The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop

However, lately I am shocked about the "advances" of the Linux Desktop: most of them are crap... And that is not just me, but also the feedbacks of the users that I see complaining... I know I will be downvoted with this post, but I must share my experience.

- PulseAudio was half-baked, pushed-down our throats by Ubuntu/Fedora, and hated by many users; with a very strong NIH syndrom, bringing little new features that could have been done better using the old architecture, with a maintainer team refusing to do release for a long periods of time or favoring some applications over other (which is totally unacceptable), not to mention not-thread safe, CPU hungry in many reproducible situations...

- PolicyKit is complex, using a very important number of processes, is almost never correctly initialized (only gdm3 seems to be able to do it) and breaks many setups, notably Network Manager... I now have to use command-line on KDE to connect to a wifi... And you cannot install Gnome3 or NM without it anymore...

- KDE4.x was not usable before 4.3 (I am actually ok with this), but still on 4.6, I have to deactivate the semantic desktop and all strigi to stop sucking a lot of my CPU power. Network Manager still does not work and I have weird kwin crashes with the nVidia proprietary driver.

- less important and less annoying, PackageKit is also a very complex thing, requiring maintainers for most distro to patch a lot of code, that has very little needs but quite some work has been pushed...

- Unity and Gnome3 have huge usability regressions, so far, but I will not emphasis on that until the next versions are out (KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were no better). But they also are very broken. For both of them, the WM doesn't support correctly application fullscreen, mixture of x11 and OpenGL, and of course not correctly Xv. Accessibility has been forgotten from Unity. On top of that, Unity crashes a lot or can trigger infinite loops; my family were quite not happy when they were upgraded.

So yes, when people ask my opinion with systemd or Wayland, I am not optimistic.

However, I have absolutely no problem with printing :)

As of December, I'm all Linux. I run Ubuntu at home. I use Linux at work, except when I need to debug OS-specific browsers. I never want to go back; Gnome hits my sweet spot. I want an OS that starts up and becomes invisible until shutdown, and I never want to touch the mouse. Ubuntu's out-of-the-box installation is probably still unusable for people without a tech background, but I love it.

I spend most of my time in Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, lots of Chrome tabs for testing + looking up reference material, Emacs, IntelliJ, and lots of terminals. I almost never need other software, and when I do, it's an apt-get away.

I've had challenges - I've never seen Ubuntu completely work on a fresh install. My wireless failed on my newest desktop install. The sound on the two before that. They never bundle my wireless driver, so I drag my desktop over to my modem. My printer gives baffling error messages. My old webcam arbitrarily rezoomed as it pleased. Gnome 3 overrode the "invert colors" keyboard shortcut, which I use heavily. I needed to steal time on my girlfriend's iMac to run Portal 2. My supercharged Toshiba laptop freezes when running on battery power (may not be Linux's fault).

But these are most of the problems I've faced in the past two years. I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.

But in defense of Linux, it has come a long way over the last decade, due to a few earth-moving forces:

- The rise of the web and end of the Windows native app lock-in

- The mainstream acceptance of open source and platform independent software engineering

- Canonical's aggressive, financially backed push to make Linux a viable mainstream desktop OS

It's easy to forget how many classic pain points have been more or less cured: building everything from source, recompiling the kernel, font rendering, working with office documents, configuring everything manually by editing text files, complete absense of tasteful design, no cross-platform apps or games whatsoever, and nobody having ever heard of your OS.

Linux is not there yet. It's still perfectly reasonable to throw your arms up and switch. But at this point, the historical trend suggests that it will get there eventually. It has never really stopped inching forward and we haven't yet seen anything that could stop it.

The Linux ecosystem doesn't burn through capital, so it can't collapse overnight like a commercial platform can. All it needs to sustain it is interest. The interest could dry up, for example if everybody starts caring only about data and not code. But if nobody's interested in it anymore, then it probably doesn't matter if it goes away.

"Try _distro_ - everything just works for me!"

and/or

"research before you buy!"

