that 7-years old hardware is not supported, or that Gnome3 doesn't even know how to switch back to the default display. I mean, we wouldn't want to have informed users am I right?
You are pretty much making legulere's point: hush hush no criticism in public, and even if it is valid please report it quietly.
So I assume you would agree if Apple or Microsoft had a similar attitude? (And no need to mention "yeah but with MS/Apple you paid, therefore...", paying entitles you to tech support, and we're only talking about informing users here.)
aside from apple stuff (who have made it quite clear they believe their users want a totally walled garden and are not interested in compatabilty with the rest of the world), the other two are now rare afaik.
so if it happens to you regularily, then yeah, very likely it is nothing more than your distro sucks.
- The oem is not obligated to support linux they aren't to blame
- The open source developers aren't obligated to provide free labor to make your hardware work they aren't to blame
- The user isn't obligated to use linux in the first place but absent a support contract or a promise from oem that the machine runs linux they aren't owed anything either.
Its like the open source software developers collectively held out to the community at large here take for free all this awesome software we have invested man decades in. It works on many but not all machines out there and a legion of users is waiting to help you for free make it work with your particular configuration and hardware and somehow a bunch of entitled individuals heard something on the order of
Here's all this awesome software we wrote for you for free it will replace all this software you are currently pay for on your existing hardware no matter what hardware you have and unicorns will fart rainbows in time with your keystrokes.
Then reacting to this promise that nobody made they get mad and make a linux sucks post on their blog.
That this rant comes from a red hat employee is quite frankly embarrassing.
In that context keeping people from buying machines that don't work with linux and complaining on the internet is equally impossible.
I don't understand how you believe people are obligated to do better work for free for you.
*Please note I'm not implying you or the author are stupid just users in general. This is why most people ought to buy complete hardware/software packages with support and experts should be able to use google and read docs.
I understand the idealistic goal that all software be turn-key simple for every user and every use case. But even if we assume it's a plausible, reachable goal, I just can't get on board with blaming the people working towards this for the failure of not being done. We're simply not there yet. We've barely even started.
I can simultaneously respect the notion that we should be striving towards it as a goal, while still having practical expectations towards the experts of today that have to interact with systems that are imperfect enough to require expert users.
We only have a few warm bubbles where interaction are easy. And there are still expectations of the users, the bar is just lower. Even the most-comfortable of tools makes demands of the users' literacy and ability to figure out how to carry out their particular goals. And we paradoxically put blame on expert users when they use those environments and want to be able, or (more ominously) allowed to do the kinds of things they know are possible but not supported.
So I can sympathize that the tools suck. I get livid at the limitations of my tools too. I can share in the frustration of fresh new roadblocks and suddenly having to learn something new. I hate hitting that kind of roadblock. But I have a hard time getting on board assigning blame when I'm a colleague of the people working to solving these problems, and I don't have the answer either.
I hope it should be clear that I also don't like putting blame on people, and I think there needs to be some collective taking responsibility by the linux community. If someone has problems the answer to that shouldn't be RTFM and PEBKAC, but questions if those issues can be averted directly in software.
Linux etc do not have that luxury so the warts out for everyone to show.
On top of that they are more often than not working blind, as they have limited to no access to the specs of the underlying hardware they are trying to support.
so the fact it struggled on what seems like ancient hardware is hardly a surprise.
wonder what his reaction will be when he finds he has to go through the whole ordeal again after they end of life his installation in 6 months.
I did similar thing with Arch recently, was long time user that switched to Mac six years ago. Then due to all the suspicious moves from Apple I installed Arch again and can't be happier.
Linux is what you make of it, not what any distro thinks it should be. I am using xmonad and there is nothing silly looking on my screen.
If doing any usability tests, fedora/red hat would be very low on my priorities list.
I also don't use any login manager, I log in into console then use startx to start gui. This way it is easy to test and debug things before booting X11, if I ever break anything. Never happened so far but I like having pure console at start.
I still like the ubuntu eyecandy, but I only see it at most once or twice a year just before I install i3.
It's just better. The same way that vi and emacs are better than Notepad and Gedit.
I need to give i3 a shot, though, and port some of its functionality!
The nice thing about stumpwm is that you can hack your WM to fit your purposes. The nice thing about i3 is that while you can customize it to a greater or lesser extent, you almost never need to. it just works, right out of the box.
apple go to lengths to make it painful, and my experience of this is that they have gone to increasingly further lengths in increments over the last 5 years. you end up having to install some funky efi bootloader like refit or refind, even if you want to use bootcamp to install windows (i've never seen bootcamp work correctly on its own, although i have heard that it does work sometimes) - even then you end up having to hack things to get it to work correctly, or find that things like the trackpad or keyboard mysteriously don't work properly if at all...
mounting your hdd into a vm in os x is often a necessity.
its a nightmare. apple don't want you to do these things.
Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones).
And of course, tons of developers do the same.
I don't advocate it myself, but it's nothing extremely uncommon. They like the hardware, but want to use Linux on it.
The issues you mention is not because "Apple doesn't want you to do these things" it's because Apple implements new hardware setups and features without taking into consideration whether people who want to run Linux have the drivers to use them.
PC manufactures are less adventurous and rock the boat less, so Linux works more easily on them with existing drivers.
But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party (e.g. change the interfaces with which the keyboard/touchpad talks to the cpu, offer graphics switching, etc.). So it wouldn't make sense to give that up to wait for Linux drivers to catch up on their new hardware.
Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work".
(That said, in this kind of situation Arch Linux is probably your best bet since it's rolling-release with the most-up-to-date drivers -- outside of compiling your own kernel. It's not trivial to install, though, and that's probably for the best, honestly.)
Also, the Arch Wiki is some of the best documentation for any distro, anywhere. So that helps.
Not for "ordinary users" which is what we're discussing here. For that you'd need an actual installer of some type.
Totally agree about the Arch Wiki -- it's incredible.
It's not for everyone, and certainly not for the writer of the original article.
Sometimes, what Arch provides is "it works" as opposed to "it doesn't work". (This was the point I was trying to make.)
This is not a hypothetical. I turned a coworked onto Arch by this simply being the only Linux distro that would work on his Macbook Pro (ca. 2015, I think?). He tried Ubuntu recently (12.10)... still didn't work because it could not understand the disk on his machine.
This guy is a very competent developer. He's not afraid of a command line. It still took him a few hours (IIRC) to get it installed. (Including with my help + googling various things about how the Mac EFI thing works/doesn't. Incidentally he still has to press some magic key combo on every startup to avoid MacOS starting up. It's goddamn ridiculous.)
The EFI bits, and keypress combo, however, are true of any Mac.
Yes, but there's a thing to balance this: unlike PCs which come in 200000 models, there are only a handful of Mac models, and they remain the same for a year or so before the next update.
So, it should be easier to target those with Linux drivers than to target tons of individual devices, even if Apple does change their hardware.
> Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones).
> And of course, tons of developers do the same.
And none of us expects to do it without much pain. I curse the moment anything goes wrong, or I get a new MacBook and have to fiddle with it for hours or days to get Ubuntu running on it. It's unlikely that I'll ever buy another one.
i'd also add that i doubt its about them supporting new stuff. its the sort of thing i look at and assume that its to make it difficult to install your own software (i.e. OS) on a mac. the benefits are negligble for the typical mac user, who cares more about photoshop and e-mail than terminals and compilers...
Is it? Others accuse Apple of not moving too fast after Jobs...
Shameless plug: I prepared an Ansible playbook that does those manipulations automatically: https://gist.github.com/a-rodin/7930a50befbc7b07e20c5c3b5aca...
I would have a much worse experience transitioning to windows, or even in all likelihood transitioning back to MacOs.
Of course, having linux interoperate with MacOs is a completely different situation. That said, for a while I dual-booted with grub, and it worked fine. In booting from usb, dual-booting, and running only linux on mac hardware, I never experienced track pad or keyboard failure, though I do think apple's keyboard layout is inferior for non-MacOs systems. I expected to have some major problems using Ubuntu exclusively, but I have had few hard-to-fix problems. It was hardly a nightmare.
/me puts on tinfoil hat
You can easily get rid of it by deactivating the digital audio port. Still this problem shouldn't exist from the beginning.
The author's package manager complaints are unfounded. Complaining about yum, and yum being replaced by dnf? C'Mon, software evolves and sometimes you have to do a hard fork.
The complaints about NFS seem to be a backend issue, and not an issue with the client.
And now you have a next to useless os, with nothing on it. In linux I have a full dev stack within minutes after installing ansible. In windows, the everlasting shitstorm has now moved from category 4 to 5 forecast to last a week of hunting down and installing disjoint tools and frameworks from a plethora of one-hung-lo holes. Hell no. I'll never work in windows shop again, that shit's cray.
Not at all. I use linux since the early 2000s and I can't recall the last time I had any problem getting a linux install to run out of the box.
In fact, the only problem I could remembered was a wifi card that required ndiswrapper to run, way back in the good old days of Mandrake 10.
Other than that, I recall problems involving flash plugins, and that's that.
Meanwhile, throughout the last decade I've used Mandrake, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian as my main OSs. They always worked right out of the box.
That being said, I do buy hardware with linux compatibility in mind. Hardware support does make a difference.
Some people focus on advanced use, 3D editing tools and such. Sure linux is behind commercial distros due to lack of hardware support and of course community development.
