Why Isn’t Desktop Linux “There” Yet?
Tuesday November 10, 2009
It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re in the mood for a good rant or are bored beyond belief or want to hear about how to get Ubuntu Karmic installed on a MacBook Pro (system 5,5), stick around. Otherwise, I’ll understand.
So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do anything that involves money quickly or lightly, so kicking down a big wad o’ cash for a laptop is not something that I can just do whenever I feel like it. For the last few months, I’ve been agonizing over what I should get and researching and pricing and comparing. I knew that I wanted something that stood out and looked good and felt good and was well-built. I’ve been using ThinkPads as my main laptop for the last decade or so, since it’s what my employers have provided me, and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy.
I also knew that I wanted some nice features that Apple provides stock that most of the other guys do not. Such as a backlit laptop keyboard. I was playing around with the idea of getting a Dell E6500, but 1) not horribly sexy and 2) that requires me to get a 15″ screen. Which is another thing I wanted… to not feel like I’m lugging around an Encyclopedia every time I take my laptop with me somewhere. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA netbook for this reason and while I absolutely loved the battery life on the little guy and the portability, the absolutely diminutive screen size is what finally did me in. Well, that and the horribly slow CPU. And the horribly slow GPU. And the really small keyboard size. And the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive. And the crappy ath9k wifi drivers that keep disconnecting.
So I bought a Mac. Spent a bunch of time before then reading up on whether the MacBook Pros can play nicely with Linux (model 5,5 is what I ended up getting), and felt pretty comfortable that a MBP could be a really nice Linux machine. After waffling and being generally unsure of which one I wanted to get, I finally decided on a 13″ 2.26 Ghz MBP. I knew I wanted a smaller screen size than my previous PowerBook of 15″ and my current work laptop which also has a 15″ screen. So 13″ fits the bill nicely. I was really unsure about the CPU and was really hesitant to get a 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP, thinking that it’d be not all that much faster than the T7500 @ 2.20GHz Core 2 Duo I have in my work Thinkpad, but as it turns out, the 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP is really nice and fast–feels faster than the Thinkpad. Also, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB and I left the 160 GB drive in, planning on replacing it with a 250 GB 7200 HDD that I already have or maybe even a SSD if they ever get cheap enough.
I spent probably 6 hours or so on Sunday night getting Linux installed onto my shiny new MBP. Installing Linux was the easy part. Getting rEFIT to recognize it and boot into it was something completely else. Turns out that rEFIT does not play nicely at ALL with Grub2 (which is what Ubuntu Karmic comes with), so one of the things I did at the end that got it to work nicely was to boot off the live CD, install Karmic, chroot into my newly installed Karmic partition, uninstall Grub2, install Grub 0.97, and that seemed to do the trick nicely. The other hiccups I had were around getting the MBP’s drive partitioned in a way that OS X and rEFIT could deal with. I ended up resizing the main OS X partition and creating MS-DOS partitions from inside OS X’s disk utility and then just formatted them from the Ubuntu Karmic install process. But now I have a really nicely working OS X and Ubuntu Karmic dual-boot MacBook Pro. I realize my details are pretty sketchy here, so if you’re interested in more details, let me know and I’ll provide more info.
Since my day job allows me to write code for Linux (and don’t get me wrong, this is the best job I have EVER had and have never been happier), I occasionally need to use Skype to teleconference into meetings. And at least five times over the last 2 days, right in the middle of a Skype meeting from my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux laptop, things totally stop working. Sometimes the audio stops working entirely and I can’t hear the people on the other end anymore. Sometimes the video freezes. Sometimes Skype totally locks up the USB webcam and I have to kill -9 it and unplug/replug the webcam. Sometimes I can’t even see video on it at all and all I can see is a black box. Sometimes, it even works as it should and I don’t have problems (but those times are rather few and far between).
So, here’s my rant. I’m sick and tired of this crap in Linux. I have been a VERY vocal proponent of Linux everywhere for more than a decade. I’ve pushed it in every company I’ve worked for. I’ve insisted on using it everywhere personally. I have been searching for a job that would let me actually program on and for Linux for a long time and I now have one (YAY!). But I am absolutely exhausted of things that work on other platforms being unreliable, crappy, non-performant, crash-prone, and in general totally second rate or worse in Linux. In this particular instance, I unplugged my USB webcam from my Linux Thinkpad, plugged it into my new MacBook Pro, installed Skype and was up and running in no time. Skype did not crash, hang, hiccup, freeze, mutilate, spindle, or in any other way be anything other than an awesome application in OS X. And, as an aside, just looking through the preferences section for Skype showed that it was obviously given more love and care than the Linux version. And ya know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of even having to think about it. I’m tired of having to apologize for stupid stuff like this, get to a shell and killall -9 it. Or try to figure out what stupidity is causing it to happen. Or try to find workarounds so that PulseAudio can not screw things up for me. Or have to check my xorg.conf to see if I might have enabled something that is causing the bizarre Xv errors Skype spews every once in a while. I’m just tired of it.
Now, the focus of my frustration in this case is Skype. And I know that without even a moment’s hesitation, 90% of you are going to say “oh well, see, that’s what you get when you used a closed-source application! just use Open Source and everything will be better!” And to that I say: bollocks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Open Source advocate than me. But that’s not the point here. And that’s not the true issue at hand here. Open Source is great. Open Source is cool. Open Source is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Open Source is the answer to a whole lot of problems! But of this I am absolutely certain: it is not the answer to this problem. In this particular instance, and in millions more like it, all across the world, every day, people are going to need to run software that IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. You can try all you want to create the best, most awesome Open Source project to meet a given need, but you will never 100% fill every closed-source software solution need. You might get close. You might even have something that is “good enough”. But the bottom line is that there’s always going to be some piece of software that you have to run that you don’t have the source for. At least, this is true in the world that I’ve lived in for the last decade+.
Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo. We even have some better applications from commercial companies. Heck, we even had the awesome World of Goo game (which I actually paid money for and LOVE)! We have much more feature-rich FOSS applications and desktop environments than we’ve ever had before. But what we don’t have is a stable platform that companies can count on being able to invest into and reap monetary rewards from. Yeah, like it or not, this is the real world and companies have to make money to stay in business.
We are a bunch of hackers. We love to tinker, to fiddle, to break compatibility in a heartbeat just for the outside chance that it might be better, to change quickly, and to do whatever we feel like. And that’s all fantastic stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re our own worst enemies. What makes Desktop Linux so awesome and fun and cool and quickly evolving is the same thing that keeps companies from investing in us–and even when they do, we end up breaking their stuff and causing Linux Desktop users grief. And we show absolutely zero possibility that this is going to improve any time soon. PulseAudio? Really? I’m so glad it’s the new hotness and is technically awesome. Your new hotness just broke an app I absolutely have to rely on. Guess how much I give a crap about your new hotness now, hm?
Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that I’m really liking my MacBook Pro, and I’m really liking OS X. Is it free? No. Is it Open Source? No. But does it just stinking work? Yeah, it really does. And it is such a drastic and refreshing change from the world of Desktop Linux that I am seriously wondering if I’m going to ever end up using that Ubuntu Karmic install I just slapped on the other partitions of this drive. I don’t think I’m yet ready to send out a jwz-like dissertation and farewell address, but I totally get it now. OS X is beautiful, and it just works. And I don’t think I’ll ridicule anyone for getting an Apple computer and actually using OS X on it ever again. Windows is still another story, but even there I can see what the allure is. You know… you get a computer to do stuff, and you want it to work. You don’t care what it has to do so that it works. You just want it to stinking work. Wouldn’t it be nice if Desktop Linux was like that?
[ UPDATE – 2009-11-20 ] – I’ve received a lot of really great comments on this post, but my initial intent at 1) venting/ranting, 2) comparing Desktop Linux to OS X, and 3) raising issues that I think we need to take a hard look at as a worldwide community were taken in a very different slant than I intended. FWIW, after having spent a week with my shiny little MacBook Pro, I am happily running Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on it and have blogged again in an attempt to clear up some of the muddiness around this first post. To this end, I’m going to change the title from “I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux” to something less vitriolic for future viewers. And hopefully this won’t cause aggregators/planets to re-publish this. =:/
Have you tried anything but Ubuntu?
I think it’s very unfair to say that if Ubuntu sucks, Linux on the desktop sucks (without elaborating further on that theme … :-).
See you later then. That’s a good enough reason to switch.
But just to let you know, Linux Desktop is not just about things just work(tm), among many things, it will work.
This is why I’m still with Kubuntu8.04/KDE3.5.10. Eyecandy sux. Stability/Usability should be #1 priority. KDE lost Linus for this reason. Now *buntu is having stability problems. Grub just worked. Alsa just worked. Maybe 10.04LTS will be on par with 8.04LTS, if these so-called developers spend the next 6 months fixing bugs. But you don’t find bugs if you don’t have users, and these so-called developers don’t care about users.
I don’t think the issue is about Ubuntu or any other distribution. The point here is that lots of stuff that you commonly (and easily) use on other platforms tend to work less smoothly, or more quirkily, on Linux – on ANY Linux. We’ve come a long way, but even today there are plenty of things that just work out the box in windows/mac that would require some fiddling and hacking to get satisfactorily working on Linux – though to be fair, many of these are through neither fault on Linux’s part nor merit on the part of the other two.
Right there with you, dude. These are exactly my feelings and frustrations with using the Linux Desktop. And I imagine the next few months will see me purchasing a new MBP. I miss Linux on a regular basis these days—Windows is still not a pleasure to use and I think win7 is the biggest improvement I’ve seen from MS in a long time, but it makes the day-to-day of my job easier. GoToMeetings and Word docs and the like… le sigh.
@sandsmark: I’ve been using Desktop Linux for more than a decade and a half. I’ve used Debian, Mandrake, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, SUSE, Ubuntu, Redhat (waaaay back when), Fedora, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. This has nothing to do with distros. It has everything to do with being unstable and constantly changing by design. It’s not that Ubuntu sucks or Linux sucks (it totally does not). It’s about Desktop Linux sucking because that’s the way we (and by “we” I mean uncaring FLOSS zealots the world over) like it. We don’t want stable, even though we (Linux Desktop users) DO want and need stable.
@David: Maybe you didn’t read my rant carefully enough (I don’t blame you, it was a long rant), but I’m not leaving Desktop Linux. All I’m saying is we sure as hell have made a mess out of things and it sure would be nice if we could fix it.
@Roland: Yeah, seriously, Ubuntu 8.10 was the last release that I could reliably use Skype on, to come back around for the trigger for today’s rant. Anyway, it’s frustrating. =:/
@Jason: Yep, exactly. =:)
@darth_mall: *nodnod* =:)
As a regular user of Linux, I agree with you.
Even Firefox is suboptimal on Linux. Wine+Firefox beats Linux Firefox in terms of JavaScript speed.
I feel your pain.
The problem imho tends to be how we integrate new features. Instead of having rational pathways towards integration into stable distributions, we tend to push things into our user’s hands before they are ready for that.
