Linux is not ready for the desktop - Mandriva devs

Romashka · 2006-10-03 20:16:17

I just read this in the latest DistroWatch Weekly:

You wouldn't expect something like this to happen at any time, let alone on the eve of Mandriva Linux 2007 release. Last week, two Mandriva developers went on record saying that "Linux is not ready for the desktop". In a web log post entitled Why I'll never use Linux for my main desktop, Vincent Danen concluded: "This kind of thing is precisely why, for me, Linux belongs on the server. Now if those kernel-developing idiots would get their act together and give us a 2.6 kernel that was a) stable and b) supported for more than a week, then I'd really be pleased." Another Mandriva developer, Fabrice Facorat, agreed. In a post called Linux ready for Desktop? Of course not!, he had this to say: "For me when you have control over the environment and the hardware, Linux is ready: think servers, workstations, thin clients, kiosks. However when you have no control on the hardware, Linux is not ready because it somewhat lacks flexibility."
There you have it, right from the horse's mouth! From two guys who have been working for a Linux company, developing a popular desktop Linux distribution, for years! Yes, that's right, Mandriva Linux is not ready for your desktop! Don't waste your money buying it!
One really has to wonder about the future of a company which happily asks Gaël Duval to leave, yet is quite pleased to keep developers who publicly hint that they consider Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and other kernel developers "idiots"! A perfect pre-release PR, non?

No comments... I just cannot find any words. :shock: :?

iphitus · 2006-10-04 01:51:48

ughhhh. Mandrake have always sucked at marketing, they do themselves no favours. IMHO, they're becoming more and more irrelevant with each release. Once upon a time I might have reccomended mandrake to a newbie, but certainly not now. They've got great assets and a good base. The *potential* to become a good distro. But each release, stupid bugs make it through, and the improvements seem negligable.

Once of their better features is their huge repository of packages -- which is horrendously poorly advertised. You'll find nowhere in the GUI's or desktop a place to access their 'contrib' repo which is the equivalent of our extra, and contains a huge amount of packages. Also an important point for mandriva has been mandrakeusers.org/mandrivausers.org, which has been a huge community offering great support for newbies to mandrake, rather than directing them into the expensive mess that is known as the mandriva club. Mandriva have totally ignored this resource, and have made no attempt to support this board, upon which you'll find, I have quite a reasonable post count from back in my early days of Linux (mandriva 8.2 was first distro), and continuing on to now. It also exemplifies their (lack of) decent customer support.

The distro has had countless irritating bugs which pervaded through releases, and all sorts of utterly stupid ones that should never have made it through the testing process. They do little to help themselves with this. I've reported countless bugs, and all of them have been ignored for months. On their last release, they included the old rt2500 module, which at the time, hard locked SMP machines, and made my mandriva unbootable as it was loaded on boot. I filed a bug, marked it as high priority and it was utterly ignored for more than 6 months, so much so I had forgotten about it. Other bugs and emails have suffered a similar fate.
It's GUI tools, have become a complete mess, for example wireless, in 2006 release, was absolutely horrendous to configure, and had no support for WPA -- wpa_supplicant wasnt even on the CD's so people could configure it manually.

It's good to see they're finally ditching their old desktop theme, which they dragged on for far too long. It's always been absolutely hideous.
Their business model emphasises the 'club' far too much, making it difficult to even find a download on their site for the standard version, which has "Free" tacked all over it, as if to try and make you feel like a cheapskate. Doesnt help how they change their release cycle frequently either.

The stupidity of Mandriva just confounds me. PR like this does nothing to help them. They criticise the developers for not providing a 2.6 kernel that is stable. Maybe mandriva should look in their own backyard, and offer a distro that's remotely stable. Last time I used it, it had a horrendously old udev, hotplug, and a very slow hardware detection system. It still used bootsplash, which has been unmaintained for over two years, and included supermount, which Con Kolivas has disowned and again, has abandoned for years. They're hardly doing themselves favours patching their kernels with this out of date crap. Nor do they update them, I dont see mandriva offering updates to newer ones, which would no doubt fix many of the reported issues.
Alternatively they could do what other distros do and pitch in and help. Many of the kernel developers are also employees of other vendors, or have an important part in other distros, such as Daniel Drake and Robert Love. It'd be great for mandrake if they employed a kernel developer, because it's clear THEY are the ones who are the idiots.

I have no idea how they made it out of their bankrupcy, with the lacklustre state of their miserable distro, I think their days are numbered, unless they do something to change around their image and fix their product.

ok, im done.