The 'it all works for me crowd'. I don't believe most of you most of the time. "Works" is in the eye of the beholder, and most of the time I've found that people who make that claim don't have anywhere near the same work style that I do.

Example: running audio from 4 different apps simultaneously all mixed together is a no-brainer under OSX/Windows, but is something most Linux users don't even dream of, because they've never even been able to try it (whoops, amarok is running, so I can't get AIM sound alerts, etc.) If they've never done it, the "works for me crowd" can't possibly know what 'works' means for them is light years away from what 'works' means to me.

"Research before you buy". Where and how? Show me an up to date list which shows even most of the compatibility aspects of stuff I can go buy in a store against recent distros. Googling around and finding that I can get Ubuntu 5.04 running on hardware from 2004 does me absolutely 0 good. Manufacturers don't always show you the exact chipsets used (and may often change chipset revisions and just ship new windows drivers in the box), and yet even if you do happen to know every single internal spec of hardware before you buy it, no one else will have bought it to determine if it works. Someone's gotta be first, unless the manufacturers would actually start certifying that "distro X" runs on particular configurations (which ain't gonna happen).

The majority of us live in a world where when we want a computer we're going to go to a local store and buy something. If Linux users want their stuff to be more widely adopted, they need to adapt to that reality. I suspect most Linux users don't really care, and are happy being 'cutting edge' and compiling new drivers to test stuff out. Really, it's an exciting and interesting way of life for some people, but one which I and many others eventually outgrow.

I used it almost exclusively until 2006, when I finally had enough. At the time I moved to Windows and abandoned Linux on the desktop completely, but I've since switched to OS X.

I can relate to the author. I spent years messing around with my systems, which was fun for a while. Every 6 months I'd reinstall my desktop box with the lastest version of Red Hat (and then Fedora) and spend the next week or two filing bug reports in bugzilla, and patching some stuff.

But after a few years, what was a learning experience, becomes a permanent wound in your sound engineering sense. It just isn't possible that something that has an insane amount of bugs with every new release will ever be something reliable and usable. Not with so many regressions, never fixed problems, and unbelievably in-your-face issues.

I've tried to return, to see if any progress was made. About once a year I install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora, but every time it seems the same, or worse in some aspects.

My last test was Ubuntu 11.04 on an old Toshiba laptop from late 2005 that I still have. It used to work apparently fine with just the LCD brightness control not working, and later with the usual application quirks, bugs and crashes.

However, the latest version has "new" drivers for the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card, which non-working 3D acceleration that makes the default WM hang on login, and not even "glxgears" works anymore. Any attempts to disable hardware acceleration have failed (not only X doesn't have a configuration file by default anymore, but it also segfaults when trying to generate one with "X -configure" and ignores any option I set manually).

Aside from the X problems, stand-by no longer works. The machine just dies never to wake up again.

The problems just go on and on.

It isn't a usable machine for anything other than simple web browsing, and even there it has issues with flash, which stutters playing the simplest of videos, even though it doesn't peg the CPU.

I've used the knowledge I accumulated from these years for my work (where I have a bunch of Linux servers working just fine), but I say that Linux on the desktop won't ever amount to nothing, no matter how much that turd is polished.

It's even more sad if you think that while all this was going on in the Linux desktop, Apple has successfully launched an unix desktop that has been stable and usable for years. So it is possible and in a short timeframe, which means that Linux on the desktop is a failed experience.

I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.

Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!

But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).

The irony is that I know it's no use to complain to people still "inside" the linux community about this, because I used to be one of them and I know what I answered to those people that complained: pick better hardware (so much choice), pick better software (even more choice), learn how to use the software (you luser), learn to build your own (with this easy 23 step guide), and finally the conversation-ender "works fine for me" (so your experience is irrelevant).

