Desktop/consumer Linux - I think it may have crept in by the back door...

[TheLurker]

... and is calling itself Android.   This may not come as a surprise to those of you don't spend your lives buried to the nostrils in the slurry that is Wintel, but it did to me. 

So here's a Friday afternoon discussion topic.  Gentlemen, Ladies I invite you to don your asbestos underwear...

Playing around with a cheap 7" Android tablet and it struck me how, well not foolproof, but how suited to non-techy users it is.  It seems to do everything that most non-techies want, web browsing, watching amusing videos of kittens and trolling in cycling forums with a minimum of spod-speak. 

I'm not especially anti FreeBSD/Ubuntu/Gentoo/Debian/Red Hat/{insert obscure distro of choice here}, but the last time I played with any of them (a good 6 or 7 years ago) it was still a slog getting a WIMP environment up and running and from the odd bit of chit-chat I see floating on the various bulletin boardsfora even now it seems they're still a bit of a spod preserve and Wintel, well it works, but it has its own set of setup/configuration headaches.

BTW does anyone know if the Chromebook is an Android box?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Chromebook, afaik, is a totally different beast. The gui part of the OS is google chrome.

Android is all over phones, too, in case you'd missed that bit. Works very well, too.

I'd actually say that Android in its current form is more akin to the early days of the Mac. Very simple to use, but a bit of a pain to code for it.

Modern version of Ubuntu are dead simple to set up. The distros have a great set of default drivers and it's about as easy to install and set up as windows XP.

Some of the other flavours are less simple.

[Kim]

I think the thing with Linux on the desktop is that everyone compares it to the incumbent MS Windows, where it inevitably falls short simply on account of being Not Windows (on software and driver compatibility, and UI differences).

A far more reasonable comparison is OSX.  This also fails the Not Windows test for much the same reasons, but nobody argues that it isn't ready for the desktop.

I'd say that modern Ubuntu (other distros are available) has a lot more in common with the Mac than Windows, and benefits greatly for it.  As with Apple's offering, if you play by their rules and don't have excessively obscure hardware, it does seem to Just Work.  With either OS, once you start meddling with the unixy side of things, stuff get a bit less straightforward and you have to know what you're doing, but if you do, you have an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal.

It's all good, and I'd put Android in the same category as stock Ubuntu - if you don't go out of your way to meddle (only installing applications from their default sources) it pretty much does Just Work.  But if you do want to meddle, you can.

I find post-XP Windows infinitely more frustrating than current Linux or Mac offerings, though I admit to a server-oriented Linux background.  When made to use Windows, I frequently exclaim that it'll never be ready for the desktop.   

[redshift]

I'm starting to become somewhat more system-agnostic these days.  Since changing jobs last September, I'm working in an environment that supports software on Windows XP and 7, Mac OSX, Red Hat and CentOS, all without actually being an IT support department.  I'm also supporting hardware that runs Linux, VXWorks and other strange embedded stuff under the bonnet. 

Whilst I've always been fairly comfortable in a non-professional-IT sense, what with using Linux at home for some years, the learning curve has been a doozy.  I find the Linux skills slightly more useful than the Windows ones, and the tools are better.  In a world that's now full of Java config tools or web browser config tools, I don't suppose it should matter, but it seems to.  It helps that the *nix text editors behave sensibly with the outputs of log files, something which Notepad seems woefully unable to do.

Plus, finding a single ID number in an error report of 3000+ lines is a job for grep.

[pcolbeck]

  It helps that the *nix text editors behave sensibly with the outputs of log files, something which Notepad seems woefully unable to do.

That's because Microsoft use a different character for end of line than *nixsystems do. Microsoft use CR+LF and *nix uses LF on its own.
Therefore when you load a *mix derived log file into Notepad it doesn't see any EOLs at all and thinks it's one very long line. Wordpad is better and recognizes the LF.

I used to have some Emacs macros I wrote to swap this kind of stuff around.

[Kim]

Proper text editors that run on Windows are of course available.

[rogerzilla]

The big problems I always have with desktop Linux are:

1. It won't run the usual games (not much iof an issue these days)
2. It tends to screw up after a few reboots, leaving you fscking angry
3. The fonts look all wrong on many web pages, including YACF.

Apart from that, the Ubuntu installation process is far superior to Windows and they've finally nailed the sound and printer driver problems that plagued Linux in the past.

[TimO]

The big problems I always have with desktop Linux are:

1. It won't run the usual games (not much iof an issue these days)

I rarely play games, and often the ones I do, are Flash ones on websites, so run as well under Linux as any other OS.

2. It tends to screw up after a few reboots, leaving you fscking angry

I can't say I've ever had this, my Linux installs all reboot happily.  Having said that, some of my Linux machines haven't been rebooted for months, unlike Windows which probably needs to be rebooted weekly to keep it stable, and generally insists on rebooting itself once a month after installing MS updates.

3. The fonts look all wrong on many web pages, including YACF.

I can't say I've ever noticed this either, and have a handful of machines which I use to browse the web, both Windoze and Linux.  I think there are bigger differences between Chrome and Firefox installs on Windows than there are between Firefox on Linux vs Windows.


Android probably manages to work better on Phone and Pads by keeping to a relatively limited, and controlled set of hardware, in a similar manner to Macs with OSX (which is also Unixy underneath).  One of the big problems with Linux has always been hardware support, specifically with things which are more important to the desktop user than servers, like Sound and Video, as well as the more unusual stuff like scanners, cameras, MP3 players, and other beasties which tend to come with Windows only software, making running it with Linux a challenge, so a big no-no for your more average non-geeky user.