James

johnisevil · 2006-10-04 02:24:09

Does anyone really take anything at all from these "Linux is not ready for the desktop" articles? The fact that Linux and OSS have made it this far say the opposite to what these so-called experts say. These articles are becoming tiresome because no one is contributing anything new, it's just the same stupid statement being repeated. It's one thing to say Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but it would be much different if the people stating this had anything to contribute to Linux to aid in this.

Dusty · 2006-10-04 02:52:59

Worse, Linux on the Desktop has so little to do with Arch Linux. This isn't a desktop OS, its a power user OS. I say this in spite of the fact that my computer-illiterate family uses it. Its not really relevant here.

Dusty

SleepyDog · 2006-10-04 03:04:48

What the heck is the "desktop" anyway?

B1GfOot · 2006-10-04 06:39:45

SleepyDog wrote:

What the heck is the "desktop" anyway?

Something that Microsoft sells to make stupid people think they are "good" with computers.

brazzmonkey · 2006-10-04 08:11:56

desktops were invented by apple on macs, not microsoft.

by desktop OS i suppose they refer to an OS that's easy to use, intuitive, on which everything works out of the box.

i don't know of such a distro, though some of them are getting better according to desktop use. KDE, Gnome and xfce try to make a good linux desktop. but standards lack or are not implemented yet. this is not a matter of linux (kernel), this is a matter of DE.

desktops are a good thing, they can make most people (who can read) use a computer. not in the most efficient manner, but still, they can quickly learn and use it. not everybody is a programmer or a developper or an IT person.
a desktop is not something to make people think they're good with computer, it is designed to make them able to use a computer without programming skills. it brings technology to everyone.

please stop these stupids shortcuts that make you think you're part of an elite. free software ought to be software for everyone. therefore good DEs are needed.

phrakture · 2006-10-04 18:19:15

Porsches aren't ready for the typical driver.
Simile ftw!

Romashka · 2006-10-04 18:36:47

phrakture wrote:

Porsches aren't ready for the typical driver.

BTW, I just noticed that this topic's title is truncated - 10 last chars are missed (now corrected).
It is definetly a bug in phpBB - it allowed me to enter

"Linux is not ready for the desktop" - say two Mandriva devs

that's 60 chars, but title became

"Linux is not ready for the desktop" - say two Man

that's 50 chars.

yankees26 · 2006-10-04 19:25:40

I think the devs have a very large and vague definition for the "desktop." The one complaining about the 3D desktop is talking mostly about ATI drivers and 3D acceleration, which has nothing to do with using Linux as a desktop. As a Mac OS X user, Arch user, and Windows user I wouldn't say that Mac OS X isn't ready for the "desktop" because it doesn't have the greatest 3D support). I accept the capabilities of all three and use Windows for gaming, Mac OS X for everyday things, homework, and programming and Linux for trying stuff out and programming.

In shorter terms, that dev is a moron.

lumiwa · 2006-10-04 19:56:48

yankees26 wrote:

I think the devs have a very large and vague definition for the "desktop." The one complaining about the 3D desktop is talking mostly about ATI drivers and 3D acceleration, which has nothing to do with using Linux as a desktop. As a Mac OS X user, Arch user, and Windows user I wouldn't say that Mac OS X isn't ready for the "desktop" because it doesn't have the greatest 3D support). I accept the capabilities of all three and use Windows for gaming, Mac OS X for everyday things, homework, and programming and Linux for trying stuff out and programming.
In shorter terms, that dev is a moron.

What is the problem? My brother decided to try a Linux. He bought SuSE and first problem was WI-FI. He called one guy and just for try a Linux he use ethernet card. It was okay. Next problem display resolution. He has nvidia gr. card. He called me, than he download from SuSE site drivers...
And what happened before? He bought computer, bought Windows XP, put CD in and after installation he started surfing, display resolution was good, printer which I forgot to mentioned before which he had problem to install too works and voila.
And remenber 80% users are not computer educated and computer is not there hobby but use computer for many other things: from game to science.
And I agree with developer that Linux is not for the desktop yet.

Lone_Wolf · 2006-10-04 20:16:08

I disagree.
If people could buy pc's with linux pre-installed it would be just as good for the desktop user as that same pc with windows pre-installed.

lumiwa · 2006-10-04 20:52:48

Lone_Wolf wrote:

I disagree.
If people could buy pc's with linux pre-installed it would be just as good for the desktop user as that same pc with windows pre-installed.