It was of course all a delusion on my part. As much as I claimed that it worked fine for me, it didn't. Not really, not 100%. So it became a trade-off, which deficiencies were worse? Those of windows, those of the mac, or those of linux? I ended up on the mac, but it's also not 100%. It still sucks just a little bit. All I've ever wanted is for there to be one OS that doesn't suck, and I'll pay top dollar (or euro) to use it, but I've never found it. I always have to pick the least sucky one, and that really sucks.

I bought a new computer past summer and all its hardware worked properly from day zero, ethernet, wifi, 3D acceleration, suspending, hibernating and dual-monitors included. I chose the right hardware. Flash support? The 64-bit flash plugin is not crashing here. I use flashblock to avoid possible security problems, but I use it in Windows too, to avoid annoying ads with sound. The quality of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is good enough for desktop users, in my humble opinion.

And the rest of the post is debatable at least. Linux and its software ecosystem are not to blame for poor Skype support, for example.

I know that Linux so often makes you put up with compromises and so often it is at the graphics card hurdle that it starts to annoy, but I think the 3 things he'll miss is the things which will eventually drive him back.

Firstly, the shell is one thing that seems irreplaceable, yes you could use cygwin or equivalent but nothing will fill the void of a shell that is so beautifully incorporated into the OS, more than OSX in my mind, despite them being the same shell, Linux makes no excuses and is proud of its Shell.

Transparency, Yes this is important, but something I know I could live without, as he mentions he doesnt do this as often as before and really its main purpose was for fixes with drivers.

Package Management and I would stretch further to even open source and free software will drive him back. I had a stint where I could only use Vista for about 7 days, the reminder of the horrors of "shareware" software and 30 day trials had me looking forward to getting back to "apt-get install"

I run NVIDIA graphics and have no problems .. I realise the latest and greatest takes a while to become fully supported on my platform of choice, and often solutions to problems require research and time - but I'd rather accept this compromise than use Windows.

Windows feels like Fisher Price, Linux feels more like Mechano - in the sense that it presents opportunities rather than fully packaged solutions

Finally I installed Ubuntu and I've never looked back. Nearly everything just worked, with the exception of plugging in an external monitor. The experience was much smoother than on Windows or Mac. I'm very happy with the Unity desktop.

One thing that has me fed up with proprietary software was that although I had purchased Photoshop CS5 for Mac, it was nearly impossible to activate. I had to call Adobe because I was upgrading from a Windows CS2 to a Mac CS5. Once I had to reinstall everything and the installer asked me to go through the whole process again. With Ubuntu I can download and install software almost effortlessly. It's not worth the hassle to spend lots of money and not even be able to use a piece of software. I'd rather use Gimp, despite some UI weaknesses. The only thing that made me want Photoshop in the first place was better compatibility with other Photoshop users' files. For myself, Gimp is more than adequate.

Since going to Ubuntu, I seem to never have trouble with applications working, Internet connectivity, or graphics. I have two computers a desktop circa 2006 with an old ATI card (x1900, I think) and a dell mini 9 both running the Ubuntu 11.04.

I certainly have troubles with Flash, but they are infrequent and usually only necessitate killing Flash from Chrome's task manager.

On the Dell Mini, I occasionally have wifi issues, but since the 10.XX series, the frequency of these problems has dropped significantly.

As far as changing to Unity, I honestly don't care. I've been using Gnome-Do since around '09, so ditching the menus hasn't bothered me at all.

I have friends using Ubuntu as well and they don't seem to have insurmountable problems either, although they have been migrating to OS X in search of a more beautiful user experience.

But going to Windows? I couldn't imagine getting any development done on that OS.

It should be obvious to anyone who's been using Linux for a while that a new dual intel/nvidia gpu mobile card is not going to be sorted out until quite a while after release. If he was a newbie I'd feel some sympathy but he's not. The rest of his rant is about the past.

I've been using Linux for 6 years, the first year I was dual-booting with Windows because I had a project in asp.net, but when It was finished I formatted that partition and use it as a backup storage now.

