
Why Desktop Linux (Still) Sucks. And What We Can Do To Fix It. - r11t
http://blip.tv/file/3538476/
======
machrider
The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be
killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well.

It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two
days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu
hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade
to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that
something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i)
could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in
12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.

~~~
colonelxc
It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and
looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made).

If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro,
they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I
know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones
that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or
whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding
edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.

~~~
vorador
But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs
and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe
they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send
anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?

~~~
nailer
I think you're both right. What I think would made a real difference is making
some cruel-but-kind decisions about deprecation.

State officially the other mechanisms are broken, then drop everything that
doesn't use pulse from the repositories.

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k-zed
The major advantage of "Desktop Linux" (that I've been using happily for quite
a few years now) is that it's utterly unlike Mac OS X or Windows. We use Linux
not because it's free, but because it's more comfortable, the UI is better and
friendlier, and developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier.

Everything Gnome, Ubuntu and this sort of people do work against these
advantages. We use Linux because of its differences - these differences to
other systems need to be accentuated (zsh, the suckless project, etc), not
fought against (Ubuntu, network-manager, HAL, etc).

By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and
less comfortable to use. This needs to stop.

~~~
blub
Not me. I use Linux (among other OSes) because it's Open and Free, and I think
that it's important to have an alternative to proprietary systems.

I don't consider it to have a better UI or to be easier to develop for and I
feel more comfortable with Windows.

~~~
k-zed
Then you need to try the following things: \- vim or emacs \- tmux or screen
\- tiling window managers \- zsh

Each of these things result in a massive usability increase.

------
krschultz
The easiest problem to tackle is .RPM vs .DEB debate that should have ended
about 3 years ago. If the LSB had said .DEB it might have happened, but since
the "official" standard and the actual majority are diametrically opposed it
doesn't want to happen. And of course the filesystems don't perfectly match
across distros.

~~~
codavid
The .rpm vs .deb debate is a fallacy. The _real_ issue is that when packaging
for say debian and RHEL you have to care about different glibc, different
compiler versions with potentially different ABI, different filesystem
conventions, different scripts for post install, etc... The format in which
the files are packaged is the least of the issues compared to that. For
example, packaging for opensuse once you have a package for RHEL is as much of
a PITA than packaging for debian, really.

Once you standardize on what makes packaging difficult across distro, you
basically end up with the same system. I think systems like the build service
from Suse, etc... are much more useful than wishful thinking on packaging
format.

~~~
sophacles
Meh, from a source point of view, once I have a debian/ directory, with a
properly set up rules file, building becomes trivial. Then it is matter of
generating a package per-distro/version with the right environment. This could
be very well done in an automated manner and a few vms.

~~~
codavid
Which is exactly what the build service gives you...

~~~
sophacles
My bad, I was under the impression that it was an RPM only thing.

------
moultano
I wish talks like these had transcripts. I listened to the first half, but
don't have the time for the whole thing.

~~~
hobb0001
tldw? Anyone?

 _sigh_ It's so annoying when you have to sit through a hour-long video for
what would otherwise be a 5-10 minute read.

~~~
jodrellblank
Might get something from the Mozilla Drmbeat project in a few years; maybe
Google's speech recognition subtitles will be able to e port as transcript
when it's properly live, too...

------
acon
I think what Linux really needs is to embrace some way of getting software
outside apt/yum. Having to go through the package managers forces you to be an
administrator to install software, and the developer and user have no say in
which version of the application you get.

I think Linux distributions should be platforms which developers can develop
applications for which they can distribute however they wish. Then users can
choose which applications and which versions to install and does not have to
go through the AppStore like package management system.

I also think applications should be stand alone. If they need anything outside
the platform, these dependencies should be delivered as part of the
application.

~~~
russell_h
Every binary distro I've ever used (SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora)
came with a little GUI that let you install packages without going through a
repository. Just download the .deb/.rpm and double click on it. This is how a
lot of projects deliver their latest builds. If you're talking about a unified
package format (it doesn't seem like it) then thats a completely different
issue.

As for 'stand-alone' applications, that doesn't make much sense for open
source stuff, but there's nothing stopping you from distributing your software
that way. A lot of commercial software for Linux is delivered that way.

~~~
blasdel
But everything packaged that way still demands to be installed as root, linked
against their depgraph of ancient fucked-with libraries, and split apart into
pointlessly separate packages.

~~~
nailer
It asks for your own password (ala Mac - that said, it could simply ask you to
confirm ala Windows).

End users don't do linking or worry about dependencies.

------
theschwa
I think it boils down to what he was talking about at the end: Linux users
need to be willing to buy software, and Linux software developers need to be
more business savy.

~~~
houseabsolute
The open question is why anyone would buy software for Linux. The key
differentiating factor for _most_ people who use it is that it's free (as in
beer). There are two other operating systems that for most people work better
than Linux. It's hard to see how you can ask people to pay for software now in
the hope that it will eventually be good. I'm sure some people will buy
software because it's the Right Thing To Do, but considering the population
that selects Linux and their reasons, it's hard to picture a big enough market
there to draw really good consumer software developers.

An interesting business question.

~~~
julio_the_squid
The differentiating factor for me is that it's just what I've used for 12
years and what I'm most productive in.