PulseAudio is a terrific example of something that was, for the user, completely unnecessary in its current state. Given another year and developer focus (something we miss in general distributions: a developer track) it could have worked out terrifically. Instead, it stinks.
And yes, I’m similarly disappointed with the results of the process. It in turn leads to pressures put on developers that they don’t need, users getting the shaft as you did, others saying really silly things such as insinuating there’s some struggle between “eye candy” and “usability/stability” going on, etc.
It’s not impossible to fix, or even overly hard. What’s lacking is some “customer focused” thinking in distro-land that would lead to a “fire break” between upstream f/oss development and what 3rd party developers get and end users experience. This in turn would lead to plateaus of stability that would be replaced by new plateaus of stability with the rockiness laid at the feet of developers and cutting edge testers in between.
This sounds a lot like the RHEL/SLES/LTS model in terms of hoped for conclusions. Unfortunately, they don’t do regular releases. So people move on, through desire or necessity. There ought to be a middle path with releases made often but around a stable base. I’m sure we can find them out there, but they aren’t one of the “big 5” (or whatever “big N” number we wish to pick)
[…] Jason Kasper (vanRijn): I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux on Planet KDETopics: MacBook Pro, Intel Core 2, MacBook, Mac OS X […]
I tend to agree with most of your points there. Fortunately for me, Skype has actually been working without a problem in Karmic. There have been several other minor annoyances from time to time, and its especially embarrassing when I’m boasting about the stability and usability of Linux to someone and something bad happens.
However, I think the biggest problem is with distributions like Ubuntu. I use Kubuntu myself, but I’ve found that the strict 6-month release cycle has its disadvantages.
Things get too rushed -> waay too rushed. We were forced to use alpha quality software (pulseaudio in Jaunty, KDE 4.0/4.1 in Intrepid, K3B/Kaffeine in Kubuntu Karmic) and put up with all the bugs and annoyances that they produce.
I think the average user’s interests would be better served if we had a year-long release cycle, with a 2-3 month testing period, with regular backports for major applications (like Firefox). One of the reasons I upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic was because Jaunty’s firefox was stuck on version 3.0 and installing their shiretoko package pulled in half of Gnome along with it.
If there were more regular backports of major applications, I think a year long release cycle would make more sense.
O.k., see you back in the linux community within a few months, or half a year. I have had similar conclusions when first using OS X, and over time I realized how much I missed linux. I started running into problems, limitations, weird issues more difficult to diagnose because of the closed heart of OS X. It is refreshing for a moment to use OS X, much like occasionally i feel refreshed by using gnome becuase it appears to be so much simpler than KDE, but I come always come back.
hope you do too,
Hey Aaron. Good to see you again! =:)
I totally agree with you. In my simplistic view, there are several pillars that must support a desktop environment on any OS. Sound and video come to mind immediately. Let’s just take sound for discussion’s sake. Now I cannot help but think that any of Linux’s desktop sound technologies (oss, alsa, esd, jack, gstreamer, phonon, pulseaudio, etc., etc.) is by now at least on par with the sound subsystems for OS X or Windows. The difference is that for OS X or Windows, it’s a stable pillar that can be written against and counted on. We absolutely do not have that in Linux. I have to believe that with all the options we have, one of them certainly by now must be good enough to suffice the needs of 99% of Linux desktop users. If we were able to pick one of them, agree that that’s what everyone is going to use, and firmly establish it as the standard for Desktop Linux for the next 5 years, making only stabilizing and fully-backwards-compatible changes, that would be a HUGE step forward for application developers.
But after 10 years of hoping that one day this will happen in Desktop Linux, I’m starting to think that it will never happen thanks to 1) NIH syndrome and friends, 2) the need to constantly tinker/hack/whatever that is seemingly so much more important than stability, and 3) complete lack of a governing/oversight-providing/decision-making entity that speaks for all of Desktop Linux. In fact, any suggestion along the lines of #3 is immediately seen as offensive and taken as animosity, and understandably so. But history has repeated itself so often in this area that I would bet money that even now, after we have all these fantastic sound systems/subsystems, in at most 2 years time, we’re going to see the next awesome new sound technology for Linux that will totally turn Linux Desktop sound on its head and break a whole bunch of apps that would otherwise have remained working just fine.
So, yeah… this is what’s so frustrating…. The very nature and definition of Desktop Linux (and what makes it so fun to work on sometimes) is diametrically opposed to that which we would need to actually bring Desktop Linux mainstream and start getting some serious commercial/3rd party app developers like we’re now seeing with OS X. The second that stability and supportability become the most important things, you lose a whole lot of developer interest. But that’s exactly what’s needed and like you, I’m unable to think of a route that could take us close to where we need to go, and am pretty sure that if one was thought of, it would be immediately hated by at least 60% of Desktop Linux developers and be rendered ineffective.
I completely agree with your thoughts about changes that would be needed in distro-land, but we already have distros who are trying to do that (and have been for years) and it is not getting us anywhere. The vast majority of Desktop Linux users, at least in my experience, want to be using the latest and greatest. Which means 3rd party app developers, etc., are forced to either try to keep up with the latest/greatest distros or just say that Desktop Linux is not worth their time and effort since not keeping up with the latest and greatest means that they’re immediately disqualifying themselves from getting a majority of potential Desktop Linux users. And they are doing the latter and who can blame them? The problem is that we’d need a governing body or oversight group or something for the whole of Desktop Linux that defined the desktop pillars and guaranteed that 3rd party app XYZ would not require rewrite or change for the next N years and that it would be guaranteed to work on every major distro out there for that amount of time. This is the kind of contract that they’re given with OS X and Windows, which helps them justify the cost for developing for those platforms. I do not see any hope that such a thing will ever be possible in Desktop Linux.