I have a HP laptop with everything Intel on it, from WiFi card to Graphics card, and everything is supproted out-of-the-box. With plain Ubuntu Live CD I can have 3D desktops and connect to WiFi networks without a problem. For multimedia Linux is strong, Flash works without problem, although if you're on 64bit it may use your CPU more than it should.

The only problem which I have and the blog post author has is Skype and Office Suites. Skype works OK but it's not up-to-date as in Windows or OS X, and LibreOffice (or it's older dying daddy, OpenOffice.org) is OK but not perfect.

As for "Poor quality of desktop apps" point, I don't use Nautilus but Dolphin, and not Firefox but Opera, and I'm happy with it.

The point in the Linux Desktop is that you don't have to stay on the default Linux distributions choice, but you can customize/change/mix everything.

And for hardware, before buying a new machine, check if everything will work out of the box on the distribution you desire to install on it later.

bye bye past 'hardcore Linux user'

P.S. There are numerous posts where the author recalls on past problems, so, they aren't really problems now.

So this guy has tried two advanced distros (Gentoo and Arch), plus one "beginner" distro which (from my experience) has provided nothing but frustration, and he's giving up on Linux because it's "too hard"?

How can you claim Linux to be "too hard" when you haven't even tried Ubuntu?

Blame falls on Intel and AMD who use Linux really just as leverage against MSFT and never have given 100% commitment to it (e.g. Intel GMA500) except on severs.

The world has moved to laptops - Microsoft still gets money for every Linux machine sold and almost none are bundled with a Linux OS that works(I once bought a MSI Wind with Suse that hand an incompatible wifi card!!). Even Dell has back-peddled.

The main failure I believe has been Taiwanese hardware companies in their fear of Microsoft or their greed almost never advertise "Works with Linux".

I agree with the other poster - you would never buy Apple equipment without looking at compatibility beforehand - why not Linux.

I watch kids using Linux desktop and it is all about using browsers. Chrome and opera work very well under Linux. Tablets - are they the future of the linux desktop?

The poster neglects to mention that that the Linux desktop has moved to the hand held - android, meego maemo etc. Where the user experience was actually very good. Driver support is better than windows.

I found I simply have better things to do than debug and write drivers (yes, I did write drivers as well). I'd much rather expend my energy elsewhere.

Since the switch I never looked back.

My experience over the years brings me to the conclusion that the driver experience will always be lacking. While many experiences on Linux have improved, the driver experience has reached some kind of steady-state. Every time I upgrade my distribution, something improves and something else breaks.

>8 years of experience and you didn't know that you should look for compatibility issues BEFORE buying? Seriously?

I for one gave up hope of "The Year of Desktop Linux", a very long time ago and can agree with the majority of your points. But really now? :| That's something you should well be used to dealing with by now

As for Skype and Flash, what is the Linux community expected to do? They are both proprietary: there is nothing "Linux" can do to make them work better.

Then you have Fedora. It has always been the "experimental" branch. Much like Debian Sid, you don't expect it to work 100% of the time. I am surprised someone experienced with Linux falls in this trap.

I hope he enjoys the life without really knowing what the machine is doing, the life without a decent shell, without a decent development environment and managing software like it was in the dark ages. I wonder how long it will take until we see a rant about how useless Windows is and why he's moving to BSD or OSX.

That's basically it. It's not the drivers, it's not the bugs - it's the culture. The culture of Linux seems to be that every user should be a programmer and should help debug the OS. If you are one, and want to help - great, go ahead! As for me, I have other things to do and I expect the OS, shell and file manager to Just Work.

There will be no reason for most people to maintain a separate computer when their phone is powerful enough to do everything they need, except that its form factor is inappropriate. It will be cheaper and simpler just to dock it in a shell that gives a more appropriate form factor.

tldr; Android will disrupt the laptop/desktop market.

I used Linux for 10 years. Bought a MacBook to that, coexisted, and then switched to it full time a few months ago.

