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Last post Author Topic: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop  (Read 72404 times)

mahesh2k

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #100 on: September 07, 2012, 07:53 AM »
Not nitpicking words, but as everyone has said, is genuinely interested.  No one is attempting to attack- it's just that much of what you said is only anecdotal, so the only way to deal with it is to ask you to see how this could have occurred. Everyone here was just trying to help it seems and see things from your perspective- not pick you apart.
Actually that's not true. If you check the post from where this started, it started as attack and now it is more of intellectually beating based on variety of experience and with nitpicking of words. We are talking about end of lifecycle OS with problems which was patched along the way. It was even hard to find some of the fixes at that time. I can't say anything but - "take my word for that". Google had very less results at that time. Then again, that is not anecdotal and convincing personal experience for you guys, fair enough.

The explanation which was asked from me was beyond my capacity as per my knowledge of fixing at that time and even today(as I am not using that OS anymore). My point is that - "If you don't experience the same set of annoyances with any OS, does that mean they don't exist". I have used all the popular OS and I can't say this at all with my experience. I have said this before and put it this again - that Win had issues with comparison to say X and that's why you can always use that X or Y if you want. I never forced, never asked to switch. In fact my reply to @taophoenix on another linux thread was that it's hard to switch if you're Win app developer. I don't know why the intellectual nitpicking on my post is being done as if I am defending OS X or Linux. I am not. I am just being happy with low bugs and headaches after the switch and that reflects in my posts.

Does that mean I am supposed to give explanation for everything from the core for why win didn't worked for me in the past and people are going to nitpick they wish with wishful attacks that too implying they're not attacks and genuine interest? Tell me how that works.

If you've moved past this and don't really have any way to substantiate it by anything that might be other than anecdotal and unwilling to/ don't want to discuss it just say so.

Sure. I did moved past that but you do see the point where most of you people picked up the point of nitpicking words "performance issue" and "unusable", for which I have given explanation. If people don't agree with that shortcoming of the OS and wants to beat on that point implying it was either my mistake or it was 3rd party or AV. How am I supposed to react to that? And saying it's not anecdotal or not even convincing personal experience is more of slap on the face, especially if you have ever gone through same experience like me with those set of problems.

 Not changing course, I can add few more bugs. I don't mind. I can stretch if you all want what we are after is intellectually beating with nitpicking. Especially the point " OS X has no security issues" for and similar points which are purely forced on me, assuming I was defending something. I can go on with the bugs which I fixed in past (which is not even my concern anymore as I moved away from Vista and XP) but still if there is going to be nitpicking with the tone-"I never had problem which you had, that means your problem is not because of OS but AV and 3rd party stuff so it's not OS, stop blaming OS" ( despite MS admitting things on their side with KB).

But if you throw out phrases like "Those who are using Visual studio knows Why I am saying this, because microsoft's own programs make the system unusable," or "I hope you remember XP days with regular fixing of broken stuff," that doesn't sound either anecdotal or personal experience, so of course people are going to chime in. 

It is my personal experience. Take whatever you want from it. If it doesn't sound anecdotal or if you guys never experienced it regardless of plenty of Google searches on the same issues with solutions (which are far different than the one I used to fix),  then do I still need to assume that people are genuinely interested? Many of you are aware of some of the XP and vista performance annoyances still the tone being forced on me is that - there are no performance issues at all. Now that I have used "Many of you are aware" doesn't sound anecdotal, right? I have to dig plenty of stuff to back that up isn't it? Nitpicking points and beating on that as if I am defending something doesn't sound to me like genuinely interesting tone. It just sounds intellectual beating which is normal on tech forums. It's just that it always goes in loop, which I tried to avoid and for which you assumed changing midstream. That and...

Then if you change course midstream, you can't expect everyone to change course with you so unexpectedly.
I am not changing course midstream, I am aware of nitpicking here from the start and I am pointing out that before people keep on assuming something which isnt there.

40hz

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #101 on: September 07, 2012, 10:29 AM »
I am not changing course midstream, I am aware of nitpicking here from the start and I am pointing out that before people keep on assuming something which isnt there.

Maybe most of this misunderstanding/miscommunication is more a colloquial language issue than anything else?  :)

mahesh2k

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #102 on: September 07, 2012, 10:32 AM »
Yes. I guess so. It's not my first language and it's lot harder to express something in less words more clearly.

