🚀 go-pugleaf

Am 15/12/15 um 03:43 schrieb destruere:
> On Mon, 14 Dec 2015 18:38:39 +1300, Peter Huebner wrote:
>
>> I am not holding my breath viz Linux. I've tried Linux every other year
>> since Linus came up with the idea, and found it wanting as a desktop OS.
>> Unlikely do do any gaming past, say, Civ 3 or 4.
>>
>> However, after installing, then uninstalling win10 on my laptop as
>> testbed, and being ambushed by MS continually attempting to reinstall
>> Win10 despite my having opted OUT, I put  Linux Mint on there. It's
>> actually pretty nice.
>> Some functionality is much better than Windows (installing software from
>> the repository). No complaints about media rendering, it's got a
>> perfectly good office suite, browser, and email that handles imap
>> superbly well. Colour me impressed. I have no hesitation taking it
>> travelling like that. Only pity is that I  can't imagine Photoshop
>> Elements will run on it.  Oh, and Linux does not like talking to network
>> attached Canon Printers out of the box. Can be solved, but requires a
>> lot of digging. Connects to the home network a treat though.
>
> The latest builds of Linux have finally surmounted the hurdle of making
> you login to Root as the admin and manually update drivers. New hardware
> detection and driver installation has improved by an order of magnitude.
>
> Unfortunately, this leap has only gotten it to the place it should have
> been 10 years ago. Nice call on Mint. I use both Ubuntu and Mint, the
> latter is the one I always recommend to someone migrating from Windows.
>
> -d
>
Drivers itself were never the biggest issue of Linux, the constant 
change in the driver APIs/ABIs always was and still is, which made a non 
opensource third party driver market close to impossibe. Add to that the 
fact that every driver which goes into the kernel main distro must have 
been sanctioned by the head Penguin himself.
So simply shoving out a hardware and adding drivers to it no matter if 
closed source or opensource caused following troubles and getting it 
into the kernel takes a long time, and sometimes is impossible due to 
restricted code.

a) The user must hook in as root and call a manual build to hook the 
driver into the kernel or somebody delivers an automation gui for the 
process.
b) You can rest assured that within two months another change in the 
driver API/ABI will break the existing drivers of the hardware.
c) Sometimes there is a core driver abi abstraction layer like for some 
wifi adapters where you can hook in copyright protected code but that is 
not standardized and means configuration hell.

Compare that to Windows where a driver ABI change happens every 10 years 
and the mac with the same for every 5-10 years and you will see where 
Linuxs core problem is. The install process can be automated, but if it 
is not in the kernel it basically does not exist or causes lots of 
trouble for the end user.

Another problem was and still is X11/XFree but the linux people have 
recognized that and are working on alternatives but now they finally 
slwly get rid of x11 they have opened another pandoras box with their 
blob like startup process systemd which seems to be an all in one 
kitchen sink solution for everything under the earth, sort of a meta 
kernel, which screams for long time trouble.

In the end Linux shines on servers and on closed configurations like 
smartphones or tvs where the vendor has full control over the drivers 
and hardware and on those systems it is pretty much standard nowadays. 
But it entirely fails on an open desktop systems where you have myriads 
of exotic configurations and the user has full control over everything.