Advice Request The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Posted on Wilders:

To be or not to be, happy. Here's an article explaining my recent negativity and dissatisfaction with the Linux distribution testing, focusing on the state of the wider Linux desktop ecosystem, my requirements for home and work, my present and past usage of Linux, my testing rigor, missing or inadequate capabilities like graphics support, Samba sharing, media playback, filesystem hierarchy and support, battery life, killer apps, backward compatibility, consistency, fonts, documentation, and QA process, project vs product, dire need for consolidation, standardization and major shift toward support, critical fun factor, and more. Take a look.

The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction

Cheers,
Mrk

Wilders thread: The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction
Original article: The Year of the Linux dissatisfaction

 

[mazskolnieces]

The article reminds me of the countless other articles that have lamented Linux usability over the decades. As the author rightly notes, the Linux community is too fractious for it to have a unified goal of good usability and support. As most things in life, it comes all down to a matter of dollars and sense.

"Projects need to become products."

This invariably means paid. Ironically, the single organization that can take Linux forward in some of the areas covered is Microsoft. It remains to be seen if that will ever materialize.

 

[ChoiceVoice]

i didn't know linux was worse on battery life. i just presumed that since is ran lighter, it used less juice. the wifi limit is interesting as well!!

 

[Ink]

Linux has never run lighter for my systems, worse on older CPUs with less than 4GB RAM.

 

[Soulbound]

Linux has never run lighter for my systems, worse on older CPUs with less than 4GB RAM.

MX14 and 16, Pure Debian and Pure Arch were lighter on my systems as opposed to mainstream distros such as Fedora, Ubuntu family etc.

If one prefers everything set up and ready to go, then distros based off the bases but you might not know what you are getting yourself into it.

One thing that also has some impact is the window manager/desktop manager. KDE came a long way

However I much preferer the pure variation say: Arch over distros based of Arch for example, due to "optimizations" implemented that tend to not be fully tested even on official releases.

 

[ForgottenSeer 72227]

It's an interesting article and the author is not wrong.

As much as I love Linux, I too feel the exact same way. The problem is the vast majority of Linux desktop users are either blind , or are just ignoring the issues that are apparent to everyone else. There are way too many distros, desktop environments, package managers, etc... It's also not helped by the fact that there is no unifying voice to bring the community together. Linus Tervolds pretty much keeps to himself, so that doesn't help things. At lease companies like MS, Apple, etc... have project managers where their sole responsibility is to keep the team focused.

The original purpose of Linux/opensource was for the community to work together, but at the end of the day, opensource, or not, people still have egos and they want THEIR solution to be the one. Linux is no different, even though so many people in the community paint it as being different. Personally I feel like there should only be 1 distro that the whole community can get around. Similarly, there should only be 1 package manager, 1 DE and so forth. Don't get me wrong, one of the great things about Linux is it's customization, however, the vast majority of things the people like from distro, to distro, or DE, to DE really is settings based and can be changed after the fact. Similarly, the distro can have different update servers, and the user can choose if they want rolling release, stable, etc...

I feel that people in the opensource and Linux community need to accept the fact that they may need to pay for software. Enough of this "FREE" business. Developers need to make money too, so constantly asking them to give away their work, isn't going to attract new developers and NO donations are not a steady source of income. IMHO if people in the Linux and opensource community can prove that they are willing to pay for good software, I think they would be surprised how many developers they attract. I laugh when I read, "I'm not paying for Adobe premier, too much money...A few posts later "well the open source versions, are ok, sometimes they crash, and not as easy to work with."

i didn't know linux was worse on battery life. i just presumed that since is ran lighter, it used less juice. the wifi limit is interesting as well!!

I originally thought so too, but I think there's more to power management than just being light. It's sad in a way, but this is exactly what the article is talking about. There are too many people in the Linux community working on their own thing to truly advance Linux (desktop) in any meaningful way. Everyone has a solution, but instead of working on a project that is already in development, they create their own project, hence all the fragmentation.