Gah, anyway, don’t mean to be all doom and gloom. None of these things are new. This has been going on in Desktop Linux for more than a decade. It’s just depressing to get a chance to use something as well-put-together as OS X and feel something die inside me that knows that our technology in Desktop Linux land is every bit as good, but that we’ll just never get there.
Yeap.. I know exact what you mean and I think the most of us had this feeling at least once, I did!! … But it will not take long and those bugs will be fixed, you will find OSX boring, regret this Blogpost and you will try Linux again… You will miss special things that only Linux has, believe me…
I think this is just a little affair, side leap.. After it you will realize why you loved Linux and be back 😉
The point is, if you really used Linux then you are not used to being controlled.. You are not used to just using the OS ! You tasted the freedom, no way you will be satisfied with less..
@V: Heh. I’m not going anywhere. =:) I’m fortunate enough to have a for-pay job that allows me to develop on Desktop Linux, for Desktop Linux, and I absolutely love it. And I get what you’re saying, I really do. I guess my rant was more of a cry of frustration and anger. It has nothing to do with our code or technology in Desktop Linux, but rather that we have a very core problem that is keeping us from getting 3rd-party app developers, and widespread adoption that OS X is seeing now. And the very essence of Desktop Linux seems to be prohibiting what we all say we’re pushing for from happening. =:/
@jscurtu: Gah. People keep misreading my post. This is not a “hey, I tried Linux and it sucks, so I’m going back to OS X or Windows” post. I’ve been a Desktop Linux developer and user for more than a decade. It’s what I do for a living. You would be hard-pressed to find more of a Linux/FLOSS evangelist/zealot than me. What I’m saying is that there’s something horribly broken with our model and it has nothing to do with bugs getting fixed or something else being boring. It’s a very core problem that nobody else seems to be getting. =:(
I don’t know how many times I felt like this… the first time was when I realized that my brand-new computer was “too new” for (K|X)ubuntu 6.10 so I couldn’t get my audio working except by installing an alpha version of 7.04.
Things changed dramatically as I changed to OpenSUSE. Sure, it has it’s flaws (Synaptic or Adept are so much more comfortable than the Yast thingie), but the point is that it’s more stable and much faster than Ubuntu, and many things that are a dreadful hassle on Ubuntu just work(tm) with OpenSUSE.
It’s too bad that especially Kubuntu is so unstable and so horribly slow, because the concept is absolutely cool – based on Debian, but everything pre-configured & working, and no “It’s not dfsg-free! BURN IT!” freetards.
I experience the same issue like you when I was using skype on Kubuntu. I have to tell the truth that t was so awful, even though I love the opensource community & Linux. My Desktop computer which have XP installed was broken down. Then I only can use my laptop(dual system, win7&Kubuntu), due to I used gparted to resize the Win7 system partition, win7 stop working. Well I can understand that, cuz that’s how it is supposed to happen in windows. I thought ok I could use skype on Kubuntu.Then I tried to chat with my families with skype on Kubuntu. The sound output was horrible, I can’t even hear what they said at all. The sound was totally twisted. Then I installed pidgin and see if I can chat with them by using gtalk. There was no sound at all. I love Linux but it just doesn’t work sometimes. Desktop Linux still has a long way to go.
Well what can be said… just quit and have fun in your new shiny, smug reality, where all is simple and taken out of your hands…
“After nine years, you know what I realize? [Takes a bite of steak] Ignorance is bliss.”
Come on, years in FOSS, and you don’t even mention the word “freedom” as an epitaph in your lengthy indictment? … and you vow for the worst camp, where even the freedom of hardware is taken out of you?
Have you understood anything at all in this respect?
But anyway, the fact you waited until the last words to say you weren’t really switching is a hint right from your subconscious (or maybe even higher up the chain already.)
Every normal reader will understand it as a farewell post, so you should maybe look at yourself deep in the mirror and just do it.
Heck, you are already “the linux programmer that switched” right on some repulsive Mac news sites.
Wow!
Talk about hitting the nail on the head. Your post resonates strongly with my recent experience. I got a new 500gig hard drive and decided to do some competition checking. I installed OSX and thought I would test it for a week or so. I ended up running it for 6 months.
No Linux distro I have used in the last 6 years has made me more productive. It seemed to have the right balance between under the hood power and ease of use. The applications did not matter as I used normal cross platform open apps as I did on linux. After that I tried Win7 for a week and it was relatively easy and painless just with more reboots and waiting for updates.
In the last month I have been back on linux with the associated hacks, tweaks, kill -9, xkill, issues as before.
Frankly, a part of me seriously yearns to go back to hackintosh.
KDE4 still excites me enough to stay for now and I am planning to run openSUSE 11.2 when it drops tomorrow, but I feel your pain.
Alsa *is* the rock solid foundation we have in linux.
You apparently missed that.
It can be redirected to whatever higher level sound system you want with three lines in an .asoundrc and then you just forget about it and everything works as it should, be it with Jack, Pulseaudio or whatever has an alsa sink.
If it is not the case then just use another distro, yours is fundamentally broken and doesn’t even guarantee the bare minimum to its users. Don’t look back. You have the *choice*.
Pulseaudio has been working absolutely gorgeously right from the start in Mandriva. Absolute no brainer.
I personally prefer jack because it allows me to route the sound of any application into any other, so I can add funny reverb and flange effects to my skype conversations if I’m feeling so inclined, which by the way no other operating system is powerful and flexible enough to allow me to do.
