The little things - why Linux still isn't ready for prime-time.

[Mem]

You would be the exception then...not the rule. What hardware are you using anyway ?

We are already blaming the hardware makers for either not having drivers, or not releasing docs to make said drivers.
That don't change the fact that it is incredibly difficult to find working drivers of anything new, since, most makers target windows.

I have installed Linux very recently on three different PCs, all have different distro's and all working fine,they all use wireless however just like Windows its the responsibility of the hardware company in question for the drivers and not the OS.

I'll say Linux seems more efficient on having more of a first time complete installation then Windows for both drivers and software etc...

 

[Elixer]

I saw nothing that has been said that would change my opinion, it still is true that if you have brand new hardware, (heck, even old PCI cards like TV tuners that don't have BT8xxx chip or a few others), then you are stuck on linux the vast majority of the time.
Sure, while this is slowly changing on the CPU and video card end, all the other devices can't work on linux easily.
Again, I blame the device makers, for not providing drivers/docs for their equipment.

Linux has lots of fragmentation and tons of wasted resources because everyone thinks they can do it better, instead of pooling all the resources together to make one kick ass distro.
Just today, installed the just released Debian, and it still can't figure out my mouse has more than 3 buttons, it doesn't install the best video drivers available for my video card (AMD's binary blob), my tuner card won't work, nor does the wireless adapter.
On the flip side, doing a win 8 install on same hardware, and everything is found, and work correctly.

This means, that until there is more support by the device makers for linux, then linux will still lie in the shadow of windows or OS X.

 

[hasu]

This means, that until there is more support by the device makers for linux, then linux will still lie in the shadow of windows or OS X.

I tried to install OS-X on my machine, the install program didn't even start!

 

[Jodell88]

Linux has lots of fragmentation and tons of wasted resources because everyone thinks they can do it better, instead of pooling all the resources together to make one kick ass distro.

Linux does not have fragmentation at all. I'd like to see you prove that one. You can write your software and only focus on one distro. Valve for example focusses on Ubuntu but I have Steam running on Arch Linux with no issues.

The beauty about Linux is that there are many kickass distros. If we only had one and it went south what would happen. See what Microsoft did with Windows 8 for reference.

Just today, installed the just released Debian, and it still can't figure out my mouse has more than 3 buttons, it doesn't install the best video drivers available for my video card (AMD's binary blob), my tuner card won't work, nor does the wireless adapter.
On the flip side, doing a win 8 install on same hardware, and everything is found, and work correctly.

This means, that until there is more support by the device makers for linux, then linux will still lie in the shadow of windows or OS X.

The reason Debian doesn't recognise those things is because it does not include non-free (closed source) drivers by default.

Nice try though. You can now install Ubuntu and get those things installed if you want to. The TV tuner card may be a hassle.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always think Linux is far behind and in some ways it perhaps is, but it's mostly due to the fault of other companies being unwiling to provide open source drivers. But then I use windows, and realize just how crappy it is in terms of performance and seems to have more annoyances. Linux does lack in GUI/user interaction point of view, but everywhere else it's way ahead. Given the choice I rather run Linux than Windows for a desktop. For a server, I HATE using windows.

My biggest grippe though is the fact that Linux does not do multi monitor support very well. It can do 2, but anything beyond that and you need some barbaric workarounds unless you can find a video card that has 3 outputs then perhaps it would work. The issue is it can't span across multiple video cards. I've given up for now and just running one monitor, but I also have an issue that's been preventing me from doing actual work as I'm constantly rebooting. Once I figure out that issue I'll really need to figure something out for triple monitors. Synergy is the only thing that kinda works but it requires having another machine so it's not exactly the most economical considering the power usage of having to run another machine.

 

[mv2devnull]

... pooling all the resources together to make one kick ass distro.

The One Distro to rule them all. The One Distro that implements the One Right Way. Disagreement is not possible.

Somehow, that does not sound right, (unless the Right Way happens to be My Way).

My biggest grippe though is the fact that Linux does not ...

You are like Cato the Elder, repeating that statement so often.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The One Distro to rule them all. The One Distro that implements the One Right Way. Disagreement is not possible.

