Economist on Linux Desktop: Free is too expensive | Hacker News Reader

Economist on Linux Desktop: Free is too expensive

economist.com

34 pointsbokchoi30 comments

Are you f'ing kidding me. He writes an entire article about how there is no professional support for Linux without mentioning Redhat or Canonical that both provide professional support.

He may have a good point in the middle in that there are still some driver issues. But those are not really issues if you treat Linux the same way you treat the competition. If you buy a computer with Linux loaded on it you will not have any issues.

But his main point, that there is no professional support is utterly and obviously wrong.

I would suggest to anybody that is considering ditching Linux to give a thought to trying another distribution. I've had very few problems with the following:

Lubuntu - simple, elegant and fast

Fedora 16 - pretty and lots of features out the box (LVM, SELinux).

OpenSUSE - No fancy new desktops, no trouble getting software such as flash to work

I know this may be preaching to the converted here on HN but I've seen several posts today from people who have ditched Linux to go back to Windows.

Great advice. I'd go with CentOS if you want something that is rock solid and 100% complete out of the box.

I liked OpenSUSE a lot, I used it for almost 10 years between 2002 and last year. It was on my computer at work for 5 years, and at home the entire time.

But the article has a point, and it is something that made me switch to Windows last year. The problem is that it never works perfectly. I am not so much talking about the desktop, although I have suffered through my share of broken Gnome and KDE desktops. The problem is the driver situation.

I started my own business last year and needed a computer to work on. The Dell laptop I purchased is great, except

- The wireless network did not work - Bluetooth did not work - The video camera did not work - The mic did not work - The SD card slot did not work - The touch pad's scroll area did not work

I worked on these problems for a few months, and I fixed many, but finally I had it. My conclusion was that while much of the software in the Linux ecosystem steadily improves, other parts continuously breaks, and it will remain that way. The experimentation with the desktops I could live with, but the driver situation is another matter. I am too old to spend hours and hours patching the distribution to support the hardware I have.

I love Linux - and my intent was to use it in Virtualbox under Windows. I reasoned that Windows will have the driver support, and Virtualbox will deliver a sane hardware interface for Linux. But Windows 7 works well enough for me, so in practise I don't start Virtualbox often at all.

I don't think I will return to Linux running on the bare metal. But I will always bring the skills I learned with me, and I expect them to last me for decades.

Funny thing is that I couldn't manage to have bluetooth working on my Latitude running Win7, while ubuntu brought up all the devices out-of-box.

The media keys on my keyboard do not work under Win7 without letting windows download extra drivers.

Let's not even mention my printer.

Meanwhile with ubuntu 12.04 beta 2 everything came up without configuration. Printer included.

Xubuntu is my main OS for personal work, but I have the same experience.

When I boot into Windows and connect to my TV with an HDMI->DisplayPort adapter, the TV is recognized as a monitor instantly. In Linux, nothing. Maybe I could figure it out. But why should I have to?

When I use gpointing-device-settings to disable the touchpad, it becomes enabled again on reboot. Maybe I could figure it out. But why should I have to?

When I lose wifi connectivity, a notification window informs me of the fact. Always. Clicking "don't show this again" has no effect. Maybe I could install one of the patches someone uploaded to the months-old Launch pad bug. But why should I have to?

Sometimes the Hibernate command doesn't work. Sometimes it works, but causes the computer to reboot. Sometimes it works, but the system does not resume on restart. Maybe I could figure it out. But why should I have to?

While editing code in gvim, sometimes the screen is corrupted with tiny dots where text isn't fully redrawn. I can hit Ctrl-L to redraw. But why should I have to?

Sound playback is consistently quieter than on Windows. Sometimes I have to switch to Windows just to watch a video with a friend. Maybe I could figure it out. But why should I have to?

I love the quality of this Thinkpad, and I love the power of the Linux command line and the simplicity of the XFCE interface. But my next laptop will have to be a MacBook Pro.

If you install Windows the same way you install linux, you'll find the same kind of driver problems - particularly with network cards, which makes it harder to get more drivers from the web. Pre-installed Windows comes with drivers, sure, but freshly installed Windows requires downloading them.

> The problem is the driver situation.

100% agree. Anecdotal data point, installing on a new Gigabyte motherboard, Fedora 16 was the distro that worked for me. The other distros were CentOS and Ubuntu. So the issue in my case wasn't even wireless, bluetooth, or video camera. It was the newness of the motherboard/chipset.

I wish I could +10 this, but alas.

The driver issue is insane. The root cause of that issue is the GPL.

The reality is that hardware margins are thin, very very thin, and there are few protections against person X taking something you spent a year getting to work right, having it built in a Chinese copy shop and using your own drivers against you.