I was listening to a Linux podcast a few weeks ago and someone made a good point that hits this topic home. The topic they were discussing was the fact that Wayland is finally getting screen capture support. One of the pod casters was like (paraphrasing)... "that's great and all, but here we are in 2020 getting exciting about screen capture." It's true though. They constantly are tooting their own horn, praising how much better they are compared to Windows and MacOS, but some of the basic things like screen capture, fractional scaling, power management, etc... are not fulling functioning, if at all on Linux. Then they wonder why people switch back to Windows, or Mac and no it's not because people are dumb and can't figure out Linux, or aren't taking the time to learn. It's quite simply that people want to get things done and don't want to spend an infinite amount of time trying to get basic things to work.

They spend way too much time worrying about what MS and the like are doing, rather than focusing on their own projects. For example I constantly see people blurting out embrace, extend, extinguish (EEE), as if MS is planning some evil plot. Just recently MS purchased Bethesda, etc..., all over the Linux forums, people were like MS is doing this to kill Linux gaming, blah, blah, EEE. I feel like saying, I think you people need to stop acting like your the center of the universe. Secondly MS didn't buy them to kill Linux gaming, they bought them to own the various studios and make money no matter what platform the game is sold. MS isn't going to stop their games from being sold on Playstation, steam, etc... MS is transitioning more to a services company and when selling services, you want to hit as many platforms as possible to maximize return. So no, this wasn't to take out Linux.

Well enough of my long winded rant lol, but at the end of the day, Linux on the desktop does have the potential to be great, it's really up to the community to make some difficult/hard choices to get it there.

 

[bayasdev]

i didn't know linux was worse on battery life. i just presumed that since is ran lighter, it used less juice. the wifi limit is interesting as well!!

My laptop already had poor battery life on Windows so I can't test that.

Linux as is it's not designed with the masses in mind (Android and ChromeOS are good examples of commercial products based on Linux), but for advanced users once you try a Linux distro and get used to the terminal commands you won't look back to Windows because you feel so empowered of adapting your OS to your likes instead of the OS doing whatever it wants and forcing you to adapt.

 

[bribon77]

A great article by Mrk, which I read often.

I agree with most of his comments in this article.
In Linux, sometimes a simple thing in windows, is very complicated to do in Linux, at work, it's hard to choose only Linux.
There are many distributions, different and ways to package in Linux it becomes difficult and changes from one distribution to another, for example is not the same the packaging from Archi linux to Debian, the commands are different, they should unify that.

But with all this I'm a Linux user and I'm happy, I'll always have a Linux partition in my computer.

 

[sepik]

Linux Mint LDME 3 ran surprisingly good on my very old ASUS EeePC with 1 GB ram and 4GB HDD
After some tweaking, memory usage was like 200mb only.
But in other hand, i've terrible experience to get Nvidia 660 to work with different distros. Pop_OS "nvidia" version works fine. Others does not.
Even "live" mode hangs the system after a while. Managed to get it to work in recovery mode console by purgin nvidia drivers and installing drivers there...sort of.

 

[brambedkar59]

Linux has never run lighter for my systems, worse on older CPUs with less than 4GB RAM.

I had same experience. You can literally feel the laggy scrolling on every browser on Linux. YT videos will drop frames even on 1080p while on windows 4K@60 runs flawlessly. Hardware manufacturers don't care if the user base is so small, so they don't polish the drivers as much as possible, just make them so it can run.

Well enough of my long winded rant

This is the best rant I heard today, I liked it.
I think the Linux community still has that same evil image of MS in their mind since their CEO compared Linux to cancer.

 

[shmu26]

I run Windows in a virtual machine on Linux. I need the VM for a few critical work apps that run only on Windows. Strangely enough, my virtual Windows has much less issues than my physical Windows does.
And I have a dual boot setup, which nowadays I use mainly to run a Macrium Reflect backup job every once in a while.

