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OpenGL is such a pain in the ass. You'd know if you tried it.

I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed:

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1. Update glibc and everything breaks

2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks

3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums

4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads)

5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters

6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do.

7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware.

8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.

This rant sounds like an informercial full of fake problems nobody has.

I have used Linux for decades and have never experienced any of this.

1. Use the software packaged for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works.

2. Use the packaged nvidia drivers for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works.

3. Prefer a laptop that is compatible with Linux, if that's not possible, use a laptop-friendly distro.

4. 99.99999% of people will never ever try to do that probably that's why.

5. Most of them are key/value based despite the syntax.

6. Yet most distros inherit from a major base distro like Redhat, Debian or others. If you want to use Slackware or Gentoo then that's your own choice.

7. There are many distros but, many of them are Debian or Redhat based, the ones that aren't are used by a tiny percentage of users.

8. And Pipewire solves this, and is the default sound server on recent distros.

Also the point about using Docker for GUI apps is crazy. I've never seen the need for such thing. AppImages, Flatpaks, heck even Snaps exist and allow developers to distribute applications along with the dependencies. They have their issues but they're good if the developer does not have much time to mess around with deps and testing in different distros, some users also prefer them due to "sandboxing".

I'm not saying Linux desktop is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not the clusterfuck NavinF is talking about.

Docker? Just use SELinux or Apparmor, seccomp, Xephyr, or something.

4. I'm an old. I will almost certainly try scaling my display by 125% or 150%.

Pipewire does not solve that unless your app uses their API. For 99% off apps (100% of VoIP?) you still get the same old latency until you go tuning configs. Pipewire is also not enabled on any LTS.

The rest of your replies reads as "La la la, I can't hear you!" which is pretty typical of the desktop Linux community. Deflect, deflect, and deflect :)

Not sure what "solving" means but it's not correct that Pipewire doesn't offer any benefits unless you use another API. Depending on what you compare it with, of course. If you use audio semi-professionally you might already use low latency software and not see better latency, but compared to Pulseaudio the difference should be noticeable.

Of course, if the application is VoIP than Pulseaudio was already good enough, as network latency is an order of magnitude greater, but for realtime streaming applications the difference is there.

Most end users won't care however. They switch when the distribution they use switches over.

You just listed a bunch of obscure issues that most people do not have and tried to portray that as being a blocker for a regular person adopting Linux.

1. Not all software is available in the repos, in some distros this happens frequently. And no, it doesn't "just work", I've even tried a popular distro that destroyed itself with the first update on a clean install.

2. I invite you to try an Nvidia Optimus setup. Good luck and hope you don't end up with a black screen because your distro thought it can handle it but doesn't.

3. Even if that was easy, most people trying out Linux do so with the hardware they currently have. And more often than not this means broken suspend or wifi or...

4. We have pretty cheap 4k screens nowadays and laptops with 4k. It's not that uncommon.

6. Are you seriously implying distros inheriting from another are all compatible with each other?

I HATE Nvidia. I had setup ubuntu once. Got everything running. Think this was 16.04. And for a couple of months it was rock solid. Then I was trying to play a game and some forum said to update the Nvidia driver. So I did… after rebooting I got a black screen. No UI. No she’ll. Nothing. If I shut down the shell would flash up for a second. But essentially I was locked out of the machine because the Nvidia drivers broke everything. Even booting into safe mode or whatever resulted in a black screen.

That’s the last time I bought a desktop computer with Nvidia card.

AMD even with their new cards being a bit buggy has never had such issues.

This is an accurate description of the different ways it sucks when one insists on using software on unsupported or semi-supported hardware.

Of course there will be unsupported wifi cards on the market. Of course there will be cards which kind of work when you load some unsuported third party driver but they will promptly crash on some future version. Those will never be supported in upstream software. Don't buy them and force Linux on them, it won't end well.

Don't buy a Dell PC and be angry at Apple when MacOS won't run. Unless you do it with the intention of working on a port. It's the same situation with any other operating system.

It's also been pretty clear for over a decade that nvidia is unlikely to be supported in upstream software, as long as they won't use the same standards as everyone else. There's been some recent developments on that front which suggests this situation may not be forever, but don't hold your breath.

Given the choice, it's pretty common to use Linux, at least among developers. One of the great things about it is that it just works. I have now thrown away the hardware but I used to have a workstation with a Debian install that was about two decades old. It had only been upgraded in-place, never reinstalled, and how many libc upgrades that included I do not know. The migration to the new executable format in the 90s was a bit problematic in the beginning, but that worked out well too. That's the sort of stability you can expect from it.

It was a long time ago I bought any new computers, but in the laptop realm well supported for a long time meant the performance Thinkpad series. Now all the big providers sell laptops with Linux pre-installed, so I take it they will work great too. But there are a lot of crappy Windows-type laptops out there. They're the kind that turn themselves on in your bag and cooks themselves. The Linux experience aren't going to be great with them.

It is the situation with Windows 11 as well. They have broken backwards compatibility with older hardware.

Disagree

Linux desktop hasn't been a thing because running anything other than FOSS on linux is an absolute nightmare. If SOMEONE hasn't compiled your gui for your specific linux flavor, you're in for a bad time.

Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux.

There's a reason 30 different containerization package distribution systems (flatpak, snap, et all) have cropped up.

In addition to all that, there's simply the fact that the Linux GFX backend is a complicated mess. XFree86? X11? Xorg? Wayland? Y11?

All of those + the fact that windows management is a DIFFERENT problem from the actual rendering so now you have concepts like "Window" strewn across 20 different systems.

The Linux desktop is a lovable freakshow. The reason it hasn't caught on is because it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files to get it just right for your specific set of hardware.

