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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

And no.

Linux was never a very good desktop OS. Though it was a fair to perhaps good workstation OS. However, the future of the desktop may well be in mobile-heritage OSes such as iOS and Android. Just as the PC grew to fill its mini-computer and mainframe big brothers' shoes so mobile OSes are likely to mature into robust desktop platforms (though founded on different paradigms).

And if that's the case, then the linux desktop dream may yet live indirectly, through android and related offerings (chrome OS, etc.)

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> Linux was never a very good desktop OS

Have you ever seriously tried to use it? Because, lacking a proper official definition of what a good desktop OS is, I am very satisfied with the one running in front of me and can only say it's really good. Good as in "solid and predictable".

I understand there are Linux distros for every taste, from the heavy-duty-server guy to the most curious hacker that wants to compile the kernel for every upstream release, but I find - and that's first-hand experience - Ubuntu makes for a very nice destkop OS.

I agree with you on everything, except the fact that it's solid. In my experience, it crashes a bit more than Windows (Gnome/the GUI does, the rest of the system runs great). E.g. gwibber-service keeps taking up 100% of my CPU at random times, network-manager-applet keeps disappearing, disconnecting me from the net, etc.

Other than that, I love it, it's my main OS. I just wish they debugged it a bit more. Ubuntu is known for using bleeding-edge packages rather much...

I have experienced some Gwibber weirdness, but in 10.04. It's been behaving very well on 10.10 and I haven't seen Gnome crashes in a long time except one during the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 (since no non-linux desktop OS can do such a feat - imagine upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 while you work on the machine being upgraded... - I consider that a moot point)

It's hard to debug with the vast amounts of undocumented hardware people run it on. The developers have access to only a tiny fraction of all the hardware combinations their users have and an even smaller fraction of those have some documentation or specs developers can write for. Graphic accelerators and wireless interfaces are just two very visible categories where far too many hardware manufacturers want to make sure open-source developers fail.

There used to be a hardware popularity/test app with Ubuntu. I can't find it on 10.10 but, if it might be useful for you to run it or whatever came to replace it. Also, it's entirely possible very few people run it on the exact hardware you have and filing a bug report may help others with similar problems.

Ah, it's good to know Gwibber is fixed in 10.10 (I'm running 10.04). I'm waiting a month or so after each release, because upgrading right after release has given me problems in the past.

Gnome doesn't crash completely, just a few applets disappearing or other weirdness. I agree that it's hard to debug wireless adapters or graphics, but gwibber, for example, shouldn't really take up all your CPU like that.

It's generally fine, everything works fine on all my computers, except nm-applet, which does crash on three separate computers quite frequently. I hope it's fixed on 10.10, thank you for the info!

There is no way to escape the fact that Ubuntu has less users than Windows has beta users. It takes a lot of luck to expose more rare bugs during the beta stage, specially in short cycles like Ubuntu's

But I kind of like having a new desktop rolled out every 6 months, even if the price is having to troubleshoot stuff or filing bug reports. If I wanted a boring, stable, rock-solid OS, I would run Solaris 10 on my PC ;-)

On your nm-applet thing, are the three computers using the same wireless interface?

What do you mean? They have different adapters, they are on the same network most of the time but it happens both on other networks, plus it happens to a computer that doesn't even have a wireless interface.

It hasn't happened in a while, thankfully.

Oh no.. Same as in same model. It could be a problem specific to that particular chipset. You can report a nm-applet specific bug with apport-bug. This helps a lot with triaging and collects hardware info and meaningful (hopefully) logs automagically.

Ah, right. I tried apport-bug but it said "You need to specify a PID", and I have no time to research that right now... I'll try later on, thanks!

Thanks.

The more users that report bugs, the better coverage the software will have.

I haven't had a crash since installing 10.10. The only restart came when a kernel security patch showed up.

But I also never have crashes in XP, so we probably use our computers for different things.

I didn't have crashes on XP (had to use it for about two years, from 2008 up to mid-2010) but I experienced increasing levels of "weirdness" that were cured with sporadic restarts. That and regular pushed updates that mandated restarts (when, I assume, a logoff would do). No crashes and no BSODs except on the Sysinternals screensaver, however.

But I did very little development on that machine. When I developed software for Windows (NT-2000-XP era) I had to rebuild the machine every 4 months...

Linux is the best desktop OS I ever used. Sure, it required me to learn a bit about its innards and consider what I need and why, but once configured it is a flawless and relaxing experience for me.

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