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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 dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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