[ian]

I'm running Xubuntu (whatever the latest version is) on my netbook. It's fine. I did run Ubuntu for a while but Unity and a bloat made it untenable on an ancient Atom machine.

I will say Linux has improved immeasurably over the years. I remember back in the day trying to install Red Hat and it was unworkable. Supported no hardware and everything you tried to do opened a portal into an eternal dependency hell. Linux now mostly seems to work. My main gripe is what happens when it doesn't. People will argue otherwise, but in my humble experience, there's a command line lurking somewhere. Despite being modestly techy, I've ground to halt on several occasions: getting wireless to work, mounting shared drives. I'm convinced that in 2012, unless you are a system admin or a power user, or get the nostalgia wibblies for DOS, you shouldn't even need to know a command line or terminal exist. Several upgrades have dumped me unceremoniously at the command line. Do not pass go. A fixable issue with the graphics card, but it shouldn't happen. Edit a config file, oh lordy. Hardware is still patchy.

I think the user experience in many open source applications and OSs are lacking. They're typically used by hardcore users who are less worried about things like the eyeball-stroking velvetiness that are well-hinted and designed fonts, not to mention intuitive menus, and a proper human interface. GUIs can be gossamer thin. Ultimately, not many people use Linux in a desktop mode and it shows. I doubt that will change any time soon, both Windows and MacOS offer very slick user experiences that are hard to match.

Would I rely on it as my main desktop? No. Horses for course though, if you're happy, no need for an OS war.

[redshift]

  It helps that the *nix text editors behave sensibly with the outputs of log files, something which Notepad seems woefully unable to do.

That's because Microsoft use a different character for end of line than *nixsystems do. Microsoft use CR+LF and *nix uses LF on its own.
Therefore when you load a *mix derived log file into Notepad it doesn't see any EOLs at all and thinks it's one very long line. Wordpad is better and recognizes the LF.

I used to have some Emacs macros I wrote to swap this kind of stuff around.

It doesn't help that Signiant seems to produce logs which helpfully inserts the section of perl script which caused the error, but without actually sorting out the LF in the script. This means that even in *nix I end up doing a find-and-replace on characters like ÿ...

[Feanor]

I have a few linux boxes 'by the back door', the latest of which is a set of Vu+ HD sat receivers.
These can do deep magic where if you shove a sky card into one, it can share it out to others using a SoftCAM.

It did require an entire afternoon's fettling, with PuTTY and Filezilla and a great deal of patience.
But it's all working now.

[TimO]

Well, I have to fettle Linux servers for a living (Spacecraft construction isn't all fun and games. ), so I'm more than happy to use a command line.  In fact, I prefer fettling that to having to fettle the Windows Registry, which is sometimes required if a Windows box is really playing silly buggers.

At least on a Linux box, if ssmtp isn't working, I know there's a good chance that the comments in the /etc/ssmtp.conf file will provide some guidance, whereas a similar problem with a Windows box will leave me Googling through MS KB articles trying to find the right key buried somewhere in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive ...

Windows tends to do a better job of providing a GUI interface to something, and generally is more consistent with that, but both of them fail big time once the GUI runs out, and you have to start digging around in the internals.

At least with Linux, if I really have to, I can resort to looking at the source code, although generally if you've got this deep into it, then you're probably on a hiding to nothing unless you've spent the last five years working on that project.  With some programs, like Samba, even the log files are so tortuously complicated that working out what isn't working is a challenge in itself, even before you then have to work out what the solution is.

Clearly Linux has done a lot better in the server world, because the sort of people who need to run this stuff, often prefer the relative openness of the Linux community vs the downright secretiveness sometimes of MS.  The desktop world is getting better, but of course tweaking the way that configuration GUIs are programmed in an app isn't that much fun, so there's not as much drive for people to sort out some of these problems.  Things like consistency in interfaces is hard to enforce when the nature of the Open Source community is very much about the freedom to do whatever you like.  Enforcement if very much the antithesis of that.

[frankly frankie]

2. It tends to screw up after a few reboots, leaving you fscking angry

I can't say I've ever had this, my Linux installs all reboot happily.

My Linux installs (various distros) reliably screw up on the 2nd reboot.

However, +1 for text-based config files.  I find *nix permissions and ownerships and all the su and root nonsense a bit OTT though.

Android does indeed seem to have got a lot right - but suffers badly from constant upgrade-itis.

[TimO]

If you want fun with reboots, build you own kernels, that always increases the fun level.

That's mostly on the first reboot however.  So long as you make sure the boot loader has the old kernel in it as a different option, you just have to reboot, and try again.  Things behaving oddly after multiple OS reboots is normally a Windows thing.  With Linux (and other Unixen, I  also support Solaris machines) things don't seem to need to do stuff on reboot, mostly it's just making sure that the bootloader and Kernel are working OK.

When you get major changes to the kernel, and inevitably they change the names of some of the options, things can also get a bit fraught.  Infamously on one occasion they changed the names of the RAID array config options, so when I recompiled the kernel absolutely none of the RAID arrays were accessible, and there's nothing quite like suddenly loosing several Terabytes of data to make you a bit nervous!

[Kim]

The thing I find with *nix type OSes, especially on server type systems, is that it's so easy not to reboot them that you run a real risk of discovering that some change breaks on reboot weeks or months after you've forgotten the details of what you changed.