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by tedunangst 5066 days ago
The situation with wireless is still terrible. It took all the voodoo I could muster to get ubuntu to install the right wireless driver.

And then the battery meter is broken. The remaining life estimate is forever "coming soon".

And then there's unity. We'll put the menu bars on the top of the screen for all your programs. Except your word processor, but that's ok, end users don't use word processors that much.
3 comments
slowpoke 5066 days ago
Another problem that GNU/Linux faces is that people are incredibly biased when comparing the two operating systems.

Whatever little fault GNU/Linux has is immediately regarded as an absolutely crucial flaw that will forever prevent it from being usable by anyone but a fat, smelly nerd living in his mother's basement.

This is completely ignoring that Windows is far from faultless, too. It's also inconsistent as hell, it's buggy, and drivers also don't always "just work".

If anything, the current popular DEs on GNU/Linux are more consistent than anything Microsoft has ever produced. They work better out of the box than any crapware-laden computer you can buy at a store. If you're not using absolutely obscure hardware, it should be usable. In fact, the Linux kernel probably supports more hardware and does it better than Windows ever has.

My point stands: GNU/Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop and has been so since years. One of the major things hampering its adoption are people like you who spread FUD about it.

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tedunangst 5066 days ago
Why do you assume Windows is my preferred desktop OS?
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muuh-gnu 5066 days ago
And you can't get new versions of apps without upgrading the whole OS (including every other app) every few months.

Ubuntu 12.04 is nice, but it is already "abandoned" in the sense that new versions of apps that came out after 12.04 dont generally offer 12.04 packages.

You can get Windows exes which work on 12 years old XP, but there is no binary for an Linux OS that was published 4 damn months ago.

Until that _fundamental_ flaw with Linux software distribution is fixed, Linux as an end user OS is going nowhere. No sane user is going to install an OS, or even worse, buy a computer with an OS, for which there is no standard way to update or upgrade apps other than reinstalling the OS.

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takluyver 5066 days ago
This is slowly changing - apps submitted through Ubuntu's app developer site are updated separately from the OS. And new Firefox versions are pushed out automatically to stable versions.

It will take some time to adopt this model, but I think that's what Ubuntu is aiming for.

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takluyver 5066 days ago
Two of those issues are irrelevant if competent OEMs decide to sell computers with Linux - they'll make sure the hardware works with it.

The menu in the word processor is a work in progress, but in the meantime it hardly makes Linux impossible to use.

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tedunangst 5066 days ago
The battery issue was strictly a software bug. A regression introduced because somewhere between upower or gnome power manager or wherever nobody could agree on the right number to use. It did work, then it didn't, because party A "improved" things, but party B wasn't ready for the improvements.

Anyway, the claim wasn't that the linux desktop can be made ready. It was that it's ready right now.

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