Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition
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This guy does an annual post outlining some issues with Linux on the desktop:
I think one major issue is that while the Linux desktop is developed under a bazaar model, it is also designed as a bazaar.
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Yeah, most of these are very old news: developers not caring about usability, centralized package managers being a bad distribution method, bad design choices on all levels, severe lack of manpower... but it's nice to see them all in one place.
I could rant about Linux all day long, but all that really matters is: yes, Linux sucks, and there's no reason to expect it not to suck.
Linux distros are a conglomeration of dozens of open source projects, with no common design principles or coordination, maintained by very people with different principles, and almost all their work being done by volunteers for free and the rest being "donations" by companies that just need a certain part maintained and don't care about the rest.
The only reason people keep expecting Linux to work is because they've bought into the Stallman delusion that everything should be free and open and then it will magically be good.
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What kind of development is even going on with Linux anyways? By now you'd think they'd have a fairly stable, solid core product. Sure, there needs to be code for new drivers / hardware, and I suppose every now and then modding it to support a new platform-- but other than that, what are they actually doing? I can't see there being any need to develop code for
cat.So with all this supposed manpower going into the world-wide development of TEH LINUX, how the hell aren't the devoting some of that to UI?
Heck, I bet they could raise $1M overnight, and hire 2-3 expert level UI designers to work for a couple years making one.
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@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I could rant about Linux all day long, but all that really matters is: yes, Linux sucks, and there's no reason to expect it not to suck.
Every few years something comes along that makes you think it might start sucking less.
Ubuntu's founding, for example. Or when Steam got involved in Linux for their own purposes.
It didn't take more than a couple years for Ubuntu to devolve into "just another distro" (with the stuff about usability-focus being completely forgotten) and Valve to realize their "Microsoft Store steals our business" was pure paranoia and more-or-less give up.
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@lorne-kates said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
So with all this supposed manpower going into the world-wide development of TEH LINUX, how the hell aren't the devoting some of that to UI?
What's funny is that not only are they incredibly manpower-starved, they refuse to do anything to let stuff run with less manpower. For example, get all Linux distributions using the same packaging format, which would save thousands of man-hours per-distro per-year.
It's not just that there's no central management-- each distro would benefit from above idea even if they utterly hated and wanted to destroy every other distro-- it's more that there's an active effort to ensure no two developers agree on anything, ever.
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From TFA:
!! HiDPI support is pretty much non-existent. At the end of 2016 Ubuntu and System76 announced a collaboration to solve this issue.
Congrats, I'm writing from a nonexistent system. Dual 4K displays.
CHECKME: ! White or light-colored font antialiasing on dark backgrounds (without Infinality patches which are yet to be included by default by any distro) is horrible.
The Infinality patches are upstreamed since 2016. Maybe even earlier.
The guy cannot even bother to really fact check the shit besides bumping the year.
Update. This one is straight away false since September 2017:
GUI network manager in Linux has serious problems. NM cannot change your NIC hardware parameters. You cannot establish PPPoE connections over Wi-Fi.
Really, if you pretend to be a serious fucking researcher, do a fucking serious research. I used that article a while ago to find out about some caveats when looking for hardware to buy, but now I see he stopped giving a shit about quality. All of dem programmers don't give a shit about quality anyway.
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@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Congrats, I'm writing from a nonexistent system. Dual 4K displays.
Running at what DPI?
@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Update. This one is straight away false since September 2017:
Even if the article is up-to-date (and yes he changes the year number each year, but he's usually pretty bad about actually updating it, I agree)...
How is it impressive that it took until September 2017 to gain PPPoE functionality? That's something other OSes have had as long as wifi has existed.
@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I used that article a while ago to find out about some caveats when looking for hardware to buy, but now I see he stopped giving a shit about quality.
Just like Linux develo--
@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
All of dem programmers don't give a shit about quality anyway.
You BASTARD!
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@blakeyrat Running at 200% scale. The one which doesn't make my eyes bleed. Non-integer scaling factors are still on their way in, I agree it could be better.
Also, PPPoE has been always available, well... over Ethernet, like it says on the tin. You could also run
pppdmanually if you really needed it over WLAN. I agree that 9 years of inability to be bothered sucks. Then again, until today, I haven't heard running PPPoE over wifi was a thing. And I have heard a lot of weird shit. Still cannot imagine a valid use case for it.