I'm actually starting to miss Linux a great deal, though. I'll probably miss some conveniences about the Mac when I go back, but I can't seen anything major. I like KDE and Gnome, and the Linux versions of Firefox, Opera and Chromium are just fine. I don't care in the slightest about Flash or Dolby sound (I listen to music on $15 'Altec Lansings' from WalMart). I don't play games. I don't care about office software. Skype works well enough for me, and will be dead soon anyway.

The ethernet driver complaint is bizarre. I never had a problem finding them in 2004, and why mention it now?

I've had problems with suspend/resume on Windows as well as Linux. You need to get everything set up right video-wise, etc. and I agree it is a pain. Power management, too - it needs to be improved.

A Linux user switching to a Mac makes sense. Using Windows is a bizarre idea - it's simply too unfamiliar and limited of an OS for me. It makes me feel like I'm locked in a padded room with a start button - powerless and declawed, and a lot of my favorite software is not available for Windows. No, I'm not installing cygwin or learning PowerShell. Mac's Unixness is comfortable for me, though I am grizzled by how some of the flags for the common command line utils must come before other arguments here in non-GNU land.

Some links to remember:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu https://launchpad.net/unity and https://launchpad.net/unity-2d

On each page there is a 'report a bug' link on the upper right.

Or, if you experience a crash, you can report the bug at the command line by typing 'ubuntu-bug' and a series of prompts will walk you through the data collection.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

Three years ago I bought the latest asus laptop (M50sv) and lot's of stuff didn't work (sound, hibernate, bluetooth etc ) but within about 12 months with new installs of ubuntu things started to work to the point where now everything wor .

I would much rather use a working version of Ubuntu than Win7 ( I used both at work and Win7 really sucks in comparison ) . But, as I said, the latest hardware always takes awhile and any seasoned Linux user knows that, even this guy.

It seems like what's really going on here is 'nix fanboys are upset at the level of vertical integration necessary in a distro like Ubuntu, to achieve a basic level of operational success at the cost of flexibility and horizontal modularity.

So go spend hundreds of hours per year hand-crafting your favorite versions of everything, and updating drivers manually every week or so, while bitching about how you want your money back from Canonical -- I'll just get on with doing some real work.

My main Linux workstations are a three year old QUAD core Shuttle XPC and a Dell business workstation. I religiously upgrade to each Ubuntu distro release every six months. Some things have gotten a lot better (like sound), then other stuff breaks. In particular, the Intel graphics drivers (like mentioned in this article) still are not quite right.

It's a little depressing how the fundamentals still are still not solid.

ZOMG, I forgot about my ASUS 1000 netbook.. The wireless get WORSE and WORSE every release. The wireless driver with 9.10 were awesome and now I can barely connect anywhere.

DE-PRESS-ING..

I started using Linux in the 0.9x days, back when I downloaded a SLS distribution on a 2400 baud modem and put it onto 20-30 5.25" disks. I then switched to Slackware (14.4kbps modem now!) and then Red Hat (in the v2/v3 days up until v6 or so).

Back then I typically just used multiple text consoles (alt-F2, etc to switch). This actually worked really well.

At the time you could run X... if you had the right hardware... if you configured all the right settings... if you had enough CPU/RAM... if (ad nauseum). But you could get it to work.

Thing is, there wasn't actually a lot of reason to use X. Programming was done in vi or emacs. You might want to use Netscape but the Web was embronic at best (we're talking 1995 here) and Netscape was a resource hog. I preferred to use lynx when I could.

Thing is, at that time I remember people saying "sure it's not great but it's getting better... give it a year or two and it'll be awesome".

15 years on I still hear the same thing and honestly I don't think it's much better. Sure the problems are different but Gnome still feels slow (not that Gnome existed back then, but you get my point). You still have to dick around with things just to get them to work.

From a combination of age and experience I both no longer value my time so low as to bother with this whenever I can avoid it and I no longer believe the lie about it getting better.

Take PulseAudio. I just don't get it. All i want to do is change my system volume and have it react relatively quickly (PA, in my experience, can have latency on volume changes of 100+ ms; yes this is a problem).

