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

["Matt Shields-4" <user=23@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 9:12 AM, 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 
> 
>