Hey guys, I’m just an ordinary dev looking for something to work on. While messing around with my hobby projects, I couldn’t help but notice that under the surface, there are a lot of places that the libre desktop can be improved. I’d like to take on your suggestions on what I should seriously consider working on and helping out with.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
(For those wondering, I’m still working on my other stuff.)
Man, just the “normies” user experience in general.
I’ve had so many issues from the start, even on “beginner friendly” distros. Hell, I’m a software engineer by trade - I literally use WSL2 every day for my job - but there are some things the OS should just do.
Prime example: wifi connectivity (er, just connectivity in general - Bluetooth included). It seems like every distro neglects this part to some degree. I’ve tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Kinoite, countless others - but it seems like every one either has some form of Bluetooth connectivity issue (a la Kinoite not detecting my Bluetooth headphones) or a straight up wifi issue (like Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Linux Mint ALL not connecting to Panera WiFi on a wiped 2012 MacBook Pro - it was because Panera has a popup to accept wifi terms, btw, which is extremely common. Starbucks was broken too).
It’s that sort of stuff that prevents people from staying on Linux. People DO go to internet cafes to hang out and surf the web. It’s a helluva deal breaker that I need to turn on my phone’s hotspot just to connect to some Internet and then deal with LTE speeds. And as for the argument of “well that’s super old hardware” - it’s prime hardware that people will try Linux on and get pissed off.
Also, Nvidia support. It’s one of the most popular graphics card options - it’s a deal breaker that it doesn’t work out of the box on a lot of distros. Never ran into this myself, but just scroll here for a bit to see how prevalent it is.
I REALLY want to daily Linux but man, these issues prevent it (even now that I’ve moved on from the MacBook). If you really wanna help Linux grow, fix these problems and / or work on improving the “non-technical” user experience. You shouldn’t need to know what KDE is to use your desktop, nor should you need to Google like 15 things to get thru the installer with certainty.
I know this will get a lot of hate, and I really really want to love Linux, but I’ve been burned often so I’m skeptical.
Yea, sadly, Linux can do nothing to support Nvidia better since they don’t support the community with opensource driver and actively add DRM do make our lives harder. It’s just sad. Right now, I try to get my MacBook pro 5,5 with deticated Nvidia GeForce 9600m GT to work with openSuse I tested and failed with tumbleweed twice now and I’ll try leap next.
Why does it need to be the open source version?
Because Nvidia refuses to offer up to date driver (compatible with mainline kernel) for legacy cards like in my mac and I refuse to throw away a fully working computing machine. I would not mind if they stopped supporting but provide the community with the source and I would not mind if they would still update their proprietary drivers for legacy cards. Now my situation is ether use the reverse engineered driver, which seems like a time bomb that kills my install (based on my experience) or I use the outdated legacy driver patched by the community, which seems not to work on 6.6.6. next I try a LTS kernel version.
So tldr: if Nvidia would open the source of the legacy driver, they would make the live of many people more easy and they would actively work on minimizing eWaste which would be a win for sustainability. I don’t need more horsepower, my MacBook 5,5 is strong enough, all it needs is software.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst
NVK is changing things for the better on NVIDIA. I tested it out the other day on my RTX3070 laptop and a lot of games are already playable. Performance has a ways to go to match the proprietary driver but it’s incredibly refreshing to see modern games running playably on an open source driver stack on an NVIDIA GPU.
This is actually… Completely wrong. Open sourcing video drivers are getting really good a and, in a few years, they’ll be probably just as good, if not better than the proprietary ones.
I said it yesterday and got crapped on, but I’m gonna die on this hill: We need fewer distros, opening up the people working on them to focus on the actual software.
We have plenty of Ubuntu forks. Stop making distros and start make awesome GUI apps for Linux.
There is a magic url by Mozilla I use a lot to get on public wifi on Ubuntu. I can find it if ya want?
Please share. It’s a very common problem.
I’ve been using this: http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html It’s a feature build into Firefox. It can be a little chatty for some folks doing web debugging, never noticed it myself. https://iamyuthan.medium.com/how-to-stop-firefox-from-spamming-your-proxy-tools-like-burp-fiddler-with-detectportal-firefox-com-7db7ce1de9a0
I don’t necessarily need it anymore, but I’m sure someone would find it useful in this comments section! Thank you!
I’ve been using this: http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html It’s a feature build into Firefox. It can be a little chatty for some folks doing web debugging, never noticed it myself. https://iamyuthan.medium.com/how-to-stop-firefox-from-spamming-your-proxy-tools-like-burp-fiddler-with-detectportal-firefox-com-7db7ce1de9a0
I’m not giving you hate, but both problems you just described simply can’t be fixed on the Linux side.
When a company says “I’m offering a service based on closed source software, and I’m not supporting anything other than Windows” there’s hardly anything you can do except use the services of someone else.
The “Open source or die” nature of a lot of enthusiasts and distros doesn’t help either.
If someone new installs debian on their machine and didn’t know their wifi card needs proprietary drivers then they’re kinda screwed unless they have another machine handy. Plus a lot of the time the open source driver will be worse for X but better for Y so now you have that conundrum.
There’s not exactly a shortage of things that don’t work well on Linux, but Bluetooth problems seem unfair to pin on it. Bluetooth doesn’t work anywhere.
IDK about you, but bluetooth works great on both my Macs and my Windows PCs. Most of my issues with bluetooth come from the device turning off to save power and I have to wait a bit for it to turn back on and reconnect.