That isn't to say that OSes like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian haven't made herculean efforts to make things appear simple. However, it's far from "Well, microsoft bad therefore this didn't happen."

> Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux.

Slackware was never a "supported platform" yet i had no problem running binaries (java, Mentor Graphics) on it.

> it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files

Well, sure, but the desktop itself is pretty solid.

I've had all my relatives on bog standard Linux desktops for the past decade or so, and the half-yearly questions about it are limited to things like "what does disk full mean?" and "should I press this button that says 'Upgrade'?" (yes, you should).

That's when all your applications are web based anyway. If you have special local software needs you should of course use whatever they support.

The Linux desktop is its own worst enemy.

The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.

I dunno, I'd say it depends on how you like to work.

GUI program not running on Linux? Find the CLI call, run in terminal, grep and analyze the logs, find the error.

GUI program not running on Windows? Eh, good luck digging through the eventlog and 90% see nothing.

I consider the "need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things" a big plus to be honest. I work with windows machines from time to time and wish PS would be simpler and more expressive.

> the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users

Have you used Windows recently? At least the former is a growing problem. Dropping down into the registry to change or create keys is no cakewalk either. If you're an inexperienced user, you're in trouble on Linux and Windows both.

Microsoft's OOXML spec was so much larger than ODF for at least 3 reasons.

1. OOXML is an XML-ization of a descendent of earlier binary office formats. You can do things in binary formats that don't map efficiently to XML. That resulted in OOXML having uglier and more verbose XML. If I recall correctly this was only a small part of the size difference.

2. OOXML was way more complete. This was a big part of the size difference.

The first approved standard for ODF for example gave no details on how formulas worked in spreadsheets. All you could get from the standard was that you should support formulas.

The OOXML spec on the other hand described in detail the format of formulas and gave detailed specs for a large number of functions. There were often 2 or 3 pages for a single function.

3. When IBM and Sun were touting that 6000 page number for the draft OOXML spec, they were using a printing that has something like half as many lines per page as the printing of ODF they were comparing with.

The other side to that is that MS appeared to "stuff" ISO committees in various places to force it through, and didn't provide enough detail in their huge spec for true interop.

Perhaps neither was perfect, but it certainly seemed like MS played dirty.

Well, they were/are the dominant player who could not adopt another standard and had zero incentive except regulatory and public opinion.

It is a proprietary standard full of History. Nothing else than horrible in standard and process is to be expected.

.doc and .xls stopped literally every single business I ever worked in from dabbling with Linux desktop for staff.

Same here. Lots of money wasted on Windows licenses.

Funny how nobody remembers how OpenGL thing was SGI’s proprietary API designed to replace the standard, cross platform PHIGS.

Microsoft phylosophy is the reason. KDE and GNOME at the beginning (1.x) were quiet good. If developers would have fixed the bugs linux would have been better. But fixing bugs sucks, do they release every couple of years a new version, incompatible with the old one and the circle is closed. The sane users had given up a long time ago. My 15 years old fvwm config still works today.

Like Windows 95 that had blue screens of death every 5 seconds? And would die if you send it a ping?

This is just confirmation bias. Let me present an alternate view: Microsoft is a corporation that wants to make $$$.

1. Making OpenGL a compatibility layer on top of DirectX simplifies the stack, and helps Microsoft save $$$. (Apple doesn't support OpenGL 4.4+, is that "psychotic ill-intentioned"?)

2. Giving things away for free costs $$$. (If the EU demanded that IBM provide an open interface to its mainframes, do you think they would comply eagerly? Would it be "psychotic ill-intentioned" if they didn't?)

3. Standards are almost never followed by the company with a dominant position. Standards benefit companies that are not dominant in the market. Adhering to standards as the dominant player in the market = wasted $$$.

4. Trusted computing puts PCs on the same footing as Playstation/Xbox and allows content to be streamed without risk of piracy. That's the simplest explanation. A lot of people would like to stream 4k netflix on their PCs, but they can't because piracy is too great a concern. More popular features = more $$$.

5. This has nothing to do with Windows vs Linux. Regardless, plagiarizing your competitor makes you more $$$.

6. It should come as a surprise to no one, owning property makes you more $$$. (If Nintendo buys a game studio, is that also "psychotic"?!)

Even the king of open and darling of oss dudes-- Google, doesn't support caldav and cardav natively in Android. So I cannot host radicale and expect to get my contacts in Android without 3rd party app.

No one forces gamedevs to ditch opengl.

Read the information in the link about how DirectX became the de-facto standard (sections 2 and 3).

The link seems full of MS distrust rather an objective review. DirectX overtook OpenGL thanks to the mess started by GPU manufacturers that introduced their own proprietary extensions and ARB sleeping.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055

DirectX was simply a better API. Game dev is hard enough without dealing with OpenGL's jank-ass state machine, which adapted to vertex and pixel shaders about as well as the Unix process model adapted to threading. One of the great tragedies in 3D graphics is that Project Fahrenheit never got off the ground. Under Fahrenheit, OpenGL would be put out to pasture, DirectX would become the new low-level standard, and a higher level scene graph API would be built on top of DirectX.

True, but that was not the reason it was abandoned initially.

Back then multi-core CPUs were not much of a thing yet.

The reason it was abandoned is because people were told OpenGL on Windows Vista was going to be implemented through a compatibility layer that was going to be slow.

By the time Vista came around, virtually no one except Carmack was seriously targeting OpenGL.

Even Carmack eventually changed his point of view on DirectX, that is how good OpenGL happens to be.

> First person shooter godfather John Carmack has revealed that he now prefers DirectX to OpenGL, saying that 'inertia' is the main reason why id Software has stuck by the cross-platform 3D graphics API for years.

https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...

Vulkan seems to be doing all the same mistakes all over again, such is the pain of committee designed APIs.