So I just wrote three lines in my .asoundrc, and voilà… all Linux apps now use jack through alsa, without so much as a hiccup.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Linux and hardware at the moment don’t mix that well. I can’t simply turn on my phone’s bluetooth and expect it to connect – because I doubt it will. I can’t move into a WiFi hotspot and expect it to work, because it isn’t set up. I can’t plug in a USB webcam and expect it to work – it won’t – heck, my built-in webcam works only randomly such that I’ve given up completely on it. I have not yet figured out how to get a proper suspend/hibernate/sleep working on my laptop. External USB speakers? Not a chance. A laptop I got recently only managed to get online through such amazing hackery it’s hot even funny (apparently it was “too new”).
Linux should offer freedom for applications – people can be as stable or unstable as they want. However for hardware and interfacing with peripherals, it should be rock solid and stay that way.
Please, when will it “just work”?
haha
I feel like, with a couple specific product names switched, you could have written this back in 2002 when I switched and it would have been equally as correct and appropriate… and that’s really what the problem is.
I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.2, Windows XP and Kubuntu Karmic (with grub2 1.97~beta4) on a MacBook Pro 5,1 and it works fine. For a couple of days I used rEFIt but now I’m just pressing ‘Option’ when I want to boot something different than the default configured in Preferences -> Startup Disk. It was a bit difficult to install due to Windows XP, but it works perfectly fine.
WRT the Linux Desktop, I agree there’s a lot to do yet. For instance, it’d be nice if you were asked for your password when you browse your hard disk with Dolphin and try to access some place you don’t have permissions and root has, or if KFileDialog asked for your password when you want to write a file in /etc. That kind of things would make Linux easier.
I’ve tried to install apple’s osX 10.5 onto my compaq presario but if fails to even bootstrap, on the other hand I’ve just purchased a cheap laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 preloaded and everything, I mean _everything_ worked out of the box… I’d say, according to your rant, that osX sucks and it’s not even close to readyness.
But I understand your frustration nevertheless.
Jack
@jackstraw
To be fair, OSX expressly designed *NOT* to work on your presario ;), so it works as advertised. I had an easier time with my installation and running it was like running linux, but without some of the niggling pains, but a huge guilty feeling.
In spite of the negativity expressed, I believe that these revitalised projects including KDE4, Network-Manager, PulseAudio, etc are crucial to solving some of these issues long term. I believe we are currently experiencing these issues as we transition to the next generation linux desktop. My biggest fear is that once we are 99% there, somebody decides to rewrite it from scratch again and we are back in the pain years.
@Pau Garcia i Quiles
> WRT the Linux Desktop, I agree there’s a lot to do yet.
and I think there is a lot *not* to do, which is imho sort of where this is post and aseigo’s response is about. The constant hacking and tweaking means Linux is always on the move, and never “here”.
Off course, it does matter which distro you use. People complain “Linux is bleeding edge”, while in reality they use a _bleeding edge distro_ (like Fedora, Ubuntu and openSUSE). Well duh. :-p or they “things don’t work out of the box on Linux” when their Linux experience is Slackware or Gentoo. double duh 🙂
In essence I think Aaron hit the nail on the head, and reading the long comment by you after that I think it can be explained a bit more.
Let me show it with a real world example; when I bought my macbook, a year ago, I wanted FOSS on it. I am like you and really don’t want the newest stuff that only works when the moon is halffull or whatever. So I went with Debian.
Debian is known to get stable. Really usable.
Unfortunately, it also was completely unusable on this new hardware. Most of the features just didn’t work. X11 didn’t start, for instance.
So I switched to Kubuntu. Simply because I wanted an apt based distro. The result is that I got loads of new end-user software. And, yeah the lower levels (sound, graphics) work great.
What I recently realized is that I’m stuck in an upgrade-in-hope-off cycle. Meaning that some software sucks majorly and the next *distro* release may fix it. But that new release will naturally introduce loads of new problems and there you go cycle!
What this boils down to is that we have too many distros and they all majorly suck. Stuff that is not finished should not get into the release. People that really want the shiny new should be protected from themselves. The biggest mistake of all distros ever was to ship KDE4.0 till 4.2 at all. Same for PulseAudio and same for many many more pieces of software.
The reason why I’m saying its a mistake is because as soon as you get it into a ‘stable’ release you get people sucked into the upgrade cycle. People want to get the latest and greatest *only* because the current sucks.
Now imagine a distro that shipped only components that are finished (kde4.3, latest linux stable kernel release, no pulseaudio, no nepomuk etc etc) in their stable release.
More distros (kubuntu included) start to have an ‘experimental’ repository for those other things.
In short, it *is* possible to have a grand designer, an architect for the whole desktop. Any distro can do that right now. If they have the guts to tell their users what is better for them, and mean it.
The pain you experienced are still growing pains. Desktop Linux is getting a little more important every day and I believe the most important use cases will work flawlessly in a few years.
Switches to something like KDE4 and PulseAudio have been so painful for the devs because of grumpy users that they won’t do something like that again in a looooong time.
SkypeUI will be open source, that is an indication that commercial companies are getting it. It will be much simpler to adapt just the skypelib to new techs and get it stable than to integrate the whole thing into Gnome/KDE/Maemo/Moblin/ChromeOS/WebOS/Android.
So things getting better is still accelerating it is just a hard transition and painful.
And exspecting every closed source app to work flawlessly on a brand new distro that is build by one employee and a handful of volunteers(every 6 months) is a bit naive, you should have picked something older/more stable when you need Skype so bad. You just want your cake and eat it too, admit it.
PS: You never wrote how you like your Pre/WebOS. Can we exspect more posts again?