I agree if is Linux pre-installed.
And what is also important? Now if I want that printer works under Linux I need first to check on the Internet or wherever. Important is that I buy printer for example which one I wanted and it works on OS. Same for graphics card, sound card...

barebones · 2006-10-04 22:29:20

Perhaps I've had an unusual experience, but I have the exact opposite situation as your brother, lumiwa. It took me an entire afternoon to install Windows when I first built this computer. Unbeknownst to me, windows has no support for raid controllers out of the box (one of which controls my hdd's) and needs you to hit F6 when the installer starts, and then install the drivers from floppy. It will not reconize cd's as a source. Then when Windows starts up, it gets put into the default 800x600, which is almost unusuable on my LCD. Windows also won't reconize my nic right away, so I have no network untill I manually install the drivers for that. When I first installed Arch I had none of these problems. My HDD's were reconized, and so was my nic. The default nv driver has always worked with my nvidia graphics cards. Without installing nvidia's drivers in windows, web browsers willl only render the page when the user has stopped scrolling, which makes it difficult to go and download the drivers.

So, to sum up that rantish post, from my experience Arch linux is ready for the desktop, but windows is far from it. I use Linux exclusivly for all my office-type stuff, I think it cleanly beats windows there. If it wasn't for video-games, I'd be ready to get rid of windows. Perhaps the mandriva devs should change their statements to something along the lines of mandriva linux is not ready for the desktop, and leave all the other good distros out of their broad statments.

lumiwa · 2006-10-04 23:04:28

Belive me I am not against Linux and I have all the time JUST a Linux on my computer...but it was and is my opinion.

skottish · 2006-10-05 01:23:34

That's funny, my use of Mandriva convinced me that Linux was ready for the desktop. On they other hand, their lame-ass customer support taught me never to use or recommend Mandriva again.

xterminus · 2006-10-05 07:31:15

The whole "2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006 is the year of the linux desktop" is getting old.

I figure that those dev's are just trolling. Linux is ready for the desktop when you run linux on your desktop.

idjut · 2006-10-05 16:18:38

skottish wrote:

That's funny, my use of Mandriva convinced me that Linux was ready for the desktop. On they other hand, their lame-ass customer support taught me never to use or recommend Mandriva again.

That was my experience as well!

Eliatamby · 2006-10-11 16:03:24

Danen obviously cannot provide any valid reasons WHY linux is not ready, aside from his inability to get new, unessential, eye-candy-esque software on a hardware not known for cutting-edge linux support, since he brings out the "this is my blog, I'm entitled to say what I want" line halfway down the comments.

He also ignores the rather unique software usage patterns that linux has compared to *dows or macs. If XGL was a an apple or micro project, the public wouldn't see it at this stage. The nature of OSS and its community is we see these things a lot earlier , so timelines for general widespread adoption are alot . Comparing it to a released apple or micro product at this stage is thus, plainly irrelevant. How long has the Vista UI been in developement for? Some 4 years or so behind closed doors?

twiistedkaos · 2006-10-11 17:01:51

personally i dont care if it's not ready for desktop yet. i use it perfectly well so i dont care about the rest of the population. besides setup right linux does more than vista+mac together

shadowhand · 2006-10-11 21:52:41

Dusty wrote:

Worse, Linux on the Desktop has so little to do with Arch Linux. This isn't a desktop OS, its a power user OS. I say this in spite of the fact that my computer-illiterate family uses it. Its not really relevant here.

Couldn't agree more. However, I did set my mostly-linux-illiterate friend up with Arch and he used it without issues for a couple of months (until his hard drive fried).

deficite · 2006-10-12 14:31:08

Linux is ready for the desktop when you run linux on your desktop.

Precisely.

I'd take those people's stupid banter more seriously once they make a decent distro. Just because they can't come up with a good desktop distro does not mean it's impossible. I run a computer that sits on top of my desk and Arch is on this puppy and it does everything I could ever wish for, save play some of the games that I dual-boot for.

Pajaro · 2006-10-12 19:35:09

desktops were invented by apple on macs, not microsoft.

Apple just copied what Xerox thought was not that useful: desktop environment controlled with a mouse, network, ... big mistake from Xerox on the 70's

palandir · 2006-10-13 18:17:01

Linux is "never" ready for the desktop, but desktop usage increases steadily. So who cares. We already have really many Linux desktop users. But people will probably first start saying that it's "desktop ready" when Linux users outnumber Windows users. So again, who cares. It's also about quality, not quantity.

soniX · 2006-11-02 19:45:14

Linux is ready for my desktop. I know it is, since Im using it right now, and it works great. Perhaps windows is more ready for the "traditional" dektop than linux, but windows is not ready for "the internet", and that is where more and more of the "dektop" is heading anyway.

Arch Linux

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Linux is not ready for the desktop - Mandriva devs

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