My intention linking this is not to provoke someone or hurt feelings, moreover to show what we as community or maintainer need to fix.
Regardless how you see it, there is some truth in it, even if I personally disagree with most mentioned points ignoring that Android already runs on 1 Billion devices which is basically Linux…
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Hardware problems/poor drivers: Linux runs well on some devices and not so well.on others. It is largely up to the manufacturer to make drivers so this will improve if manufacturers want to support Linux.
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Software availability: Projects like nix, app image and flathub try to fix this by providing a way developers can package their app so that it can be used on all distros. As far as I can tell:
- Snap is centralised around canonical.
- flathub doesn’t seem to have a huge amount of apps packaged yet (at least compared to nix or the aur).
- App image doesn’t really have an easy way to manage all your different packages/update apps. It is useful though because it lets you install an app by simply downloading a file.
As far as I can tell nix is the best option long term but it doesn’t have a simple gui yet/at the moment. Although there is one being worked on.
I fully agree with your points, one should also not forget that even Windows drivers are not perfect. They can cause problems and even sometimes security vulnerabilities.
I think most of the points on mentioned website are fixable, however I would love to see more providers open sourcing their driver code to easier inspect and fix possible driver issue.
UX and UI wise, I think basically every OS is customizable. I am not sure if that is a valid argument, even on closed source operating systems there are a bunch of tools to change that.
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This blog post is painful reading by someone who seems to have trouble holding a point together (and I’m not trying to be mean about it, it can be a hard thing to do). Their last paragraph of Manjaro, Arch, the AUR sounds mostly like a dog barking.
This person sounds like they’ve played around with a few distros, have got caught up in forum nonsense rather than read appropriate and official guides (I think some of the other commenters here have touched on that end of it), and really not approached many, if any, of their situations from the perspective of the target audience of their blog post (non-technical newbie to Linux, right?).
He’s critical in his Mastodon posts about criticism about his post because people are missing the point, but I still don’t think this user has ever tried to approach things from that target audience.
People do wind up hearing about the newbie friendly distros - Ubuntu should ‘just work’ on nearly any hardware, including Nvidia-driven systems, no?
If more companies that sold computers would put Linux on them and support it, things could change dramatically. In the meantime, hopefully we can guide new users to appropriate places.
(Nothing posted in here suggests I believe Linux is the best OS for all situations - if we could get an alternative to Adobe, that’d be great, k? heh)
even manjaro ‘just works’. I know I’ve been using Linux in various forms for the last 20 years so I may be a bit biased but the installer is just as simple as Ubuntu or windows. plus it’s been extremely stable even running the testing repos.
not to mention kde plasma is extremely user friendly.
You want to do any professional electronics design works and don’t have half a million dollars per year for 1 license of all of Cadence’s tools: You can do circuit simulation through WINE and LTSpice or hspice and you can do hobby hardware development through KiCAD, but anything beyond that is difficult. You will also not be able to use almost any chip-specific development tools. Generally you can always flash devices, but advanced features are usually not available
If you want to do any significant 3D CAD: Maybe you can get Fusion 360 working through WINE by luck or can learn to make do with FreeCAD, but anything other than that is a no-go.
If you do competitive gaming: you are mostly SoL for the time being
If you have any dependency on Adobe tools for work, previous projects you need access to, etc…
If you like to read books on a kindle but don’t want to buy through Amazon: since the python3 migration of DeDRM and Calibre it is extremely difficult or impossible to get it working only on Linux using ADE on linux through WINE for the encryption key.
Plenty of reason to use linux, but above are some reasons not to.
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Oh fully agree, but there are a ton of phenomenal books out there that are impossible to acquire legally without DRM. Many aren’t even available illegally, especially if they are in a language other than English, like try finding “De Grijze Jager” anywhere DRM free, legally or illegally hahaha. Many authors don’t even know the issue with DRM and just do what their publishers say is standard.
Android already runs on 1 Billion devices which is basically Linux…
At which point? It takes only the Linux kernel. But kernel is the least important part from practical usage perspective. Everything else is different, the bootloader (no GRUB or systemd-boot), screen compositor, sound system (not a Pipewire or PulseAudio), package format, init process, shell, even the standard C library (Bionic instead of glibc).
There are projects to run Linux on phones (see: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices), but it takes huge about of reverse engineering and work.
because damned-near all FOSS has a few glitches. I updated to Debian 11 (from 10) and there are security error messages when I try to update: E: Failed to fetch http://http.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/InRelease Clearsigned file isn’t valid, got ‘NOSPLIT’ (does the network require authentication?) Also, every app seems to work and install quite differently depending on what package type you use (.deb, snap, appimage, flatpak…) and also put files in different places. Also, some other users seem to think you should have to have a tech degree or extensive knowledge to use Linux. Arch users are the worst, of course, in this regard. Software should be easy to use, quick to learn, intuitive - because it is a tool to get something ELSE done. If my power tool requires me to read a 100 page book, I’ll choose another model/brand. Some learning is good, but the end goal is to work and enjoy - not to fight with your software and plead with it to install or work right. I love the ideology behind FOSS/Linux and hate Big Tech and BigBiz. But, Linux is rather too scattered and it would be great if people agreed to work together to make a few distros and D.E.s work GREAT rather than have 50 distros and a few so-so D.E.s. and window managers. And, those need software/apps to run on it, of course.
The funny thing is that the same can be said about almost every OS that is open source and even end-to-end closed systems like iOS are not perfect.
They are easier to use for the average user but package updates and OS updates are still - sometimes - problematic across all systems. So I do not think that the argument is valid.
Ideology over functionality
imagine actually thinking this is a bad thing, i’d take ideology over functionality anytime possible
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On top of this, think about the alternatives if you’re into gaming. You either lose a lot of performance or you need to replace your card. The former is a non-starter for many games and the latter is a waste of precious resources.
I spent 2 weeks almost trying to install the open source driver, but gave up and found that the NVidia driver installed almost immediately. I almost cried. I really wanted my system to be 100% open-source, but its never gonna happen for me. nonfree it is.
switch to amd
Never go to a hospital if you encounter an accident or something. Lots of closed source things, you know.
if you’d read it you’d see the author has no problem with people who choose ideology over functionality, only people that try to force others to.
I didn’t read dude’s blog/article and was drawn to FOSS/Linux because of ideology. But, functionality truly needs to be improved upon.
I’d still like to know why uninstalling xfburn takes other major, necessary programs with it. Same with Adwaita theme. Many other programs are like that, too. I no longer trust purge when removing a program, because it often takes too much with it and I don’t always have the time to look up all of the files it says it’ll take. If it didn’t add it when installing, it should take it when uninstalling. I am grateful for Linux and FOSS, but having to spend an entire week to re-add everything after formatting my partition to re-installing to Debian 11 has gotten me frustrated. I think one problem is the communication or not working together problem. Filing a bug report on any FOSS is not easy enough and I’d bet most of us skip it.