Serious Linux users use it because it's the only thing that fits the way they
work. Linux has all the interface and programs I'm used to, so of course I'd
be more likely to buy software for it than any other OS. What holds me back is
that there isn't any software I need that I don't have...

~~~
scorpioxy
Same for me I guess.

One problem that I do have is that if I pay Canonical, for example, to make
the whole OS better, it would mostly still crap out because I made the mistake
of buying at AMD/ATI graphics card. Not sure who to blame at that point. The
Ubuntu people say its from ATI/AMD and ATI/AMD say that there's not enough
money in the market to justify better work on the driver(that or technical
problems with the differences between distros). So what then? It would still
have the same result.

But, in general, I do vote with my dollars.

------
nitrogen
If the camera person for that video reads this, I suggest placing the speaker
in the bottom-left/bottom-right corner of the video frame and keeping the
slide visible at all times. You can pan around when people ask questions, but
keep as much of the slide visible as possible and move back when the question
is done.

------
batterseapower
The blog post from the speaker has a link to the slides:
<http://lunduke.com/?p=1075>

------
richardw
So much of Linux is designed and modified by committee, so change is slow and
painful. Apple managed to get a seriously hot UI onto FreeBSD in a
(relatively) short time. Linux has everyone and their dog bartering to make
changes, so the UI goes nowhere.

Stop copying Windows, already. Start menu sucks. Dump X.

~~~
thingie
Did you listen to the talk? :) X.org is quite an advanced graphic system
mostly doing what you want it to do. Throwing it out and trying to make
something new (for what gain?) means wasting so much resources that it's not
even nice. (And how is X related to some start menu?)

~~~
gizmo
You say advanced as if that's a good thing. I think a lighter system that
considers hardware acceleration and multiple monitors from the ground up may
be a good investment in the long run. Not to mention audio, and vector
graphics and so on.

Multiple X sessions (one for each monitor + one for each vnc session + virtual
X sessions for whatever reason) has to be combined with Xinemera and with
graphic drives and with a KDE/Gnome desktop environment... and all the parts
have to fit together perfectly for the system to work. I just don't see that
happening anytime soon.

The whole concept of X clients and X servers... it's just too much. X was
created back in the 80s, and it still doesn't get the basic usecases right.
The requirements for desktop computers have shifted a lot in the last 30
years, so this kind of thing is to be expected.

Starting over every 30 years? I think that's reasonable, especially when it's
holding Linux back. We've learned a lot since, and X isn't going to last until
2030... so why not throw it out now?

~~~
thingie
X.org considers hardware acceleration, with XRender, for example. Quite too
often, buggy and incomplete graphic drivers and other problems makes it even
worse than no acceleration at all. I don't really see these problems as X.org
specific, is there any evidence that they are? I think it's more likely caused
by very limited resources that are available, incomplete or proprietary (ati
and nvidia tends to lag months behind new X server releases, would they ever
catch up with a completely new system?) drivers, and other problems, and
throwing out X means throwing out all effort spent to solve this problems.

But that doesn't mean that it is not a good idea to explore other
possibilities and experiment with another systems in parallel. Like Wayland,
for example. Of course it is. Just, don't hurry with burying X11, it's the
best what you've got, and likely to remain so for a long time.

~~~
gizmo
You kind of have to bury X, otherwise you're going to end up with two
competing projects and then you're even worse off. See: Linux audio.

If X were to disappear from the face of the earth open source programmers
would scramble to get something new into place, and that would in all
likelihood be better at dealing the realities of graphics today.

Just because it's the best we got doesn't mean it's good enough.

(I'm not advocating we actually should bury X... just making the general point
that sometimes it's worth it to stake a step back to take two steps forward
later. I realize it's often not politically feasible.)

~~~
thingie
Well, I was hoping for many more than just two. I don't really see any other
way than many competing projects, one eventually killing all others.

But it shouldn't be that painful. As you've said, it's mostly about toolkits,
and it's easy to simply run X server atop of the new system (Mac OS X does
that, Linux does that in some ways, Windows can do that, so anybody can). I
guess that the terrible mess of Linux audio can be avoided (after all, you
don't have X11 applications locking whole graphic system for just themselves,
as is often the case in audio).

------
Maro
Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of
OSX.

~~~
hristov
Don't agree. Installation of distribution supported software on linux is very
easy already. Drag and drop will just cause a lot of issues with software that
actually requires more complicated installation, as well as libraries, etc.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
That is pretty much the problem. The only software that installs easy (in most
cases) is the "distribution supported software" (in the version(s) currently
used by the distribution that is).

------
houseabsolute
If history is any evidence, nothing. :P

~~~
davidw
Actually, as someone who has used Linux as desktop software since 1996, I
would say the exact opposite: it's making rapid progress compared to where it
was once. Perhaps it still hasn't quite caught up, but I'm relatively certain
that soonish, it will be 'good enough' for an ever-larger segment of the
population. It's already 'good enough' for a lot of people.

~~~
jim_dot
it will always "soon" be ready for large-scale adoption.

But it never will.

~~~
davidw
Until it is. In 2006 we had Ubuntu on all computers at the company I worked
for, because most of the people were either 1) developers and used it anwyway
or 2) didn't really need more than a browser and openoffice anyway, and were
thus perfectly content with it.

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Kilimanjaro
Sell Ubuntu (and other apps like OOo, Gimp, etc) for a nominal $9.95

Give two options in the download area of your software, one green button with
a $9.95 download and one blue button for a free download. Both pointing to the
same package.

If you want to contribute to open source, click the green one.

Also sell it on best buy and walmart for $9.95 to reach the non-tech-savvy
audience.

Even if they drop it on the trash can when they get home. At least some money
goes to the pockets of the open sourcerers, which is better than none.

------
known
Linux on Desktop is offering _too many options_ for users to install and
configure apps.

------
macco
Does somebody know who is the speaker? Didn't see it on the blip.tv page.

~~~
macco
Bryan Lunduke - sorry I saw it on the video now.

------
nessence
I gave up on Linux. Not fodder; ^ if you agree.