Somehow, that does not sound right, (unless the Right Way happens to be My Way).


You are like Cato the Elder, repeating that statement so often.

I just find the lack of multi monitor support to be outrageous, especially for a geek oriented OS. If there's one thing it should do better than windows, it should be that. And no don't point me towards Cinerama since that's a really barbaric workaround and not a solution.

 

[Jodell88]

I just find the lack of multi monitor support to be outrageous, especially for a geek oriented OS. If there's one thing it should do better than windows, it should be that. And no don't point me towards Cinerama since that's a really barbaric workaround and not a solution.

Still not ideal but this guy got six monitors working.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM3NTM

 

[Merad]

I've been using Linux a lot more recently and while I think that the average person could probably get by with it, it's lacking polish in many areas.

Couple of examples that come to mind:

GUI design that's generally lacking. It's not necessarily bad in most cases, it's just pretty obvious that the guys who created it would really prefer that you just use the terminal or edit config files by hand. I certainly wish that windows had a useful terminal out of the box, but every time you ask general users to go into the terminal you're excluding roughly 98% of them.

Also, lack of UI feedback. Lots of my usage is on a Raspberry Pi (v2). When I need to go into LXDE for some reason often I'll double click a desktop icon and then sit there for 20 seconds wondering... did it miss my double click or is the Pi just being slow? Even when windows takes a derpily long time to start a program it gives feedback that it's working.

Sharing folders... Mounting shares in linux? Not that bad. Getting linux to share with windows? Shoot me in the face. Spent close to 2 hours Friday trying to get samba to work on the Pi, still no luck.

Package manager.. it's advertised as a big feature of linux, but my experience has been that at least half the time the software in it is out of date.

 

[Jodell88]

I've been using Linux a lot more recently and while I think that the average person could probably get by with it, it's lacking polish in many areas.

Couple of examples that come to mind:

GUI design that's generally lacking. It's not necessarily bad in most cases, it's just pretty obvious that the guys who created it would really prefer that you just use the terminal or edit config files by hand. I certainly wish that windows had a useful terminal out of the box, but every time you ask general users to go into the terminal you're excluding roughly 98% of them.

Also, lack of UI feedback. Lots of my usage is on a Raspberry Pi (v2). When I need to go into LXDE for some reason often I'll double click a desktop icon and then sit there for 20 seconds wondering... did it miss my double click or is the Pi just being slow? Even when windows takes a derpily long time to start a program it gives feedback that it's working.

Sharing folders... Mounting shares in linux? Not that bad. Getting linux to share with windows? Shoot me in the face. Spent close to 2 hours Friday trying to get samba to work on the Pi, still no luck.

Package manager.. it's advertised as a big feature of linux, but my experience has been that at least half the time the software in it is out of date.

You're using LXDE... It not polished and may even be dead upstream.

As for GUI design, I think GNOME has the best designed applications overall though KDE has some very nice ones as well. Visual feedback is the same as it was in windows if you use the big DEs.

As for package management, this heavily depends on your distro, I can say that with the distro I use I get the latest everything.

 

[Merad]

You're using LXDE... It not polished and may even be dead upstream.

We're talking about a Raspberry Pi. It doesn't really have the resources to run much else. Regardless, I think it's indicative of the problems you run into with Linux. LXDE is supposedly be a GUI specifically targeting low-end platforms, and even its developers failed to realize the importance of providing user feedback (when you know up front that things will be running slowly).

Actually, I just checked and the same argument applies to Mint 14 with MATE... no GUI feedback to the user while a program is loading.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

From what I remember of virtualbox they make it very clear that there's a capture button (the right CTRL from memory) that can capture and uncapture the mouse and keyboard. They have a dialog box open at first startup, and unless you're in seamless mode at the bottom right corner it even has that icon to remind you.

Outrage not found.

 

[TwiceOver]

Yeah I don't think the average user is going to install VirtualBox and then install WinXP.

My biggest gripe with Linux is actually that it is too open. Too many people working on the same things but with different applications. Say I want an application that does something (anything really), there's 20-2000 choices for me, none of which are "GREAT". All are adequate, but nothing that just blows my mind. There's always something minor missing from one application that can be found in another, but that other app is missing something from the first app. The issue is too much choice, too open. If someone doesn't like the direction an app is going, just fork it and make yet another app.

