Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet?

["Rich Braun" <user=44@nabble.blu.org>]

 Before the rise of the Windows desktop, long ago my preferred desktop 
environment was a pretty typical Unix/X11-based workstation.  When Linux came 
out, that's what I used for the first year or two but once editing and finance 
software emerged on Windows, I embraced that and never could get it to run 
with emulators of those early days so since then my home setup has always had 
separate systems to run Windows on the desktop and Linux for back-end 
services. 

I started to install VMware at work several months ago so now I decided to 
once again try merging Linux/Windows at home.  Just a few weeks ago, openSUSE 
came out with its 11.0 release.  Aha, perhaps the Linux Desktop has truly 
arrived, I thought! 

This new version from SUSE is a tour de force in terms of fixing the 
annoyances of 10.3.  Once I got an autoyast file set up the way I wanted, all 
the server-side issues come up the way I wanted.  (It can even install on a 
four-drive RAID10, even though the GUI doesn't include the option.) 

*However* let me count all the ways that it fell apart once I tried setting up 
my typical desktop.  Mine is atypical in one way:  like many people, I use a 
dual-head desktop (dating to 10 years ago when Win98 came with support for 
this out of the box); but I turn one of the two monitors sideways for portrait 
mode.  (Don't you just *hate* scrolling through screenfuls in a browser 
session?  And how often do you really want to watch widescreen DVDs or compare 
two side-by-side pages of text anyway?) 

1) 
Monitor rotation in sax2 falls apart totally if you have two screens.  It's 
clear that no one at SUSE or the X consortium ever did QA on this stuff.  I'm 
sure I could debug the 5 or 6 issues that I found with it, but I don't have 
the time.  Any time I do something "stupid" like resize a window to 
full-screen (something that's worked on Windows since the 98 era), it 
scrambles my frame buffer sufficiently to require log-out and restart. 

2) 
The xrandr rotation support, at least on the Intel DG33TLM motherboard display 
interface I'm using, is exceedingly slow.  Maybe there is an acceleration 
parameter I could set--but this is the sort of thing that just works right out 
of the box in a Windows XP installation. 

3) 
When *will* Linux screensaver support actually work?  The latest failure I'm 
having is that I've got a "clear" screensaver--it locks the display so I have 
to type a password to unlock it, but the applications remain visible.  I've 
never been able to get it to activate Energy Star monitor-standby mode.  The 
most common problem I have with the screensaver is that it simply fails to 
activate:  you come in to the office in the morning and see the same root 
shell that you were working with the previous day, a major security headache. 

-- 
Footnote:  I have a kubuntu KDE setup at the office; it was much harder to get 
dual-head mode working than this openSUSE system at home.  (I've never tried 
rotating one of the monitors there, mainly because I don't want to breathe on 
that setup.)  The screensaver problems are just as bad on Ubuntu as openSUSE. 

Well I just had to vent.  My conclusion:  Linux is *still* not truly ready for 
the desktop, at age 17.  Maybe once it reaches drinking age? 

-rich 


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