 

[bayasdev]

my virtual Windows has much less issues than my physical Windows does

That's because you only install the bare minimum required to get an specific program to work, Windows doesn't provides a tool to manage installed programs in a smart way so a physical install will get cluttered in matter of days

 

[ForgottenSeer 72227]

But with all this I'm a Linux user and I'm happy, I'll always have a Linux partition in my computer.

Same here.

As much as I have some frustrations with some of the ignorance in the Linux community, I still am very much using Linux and will continue to do so. The way I use a computer now a days has changed drastically. Most stuff is online, so it works regardless of OS. The only big thing for me is games, but Linux has come a long ways, and I still plan to dual boot for those that don't work on Linux. Other than that Linux does everything I need.

I run Windows in a virtual machine on Linux. I need the VM for a few critical work apps that run only on Windows. Strangely enough, my virtual Windows has much less issues than my physical Windows does.
And I have a dual boot setup, which nowadays I use mainly to run a Macrium Reflect backup job every once in a while.

I plan on re-building some of my computer and will be switching most of them over to Linux. The only exceptions will be my gaming PC which will be a dual boot, and my wife's laptop which will be Windows (mostly since I haven't convinced her yet to switch). I am hoping that one day I will build a Proxmox server (or something similar), and run Windows in a VM that way, or I can just fall back to Virtualbox.

 

[shmu26]

That's because you only install the bare minimum required to get an specific program to work, Windows doesn't provides a tool to manage installed programs in a smart way so a physical install will get cluttered in matter of days

My VM is actually a conversion from my physical machine, which was already junked up by software.
Very often, it is the hardware and its drivers that cause the issues in Windows. So a VM is spared from a lot of trouble, because it does not interact directly with the hardware, in most cases.

 

[shmu26]

Linux has never run lighter for my systems, worse on older CPUs with less than 4GB RAM.

If you want your desktop to respond as fast as a demon, try a distro with Xfce desktop environment. Ubuntu with the default Gnome desktop is a bit clunky and has drawn a lot of dissatisfaction.
But stay away from MX Linux, if you want short boot time. This is because MX does not use systemd. So the boot process can't run parallel processes, and it is slow.
MX does have an option for enabling systemd, but this is strictly for the non-purists.

As far as RAM consumption goes, modern versions of the KDE Plasma desktop eat up very little RAM, and they look great.

 

[bayasdev]

As far as RAM consumption goes, modern versions of the KDE Plasma desktop eat up very little RAM, and they look great.

IIRC this is what a default Ubuntu (GNOME) install uses on idle (~1.2GB according to htop) but Kubuntu (KDE) uses the same with Brave opened on MT

 

[jackuars]

i didn't know linux was worse on battery life. i just presumed that since is ran lighter, it used less juice. the wifi limit is interesting as well!!

Depends on the distribution you use, there are lightweight, midweight and heavy weight distributions optimized for different configuration. I have found Linux to work much better on lower end hardware, older laptops etc.

 

[shmu26]

IIRC this is what a default Ubuntu (GNOME) install uses on idle (~1.2GB according to htop) but Kubuntu (KDE) uses the same with Brave opened on MT

View attachment 247342

I must admit that measuring RAM usage on Linux is a tricky business, because there are many different task managers and other tools to do it, and each one gives a different output, which has a lot to do with methodology: whether to count shared RAM, cached RAM usage, etc.

 

[shmu26]

Depends on the distribution you use, there are lightweight, midweight and heavy weight distributions optimized for different configuration.

Lightweight versus heavyweight usually refers to how much software is bundled with the distro, not how light it actually runs.

 

[jackuars]

Lightweight versus heavyweight usually refers to how much software is bundled with the distro, not how light it actually runs.

What no....For further reference

Lightweight vs Heavyweight Distros: A Comparison!

As a beginner to the Linux world you will often hear the words “Lightweight distros”, but what does it mean? What are Lightweight Distros? Lightweight distros are Linux distributions specially made keeping old and resource constraint hardware in mind so that the user can have a responsive and...

embeddedinventor.com

Anyway most useful Linux falls into midweight/heavyweight category. Anyway it doesn't depend on how many softwares are bundled.