Of course I like this type of environment, in theory. It creates rapid development, but the problem is (in my opinion) development loses focus.

Note that I do use Mint Desktop and Ubuntu server on a daily basis.

 

[Elixer]

Linux does not have fragmentation at all. I'd like to see you prove that one. You can write your software and only focus on one distro. Valve for example focusses on Ubuntu but I have Steam running on Arch Linux with no issues.

What do you call Wayland, & Mir (and I suppose X) ?
You have lots of people on each of these, instead of pooling together to make a standard.
Without a standard, then OEMs are left with picking one over the other.
That, is fragmentation.

The beauty about Linux is that there are many kickass distros. If we only had one and it went south what would happen. See what Microsoft did with Windows 8 for reference.

If they all follow some kind of standard, then it would be easier to port whatever from one distro to another.
This isn't always possible right now.

The reason Debian doesn't recognise those things is because it does not include non-free (closed source) drivers by default.

Nice try though. You can now install Ubuntu and get those things installed if you want to. The TV tuner card may be a hassle.

Yeah, I know this, but, even with enabling non-free, it still doesn't work on hardware that has no drivers.
What you say is a 'hassle' turns into impossible.
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATSC_PCI_Cards#Currently_Unsupported_ATSC_PCI_cards

While I do like linux for some tasks, it just isn't getting the support from OEMs to get drivers it needs to compete fully with windows.
There is no distro (well, Ubuntu is trying) that all the OEMs can get behind and offer full support for their hardware.
Lots of people will not use the binary blobs available, for whatever reason.
While they make some good efforts with the OS video drivers, they still lag behind the binary blobs and that just isn't going to change anytime soon.
QUick example, windows drivers have openGL 4.3 support, the OS ones barely have 3.

Thus, we come to what the OP's title says, '...Linux still isn't ready for prime-time.' and, that is true.

 

[Jodell88]

What do you call Wayland, & Mir (and I suppose X) ?
You have lots of people on each of these, instead of pooling together to make a standard.
Without a standard, then OEMs are left with picking one over the other.
That, is fragmentation.

You couldn't have chosen a worst example to support your claim.

X11 is a technological dinosaur and is not fit for graphics technologies. You can say that it's actually keeping the Linux desktop back a bit. Wayland is its successor, its replacement. All the upstream projects and companies are fully behind it. It is meant to be better suited for the technologies of today and the future. Again, Wayland isn't a competing technology, Wayland is a replacement. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries has Wayland support, as of GTK 3.10, GTK3 has full Wayland support and Qt will get full Wayland support in Qt 5.1 or 5.2.

The GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment camps have all said that they're moving to Wayland. While Cinnamon has not said when they'll move to Wayland it would be after GNOME does since they depend on GNOME technologies. GNOME has stated that they want full Wayland support by GNOME 3.12, Full Wayland support KDE will come in KDE 5 which development seems to be under way.

Mir is Canonical's attempt at something... whatever that is. However, since all upstream projects has stated that they're not going to accept patches for Mir, Canonical has a monumental task on its hands that I'm not even sure they realized it yet. :biggrin:

If they all follow some kind of standard, then it would be easier to port whatever from one distro to another.
This isn't always possible right now.

I'm still not understanding the point you're trying to make here. Are you saying that you want the packages from fedora to work on Ubuntu?

While I do like linux for some tasks, it just isn't getting the support from OEMs to get drivers it needs to compete fully with windows.
There is no distro (well, Ubuntu is trying) that all the OEMs can get behind and offer full support for their hardware.

That's because there is no need for OEMs to get behind a distro to offer full support. If they're developing drivers they develop using the linux-next kernel branch, or they develop with with whatever upstream projects that they need to. The distro they use for the development is irrelevant.

Lots of people will not use the binary blobs available, for whatever reason.
While they make some good efforts with the OS video drivers, they still lag behind the binary blobs and that just isn't going to change anytime soon.
QUick example, windows drivers have openGL 4.3 support, the OS ones barely have 3.