But it's still a fantastic movement to produce so many usable distros for nothing at all.
I personally use NFS to stream video at home, and across VPN. The problem is always the connection, for example poor wifi reception and full HD movies don't go together but low res simpsons episodes from the 90s work fine on poor wifi reception.
It's a bit like being proud that someone compares your Lada to their Bugati :-)
Obviously developers try to support as much hardware as possible with varying degrees of cooperation from the manufacturers but its not reasonable to expect support for every device under the sun. Developer hours are expensive and finite the logical solution is to buy machines with linux in mind if you want to run linux.
This is probably why I've been running Linux for 13 years with limited difficulty because I take responsibility for making reasonable choices instead of complaining.
The current state of Desktop Linux is the same as Desktop Linux 15 years ago, and it will never change. I still use it, because I like all the control it gives me, I just don't like having to exercise said control so often.
Admittedly, "day one" was not when Ubuntu switched to PulseAudio well too soon. It was around 2012, and it was just magical to have the whole network transparency of audio devices just work.
As probably an even longer time Linux user (used it back in 1997 to 2004, used classic unices previously, use mostly OS X since and Linux on vms and servers), I can't share that pride.
Back in 1999 or so, the slogan and the idea was that Linux will soon prevail "on the Desktop". Every year since then, until the idea died out, has been touted as the "year of Linux on the Desktop".
And not in the same of some people happily using it either. Those existed back in 1999 too, heck I had a KDE based desktop and used Konqueror as my main browser.
It also wasn't about "this phone runs the Linux kernel with some custom company frontend, but otherwise there's nothing especially Linuxy about it, and you couldn't tell it from a QNX or iOS phone with a similar facade". So, no Android is not that dream fullfilled.
"Linux on the Desktop" meant undertaking Microsoft (OS X was negligible or not still existing then) at their own desktop/office desktop game, and for if not the majority, of a huge share (30% or more) of users.
Which basically means: a stable desktop OS, with a suite that covers all the basics. And what we have?
- Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations.
- On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with.
- Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X.
- Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making)
- OpenOffice (and it's various forks) are still not as capable as MS Office and full of quirks and slowdowns, plus the bizarro old-school UI.
And tons of other things besides...
Is that the OS's fault? Manufacturers supply drivers for Windows, but Linux is left to just figure it out by itself.
My team and I routinely use google docs to write multi-million dollar proposals. We use gmail, github and everything else the cool kids use and we all use Ubuntu on our desktops. A tiny fraction of people gets paid to use whatever gimp is used for, those people can and should buy the best tools for the job, and make the rest of us pay for that by claiming the cost back from tax. Same for Office, of whatever variant. If you spend hours a day doing work in whatever Office is good for, acquire a word processing appliance and be done.
Desktop environment envy is a silly human affliction easily cured by using a tiled window manager, I use i3, and so should you.
And lastly, where has this nonsense of everything on this one laptop came from ? Have a laptop for each of your major tasks. For cutting code, nothing but Linux will do. Getting paid to 'shop putin and trump in various man-love positions on top of a horse ? Have yourself a recent mac with elements.
No, they really aren't. Let's see:
#Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations
That's not an issue at all on Windows or Mac.
#On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with
Again, not an issue at all.
#Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X.
Both OS X and Windows change their desktop GUIs, but nowhere to the extend that Linux does, and without the resulting breakage (e.g. from Gnome 2 to 3, KDE migrations (and changes to QT) etc), and all for really ho-hum changes. When Apple makes a ho-hum change to OS X desktop (Cocoa UI, the Finder, etc) (which they do frequently) all the rest works just fine, apps don't need to be migrated, whole classes of things (e.g. stuff like Gnome Panel widgets) aren't suddenly dead, etc.
>Granny browses midget porn on her Chromebook just fine, thank you very much.
And then Granny wants to produce her own senior-porn, or edit her grandaughter's birthday video, and finds out that multimedia support on Chromebook is crap, and switches to Windows.
>Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making)
Well, it's still unusable for professional printing use.
>My team and I routinely use google docs to write multi-million dollar proposals.
Well, that's a moot argument. Doesn't mean Google Docs is "as good as MS Office" for that, just that multi-million dollar proposals can also be written with very basic features. Heck, one can write multi-million dollar proposals in Notepad too. On the other, for industries and documents with more dedicated workflows (e.g. legal documents, etc) that wont do, as wont be as efficient.
>And lastly, where has this nonsense of everything on this one laptop came from ? Have a laptop for each of your major tasks. For cutting code, nothing but Linux will do
Actually there are more Windows developers than Linux ones. In the enterprise space it's mostly all Windows (with C#, Java, etc). And even tons of Linux targetting devs use Windows or OS X and just run a vm, docker or connect to a remote server (which is cleaner anyway: reproducable, exactly same as the deployment environment (of which they might have many), with snapshots and all, and doesn't mess with their main desktop machine for testing server tasks).