40hz

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #103 on: September 07, 2012, 11:01 AM »
Yes. I guess so. It's not my first language and it's lot harder to express something in less words more clearly.

^My hat is off to you for being bi-lingual and willing to put it use. I have enough trouble speaking the language I grew up with. My own wordiness is often a problem when I post. One for which I have no excuse since American English is my first language. I'd be totally up the creek in a non-English speaking forum. :) :Thmbsup:
« Last Edit: September 07, 2012, 12:38 PM by 40hz »

kilele

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #104 on: September 11, 2012, 04:33 AM »
It' nice to have FOSS operating systems even if only because they are far more trustful (thousand of eyes watching their source code very closely). Amen

kalos

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #105 on: September 14, 2012, 10:00 AM »
I am trying to re-get acquainted with latest linux (due to some ankyloses at work)

does that pain to install a single app still exists? compiling, getting dependencies, etc?

I hoped that it would become someday easy to install software in linux, like in winxp, but I saw so many people in the linux community that seemed they were excited with such long install procedures, so I gave up

TaoPhoenix

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #106 on: September 14, 2012, 10:08 AM »
I am trying to re-get acquainted with latest linux (due to some ankyloses at work)

does that pain to install a single app still exists? compiling, getting dependencies, etc?

I hoped that it would become someday easy to install software in linux, like in winxp, but I saw so many people in the linux community that seemed they were excited with such long install procedures, so I gave up

I think it still is. I just saw some article the other day about (I think) some software update not being in "this edition of uBuntu." Some people like the whole "reinstall it all" thing, but as a long time Windows user, just gimme the app. : )

jgpaiva

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #107 on: September 14, 2012, 10:16 AM »
@kalos: I think it all depends on what you're doing. For most of the stuff, you can just go to the "app store" (or whatever its name is), search for what you want, click install and you're done.

re:compiling: depends on the distro you choose. The most user friendly ones (ubuntu, suse, red hat, fedora?) use pre-compiled packages, so no. If you use something such as gentoo, I believe you can choose but many people compile from source.

re:dependencies: I never fully understood why this is a problem. Maybe because I arrived too late to experience the problem, but for me, the package managers always sorted out the dependencies for what I asked them to install and then installed them with no trouble.

Also, here's superboyac having fun with installing stuff on linux: https://www.donation....msg294867#msg294867 notice that when he uses the "app store", it's really easy. When he installs from source, well... Not so much :P

40hz

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #108 on: September 14, 2012, 10:21 AM »
I am trying to re-get acquainted with latest linux (due to some ankyloses at work)

does that pain to install a single app still exists? compiling, getting dependencies, etc?

I hoped that it would become someday easy to install software in linux, like in winxp, but I saw so many people in the linux community that seemed they were excited with such long install procedures, so I gave up

I think it still is. I just saw some article the other day about (I think) some software update not being in "this edition of uBuntu." Some people like the whole "reinstall it all" thing, but as a long time Windows user, just gimme the app. : )

It's not all that common that you'd need to compile and install with today's distros. About the only time you'd need to do that is if you wanted the most bleeding-edge release (i.e. "unstable" or beta) of something. Which is fine as long as you're willing to forego the quality control that takes place before something makes it into a distro's repository. Don't forget that most F/OSS developers work independently so there's no guarantee compiling their app and installing it won't break compatibility or screw up your Linux environment. Backporting and dependency checking are a large part of the reason why distros started doing repositories in the first place. As is security. You can be relatively sure you're gremlin and malware free if you install from an authorised repository.

So until you get more familiar with Linux, I'd suggest you forget about compiling and stick to what is available in the repositories until you gain that experience.

Like Tao said: "Just gimme the app."

I agree with him 100%. So use the repositories as much as possible. That's what they do. That's what they're there for. :) :Thmbsup:
« Last Edit: September 14, 2012, 10:47 AM by 40hz »

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #109 on: September 14, 2012, 10:48 AM »
It's not all that common that you'd need to compile and install with today's distros.
Depends. *buntu is known for broken packages, so self-compiling is a good choice there.
Or just choose a better distribution.

40hz

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #110 on: September 14, 2012, 10:54 AM »


Depends. *buntu is known for broken packages, so self-compiling is a good choice there.