Hm. From skimming the blog, it seems to be the closed software that doesn’t work. Why not just use Grub2 for booting? And skype… yuck. I suppose you sometime have to use something like that, and it sucks, but if it isn’t working, that’s how closed software usually works on linux. Either because it is something written lefthandedly (skype) or something that is probably actively designed to strike at Linux (all Apple software).
Personally, I am still more productive on Linux/KDE/Debian/Kubuntu than I have ever been on any other system. And judging by the posts I see from the Max people, OS X would not exactly work out for me either.
In any case, use whatever you feel like. I don’t see why you want to make such a big deal out of it. What matters is contributions to free software, everything else is just talk.
I use mandriva and starting to wonder if that as something to do with it, only tried ubuntu once (horrible experience) and suse always seemed nice enough dough I didn’t test it enough.
I’m not saying you are wrong its a pain that stuf like that appends to you, but I’m not sure complaining about the entire desktop linux is the right thing to do, as it seams to be something distro related.
@Ben
To me the concept of freedom is really important.
Anyway this concept can be interpreted in various ways.
For example :
1) freedom as stated in the GPL license
2) freedom to do not waste time in something unwanted (if something is supposed to work and then i must spend 2 hours to let it work)
3) freedom to pay money to buy something stable
4) freedom to ignore the concept of freedom
And so on.
It is clear that the real problem in the FLOSS world is the lack of real desktp standards.
I am talking about interface standards.
Sound, Graphics, boot system, file system etc etc.
i am not talking about a linux server here, I am talking about Desktop.
If you do not make standards no one will spend money on linux so no Games, no killer applications, no business.
This is becoming not also frustrating but even embarrassing.
I do not blame anyone who want to switch to OS/X because it simply works and more it is “strandard”. from the Apple point of view.
I would like to point out that in linux desktop we do not have even a single standard on packages (rmp,deb,tgz etc etc).
Too much freedom is anarchy.
feel sorry for you that you have that experience.
version-cycling in the hope of better software: try cylcing the distro, give chakra a shot and tell me how disappointed you still can be.
been in the same cycle of hope with suse/opensuse/fedora/kubuntu for some time. chakra / arch has slain that dragon pretty well.
It’s funny to read such things. You blame Linux, because you tried crippled distro (pulse audio, some experimental core packages…) with even more crippled desktop environment which gnome is (slow as hell gtk which is missing its Win XP equivalent features). I used os x some time ago and thanks, but I won’t touch it again. I use Kubuntu right now which is also crippled distro, but I didn’t trigger any problems (or I’m smart enough to solve them easily). If you’re looking for some good distro which will send OS X to trash try OpenSUSE which uses KDE for default and doesn’t use Pulse Audio.
What is sad and strange you judge Ubuntu which you installed yourself and compare it to pre-installed os x. If you want to make a fair comparison compare OS X against pre-installed Ubuntu – on Dell or something. However, this post is really lame and spread only stupid FUD…
P.S. I have over 7 computers I maintain, I’m not a coder and I have a very blurred idea of how this all works, It just does ™ Skype included, I have huge amounts of complaints about mandriva (mostly in the looks department) but as hardware goes everything just works, in all computers I installed, Skype works like a charm as well btw.
I really don’t get it, cmon i know nothing about this stuff and everything just works for me, you guys do development and in most computers I see developers using, hardware acceleration is not working and i have no idea how come It must be distro related as I see no other explanation, I surely don’t know more than they do
and apart from disabling pullsaudio every time I remember to do so I really don’t do anything special.
I can install hackintosh on my PC and compare it to Ubuntu. I bet I won’t have single thing working in hackontosh os x while I’ll have full support in Ubuntu. This is what you did, but in your case Ubuntu was hackintosh. I’m really disappointed some people can fell to such level…
I bougth a hp compaq mini 311c and installed opensuse 11.2 wit kde (better than ubuntu for kde integration imho) and it works very well for me =p
I will not enter in the debat but it sad to hear that you abandon all that we are working/fighting for.
Hope to see you return.
Err, did you install Ubuntu or Kubuntu? In my previous post I assumed a KDE hacker would install Kubuntu ..
@Pawel: Of course it’s “unfair” because OS X is optimized for that hardware, but the user experience is something like that: OS X works – Linux/Ubuntu does not -> Linux is crap.
>Err, did you install Ubuntu or Kubuntu? In my previous post I >assumed a KDE hacker would install Kubuntu ..
hehe this gives a lot to think about…$$
@blueget
I don’t speak with trolls, but I’ll answer you. OS X isn’t optimized for such hardware – it’s just made to be able to run on it. From my experience OS X is something I won’t use any more, sorry I’m not such idiot to pay apple for such crap while I can have much better experience with Linux. Linux just works, OS X is just pre-installed. That’s it.
[…] http://movingparts.net/2009/11/10/i-think-im-tired-of-desktop-linux/ a few seconds ago from Choqok […]
Your comments mirrors mine. I use OS X these days, but earlier I used Linux (I still occasionally do). I first used Linux in 1998 or so.
Linux on the desktop has advanced a lot in that time. But the thing is that the competing desktops have advanced even more. Well, maybe not Windows….
When I used Linux (I have used SUSE (back when it was still SUSE Linux and when it was OpenSUSE), Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, (K)Ubuntu so this can’t be a case of “you just picked a crappy distro!”. And I have used KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, XFCE and various other UI’s) I too often run in to things that do not work. Or work in suboptimal way. Or they work, but using them is not enjoyable.
Too often I see UI that are designed by coders. Too often I see features that make sense to two guys in the server-room, whereas everyone else is left wondering “why is that thing cluttering this app?”.