If your gripe is with the slow progress of Linux development; we're talking about a completely free operating system, that also tries very hard to be open in source code. Those two things combined with community effort is bringing us an OS that I'm using right now and use daily for my work.
You're covering some pretty advanced topics, that are all good goals but Gnome has just barely started standardizing APIs and systemd is brand new so I think we're still learning to walk after having crawled for many years through the desktop market.
My main problems with Linux, I've recited these countless times in countless fora already. :)
* EWS support * MS Office support
And those are issues only because of my work environment.
Of course I'm viewing Linux from a power user perspective. I can also step outside of myself and see that it takes too much experience to solve issues in Linux.
Thinking back to the last problems I've had on my fedora laptop, I have to think really hard first of all but they all seem related to advanced usage. For example getting Juniper VPNs to work or troubleshooting EWS issues in Evolution.
The worst problem is, almost always someone would come up and reply with one standard answer : "Oh, that's because you're using distro <x>. Had you used distro <y>, this problem would never occur!". More than two decades, and Linux hasn't got the basic things right, and still remains a Nerd only OS (and it's coming from a nerd).
There's quite a lot of things that can go wrong there compared to the less adventurous Linux experience of, say, Ubuntu LTS on a Thinkpad/XPS/Zenbook.
Fedora on Thinkpad (including Wayland) is very nice, accessing Synology via SMB or even AFS works very nicely. If I was feeling adventurous and had a need for remote block devices, I would try iSCSI too.
RHEL shouldn't be like that. It should install with minimal surprise or weirdness. I recognize the author's complaint about the "Done" button because RHEL uses the same installer. I have a similar complaint along those lines. The system prompts you to set up a non-root account, but you have to click a checkmark to make this user an administrator (ie. in group wheel). Unless I'm completely misreading the target market, making the first user created an administrator should be opt-out, not opt-in. It's not a big deal, but it seems careless.
As for Fedora, I don't know. I haven't had the kind of experiences the author describes when installing Fedora, but Fedora systems have never been stable enough for me to stick with. They install okay, then a month or two later you run an update and suddenly your desktop's max resolution to be 640x480 or audio or wifi no longer works. Maybe it's because I've always used LXDE or XFCE instead of GNOME, but oh god I can't stand GNOME.
Some things are going to be tough unless you're some kind of guru, because few would've recently tried it and you may hit a brick wall before long.
Sounds like openness to weighing up other distros might have helped the author too (not to dis' Fedora!)
It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to try) just wouldn't find the network adapter owing to some obscure error that took hours to track down any information on.
Debian found the network adapter, but the USB devices wouldn't work. I had to tweak the USB bios settings – sometimes it'd work with the keyboard, sometimes with the USB flash drive I was installing from, sometimes not at all. To make USB work reliably I had to set the BIOS to use USB 1.1. Oh boy. Slow, but it worked.
It took a lot of fighting to convince the computer to use the network settings I wanted it to. I basically spent as much time turning off whatever-the-hell it was trying to do (network-manager, I'm looking at you), and edit the settings directly.
It took about 11 hours to get the thing setup (including the time to download 4 distros). There were many other nuisance and time-consuming issues.
All that said, now that it's setup it'll probably run perfectly until it physically dies. The firewall setup, though reasonably complex, was straightforward with ufw. VPN was a bit of a nuisance, but predictable.
So it would seem that a lot of effort depends on choosing the right hardware, and I'm probably missing out on some of the newer distros abilities (not that debian is old, but Ubuntu & Elementary OS clearly have had more resources put into the desktop-refinement).
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-...
I'll check out Fedora – Thanks for the link. I wouldn't have thought to look at it.
Cheers
You think that was a nightmare, try installing OS X on a Dell!
There are many more distros out there. I wonder if Ubuntu or ArchLinux might present these issues.
Why didn't he google Mac Book Pro Linux?
If I get some free food in a soup kitchen and get food poisoning, I'll complain as well.
Not only you should look a gift horse in the mouth, you should also check it for any diseases before you put it in your stable lest it infects you or other animals there. And if it is indeed sick, you do have a leg to complain, even if it was a gift.
But, free software is not exactly a gift. It's also something people put out (and often companies put out) to reach as many people as possible, and they do want it to be adopted and users to like it.
Besides, by your logic users not involved in free software projects should never criticize and complain about their shortcomings. How would their developers know what users want, and what's wrong with their programs then?
And no, not all development contribute the free software projects just for themselves and/or other community members only. Some really want the software to be adopted by as many users as possible, and are interested in their feedback.