PulaseAudio, for me, exemplifies all that's wrong with desktop Linux. As someone described it, it's a solution in search of a problem, overengineering at its finest. It simply aims to solve problems I don't have or care about and fail at solving the problems I do have (unrelated side note: if you happen to be on the CSS Working Group, go back and read this paragraph 400-500 times until you get it).

Lots of apologists on this thread say OSX isn't a valid comparison because it only supports limited hardware. Nonsense. OSX is the way it is because the focus is on user experience and working well, not on, say, remembering per-application volume settings or being able to position particular audio streams (because, hey, it's a cool engineering exercise).

I'll use OSX whenever I can. I just wish Apple didn't make it so hard, like your desktop options are the Mac Mini (still Core 2 Duo, no thanks, my laptop had one of those in 2007), the Mac Pro (no thanks, proprietary hardware that is no longer supported 2-3 years later) or the iMac (can you make it any harder to install an SSD?).

I'll happily use Windows 7 too. It's stolen most of the best bits of OSX, enough that it's "good enough" anyway. Sure it's a nightmare of complexity too (policy settings anyone?) but at least using it on the desktop, unlike Linux, doesn't leave me wanting to stab out my eyes with a spoon.

I just wish there was a Mac Mini equivalent that used a Sandy Bridge i5/i7 (the 13" MBP has this, I don't see why the Mini can't) and a second hard drive instead of an optical drive (SSD + 2.5" HD for storage or even RAID1 SSDs for reliability). Integrated GPUs are fine.

Come on Mac Mini refresh, you're long overdue.

Anyway, the story of Linux on the desktop is the ultimate answer to the question of why shoot yourself in the foot when you can shoot yourself in the head.

But there's nothing wrong with that.

I am not blaming Linux. It is free anyway and done by a lot of smart and dedicated volunteers. My mindset now is I don't mind to pay some money so that my computing needs can be met without too much effort from my end. I am using OS X, and frankly I find Windows 7 is _very_ useable and quite pleasant to play with. Linux has its place in computing, and my desktop always has a partition for the latest version of Ubuntu. But for daily use, count me out. Thank you very much.

I'm very comfortable with cygwin, emacs, and putty on windows, and can move more or less effortlessly between windows and linux when working. The biggest annoyance is probably the slightly different copy-paste rules between putty and gnome/gnome-terminal. So I generally use Linux and Windows concurrently enough that whenever I encounter something that windows does better, I can just use that.

Because those four positives the original author lists are enormous:

    * shell
    * transparency, control
    * package management
    * lack of viruses, malware

- Poor modern hardware support. "Linux on the Desktop" is dead in the water without a devoted hardware supplier that writes all drivers and sells computers running Linux. The kernel itself is perfectly modern but we just often don't have proper driver support.

- Some desktop subsystems still suck. Is Audio bulletproof yet? PulseAudio seems too complex, OSSv4 is out of kernel and is not suspend/hibernate aware, Alsa is outdated.

- Desktop software is terrible. No office suite that feels solid, apps written with a mismash of backends, languages, and toolkits, everything feels designed by committee. No stationary canonical APIs to build proprietary software on. No commercial software suites (CAD, Office, Adobe, Steam, etc) or free software equivalents.

- GTK and Qt do not cut it. They are not attractive, they are not modern, interface design doesn't appear to be a priority, most devs don't want to write desktop software in C or C++.

The only way for Linux on the desktop to thrive is under the power of a commercial hardware company that designs systems with Linux in mind, gets the support of commercial 3rd party software companies, and completely eschews Gnome and KDE. That is a massive amount of work/money so I don't expect it to ever happen.

I have used Linux on the desktop since 2002 (and will continue to use it) but I'm not delusional. Funnily enough, I've tried going back to Windows 7 (I am dual booting now) but I inexplicably have more driver problems on Win7 than I do on Linux (Thinkpad).

I'm not a typical computer user, though. I could survive with only Emacs and Chrome.

