OpenGL is such a pain in the ass. You'd know if you tried it.
I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed:
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1. Update glibc and everything breaks
2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks
3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums
4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads)
5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters
6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do.
7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware.
8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.
This is an accurate description of the different ways it sucks when one insists on using software on unsupported or semi-supported hardware.
Of course there will be unsupported wifi cards on the market. Of course there will be cards which kind of work when you load some unsuported third party driver but they will promptly crash on some future version. Those will never be supported in upstream software. Don't buy them and force Linux on them, it won't end well.
Don't buy a Dell PC and be angry at Apple when MacOS won't run. Unless you do it with the intention of working on a port. It's the same situation with any other operating system.
It's also been pretty clear for over a decade that nvidia is unlikely to be supported in upstream software, as long as they won't use the same standards as everyone else. There's been some recent developments on that front which suggests this situation may not be forever, but don't hold your breath.
Given the choice, it's pretty common to use Linux, at least among developers. One of the great things about it is that it just works. I have now thrown away the hardware but I used to have a workstation with a Debian install that was about two decades old. It had only been upgraded in-place, never reinstalled, and how many libc upgrades that included I do not know. The migration to the new executable format in the 90s was a bit problematic in the beginning, but that worked out well too. That's the sort of stability you can expect from it.
It was a long time ago I bought any new computers, but in the laptop realm well supported for a long time meant the performance Thinkpad series. Now all the big providers sell laptops with Linux pre-installed, so I take it they will work great too. But there are a lot of crappy Windows-type laptops out there. They're the kind that turn themselves on in your bag and cooks themselves. The Linux experience aren't going to be great with them.
I HATE Nvidia. I had setup ubuntu once. Got everything running. Think this was 16.04. And for a couple of months it was rock solid. Then I was trying to play a game and some forum said to update the Nvidia driver. So I did… after rebooting I got a black screen. No UI. No she’ll. Nothing. If I shut down the shell would flash up for a second. But essentially I was locked out of the machine because the Nvidia drivers broke everything. Even booting into safe mode or whatever resulted in a black screen.
That’s the last time I bought a desktop computer with Nvidia card.
AMD even with their new cards being a bit buggy has never had such issues.
This rant sounds like an informercial full of fake problems nobody has.
I have used Linux for decades and have never experienced any of this.
1. Use the software packaged for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works.
2. Use the packaged nvidia drivers for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works.
3. Prefer a laptop that is compatible with Linux, if that's not possible, use a laptop-friendly distro.
4. 99.99999% of people will never ever try to do that probably that's why.
5. Most of them are key/value based despite the syntax.
6. Yet most distros inherit from a major base distro like Redhat, Debian or others. If you want to use Slackware or Gentoo then that's your own choice.
7. There are many distros but, many of them are Debian or Redhat based, the ones that aren't are used by a tiny percentage of users.
8. And Pipewire solves this, and is the default sound server on recent distros.
Pipewire does not solve that unless your app uses their API. For 99% off apps (100% of VoIP?) you still get the same old latency until you go tuning configs. Pipewire is also not enabled on any LTS.
The rest of your replies reads as "La la la, I can't hear you!" which is pretty typical of the desktop Linux community. Deflect, deflect, and deflect :)
Not sure what "solving" means but it's not correct that Pipewire doesn't offer any benefits unless you use another API. Depending on what you compare it with, of course. If you use audio semi-professionally you might already use low latency software and not see better latency, but compared to Pulseaudio the difference should be noticeable.
Of course, if the application is VoIP than Pulseaudio was already good enough, as network latency is an order of magnitude greater, but for realtime streaming applications the difference is there.
Most end users won't care however. They switch when the distribution they use switches over.
You just listed a bunch of obscure issues that most people do not have and tried to portray that as being a blocker for a regular person adopting Linux.
1. Not all software is available in the repos, in some distros this happens frequently. And no, it doesn't "just work", I've even tried a popular distro that destroyed itself with the first update on a clean install.
2. I invite you to try an Nvidia Optimus setup. Good luck and hope you don't end up with a black screen because your distro thought it can handle it but doesn't.
3. Even if that was easy, most people trying out Linux do so with the hardware they currently have. And more often than not this means broken suspend or wifi or...
4. We have pretty cheap 4k screens nowadays and laptops with 4k. It's not that uncommon.
6. Are you seriously implying distros inheriting from another are all compatible with each other?
Also the point about using Docker for GUI apps is crazy. I've never seen the need for such thing. AppImages, Flatpaks, heck even Snaps exist and allow developers to distribute applications along with the dependencies. They have their issues but they're good if the developer does not have much time to mess around with deps and testing in different distros, some users also prefer them due to "sandboxing".
I'm not saying Linux desktop is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not the clusterfuck NavinF is talking about.
I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed:
---
1. Update glibc and everything breaks
2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks
3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums
4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads)
5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters
6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do.
7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware.
8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.