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@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Running at 200% scale.
The lazy solution. Well if it works, I guess.
This is a kind of thing where not giving a flying fuck about backwards-compatibility in an OS could really help. All the weirdness around high DPI in Windows and OS X is due to needing 50,000 older apps to run without problems. In Linux you could just say "fuck you app users!" like you do all the time anyway.
@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Also, PPPoE has been always available, well... over Ethernet, like it says on the tin.
Right; but why should the network interface matter to this protocol? The only explanation is: Linux is badly-designed. Because those are two different layers in any sensibly-built system.
@wft said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Still cannot imagine a valid use case for it.
Common Linux defender refrain: "if we don't have it, it's because you don't need it"
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
How is it impressive that it took until September 2017 to gain PPPoE functionality?
I was using PPPoE on Linux in 1999.
PPPoE ove WiFi, never needed it
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@bb36e Meaning I don't know if it worked or not
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@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
centralized package managers being a bad distribution method
They're the worst, except for all the other methods.
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
centralized package managers being a bad distribution method
They're the worst, except for all the other methods.
Windows store is the best method.
Oh, wait a sec...
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
They're the worst, except for all the other methods.
The method is fine; the flaw is considering applications part of the OS. And that's a human being flaw, not a software flaw.
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I remember ten years ago or so, I bought a book on Linux -- Linux in 24 Hours or something like that. It went something like this:
In say, chapter 2 it would say something like "edit this text file to setup your internet"
In chapter 3, "edit this text file to setup your graphics card", etc.Problem was, it didn't tell you how to edit a text file until chapter 10!
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
They're the worst, except for all the other methods.
The method is fine; the flaw is considering applications part of the OS. And that's a human being flaw, not a software flaw.
No, that's not a problem. It's quite useful. Though it's obviously easy enough to add software repositories outside of those provided by the distro.
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
No, that's not a problem.
Kind of.
It's not a problem because Linux distros need to do it basically by design, because none of the ABIs/APIs in Linux are stable whatsoever, so the only way to ensure a stable OS is to "test" (scare-quotes for obvious reason) the software when it was shipped and just keep shipping that version forever until the next distro is ready. For long-term support distros, that means you could be using software that's years out-of-date.
If Linux had stable ABIs/APIs then none of this shit would be necessary and you'd be able to upgrade Firefox whenever the hell you wanted. Also distro makers would have an easier job because they could avoid the testing they do now and just test core OS functionality, like Apple and Microsoft do.
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Though it's obviously easy enough to add software repositories outside of those provided by the distro.
Right; but that's not officially sanctioned because of how likely it is to bust shit up.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
If Linux had stable ABIs/APIs then none of this shit would be necessary and you'd be able to upgrade Firefox whenever the hell you wanted.
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Right; but that's not officially sanctioned because of how likely it is to bust shit up.You are 100% talking out of your ass. For instance, I link to google's repository for chrome and it updates whenever they update their repository. And I have no idea what meaning or significance you're trying to attach to "officially sanctioned," but at least you're living up to your sig.
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
For instance, I link to google's repository for chrome and it updates whenever they update their repository.
I also link to Chrome's repository, .Net Core, Skype, Spotify and VScode.
My installation must be all busted up by now
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
You are 100% talking out of your ass.
Well I have a sore throat.
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
For instance, I link to google's repository for chrome and it updates whenever they update their repository.
Does your distro-maker recommend you do that, or are you going against their recommendation?
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
And I have no idea what meaning or significance you're trying to attach to "officially sanctioned," but at least you're living up to your sig.
Well you can go in Windows and fuck up all the registry entries and all the permissions and stuff happens. But Microsoft will never tell you to do that.
I'm saying that if you go to the distro's official support channel, and say "hey my Firefox is too old", do they come back with "well here at this third-party repository" or do they come back with "upgrade to a new release of distro, do not add third-party repositories"?
Look the main theme here is that manpower is a HUGE problem in the Linux ecosystem. They don't have nearly as many people as you need to create a quality OS. Obvious solution is to change their behavior to reduce the manpower required, like stabilizing the ABI/API and standardizing on a single packaging format.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Well you can go in Windows and fuck up all the registry entries and all the permissions and stuff happens. But Microsoft will never tell you to do that.
Are you saying that Microsoft never tell you to edit the registry?
