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



 To answer your question briefly: yes 

To make your point for you though, unixes build upon dependencies of 
other libs and applications.  This would seemingly be a great benefit 
to reduce code.  The problem is when vast changes are made and the 
apps utilizing the libraries don't catch up or ultimately fail to 
coexist together!  Yes, this is the problem and why everything works 
one day and then not the next.  There needs to be a solution!  Feel 
free to investigate :-). 



On 7/13/08, Rich Braun <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> 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 
> 
> 
> -- 
> This message has been scanned for viruses and 
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> believed to be clean. 
> 
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