You're partly right here. The open source drivers do only have OpenGL 3 support, though they are working on improving that upstream. However, to say that Linux does not have OpenGL 4.3 support is wrong.

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GT 525M/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 4.3.0 NVIDIA 319.17
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Thus, we come to what the OP's title says, '...Linux still isn't ready for prime-time.' and, that is true.

I just refuted the majority of your claims.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Still not ideal but this guy got six monitors working.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM3NTM

Yeah found that, very not ideal. Especially considering it has to be reconfigured at each bootup, and does not support 3D acceleration.

I've been reading I might be able to get 3 going with an ATI card though, I will have to buy one and hope for the best. Had nothing but trouble with nvidia anyway. Graphic artifacts and crap like that.

 

[Jodell88]

Yeah found that, very not ideal. Especially considering it has to be reconfigured at each bootup, and does not support 3D acceleration.

I've been reading I might be able to get 3 going with an ATI card though, I will have to buy one and hope for the best. Had nothing but trouble with nvidia anyway. Graphic artifacts and crap like that.

He said that OpenGL works and WebGL.

AMD does seem to be the way to go if you have multiple monitors.

 

[HeXen]

"Not ready for prime time". You know I recall hearing this back when Vista first came out and Linux for the first time had a small chance to gain some notoriety and break the 1% userbase in the desktop market. People were trying to push it like crazy, however consumer's were not able to do all the things they wanted to do of course...nothing has changed. Even just to put it on a laptop or some netbooks that came with Windows, you often disable some of the physical buttons due to lack of a driver. Your not gonna Netflix on it or have it very easy to convert some media files, so it is limited and yet ripe with potential.
But "potential" is a word that only dreamers use.

Years later, we are still hearing the same thing. I think it's pretty obvious it's not going to happen. Linux has it's uses and corporations will use it for making custom little OS's for car radio's and things like that. Steam still doesn't have a lot of noteworthy games imo, I mean we're never gonna see the Crysis level type games on there or nothing nor have as vast of gaming options available. Fixing problems can be a pain in Windows but in Linux it can be a nightmare.
I seriously also think that Valve will at some point, eventually either give up on Linux gaming or just stop/slow down the resources they put into it cause Linux will continue to have such a low userbase with many such users having weak gaming laptops that Steam will just be nothing but indie games.

 

[Jodell88]

"Not ready for prime time". You know I recall hearing this back when Vista first came out and Linux for the first time had a small chance to gain some notoriety and break the 1% userbase in the desktop market. People were trying to push it like crazy, however consumer's were not able to do all the things they wanted to do of course...nothing has changed. Even just to put it on a laptop or some netbooks that came with Windows, you often disable some of the physical buttons due to lack of a driver. Your not gonna Netflix on it or have it very easy to convert some media files, so it is limited and yet ripe with potential.
But "potential" is a word that only dreamers use.

Years later, we are still hearing the same thing. I think it's pretty obvious it's not going to happen. Linux has it's uses and corporations will use it for making custom little OS's for car radio's and things like that. Steam still doesn't have a lot of noteworthy games imo, I mean we're never gonna see the Crysis level type games on there or nothing nor have as vast of gaming options available. Fixing problems can be a pain in Windows but in Linux it can be a nightmare.

Linux has netflix and when netflix switches from silverlight to HTML5 almost every device can have it.

Fixing problems in Linux has never been a problem due to the fact that meaningful errors are most likely always produced.

I have a Dell XPS L502X laptop that has the notorious optimus freezing issue in windows where the only 'fix' seems to be not using my Nvidia card. In Linux this problem does not exist.

As for games. One can easily develop games using Open source software (OpenGL, OpenAl, SDL) that can target Windows, Mac OSX and Linux at the same time. Valve has seen the light and I don't think they'll go back to using DirectX only.

 

[ControlD]

Here is an interesting article where the author proclaims Mint 15 to be the best desktop OS period: http://www.zdnet.com/mint-15-todays-best-linux-desktop-review-7000015691/ . Of course that is just one man's opinion, but I tend to agree with it. I run systems at home with all of the major OS's: Windows, OSX, and Linux. I find my main Linux machine to be the most trouble free and best behaved system of the three and that is enough to keep me on Linux.

