Why Linux family isn't popular.

[01xB100D]

Hi,

I've been using various linux distributions for over the years and they all have one thing in common.. they are all DELICATE or maybe just plain unstable I should wrote.

In past couple years i've been using M$ OS, windows 7 x64 ultimate because I mainly program win32 apps and I like to play games in break time.

Three days ago I wanted to see if it's better now after the years of development has passed. I have downloaded latest kubuntu and used it only for browsing sites and connecting to my vps through krdc.

I was happy until... I have closed the lid of my laptop while the kde splash screen was still on and the profile was loading. System halted to suspended mode.
Earlier I have set the behaviour of lid closing to do nothing but I didn't know they are active only after the profile loads completly and I wanted to use external display.

So.. I have opened the laptop and pressed the space to resume loading of the kde.

And that was it, the kde didn't want to load, I have switched to other terminal and rebooted it. Nothing, kde wasn't displaying loading splash screen and hdd was sitting and doing nothing. At first cpu was going very hot, probably some loop at 100% of cpu time.

I know this is a simple error and could be repaired by flushing some files/cfg but for normal user this system is now dead.

This kind of untested routines are very common and because of this, linux is still unpopular among normal users. For comparison, I have site that is visited by 90k+ UU daily of which 2% is linux.

It just can't be that OS which is at 14 version is still that valnurable to user error.

[Teunis]

I agree with you that computer programs are sometimes not tested for all possible behaviour of their owners, this is most certain not limited to Linux or OS.

At the same time I keep running Linux because it's for my usage more stable than other available options.
Stability does for me include security.

Some help with your version counting, present Ubuntu and thus Kubuntu, is at 14.04, that stands for the year 2014 and the month 04 or April, it is the 5th. LTS release.
The very first version was 4.10, it came out October 2004, since then there have been 19 other half yearly releases.

About the 2% Linux users you detect, please be aware there's still a group of Linux users that has their browser report them as something more mainstream, a habit caused by ignorant web designers that refuse to serve to Linux users.

But with the continuing invasiveness of Windows vulnerabilities we are bound to see an increase in the number of people that realise there are other options.

[GreyGeek]

And, on the other hand, many, many users like myself, some who have been running Linux for almost two decades, find it very stable and reliable.

I've been using Kubuntu since 9.04 alpha and 14.04 since it went alpha and haven't experienced a single crash and only a rare hickup. Up until a couple months ago I used to leave my Acer on 24/7/365 but now I shut it down in the evening when I am through using it. My system runs Qtcreator, PostgreSQL 9.4, Universe Sandbox2 and various other LinuxSteam games, GoogleEarth, Stellarium, various releases of Mincraft (both client and server), etc. I never have problems burning CD, playing DVDs, making and playing audio CDs and video DVDs, etc... My HP duplex laser prints beautifully, quickly and reliably. My 7 port active USB hub works faultlessly, as does the other peripheral devices I occasionally use, like the stereo speakers, the two external 500MB HD's, the SD port, the HDMI port, etc. Skype (which I no longer use), Google Hangout, Teamviewer9, and many, many other 3rd party programs work beautifully.

I used to keep a copy of XP as a guest OS on VirtualBasic for emergency use for the rare Windows app I might need to run, but I never needed to and when XP was dropped I dropped it. This Acer came with Win7 Home Edition preinstalled and I dual boot with it. This Acer is over two years and I have yet to use the Win7 side for anything but back up storage. I boot into it about once every 3 or 4 months to run the usual updates and then boot back into Kubuntu, which is normally selected automatically.

So, you may find your experience with Kubuntu less than appealing. It may be that Kubuntu doesn't run your particular hardware setup very well, or it could be due to a faulty install. Usually the ISO is sum checked to verify the download, and then the installation CD or DVD is created with the verify option on. Failing to check both the downloaded ISO or the CD/DVD is the source of problems by some people.

As far as the claim that Linux isn't popular ... your impressions are contrary to fact. Over all, PC sales are flat after eight quarters of decline. Joe and Sally Sixpack are moving to tablets and smartphones. In that arena Microsoft has a 2.5% market share. Android, built on Linux, is eating Apple's lunch. The last I saw, Android had over a 70% market share. Here is distrowatch's OS share:
http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awsta....osdetail.html

[Feathers McGraw]

About the 2% Linux users you detect, please be aware there's still a group of Linux users that has their browser report them as something more mainstream, a habit caused by ignorant web designers that refuse to serve to Linux users.

More significant than that is the huge number of bots masquerading as MSIE6 on Windows XP. I know these are bots because I can see what they actually do in the log files... comment spam and SQL injection attacks galore.

Check this out, it's a breakdown of the operating systems reported in user agent strings for the visits to my website so far this month, produced by awstats:



Bare in mind that it's a website about free software, targeted at Linux users...

[01xB100D]

I know Android is very popular but I was referring only to PCs.

I'm still going to use kubuntu as my primary OS because I don't like Microspy policies and I don't have a problem bringing it back to live after any crash.

It's possible that my configuration was at fault but I have very common hardware so I think the problem is not enough testing.

Nevertheless, great system. I was always using xfce but this time I'd go for candies, it's halloween afterall

@Teunis: I know how the versions are counted, thanks for your time and explaining it to me

[Chopstick]

I suspect that 01xB100D is not just a disgruntled user who will defect to Windows but a loyal and experienced user who just wanted to point out a flaw to the community.