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@timebandit said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Are you saying that Microsoft never tell you to edit the registry?
No I am not. Why would you think I am? The text is right there; you quoted it.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Does your distro-maker recommend you do that, or are you going against their recommendation?
They actually have a whole system of "extra" repositories that people make for you to link to. I have never heard anyone say "don't do that."
@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I'm saying that if you go to the distro's official support channel, and say "hey my Firefox is too old", do they come back with "well here at this third-party repository" or do they come back with "upgrade to a new release of distro, do not add third-party repositories"?
Well, they actually keep firefox updated. I'd guess they'd say to upgrade the distro (if that option existed) as that's all they support. If another repository existed, someone else would probably suggest that. Or, of course, build from source.
It's common to, for instance, add mongo's or node's repos (I use these as examples because I've experienced it myself doing stuff with nodebb). It's no doubt possible to get incompatible stuff installed and possibly hork up your system. I haven't done that in many many years, personally, but I don't generally faff about with really low level OS type stuff.
@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Look the main theme here is that manpower is a HUGE problem in the Linux ecosystem. They don't have nearly as many people as you need to create a quality OS. Obvious solution is to change their behavior to reduce the manpower required, like stabilizing the ABI/API and standardizing on a single packaging format.
Maybe. But none of that makes your wildly wrong "knowledge" about how package managers work make any more sense, and I think you're wildly overestimating the problems WRT ABIs.
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Maybe. But none of that makes your wildly wrong "knowledge" about how package managers work make any more sense,
Ok.
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
and I think you're wildly overestimating the problems WRT ABIs.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree there. This is by far and away the biggest of Linux's problems, now that the Linux community is (finally) actively working to shut down X11 (the previous biggest problem) and got proper services with SystemD (another big previous problem).
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@timebandit said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
centralized package managers being a bad distribution method
They're the worst, except for all the other methods.
Windows store is the best method.
Oh, wait a sec...
Objection: conflation of different concepts. An "app store" expects developers to upload their programs there via a dedicated interface. A "repository" traditionally work by expecting developers to post their software somewhere under an open source license, then ask the repository maintainers to download it, package it, and upload it to their repositories. Which is why programs there tend to be 3 or 4 years out of date, which is just unacceptable.
Yes, Ubuntu has actually worked towards the "app store" model (and external repositories, etc.), but repositories remain the default model in most distros.
And the reason they do is that, as we've discussed many times, it's impossible to build a program for "linux" because there is no standard list of libraries that "linux" includes. So it's better to leave it to the packager to adapt your program to their distro's quirks.
(I don't particularly like app stores either. Distributing software in a myprogram.app file should always be possible)
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@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
A "repository" traditionally work by expecting developers to post their software somewhere under an open source license, then ask the repository maintainers to download it, package it, and upload it to their repositories. Which is why programs there tend to be 3 or 4 years out of date, which is just unacceptable.
Chrome, .Net Core, Skype, VS code, Spotify, etc
These are all apps that have their own repo that you just add to your repo list.
You get updates the same way that you get your OS updates.
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@slapout1
The hardest part about editing linux text files is figuring out how to actually exit vi
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@izzion said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@slapout1
The hardest part about editing linux text files is figuring out how to actually exit viNot as much of a problem when you use nano :D
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
the flaw is considering applications part of the OS
An alternative model is explored, where the application and all its libraries goes into one package, the same package is intended for all distros.
Flatpak—the future of application distribution
The days of chasing multiple Linux distributions are over. Standalone apps for Linux are here!
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@izzion said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
The hardest part about editing linux text files is figuring out how to actually exit vi
Noob.
killall -9 vi
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
An alternative model is explored, where the application and all its libraries goes into one package, the same package is intended for all distros.
Flatpak—the future of application distribution
"The FUTURE of application distribution! ... despite being the standard for every other OS for decades."
How do "Flatpak" applications update themselves if a, for example, security flaw is found in one of the libraries they ship with?
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
How do "Flatpak" applications update themselves
They seem to have a repository, where developers can publish new versions
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@adynathos Right; but what if the exploit is in something really common like
libpng.soand the original author is dead? Are you just fucked?(AND NOTE pedants, I'm not saying other OSes do this any better, I'm just asking out of curiosity.)
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
what if the exploit is in something really common like libpng.so and the original author is dead?
