Linux sucks

[Bikerdude]

maybe like under windows you have to set which one is your "main" display..?

[OrbWeaver]

It always makes me laugh when people complain about Linux having poor driver support, making it hard to get things working etc.

 

I just upgraded my AMD graphics card to a newer model. Windows booted to a 640x480 VGA desktop and required a complete driver redownload and reinstall even though it was the same GPU manufacturer using the same Catalyst driver. It also spent 5 minutes "Installing device driver software" because some of my USB devices were plugged back into different USB sockets on the back of the machine, after which I had to re-configure my USB sound card which had defaulted to using the wrong output channels.

 

Linux didn't give a volcanic shit. It carried on working exactly the way it had before, and the only way I could even tell the graphics card has been changed was by inspecting the Catalyst control panel.

 

I think the people who complain about Linux's "poor hardware support" are either referring to Linux from 2004 or have never actually used Windows.

[motorsep]

I used Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows. I am currently on Windows 7 Pro 64bit 99% of the time and I prefer Windows to Linux any day.

 

Both OS have their bright sides. However on Windows I simply work and do my thing, while on Linux it's always struggle to build stuff making sure all dependencies are updated. Some of those need to be build and that requires more dependencies to be installed/built. That's the part I can't stand about Linux. There are apps that designed properly and they just compile, but most of the apps are horrible on Linux. It requires too much effort to get working. On Windows it just works.

 

Never had any issues with video drivers, after I removed that Noveau crap and installed manually Nvidia blobs. As a matter of fact, video games run 10% faster on Linux (idTech based games at least).

 

Note that gaming market share for Linux is tiny and doesn't grow. Valve's SteamOS might be just a PR move, since it hasn't been advanced in a while, plus Steam Box hasn't even materialized yet.

 

Stability wise I'd say Ubuntu and Windows 7 are equal.

[OrbWeaver]

Both OS have their bright sides. However on Windows I simply work and do my thing, while on Linux it's always struggle to build stuff making sure all dependencies are updated. Some of those need to be build and that requires more dependencies to be installed/built. That's the part I can't stand about Linux. There are apps that designed properly and they just compile, but most of the apps are horrible on Linux. It requires too much effort to get working. On Windows it just works.

 

Interestingly that's the exact opposite of my own experience. Installing the dependencies to get DR to build on Ubuntu can be done in a single command. When I tried to set up a Windows build environment to do the same thing it was an absolute nightmare, installing and re-installing various SDKs, manually downloading dependencies and extracting them into the right folders, at one point I even had to edit some batch file in Program Files to get the compiler to actually use the right libraries.

 

I guess it's just whatever you are used to. An experienced Windows developer would probably have solved all of my problems in a few minutes based on their past experience, whereas I had to figure it all out by hand.

[lost_soul]

Yep, sometimes compiling things can be a bitch. A lot of the "fanboys" will say that you "never need to compile anything because its available from the package manager", but sometimes you want to run something that isn't popular.

[motorsep]

Interestingly that's the exact opposite of my own experience. Installing the dependencies to get DR to build on Ubuntu can be done in a single command. When I tried to set up a Windows build environment to do the same thing it was an absolute nightmare, installing and re-installing various SDKs, manually downloading dependencies and extracting them into the right folders, at one point I even had to edit some batch file in Program Files to get the compiler to actually use the right libraries.

 

I guess it's just whatever you are used to. An experienced Windows developer would probably have solved all of my problems in a few minutes based on their past experience, whereas I had to figure it all out by hand.

 

Now that is true - compiling Linux-based apps on Windows is a bigger horror than building so-so made Linux apps on Linux. That comes down to using too much of the 3rd party libs. If DR would only use Qt/wxWidgets, compiling on any OS would be a breeze. But it uses Boost and some other stuff, so it's makes it really hard to be friendly to Windows.

 

For example, Darkplaces engine and RBDoom 3 BFG and Dhewm3 were made to use almost no 3rd party libs, and cmake, and they compile easily anywhere. GIMP migrated to Windows from Linux, and it's royal pita to build it on Windows. Same goes for Blender. Now Blender is moving to cmake, so it should make it a bit better/easier. Note I had issues building newer GIMP and Blender on Linux, since they used libs that don't come with my Ubuntu install.

[OrbWeaver]

If DR would only use Qt/wxWidgets, compiling on any OS would be a breeze. But it uses Boost and some other stuff, so it's makes it really hard to be friendly to Windows.

 

Huh? Both Boost and wxWidgets are in the dependencies packages we provide for Windows builds, which should work out of the box after just extracting them into the main DarkRadiant working copy. Using just wxWidgets wouldn't make any difference to this process except for slightly reducing the size of the dependencies archive download itself.

 

Note I had issues building newer GIMP and Blender on Linux, since they used libs that don't come with my Ubuntu install.

 

Agreed, trying to update applications like GIMP outside of the core Linux distributon can be a bitch. There's no reason why someone couldn't compile a new statically-linked version and distribute it via a PPA, but people seem not to do this for things which distributions package for themselves (understandably, since it's extra work and would be obsolete in a few months).