Linux can be seen as being a developers OS and if you are serious about development, the first thing you do is move to Linux. The amount of diagnosis and control it offers on the network and the OS through simple commands and DIY scripts is just unmatched. Though, the number of people involved in development is extremely small as compared to the number of regular home PC users.

The second kind, are the people who want to use Linux for web surfing, watching videos, playing some songs and do some office stuff. Here is the problem. Linux just does not fit this user portfolio. At least, it does not fit this as good as Windows does. OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are light years behind MS Office. VLC is the only video player that brings some decency into video playback, and people are torn between music players.

Why did Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint take off so well? In a world ruled by Windows, Linux has to understand its users and their Windows world view.

Wayland can be the savior for Linux and Unity is already turning some heads.

All my problems with @nix/@bsd and desktops start with "X".

The big wakeup for me is that the bug known, marked severe and has existed since 2005 without resolution. [0],[1],[2] It doesn't matter what distro or OS I choose. The core of the desktop has problems. I don't blame Linux, X or gnome devs for this, nor do I contemplate switching back to Windows or deserting to Apple. The culprit here is crappy software (eg: try reading through the various GDM shell wrappers) and closed binary drivers (nVidia) and the solution is writing better low level software.

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=182517

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/63905

[2] http://www.xfree86.org/current/chips7.html

I've had many of the same issues over the years, but it has progressively gotten better. Now have Ubuntu Maverick on my Dell Studio XPS and it runs like a dream. Video, camera, networking, sound, hotkeys, suspend/resume ran since first boot, and I didn't have to do anything. Printing surprised me too. When I went in to work one day I was printing after two or three clicks in the control panel. It was never that easy in Windows XP, tho maybe 7 is better. And keeping up to date is 10x easier than windows of course.

I did have a problem with Video crashing occasionally on first install but a subsequent kernel update fixed all that.

My tip for Ubuntu users (at least) is, don't upgrade to the newest release, stay back one. And if you do upgrade, wait a full month for the most egregious bugs to get fixed. I'll start looking at Natty when finished with my current project.

That said, OSX still has better application experience. I've used it for the first time as my primary machine at work for the past few months, and coming from a traditional Linux background, I'm sold. Strongly considering a MBP as my next hardware purchase. Idealistically I'd prefer to go the OSS route, throwing Arch or Ubuntu on a Lenovo, but it's really just not there yet.

Unless that kind of attitude and culture of blaming the user changes I am afraid Linux won't be winning many desktop users from the mainstream.

However, it sounds to me like this guy had just had enough with the platform for whatever reason - and then proceeded to make a bunch of decisions that put him on a collision course with failure. Not saying he didn't run into valid issues, but someone with that much linux experience should have well known about some of the issues he was about to run into.

Running Fedora 15: This got released a bit more than two weeks ago. Fedora always seems to have a bunch of issues for me in the first month or two until they get a bunch of user submitted problems ironed out. I know this well with F15 right now - I'm running it and have run into power management problems, nfs blocking hibernation, occasional extreme gui lag, an incompatibility with gnome shell and fglrx etc. There are tickets open on these and I'm confident many of them will get resolved. F14 has none of these issues now - if you want a super stable and reliable desktop experience you generally shouldn't run a brand new Fedora release.

Running gnome 3 / gnome shell: This is also brand new and it should be somewhat of a nobrainer that there are going to be some issues. Early KDE 4 had similar issues. But then again so did Aero when Windows Vista was brand new. Want a stable, polished experience? Run something that's been worked on for a while - this is more or less true in any OS.

Driver issues with new hardware. Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but it's a reality. If you don't want to fuss with drivers consider buying stuff that's been out for a little longer. My ironlake gpu is supported 100% perfectly in fedora 14. Then again I've seen F15 running on a sandy bridge gpu working just great so I'm not sure what issue he's running into. It seems quite possible that the dual gpus are confusing the issue. My laptop with dual gpus (ironlake and radeon) has some issues until I ban the radeon driver from loading at boot (it can still be loaded before switching to the amd gpu before X loads).