If it was closed source, you would be fucked.
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@timebandit said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
If it was closed source, you would be fucked.
If it's open source, and someone forks it to fix the exploit, is there a way to get the fork to replace the original package? Or at least announce to the user that they should switch to the fork?
I don't see how being open source significantly improves the situation.
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@blakeyrat The owner of the repo can still edit it.
But if we want someone to carefully update all the libraries when an exploit is discovered, we end up at the current system with distro repos and maintainers.Speaking of unusual package management systems, I heard this one has some new ideas:
(I never used it, don't ask me)
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
An alternative model is explored, where the application and all its libraries goes into one package
Yeah that idea has been invented every year for the last 20 years.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
If it's open source, and someone forks it to fix the exploit, is there a way to get the fork to replace the original package?
Yes
I don't see how being open source significantly improves the situation.
If it's closed source and the original author is dead, who can fix it?
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@blakeyrat The owner of the repo can still edit it.
He's dead, remember?
@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
But if we want someone to carefully update all the libraries when an exploit is discovered, we end up at the current system with distro repos and maintainers.
Not necessarily. I mean that is one possible solution, I can think of others.
@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Yeah that idea has been invented every year for the last 20 years.
Mac Classic worked that way for decades. I don't think it even had shared libraries as a concept until Microsoft introduced it after the big MS Word 6 rewrite.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
The owner of the repo can still edit it.
He's dead, remember?
I mean the owner of
flathub.com, not the owner of the application (who is dead).
If the owner offlathub.comis dead, switch your repo URL tonewflathub.com.
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I mean the owner of flathub.com, not the owner of the application (who is dead).
Oh so it's not secured with some kind of encryption, the admin can override everything.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Oh so it's not secured with some kind of encryption, the admin can override everything.
It seems to have signatures: http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-builder.html#signing
So the new version would have a different signature, and it would display "WARNING: Signature of package changed", to which the user would of course click "Ignore and get on with the installation".
(I don't know if it says that, its just speculation)
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@adynathos Nix is interesting. It's kind of like Gentoo's overlay system, except that it makes it easy to change between environments/overlays.
It picked up some steam in the Haskell eco-system, back when
stackhadn't been invented and everybody wanted to have multiple compilers on their system and reproducible builds. (Haskell had a DLL hell problem for a while)I ended up using cabal-sandbox to hide the problems it was solving, so I never really tried it.
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@anonymous234 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Distributing software in a myprogram.app file should always be possible
You can do that with appx. You just have to enable developer mode...
(And that .app "file" on Mac, that ain't a file!)
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Flatpaks use a layered approach where the sandboxed filesystem the application sees is assembled from a few containers. There's the "runtime" container, which, for example, can carry GTK/GNOME libraries and shared files, and there's the application container which depends on a runtime. Both are flatpak bundles, none of them splatters all over filesystem.
So, if something incredibly common like
libssl.so, orlibpng.so, is shipped within the application container, and the author is dead or stopped giving a shit, the author is stupid. Those libraries must come from within the runtime containers (I don't know if there's a limit in how many you can layer before the performance of the whole goes to crap). Update the runtime to the next ABI-compatible version. I haven't checked it, but my reasonable assumption is that the application authors should be able to specify runtime dependencies in a way that doesn't preclude upgrading to an ABI-compatible bundle with security fixes put in, otherwise it's all a waste.
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I particularly hate Linux fanboyz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pOt3MxOSSY- This is not the first linux kernelled OS from MS - they built one for datacentres.
- The guy bashes MS slides saying it's all rubbish and then goes through them and agrees with them.
- "Its got Linux kernel OF COURSE it doesn't need security layer"... because all IoT based on Linux is secure ??
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@helix Is he saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in his calculations. I hope he realizes that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people don't realize this.
Microsoft spent $9 billion and many years to create Windows 10, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but eventually gave up and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think he needs to re-examine his assumptions.
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@helix Is he saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in his calculations. I hope he realizes that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people don't realize this.
Microsoft spent $9 billion and many years to create Windows 10, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but eventually gave up and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think he needs to re-examine his assumptions.
I was about to say something about onions and belts, but then I saw who posted it...
Carry on, gramps.
Filed under: Best example of Poe's law ever
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@boomzilla said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Is he saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ?
No he is not.
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