In 2005 when Apple released Mac mini, I decided to give it a shot. What did I have to lose? Had OS X sucked I could always turn the mini in to a server or something. And I love technology, and mini was a new toy to play around with. But the thing is that it did not suck. Everything just worked. No hair-pulling, no struggle. I had all the apps I could ever want, I had a gorgerous and easy to use UI that just worked without tearing, flashing, glitches. And if I swing that way, I had CLI. In the end I was left wondering “why can’t these other systems work as well as this?”.
Today I have a 64bit certified UNIX with gorgerous UI running on my laptop. It has features that are still nowhere to be seen in desktop-Linux. Time Machine? Quick Look? Automator? Services? Sure, you could accomplish most of those thinbgs in Linux, but you need to be a propellerhead to do it. In OS X, it’s all built in and mere mortals can use them. With OS X I can spend my time doing productive things with my computer, as opposed to wasting my time learning how to create shell-scripts, or wondering why something suddenly decided to stop working.
And again, if this is about me using wrong distros, then what am I supposed to do? Keep on going through all the distros and UI’s until I find the one that works? Why on earth should I go through with that when I could simply run OS X and stop worrying? And like I said, I tried all the major distros, some worked better than others, but they all had their share or problems.
My in-laws were Windows-users. I had tried to steer them to use Linux, and they dabbled with it, only to discover that they hated it because all those glitches. To preserve my sanity (I’m their tech-support) I once told them to get a Mac. Few months later they got an iMac. And guess what? Not a single issue. I no longer have to waste my time fixing their computer-problems, Windows or Linux. No viruses, no issues, no glitches.
And something interesting has happened. Both my in-laws are not powerusers. But I installed iWork on their computer, and today they create documents that rival professionally created documents. It just happens that MS Office (and by extension, OpenOffice) have set our standards so low in what we can expect from user-generated documents. With Mac and iWork, my totally computer-illiterate in-laws are creating gorgerous documents. If I were still a “Linux or death!”-guy, I could tell them about merits of free software until I was blue in the face. And in the end they would just say “with this system we can create documents like these, whereas with Linux (or Windows) we could create bland and boring documents”. What could I say to that? Seriously? What would Linux offer to them that OS X does not?
A tangible example: my sister in-law got a new bicycle for birthday-present. My mother in-law decided to create a humorous document about history of bicycles with iWork. It contained pictures and advanced typesetting, tables and layouts. When my sister in-law saw the document, she said “I did not know bike-companies give documents like these with their bikes these days”. You should have seen her face when we told her that “um, your mother created that document from scratch”. THAT is what using a computer should be about! Amazement and excitement.
People seem to expect that computers cause problems. That using them is a struggle, and that things don’t work. It’s sad that Microsoft has managed to set our standards so low when it comes to computing. Seeing people use a Mac and see that things don’t have to be like that is a real revelation.
Now, I still use Linux occasionally. I like to know where it stands and where it’s going. Knowing several OS’es is still a good thing in this field of business. But my main OS is OS X. I just don’t have the patience to fight with my computer anymore.
I really do hope good things to Linux and everything related to it. World deserves it.
This is pretty much exactly the same situation I found myself in, stuff on Linux not working right, bought a Mac and now everything just works and I’m spending my time hacking rather than messing around setting up my machine. The difference being I’m paid to write cross-platform software so can choose the OS I use. I’ve now chosen OSX and, other than my old machines, I can’t see myself using desktop Linux again.
Desktop Linux (and specifically things like KDE) need a strong Jobs-type figure who is a perfectionist and doesn’t let things be released until they are done.
Konqueror, to take one example, is a complete joke. Every release of KDE that ships with it is the sign that the desktop Linux model is failing, no commercial company would keep shipping Konqueror when we have things like reKonq and Arora working well.
Sadly I’ve just accepted that desktop Linux will never beat OSX at a smooth, easy-to-use experience as most of the developers are doing it for fun so don’t do the “boring” stuff like delaying software until it’s done, improving old code rather than rewriting it, unit testing, usability testing and integration testing of the hardware and software people actually need to use. Some projects do this and it’s great but until there is a strong top-down focus on these issues desktop Linux will remain just a cheaper or less hardware-taxing alternative Windows or OSX.
I’m glad you found something operating system that you like. It is really rare (it always was). All operating system and display managers sucks in some way. Some really sucks in some point they are almost useless (read Windows) while others suck in some way we can deal with them…
Personally, based on my background experience and current needs, I prefer Debian Linux with KDE4 over the other alternatives. I tried MacOSX a little bit on a friend’s laptop but at first glance it seemed a little confuse and non-intuitive, and uglier than KDE 4, but I would need to spent more time on it before judging it…
I really think, as others already said, that you are really experiencing problems with your Linux because of your distro (Ubuntu/Kubuntu). The problem is that this distro does some kind of voodo to try to be similar to Windows. And the worst part is that it achieves its goal, it comes out to be another Windows… Unstable, unstested, etc. At least for the KDE 4 packages…
I say that because recently, when changing to a new job, I was kind of forced to use Ubuntu just like the other developers instead of Debian which I have been using for several years after bad experiences with RedHat, Mandrake, Conectiva, Mandriva, Kurumin, Gentoo and Suse. KDE4 is completely unstable on Ubuntu/Kubuntu karmic. I’ve recently changed to Debian at work too… The other developers use Gnome so I can assume it works better on Ubuntu… I think KDE should state on its page: “KDE strongly recommends against Ubuntu/Kubuntu”.