Haven't run into that too much...but then again I don't use *buntu that much.

Haven't since Lucid Lynx (v10.04) which I though was their last genuinely good release. ;D

Or just choose a better distribution.

Agree. :Thmbsup:

Edvard

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #111 on: September 17, 2012, 01:34 AM »
Agree as well.  
There were several packages in Ubuntu I found that never worked for me EVER, and there was always a few forum threads here and there that folks would complain on and eventually someone would stop in and just say flat that the package was broken because of some dependency thing that couldn't be resolved, but the package was there anyway.
Jokosher comes to mind, due to some shenanigans with the gstreamer-gnonlin library (this persisted for 3 versions before I gave up...) as well as a few media players that would consistently break each other depending on whether they used mpg123 or mpg321  >:(

BTW- I compile lots of stuff nowadays, but usually software packages, not libraries, and always stuff that's just not in the repos yet.  I use the repo to install the -dev header packages for the needed library and life's a peach.

zridling

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #112 on: September 20, 2012, 11:08 AM »
Time for me to rejoin.
[For me], Linux has served my desktop needs quite thoroughly for more than a half decade. My point way back on page 2 was simply, Why do I need commercial alternatives when free works fine?

I'm still an openSUSE, but thanks to suggestion by 40hz, I have Pinguy installed on a second system and it's absolutely elegant, not to mention quick and nimble. I would recommend it to anyone. Now this love of Linux doesn't mean Windows or OSX is shite, but rather that I'm not going near walled gardens. I've already surrendered my online life to Google with regard to their apps, and I do enjoy Google+. But even if I was forced to use Windows or OSX, it would just be to launch a browser. That's all the controversy I can make out of it any more.

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #113 on: September 20, 2012, 11:18 AM »
So Google is not a walled garden?
Good luck with your online life when Google Mail is down again.

wraith808

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #114 on: September 20, 2012, 11:28 AM »
So Google is not a walled garden?
Good luck with your online life when Google Mail is down again.

You can get your information out of google in order to use other services.  And it interacts with other services, and doesn't lock you into using only what they release when they release it.

I think that's the definition of walled garden here- not service outages.  If you use a cloud based service (any cloud based service) there are things out of your control.  What you can use doesn't have to be one of them.

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #115 on: September 20, 2012, 11:48 AM »
So you can transfer your Google+ account to Diaspora? How?

wraith808

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #116 on: September 20, 2012, 12:08 PM »
I don't know how you'd get the information into diaspora, but you can get all of your information out of google through google takeout.  From there, your information is yours.

Ref: http://www.dataliber...org/takeout-products

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #117 on: September 20, 2012, 12:55 PM »
Oh, great, you can export the data you actually provided yourself. Now that's useful.

Josh

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #118 on: September 20, 2012, 12:59 PM »
Oh, great, you can export the data you actually provided yourself. Now that's useful.

Would you rather not be able to get your data out? Seems like a standard export function that one would expect to be available...

tomos

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #119 on: September 20, 2012, 01:05 PM »
Yeah, look at the (well deserved) fuss over Roboform cause they've limited export capability.
I'd probably prefer to have as much as possible locally myself but that's got nothing to do with the Linux desktop anyways ;-)
Tom

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #120 on: September 20, 2012, 01:18 PM »
Yes, the "cloud" is something different. While it is nice to have it (for example: Evernote), it is dangerous when it comes to sensitive data.

wraith808

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #121 on: September 20, 2012, 03:32 PM »
Oh, great, you can export the data you actually provided yourself. Now that's useful.

Isn't that what we were talking about?  Being able to get at your data instead of being locked into an ecosystem?  I mean, you can't truly expect them to make the interface for transferring into everything there is out there, can you?  I haven't seen anything (other than dedicated import/export utilities) that go that far.

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #122 on: September 20, 2012, 03:47 PM »
Of course I can.  ;D
At least it should be able to import too.

wraith808

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #123 on: September 20, 2012, 03:49 PM »
It can import into its own ecosystem from others... or that's not the type of import you're talking about?

Tuxman

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Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop
« Reply #124 on: September 20, 2012, 03:58 PM »
I meant: Complete merging.

You can't just type your IMAP data and everything is in Google Mail, right?

You can't just provide Dropbox access and everything is on Google Drive, right?

Etc.etc.