Hacker News Reader

Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

> "but a really terrible choice on the desktop"

This is a very subjective claim. Maybe a long long time ago you could say this, but not the case today.

> "not convinced that free software documentation is any better"

That's beside the point. If that were true, that is an argument for focusing a community effort at improving documentation for a free desktop. And actually with linux the problem is not as much a lack of documentation, but rather that the documentation is a little overwhelming, because it is just too specific or technical. (ever typed "man" something in a terminal?)

View on HN

I shouldn't have to go to terminal to edit a conf file to make audio or video work. I have every single time I have tried Linux on the desktop. It does not work out of the box. You must know how to use terminal and edit Byzantine configurations, and read Linux forum posts from 2005 to make basic functionality work. It's my "subjective" opinion, but after 5+ hours troubleshooting and configuring as a power user who does know how to edit conf files I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

That's it though, it very often does just work.

Without vendor support and with barely any investment from manufacturers, the Linux community is still pushing on to get things to a point where your dog could install it.

Your experience is an anomaly they're trying hard to eradicate.

I understand that, and have tried again nearly every year for the past 15, using the most "user friendly" distro I can find each time.

I don't mean to say that there aren't problems, just that they are fewer today than ever before.

It only takes a particularly new graphics card, or certain wireless chipset to give even battle-hardened users a novel and painful experience.

Audio has "just worked" for years now, thanks to PulseAudio. Video was a mess for a while, but now it will generally work great out of the box if you've got Intel or AMD graphics. Nvidia is still a mess, but Nouveau will work fine for non-gaming stuff.

I've got Nvidia - probably the core of my problems then.

Yes, it is.

For example, there was an article recently, how Nvidia isn't going to support OpenGL acceleration in XWayland.

The keyholder to solve the problems with NV cards in Linux is Nvidia itself. They have all the info, all the sources, and whatever roadmap they planned.

Linux community can solve only Intel and AMD problems, and that's because Intel and AMD are cooperating. Nvidia isn't (Linus' middle finger says hello).

Meanwhile, it is up to you as an consumer, to vote with your wallet and use that to show the vendors your preferences.

Not sure why NIVIDIA should even invest any time in XWayland. It is just a stepping stone towards Wayland, and the retirement of X11

The reason are: games.

All the games (which are of course binary-only, often 32-bit only) released for Linux are linked against SDL 1.2/SDL 2 and X11. It means, that if you are Nvidia owner, you cannot switch to Wayland, unless you are willing to give up gaming (in the current session, at least).

On the other hand, who is buying Nvidia cards? Gamers.

So by not having OpenGL support in XWayland, they have to choose what kind of session they want to run. Many are of course going to choose X11, thus slowing down the adoption of Wayland, delaying the retirement of X11 and of course losing some benefits of Flatpaks (namely isolation at GUI server).

> For example, there was an article recently, how Nvidia isn't going to support OpenGL acceleration in XWayland

Note: Xwayland, not Wayland itself.

Xwayland is the X11-emulation server running inside Wayland (which itself is HW accelerated).

Not saying anything you claim is wrong, but it's easy to interpret wrong so posting for clarity.

> "Audio has "just worked" for years now, thanks to PulseAudio."

For your use cases perhaps, but it's not suitable for all use cases in the same way CoreAudio on OSX is. Music production is a key weak point, which is why JACK and PulseAudio are both required to have what CoreAudio offers out of the box.

There are a few options to allow for Jack and PulseAudio to coexist: http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html

There is a reason why there is both Jack and Pulse...they meet different needs (pro-audio vs desktop), and it is not necessarily a bad thing to have separate tools to handle separate needs.

> "and it is not necessarily a bad thing to have separate tools to handle separate needs."

It's not a bad thing to have different high-level tools for different needs, but in the case of lower level frameworks it's suboptimal unless interoperability is seamless. In the case of PulseAudio and JACK that interoperability is not seamless, and is fraught with problems, so in this regard Linux audio is worse than CoreAudio.

I'm going to strongly disagree with you. Audio still has a lot of problems experienced by a lot of people. These naive statements are why people get frustrated with Linux. I strongly support FOSS software and use it all day, everyday, but we need to stop saying that our shit doesn't stink.

> I shouldn't have to go to terminal to edit a conf file to make audio or video work.

I never needed to.

> It does not work out of the box.

It does.

> You must know how to use terminal and edit Byzantine configurations, and read Linux forum posts from 2005 to make basic functionality work.

What was your problem?

> It's my "subjective" opinion, but after 5+ hours troubleshooting and configuring as a power user who does know how to edit conf files I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

You're lying, if you'd be a "power-user" then you wouldn't complain about manual text-based configuration.

Seriously - I prefer text-based config via CLI

Apple devices are fine-tuned to run macOS. It doesn't make sense to compare a MacBook to some random Linux installation on incompatible hardware.

Buy one of those Developer Edition Dell laptops to even the field, and compare then.

They are almost impossible to buy in Germany.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com