But aside from the instability of KDE on Ubuntu, PulseAudio is unstable in all distros I know of. I’ve just removed it since it appeared on my system. I don’t need PulseAudio, I am happy with ALSA and PulseAudio really give a lot of problems with Skype and other softwares…
I really do not care very much about freedom in every kind of software. I use skype, opera and flash player (I can’t remember of other proprietary software I am using) and I see no problem in them being closed source. The problem with Skype is that the protocol is not available to others develop a Skype integration to available alternatives. The problem with Flash Player is that it does not work very well and no one has built a really good flash player alternative even though the specification is available. But there is absolutely not to complain about Opera. It is one of the best well written software on Earth and I really love it…
I don’t mind in using closed source proprietary software as long as my job doesn’t depend on them. If Opera gets worse I could easily change to Firefox or Konqueror, for instance. I really care about standards. That is what allow me to change from Opera to any other standard compliant browser.
Backing to the subject, my wife has changed to Linux some years ago and although she has a dual boot configuration on her laptop, she rarely uses Windows. She only uses it when she need an Excel supplement that doesn’t work under wine for doing some chemistry related job, but this happens rarely. She often uses PowerPoint, but it works under wine so she doesn’t need to reboot to Windows. PowerPoint worthed the amount invested. I wonder if someday Microsoft will release a Linux native version for PowerPoint… It is one rare product from Microsoft what surprisingly works good. OpenOffice.org Presenter really sucks when compared to PowerPoint… Lucky me that don’t use this kind of software since I don’t have enough patience to build really good looking presentations as my wife has.
About a month ago, my cousin asked me to install Linux on his laptop since he was not really satisfied with Windows. Well, it took me a lot of time and energy to find the correct hda-intel model for his Sony Vaio model until it really worked. But, although we spent a lot of time configuring Linux, it usually just to be made once by hardware. I never had to reinstall Linux, except from changing distributions a long time ago.
After some complaints he is really enjoying Linux and using it more often than Windows. He still needs Windows because of Finale and other musician’s software. But he is using Linux for the daily tasks. I tried with no success to install a M-Audio Firewire Solo professional audio interface.
I usually install Debian Unstable that is actually more stable than Testing and has useful packages, such as KDE4 and newer and fancier software. And much more stable than any Ubuntu version I must state. But it appears that Debian has disable the raw1394 module in its kernel and the M-audio would require freebob driver which depends on raw1394. I have not had time to compile a new kernel and test since he doesn’t live in the same city I do and we don’t see each other frequently. But this story is to tell you that I understand your frustrations with Linux.
But as I said, my cousin, although frustrated with some aspects of Linux, preferred to use a mixed environment. He uses Windows for Finale, audio capture and other musician’s software (MIDI never was well supported on Linux so that we always needed to emulate it somehow with timidity for instance), but he preferred Linux for the daily usage.
Run Windows in VirtualBox would be an option if it could handle well the MIDI and firewire devices…
That is why I’m saying to enjoy MacOSX as much as you can. Sometime you will discover that it sucks in some aspects as all in the software/hardware world, unfortunately. I hope it takes more time to you than it took to me…
You don’t have to be bound to any operating system or desktop environment. I would certainly not hesitate in changing from Linux/KDE to a better operating system/desktop environment one it is available. But today, from my personal research, Linux+KDE is what fits better to my needs. I am glad you found something that fits better to your needs. Congratulation and enjoy it!
Best regards,
Rodrigo.
I can feel your pain. But in my opinion there is a lot of hope, the situation was a lot worse 2 or 3 years ago, I’m not satisfied with the current state of things, but most things work good enough and I sense that good enough will turn into absolutely fantastic in the next years.
Mandriva has always eased the pain for me, I mean they are not an “easy” distribution , they are a polished distribution, and you know that they take great care of fixing the most annoying bugs, when you ever dare to try another distribution.
So I’ve never had a lot of problems with PulseAudio on KDE. So they helped to port important applications to KDE4, like k3b. So they integrate important 3rd party software like the nvidia drivers very well into their repositories and have a well thought out installation system for such packages. The control center never fails me, but I really don’t need it that often. Mandriva has been the iceing on the cake since I first used Linux in 2000.
What’s really going to make a good experience fantastic, will be the progress in KDE4 with the KDE4.4, KDE4.5 versions etc., I see where things are going and it’s a good direction, very feature rich, very stable and very fast.
I agree. What makes Linux so much fun, also kills it for major adoption. *If* (it is an important if) Linux wants to compete with the mainstream platforms, it must change.
Distributions like Fedora, OpenSUSE and non-LTS Ubuntu should go away. RHEL, SLED and Ubuntu-LTS should have a development model like Debian, with a development branch labeled unstable and stable releases every 2 years. Preferably, RHEL, SLED, Ubuntu-LTS and Debian Stable should release around the same time with the same package versions, and these distros would be what 95% users should use (the other 5% -which are 80% of current users anyway- would use the development branches). Geeks happy, normal users happy, 3rd parties happy.
MHO.
I must agree with ano. Mandriva is the best kde experience out there, and maybe even the best linux desktop experience on pair with Ubuntu gnome edition. (IMHO Mandriva is better)
Other kde distributions are in a quite bad state I’d say…
Kubuntu is still too buggy and misses a good control center (Firewall?). OpenSuSE has Yast, but 11.1 was a complete disaster IMHO. 11.2 is quite good, but it still suffers in multimedia: no vlc and no codecs withoud the messy packman…if a user opens an mp3 there’s no notification about missing codecs…it just fails! A lot of drivers are missing from the default DVD (broadcom?)
Mandriva 2010 (ONE EDITION) won me again providing a “just working” kde pulsaudio support.
I think people should consider it more. 🙂