Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Ely Levy]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at shlomifish.org> wrote:

> Hello Ely,
>
> please reply to the list (or don't reply at all.).
>
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:52:04 +0300
> Ely Levy <elylevy at cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > You might want to take a look at:
> >
> >
> http://www.hboeck.de/archives/787-The-sad-state-of-the-Linux-Desktop.html
> >
> > Or one of the other million posts on the web about it.
>
> A million posts? Did you count them?
>
> And this post is kinda long.
>
> > Linux desktop is a mess, from video support (no ogl 3 even)
>
> By "ogl 3", do you mean OpenGL version 3? All the video files I throw at
> VLC
> or mplayer just work, but I admit I'm not an OpenGL power user (which is
> 3-D
> graphics for games/etc. and not particularly related to video playback.).
>
> Video playback actually works well on Linux. Unless of course you wish to
view your new blue-ray video.
OpenGL acceleration is used by various of applications these days. From 3D
effects on your desktop, to rendering graphs using Matlab.
One could also add the general poor state of the Linux graphic stack, but
let us assume that gallium and wayland will reach production level quality
during our lifetime.


> > sucky sound
> > support (pulseaudio has it's share of bugs and alsa is way too limited)
>
> I never liked PulseAudio and always disable it. What's wrong with ALSA?
>
> PulseAudio provides a few important features, the two most well known are
controllable per-application volume levels and providing a cross platform
API.


> > Lack of programs (Most of the program are not in the level you can give a
> > simple user e.g. normal sound/video/flash editor and so on).
>
> I admit the situation with Video editors is a problem, and I don't know
> about
> Adobe Flash editors (I don't really like Flash). But my father had no
> problems
> coping with Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) on Windows, and
> I'm
> using it for various small tasks too. What do you find is lacking with it?
>
> I should note that I'm also skeptical about how many people ever edit
> sound,
> video or Flash.
>
> Audacity are very lacking on effects and other features required for a
hobbyist power user.


> > The programs which are around don't play nicely with each other.
>
> How so?
>
Very hard to create a smooth experience between all the different toolkits.
They all behave differently and lack a common look and feel.

>
>
> Freedesktop
> > is so busy in not deciding on any standard that it changes
> > utility programs every 2 days and never document any of them.
> > (policykit/udisks/upower/dbus? who say what to who?).
>
> Well, I'm a little overwhelmed by this myself, but it otherwise seems to
> work
> and not be a concern of a user.
>
> If you are talking about the PC home market then yes. The user admin
his/her own machine.
And if changing a policy requires dealing with one of the many XML files
that resides on the system these days,
I can see how that person will want to move back to windows:)


> > Sucky unicode
> > support/sucky nonstandard bidi support.
>
> 1. Why do you think that Linux's Bidirectionality support is non-standard?
>
> There are too many implementations of the Unicode standard, each is doing
things a bit differently.
There are also a lot of situations that the standard doesn't cover at all.
Look at the different Bidi behaviour
between KDE/Gnome and Openoffice. Sadly I no longer remember the bug report
numbers by heart.


> 2. Why do you think that Linux's Unicode support is bad?
>
> It's been a while since I recall having a significant Unicode problem with
> Linux.
>
> You mean once you ignore the various c programs, perl scripts and pre
python 3 programs,  which weren't
written with unicode in mind? Have you ever tried porting a wxwidget program
to use unicode?
The situation is a lot better if you strict yourself to QT/GTK based
programs. But still there is a long way to go...


> > Lack of normal office suite.
>
> Well, by this card, the only "normal" office suite around is Microsoft
> Office
> (which only runs properly on Windows), and all the alternatives are much
> lamer. Many users will be perfectly happy with OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
>
> The users are know are complaining about the lack of presenter Hebrew
support and bad Hebrew import from word documents.


> > Lack of
> > production quality voice/video over ip client.
>
> Do you mean SIP or something like Skype?
>
> Yes, something like skype on windows, not the shadow of a skype that exists
on Linux.
And please don't offer me to use ekiga unless you actually used it and saw
how lacking it is
on performance.


> > For programs things are even
> > worth, nothing that compared to xcode or visual studio, million of gui
> > interfaces, no debugger with good interface  or profiler (oprofile is way
> > too complicated unless you are a linux savvy).
>
> Well, many programmers (including me and many people I interact with on
> IRC) are
> perfectly happy developing on Linux using command-line tools and non-IDE
> editors. There are also Eclipse, KDevelop, Anjuta, etc. that some people
> like
> and also see:
>
> * http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/editors-and-IDEs/
>
> * http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/ides.html (also see the comment at
> the
>  bottom).
>
> I should note that XCode is primarily useful for people developing using
> Apple-blessed technologies, and that MS Visual Studio is not much better in
> this respect.
>
> Which one of the above mentioned got a good debugger/GUI editor integration
for c++?
Which one of the above can handle OpenCL kernel without crashing?


> > Every new technology takes
> > years before it get open source support (try finding normal opencl
> utilities
> > on linux) and I can continue for days.
> >
> > And please spare me all that hardware people fault or everyone like
> > microsoft. If there is one good thing apple did, it's making this excuse
> > void.
> >
>
> Well, companies can create dedicated hardware where Linux works well.
>
> Regards,
>
>        Shlomi Fish
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
> List of Portability Libraries - http://shlom.in/port-libs
>
> There is no IGLU Cabal! None of them could pass the Turing test. But
> strangely
> enough a computer program they coded, could.
>
> Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
>

Just sharing my experience,

Ely
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