A lot of his rants about GPU drivers honestly don't sound very accurate to me. Intel drivers are garbage? Not in my experience - it seems to me that the Intel maintained open source drivers are some of the best of the open source solutions and generally work out of the box on everything I use them on. Maybe he's running into a problem because Sandybridge has really only been practically in use for 4-5 months. AMD drivers are garbage? There is an element of truth here but it's quite overstated.

If linux doesn't agree with him any longer that's perfectly understandable. Hopefully he'll be happier under Windows. But to me it sounds like this guy has some rage issues and has either warped his own perspective of the situation due to them or is intentionally looking to make the situation look worse to the reader.

/shrug

I don't give anything back to the community which works hard to provide, all of us, with free and pretty stable software.

I don't submit bugs.

I don't support a project and volunteer my own time to help support it.

I don't pay a dime for the many applications that ship with ubuntu.

Yes, it's frustrating at times when something doesn't work. But the reality is, I can't really complain for something I don't work on, support, or pay for.

If we all really want this amazing experiment, of running a free - and - open desktop OS to succeed and flourish. We should probably find more ways to support it. I know I should.

Major thanks to all of you who do though!

[1]: http://laclinux.com/gnu/Start

As for desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), I wish they'd progress towards simplicity, speed, and smaller size, rather than becoming larger, more complex, and monolithic. They both should come to their senses and stop trying to copy the most recent OS X and Windows desktops.

It also needs better cohesion between design and code...

A lot of these complaints are hardware related. A quick guide based on my experience with my new coworkers installing linux:

Lenovo Thinkpads: Work seamlessly

Dell Latitudes: Only minor issues

Macs: Hell setting up

Interestingly, most of my favorite desktop apps are written in C++ (Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, Lyx, Kivio, CodeBlocks, Inkscape, etc...).

Anyone, else notice a similar pattern?

and while i would like to say that opensuse these days does "just work", i too have had problems with the current intel driver (open bug report, no response; there is an older version in the X repo that works much better). this same problem was mentioned in the thread here on the new driver contributions from intel.

so what's happening with the intel driver? why is something so unstable being released as part of standard distros?

printing, sound, skype, ...

updates that break stuff, etc. Still like it on servers but not on my laptop ;)

This basically sums up how I feel about using Linux on my home machine. I've used it for a couple of years now; I've reached the point in my life in which I want to use my time to work or entertain myself. And I don't have that much free time. It's a bad use of my time to constantly have to debug my OS; I could be using Windows 7 with VM(s) running Linux. I would have all of its benefits and I would be a lot more productive.

Have been a happy Ubuntu user (desktop + netbook) for the last 5 years without a single glitch.

Floating desktop environments like Gnome and KDE on the other hand feel like bad OS X copies and definitely are not on of Linux' strengths.

On hardware: You have to watch out what you buy. If you just want to run the most bleeding edge hardware then there will probably be some sort of driver fuckup with linux. Though you might not be able to avoid the mentioned Optimus technology in a months :(

On suspend/resume: I'm running Linux on an 2009 Macbook Pro and the suspend/resume works like a charm. It needs a few seconds more than OS X to wake up completely but it works. So I guess this is hardware dependent too and not a general problem with lx.

Desktop software: If you want to run typical desktop software like Office, Video Editing, etc. Then yeah - Linux is probably the wrong OS for you. I'm in the lucky position to be able to do most of my work in terminals and VIM and for that there's nothing better than a Linux box with a tiling WM.

I'd say Linux is not a general purpose desktop OS in its current state. But there are use cases where linux rocks. (Even on the desktop.)

TBH the only reason I NEED Linux is valgrind.

To look at things another way, hardware vendors (Lenovo included) build and test their systems for Windows because 95%+ of their customers will only ever run Windows.

If you plan to run a Linux desktop you simply must research the hardware before you buy, because your vendor certainly has not. Nvidia Optimus is just one big, sad, ugly example of this.