I think Linux in general is caught in an almost can't win chicken and the egg situation. The last time I looked, Linux comprises something like 1.5% of all desktop use. We then get the same old complaint of "Why won't xxxcorp support Linux? Then I might switch over.". At the same time you have xxxcorp saying "We will start supporting Linux when the usage numbers warrant it.". What you end up with is not a lot of exciting things being developed for Linux. I'm not sure how that is supposed to change at this point. In the meantime, if you want AAA games you need Windows. If you want iDevice support you need Windows or OSX. The list goes on and on. For sure there are ways around many of these issues (Wine for Itunes for example) but then you start losing the "easy" operating system many people want.

 

[bbhaag]

I'm going to have to agree with VirtualLarry. It's just not there yet. It's getting close but there are to many little things that will keep discouraging a first time user.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I quit caring about a decade ago.

Amen.

Linux is on my cell phone, my moms router, my sister's Chromebook, and my dads media center.

So what the old form of Linux meant to compete on desktops is never going to "win," OSX couldn't win either and its a better desktop OS preinstalled on the best hardware.

Google has a new approach that is really simple- all the stuff that is hard to do in Ubuntu you just can't do at all. Sure it means you just have a web browser and a file manager but people love it. Best selling laptop on Amazon and all. This minimal Linux might "win" the consumer market given enough time.

What I care about in 2013 is that I can take Ubuntu minimal and turn it into a 10 foot media center. Or that I can hack it onto my arm tablet for added functionality.

Even Ubuntu doesn't care about winning the desktop anymore as Mir basically exists to overcome current issues with Wayland and mobile devices.

 

[Shephard]

For starters there are way too many distro choices. It might seem like fun for geeks but the average user it's overwhelming.

I don't mind trying them out, but if I say 'Hey mom do you prefer Ubuntu or Crunchbang?'

Maybe the answer would be Ubuntu because it looks more modern, but... You can change the desktop environment on every single distro.

You can make Crunchbang look like Unity. So that makes it even more confusing for an average user.

 

[Red Squirrel]

At this point I'm not that concerned about Linux winning, but the fact that we can even USE it if we want. With UEFI, and lot of push for vendor locked BIOS and overall death of the custom PC that is looming, building a Linux system may actually be harder and harder over time. Let's not forget the fact that hardware makers really don't care about it so the harder they make their hardware to reverse engineer the harder it is for Linux devs to write drivers.

I don't see this happening for at least another 10 years though.

 

[Sheep221]

Here is an interesting article where the author proclaims Mint 15 to be the best desktop OS period: http://www.zdnet.com/mint-15-todays-best-linux-desktop-review-7000015691/ . Of course that is just one man's opinion, but I tend to agree with it. I run systems at home with all of the major OS's: Windows, OSX, and Linux. I find my main Linux machine to be the most trouble free and best behaved system of the three and that is enough to keep me on Linux.

I think Linux in general is caught in an almost can't win chicken and the egg situation. The last time I looked, Linux comprises something like 1.5% of all desktop use. We then get the same old complaint of "Why won't xxxcorp support Linux? Then I might switch over.". At the same time you have xxxcorp saying "We will start supporting Linux when the usage numbers warrant it.". What you end up with is not a lot of exciting things being developed for Linux. I'm not sure how that is supposed to change at this point. In the meantime, if you want AAA games you need Windows. If you want iDevice support you need Windows or OSX. The list goes on and on. For sure there are ways around many of these issues (Wine for Itunes for example) but then you start losing the "easy" operating system many people want.

The problem is that linux, despite it is free and entire networking/science/technological computing lives on it, it started to be pushed to the basic desktop users way later, where the windows and mac os took over the desktop market long ago, it's a dead end that won't change anytime soon, unless something bad would happen to windows(after W8 it might come any day), the linux won't take over.
But then again, why it is important for linux to be widely used at home desktops? In fact beside desktops, everything from cell phones and music players to airplanes is running on linux. Which means that actual amount of all devices running linux greatly outnumbers the windows and mas os computers.