Why Linux Sucks On Desktops and How to Save Your Ass.

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Here's why Desktop Linux Sucks

Desktop Graphics Drivers

If you've a plain Intel IGP on your mobo and you are not a gamer, almost
always you'll have a smoother experience. Similarly you'll have a
painless experience with older realtek, atheros, huwei and many other
devices. But if it's new, shiny and of non-standard (as per linux driver
support) you're stuck. Take for example Nvidia optimus graphics
technology related to switching between IGP and discreet graphics. It's
been more than two years yet the graphics stack is half-baked. ATI/AMD
side of the story, especially concerning the recent Fusion series APUs,
is more grim. Though AMD was much vocal a year back regarding open
source drivers for its fusion series APUs, the driver support for Linux
is lame at best at the moment of writing this post.

I have an Asus 1215b EEE PC based on Fusion platform that sports a C-50
APU (AMD Ontario CPU + Radeon 6250 GPU). Windows 7 runs quite well and
offers a thrilling graphics experience powered by UVD and DirectX 11.
Linux? Fusion graphics is muddy with multiple wrappers, drivers and
methods. When kernel 2.6.38 flaunted of having Fusion APU support
through Gallium drivers it didn't disclose that it was limited to just
decent graphics. You can't expect anything beyond, forget the support
for UVD and 3D acceleration till next couple of years. For better
graphics experience you're left with distro-specific fglrx drivers,
xvba/vaapi wrappers and suitable xorg pieces. But the distro-specific
drivers are generally dated, so, I pulled in the latest catalyst driver
sources from AMD and compiled them for Debian Squeeze. I had a good-go,
but the graphics performance was inferior to that of Windows 7.



Correct the Basics

Blue Screen of Death is history. Modern Windows OS (XP onwards) ensures
you land at least on a basic vga mode if the install disk lacks proper
display drivers. Then you're ready to install the proprietary drivers.
But linux graphics problems sometimes slam you with a black screen (call
it Black Screen of Death), and if you are unlucky you even can't enter
to a rescue shell. Sure, there are dozen of cheat codes [(nomodeset,
radeon.modeset=0, nvidia.modeset=zero, intel.modeset=0, if kms is messed
up) or (vesa="numeric resolution value" for a vga screen or xforcevesa)
or (some similar acpi cheat codes on the kernel line)] to put you on a
workable shell. Who cares with these not-so-dirty but definitely-cryptic
codes? Distributions should come up with fool-proof measures to land the
users on a vga desktop without much fiddling around.

Bewildering Choice vis-a-vis Rapid Development

Choice is good. But bewildering choice is very bad. Mass look for a few
working applications, not a million shoddy clones. Situation is slowly
improving in this regards. Thanks, the leading and serious flavors such
as RHEL (and its clones), Debian, Arch and most recently Mandriva
following frugality as far as choice of applications and desktop
environments are concerned. Less configurations and less packages means
less clutter. The bewildering choice and plurality in design philosophy
decrease the mindshare. It also kills much of developers' hours in
re-inventing the wheel. This coupled with rapid development worsens
things further. Take the most popular distributions of our time, Ubuntu.
Though it pulls packages from Debian testing/unstable it puts efforts in
developing a few packages and polishing them. It follows a fully
automated packaging and testing. However, given a 6-months release
cycle, it must not be putting more than a month towards real
development. Who'll expect fidelity from such a fleeting women!

Linux != Open Source. But the later is blamed for the plurality in
Linux. For example, in Windows, if a certain version of package works it
works. But in linux that's not always true. For example pidgin 2.7.3 on
Windows, owing to the singularity of platform and API standards will be
the same across XP, Vista and Win 7. But the pidgin on Fedora might
behave differently than it does in Debian. The difference lies in how
the particular software is packaged across various distributions. The
same is true in case of some core components such as kernel. Kernel
2.6.38 in Debian backports repository is not 100% the same in Remi's
repository meant for RHEL and its clones. The same trend is true in case
Ubuntu, Mandriva, Arch and Slackware. Each original distribution has its
peculiar set of patches for kernel, and particular build flags and
dependencies for a particular software.

Features vs. Polish

Firefox undoubtedly has more options than Chrome, and OpenOffice is more
versatile than any other proprietary office suite. Both are
feature-rich, but both lack polish. Firefox is trying to catch up chrome
on desktop. But still it lacks the philosophy of chrome, frugality.
Firefox still caches aggressively like a hungry beast and sometimes
forgets to flush. OpenOffice is jumping from Sun to Novel to Document
Foundation. It's as slow as a sloth. Performance improvement is a long
due for OpenOffice (now LibreOffice).


So, How to Save Your Ass?

Hardware and Distribution

1. Choose standard hardware. Save the output of your "lspci" commmand
using any liveCD and post the text across popular forums to know which
distribution fully supports your devices. Of the supported distributions
choose a stable one from Ubuntu LTS, Debian stable, CentOS or Scientific
Linux. If you're hardcore gamer, forget linux for a while.
2. Pin up the critical packages. If your current setup runs your devices
well pin up the core packages such as xorg, kernel, sound-base packages
and other device drivers so that future upgrades won't break your setup.
I've faced sound problems, graphics hells and many booting problems
related to upgrading core packages.
3. Don't tinker much. Choose your favorite distribution, customize it to
your liking and forget. No need to always put newer bits and pieces.
Newer is not always better. Even all new features may have nothing to do
with you. Go by perceivable experience regarding performance, features
and stability, not by numbers and benchmarks.

Personality and Distribution

1. If you really want to learn linux and expect a painfree experience
for a longer future, choose Arch or Slackware. The things you learn here
will last for ever. And a perfect Arch or Slackware setup will rarely go
wrong.
2. If you want to make living out of Linux go with Scientific Linux.
Because it's perhaps the most sincere clone of RHEL the present king in
the enterprise world. Though it doesn't replicate RHEL in bug-for-bug
philosophy, it's more predictable and open than its more popular cousin,
CentOS.
3. If a great no-nonsense home desktop is all you want choose one from
PCLinuxOS, Mepis or Mint. All three guarantee a superb desktop
experience out of the box. PCLinuxOS gathers the best from across entire
Linux distros, Mint does Ubuntu much better and Mepis polishes Debian to
the extremes for a hasslefree desktop experience.
4. If you don't fall into any of the above and are apathetic to Windows.
Choose FreeBSD, tame it with extra caution and make it your own. It's
very very unix to the core and very systematically designed. If you
don't want to shed that extra sweat choose OS X. Buy Apple hardware or
assemble your Mac following insanelymac website and put OS X. OS X Mach
kernel is heavily inspired by Unix. You will get many of the POSIX
features including Bash shell.

That pretty well sums my two cents!
Posted by manmath sahu

http://pclinuxos2007.blogspot.com/2...ow-to.html

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