No one is funding open hardware, try to create a business model where your first chip has to make back its development cost at commodity margins. It can't.

Newer Windowses really aren't so bad anymore, either, making them more compelling to Our Kind. I'm a big Linux fan, but running Win7 in a VirtualBox, I've found it perfectly adequate. (Well, there was the time that it thought I had pirated it--I hadn't--and made me go through a guilty-until-proven-innocent routine to get it going again, but aside from that...)

But I don't run a standard desktop (I run fvwm on Arch), so I get huge mileage out of Linux that I wouldn't get out of Windows. Could be people running GNOME or KDE don't realize such a gain.

> Lubuntu - simple, elegant and fast

I can strongly recommend Lubuntu (and Xubuntu). I've installed it for relatives and acquaintances with great success - there are people still using 5+ year old computers that they were about to throw out after just 2 or 3 years because Windows had gotten really slow.

For the ones that are tech-savvy and interested, I compiled a simple guide on clean installing new versions of L/Xubuntu, while the others have been running LTS releases for several years now.

Whats wrong with debian? Ive never run into a situation where debian stable has negatively surprised me by moving into some unproven tech. Upgrades work between releases as they should, synaptic is pretty decent.

Even though the author may be making a valid point, I don't think it matters. I mostly program for myself and for other programmers (or at least technically inclined people). I don't care if my mother uses the software I write. That is why I don't really care about such things as popularity. I am quite certain that my distribution of choice (arch) will be there for a long time and its maintainers will keep making it better for themselves and for their core user group.

Repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3778999

Oops. HNSearch didn't find that when I checked.

Writers seem to have realised that writing stories elaborating about the dismal state of linux on the desktop translates into large click throughs from angry nerds.

This feels more like the heart-felt lamentations of a longtime Linux user than click-bait trolling for angry nerds. The author brings up some good points; Linux has to be better than Windows 7 on the desktop, because that's what the kids will be using in the meantime.

Yes large parts of the article were more balanced than other recent pieces and there seemed to be some genuine warmth for linux but the ending was trollish imo - "Now let the angry ad hominems from the Linux faithful commence..."

It's yellow press for techies. :-)

Also, there is an lively discussion on lwn:

http://lwn.net/Articles/489689/

I tend to agree that linux desktop needs a stable ABI that ISVs can target.

Static linking is your friend. I happily run Perforce 2002.1 clients meant for Linux 2.4 on x86 on my Kernel 3.2 amd64 machine when testing back-compat. I'd say ten years is pretty stable - just don't do random crap in your app :)

A fun read, and most of the problem seems to be repesented in this subthread ( http://lwn.net/Articles/489747/ ).

A sample:

"To what end? If you want the experience of running Windows or MacOS, and you're happy with proprietary software, then there a a couple of perfectly decent ways of getting those experiences. I run Linux because of the things it does differently - we don't need another Mac OS, we have one already."

This is why everyone laughs at Linux folks when they complain/hope-for Linux On The Desktop (For Real This Time!).

Linux users are not a monolithic group that all simultaneously want mainstream success and exclusivity. There's plenty of room for both approaches.

Room, yes--patronage, no.

The vast majority of users don't care about the sort of crap even really friendly distros (#!, Mint, Ubuntu) make you wade through. They literally want--and have come to expect--"push button, receive app."

I'd suggest that the Linux community either decide that they need to create a compelling, modern UX (and in so doing acknowledge that things like package management and security are really bikesheds as far as users are concerned), or they need to decide that they are an elite operating system and should optimize for retaining and helping their users (and in so doing stop with stupid UI decisions that break conventions and alienate existing users).

I don't care whether Linux goes mainstream or totally elitist, but the current compromise is this awkward kid at a party who is no fun to be around for the popular kids and who is hated by his old D&D buddies for snubbing them.

Your expectations are odd. Large, loosely-knit communities don't (and can't) decide things in the way that you're suggesting.

Regardless of what "should" happen, we're just going to continue muddling around. It's worked out OK so far.

Why not simply throw Mint to the trashcan and check any other distro? Besides, when speaking of office usage, there're clearly just 3 options available: Ubuntu LTS, SLED, and RHED. All the rest should only be considered as-is: e.g. no centralized support from ICT, no updates, and so on.

The first beige-box PC I owned, I bought with the express intention of declining the Windows license, wiping it, and installing Linux (Slackware, back in the day). I fought with weird window managers and device drivers for a few years, then tossed it all when Mac OS X came out. Today, Terminal.app is still the killer app on Mac for me. I have yet to see a Linux distro that can compete.

Content aside, this commenter found the acrobatics to avoid first person painful to read.

It could be an Economist thing; they don't credit their writers either.

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