And unfortunately I have to agree. Ubuntu probablz runs fine on most systems, especially older hardware and PCs in general, but on laptops with recent hardware there are still a lot of problems. By far most of the problems are minor and easy to fix for experienced users (or not so easy...), but I think many of them would be total showstoppers for the average user.
For example, I had to upgrade the kernel and install a new firmware in order to get the wireless working on my new Thinkpad - without wifi a laptop is useless these days and this is not something that the average user would have been able to do.

But because of the structure of open-source development, I don't think this is likely to change anytime soon: open-source developers are generally not driven by customer demand, but by their own needs, which are very different. To make a product user-friendly for the average person, you have to pay a programmer real money, because that's a really tedious and boring task (and that includes writing accessable documentation...).

[Feathers McGraw]

Chopstick, I agree with most of what you said there. I had some real problems with my old laptop because of its dual AMD graphics, which combined with a heat sink problem meant it often overheated and turned off. I've never had any problems like that with integrated Intel graphics, I think the difference is due to their popularity.

All of the hardware in my T440s worked out of the box, which I was impressed with.

To make a product user-friendly for the average person, you have to pay a programmer real money, because that's a really tedious and boring task (and that includes writing accessable documentation...).

I have to disagree with that! I think the documentation for many free software projects is excellent.

[Chopstick]

I sort of expected some disagreement regarding the documentation; I also agree that many open-source tools have very good documentation, but some don't.
For example a lot of scientific software is very poorly documented, if you compare it to commercial tools like Matlab, which, I think, has an excellent documentation and very good tutorials. At least that was the case a few years ago, when I still used Matlab... now I use Python, and eventhough the core documentation for Python is good, the documentation of many scientific packages is almost non-existant.
I suspect that the critical mass (of developers and users) for writing good documentation is significantly higher than for just writing good software.

[Chopstick]

Another criticism of much of the open-source documentation is that it is essentially written for experts or experienced users and is very hard to read for beginners. Fortunately forums like this one go a long way towards remedying this problem.

And, yes, in the past I've also had a lot of problems with video drivers for my old T60p (ATI card). Now I have a plain Intel card, which is well supported.

[Feathers McGraw]

Yeah, I think you're spot on there. Compare the Apache documentation (excellent) to some of the documentation for specific perl modules on CPAN, which can be very poor, even when the modules themselves work really well. The difference is the number of developers.

I think you make a good point about technical documentation too, the postfix technical reference is very clear in a technical sense but isn't great if you want an overview to get you started. As a noob, I found setting up an email sever really difficult (which is why I wrote a tutorial once I had cracked it).

When it comes to installing Linux, it's easy to forget that windows isn't necessarily "easy" either - most hardware comes with it pre-installed (the experts have already done the hard bit). The one time I ever did it there was a fair amount of tinkering involved to download all of the necessary drivers needed on top of "vanilla" Windows. IIRC my WiFi didn't work out of the box.

[GreyGeek]

As I've mentioned before, a Kubuntu CD/DVD has libraries and drivers on it that fit a "window" of compatibility. The newest machines haven't yet moved into that window, and the old machines have moved out of that window. In the former case patience is required. In the latter case the user has to pull drivers from archive files. For a very small percentage of "edge case" machines your mileage may vary. I've had some friends who purchased new Windows boxes and called me because something didn't work right. I had to go searching for new or different drivers to get it to work the way Microsoft intended.

[Snowhog]

John Lydgate

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.”

[SteveRiley]

I was happy until... I have closed the lid of my laptop while the kde splash screen was still on and the profile was loading. System halted to suspended mode.
Earlier I have set the behaviour of lid closing to do nothing but I didn't know they are active only after the profile loads completly and I wanted to use external display.

So.. I have opened the laptop and pressed the space to resume loading of the kde.

And that was it, the kde didn't want to load, I have switched to other terminal and rebooted it. Nothing, kde wasn't displaying loading splash screen and hdd was sitting and doing nothing. At first cpu was going very hot, probably some loop at 100% of cpu time.

In case you're curious... the "splash screen" is provided by a component of X called the desktop manager (DM). The default DM for KDE is KDM; however, this code hasn't been updated for a very long time. In Ubuntu and some of its flavors, including Kubuntu, the default DM is LightDM. LightDM is a project of Canonical and you won't find it used anywhere else. KDE is switching to SDDM, and the plan is that the next version of Kubuntu (14.10) will use SDDM rather than LightDM. One of the goals of Kubuntu is to provide a straight KDE experience as much as possible.

Now regarding your specific situation. The desktop environment (DE) -- KDE in our case -- has no control over the power management system until after the DM has completely loaded the DE. While the DM is running, only the DM can control the power system. KDM, being very old code, likely has no mechanism to handle a modern laptop's suspend state. I can't say for sure, as I haven't tested this particular scenario. You're most likely using LightDM; from your problem description, it would appear that LightDM also has no mechanism to handle suspend. To be honest, it's probably an edge case for a DM to implement that much functionality, as typically a DM executes for only a few seconds -- the goal is to get the DE loaded fast, not to give you a break that requires closing your lid.

I realize this isn't an excuse -- it's simply an explanation for the behavior you've observed. The great thing about open source is that you can (1) file bugs for the developers and (2) actually offer improvements yourself! In fact, a quick search of Google shows that there are already some reports of LightDM not properly handling suspend/resume; it seems there were some partial fixes after 14.04 was first released.

[dibl]

LightDM is a project of Canonical and you won't find it used anywhere else.

Actually lightdm is available in Debian since Wheezy, and it is being encouraged for use in lieu of KDM because of the lack of maintenance and future development of KDM. Although a check in Jessie packages indicates they are keeping KDM available for that release. But it doesn't appear to have much of a future in the longer term.

[01xB100D]

I'm always curious how things work thanks for sharing your knowledge.