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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

That's part of the problem. You face a problem, look online for a solution, and find answers that pertain only to different distros than what you're using. It hasn't gotten much better as far as I can tell. I used Linux as my primary desktop for a few years around 2002-2005 (Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Back then, configuration was mostly automatic, though you had to do stuff like install the NVIDIA kernel blob manually. When things broke, it was at least possible to fix it by dropping into the CLI.

I recently tried to set up Fedora running a VNC or RDP server, and after a couple of days of futzing I gave up. I guess Wayland has managed to regress on that from where X was a decade ago? Systemd also made startup issues impossible to debug, and also apparently f--ked up with how log files are stored? It's a mess.

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My experiences are similar. The more time passes the harder (???) it gets to work with Linux. I had to bump my Linode machines forward to avoid getting left behind by the Ubuntu upgrade train and the transition to systemd broke all my services and made everything harder to debug. Not pleasant.

I used to operate under the assumption that I could sit down and use Linux if I needed to - and I started a job that required just that, and it was fine. I'm increasingly less certain of that, because things seem to change rapidly and it's very hard to find documentation that is clear and up-to-date. It's already hard enough to figure out how to do things like add a shortcut to Ubuntu's app launcher.

Debian Wheezy (systemd-free) is still receiving security updates. Devuan provides systemd-free Debian.

> made everything harder to debug

It's not harder, it's just different. As a counterpoint, I never figured out how sysvinit works and got by with guesswork and Stack Overflow answers. And I hated how logs were scattered all over the place. Nowadays you have systemctl(1) and journalctl(1) which are exceptionally well-documented in their manpages, and now services and logs work the same all the time across all distros.

(Not going to argue about journald's weird binary log format though. I don't get that. But at least it doesn't get in the way for me.)

I believe you, but design decisions like 'the systemd utilities for controlling services exit silently with no output even when they fail to start a service' definitely make it hard to learn the new systems.

Eh, what? I've seen them fail non-silently. What you're thinking of is probably when a service comes up fine, but then fails a few seconds after it has started up.

First of all, I disagree flatly that Linux is hard to use and troubleshoot. Google "blah ubuntu" or "blah fedora" and you get an answer. This isn't 2002.

Second, systemd troubleshooting and RDP servers are not common uses for Grandma, so even if valid points were made, most users aren't affected.

Just yesterday I was searching the Internet to understand why the travel netbook where I have an AMD GPU has suddenly stopped supporting hardware acceleration for videos.

Something that was working up to a few months ago, the last time I used it.

We had Google in 2002 and the answer would probably have been easier to find at that time since there wouldn't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub-distros to clutter up the results. I can't count the number of times I've found an answer that applies to "Ubuntu" where the alleged solution didn't apply to the version that I'm running.

Also, systemd can cause anyone problems - I'm not sure it can distinguish between you or Grandma.

And this situation doesn't apply to windows or macos how, exactly?

since there wouldn't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub-distros

There are no macOS or Windows subdistros. So, the only difference may be between different versions. Adding to that, Apple generally does not have the tendency to replace/rewrite macOS subsystems every few years, so it is much more likely that thing still work after a couple of years.

> There are no ... Windows subdistros

That's a pretty naive trust in Microsoft's branding/marketing team. Of course there are heaps of different Windows distributions. They don't necessarily differ as much as, say, Ubuntu vs Gentoo, but they do differ.

There were Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and dozens of others then too. Software still switched its method of configuration between versions, and distros still had their own incompatible ways of doing things. Linux was farther from mainstream, StackExchange didn't exist, Google wasn't as good, and Linux in general was less polished (and required more manual intervention to get things going).

The last time I wanted to use my HiDPI screen on Wayland/GNOME, I had to change the Mutter source and recompile, because my Dell HiDPI screen does not fulfil the GNOME definition of HiDPI.

A random non-expert user would simply not be able to enable scaling properly (and stare at miniature windows).

Yes, I know KDE is better and GNOME is working on this. The fact is that hardware that has been around for years does not work out of the box or even with a 'blah fedora'.

The point is that the ecosystem is so fragmented now that Googling often doesn’t get you useful answers. You find an article that applies to some version of Ubuntu, but you’re on Fedora, or you’re on a different version of Ubuntu that’s made major breaking changes in basic components (systems, Mir/Wayland/etc). At least back in 2002 most everything used SysV Init and Xorg.

As to your other point—grandma has an iPad. To the extent Linux has relevance in the desktop, it’s for CS students, people setting up a lab of workstations, etc. Simple stuff like setting up a Remote Desktop is squarely within that use-case.

>I recently tried to set up Fedora running a VNC or RDP server, and after a couple of days of futzing I gave up. I guess Wayland has managed to regress on that from where X was a decade ago?

According the Wayland FAQ [1] they have specifically avoided defining a remote API.

[Q]: Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

[A]: No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

Which leaves you using Spice, or older solutions like X+VNC. Check out Apache's incubator project Guacamole [2] if you'd like a solution that can stream a Linux or Windows desktop to a browser via HTML 5; it supports SSH, Telnet, RDP and VNC. And despite supporting those older protocols it integrates with LDAP or CAS [3] for external authentication along with DUO for two-factor authentication.

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

[2] https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Authentication_Service

N.B.: I added the Q and A tags to the Wayland FAQ quotes for clarification which is why they're highlight differently from the copied text.

As far as I can tell, Guacamole is not itself an RDP or VNC server, and doesn’t solve the problem of exposing a Wayland desktop remotely.

Right: Guacamole doesn't do anything for Wayland. It just lets you create a parallel solution.

It is frustrating how far Ubuntu has diverged from Debian. It used to be easy to set up a remote desktop, I can't even get it to work in Ubuntu 16 now, just tried the other day too.

What if you use Teamviewer? It seems to support both Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS, etc.

Nasty piece of software that requires running a server daemon even for the client. Bad secuity history and non open. Simply horrid.

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