Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Posted May 2, 2011 9:36 UTC (Mon) by Cato (guest, #7643)In reply to: Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"? by jrn
Parent article: Poettering: Why systemd?
Sounds like KMS probably shouldn't be in an LTS release at all... however, 18 months since its introduction in Ubuntu 9.10 should be enough to stabilise it on an older Intel GPU which has had open source drivers forever.
Of course I should do some bug reports but the sheer number of issues I've had, and seriousness of some of them, make it hard to spend the time logging bugs.
Posted May 2, 2011 14:23 UTC (Mon)
by bazsi (guest, #63084)
[Link] (12 responses)
And I'm not that reinstall if there's a problem kind of guy, but finding obsolete files scattered in .d directories to fix problems takes an immense amount of time.
When I realized the root cause (obsolete packages leaving .d files around), I started to feel they are not such a good idea after all, or at least dpkg/apt should support them better.
Posted May 2, 2011 15:08 UTC (Mon)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (10 responses)
I agree that the package manager could support such files better. Perhaps there could be a separate directory for configuration files belonging to removed packages pending reinstallation or purge, where they wouldn't interfere with the rest of the system.
Posted May 2, 2011 21:05 UTC (Mon)
by bazsi (guest, #63084)
[Link] (9 responses)
And that's when the battle starts to find out why a function doesn't work.
Posted May 2, 2011 21:41 UTC (Mon)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (7 responses)
$ dpkg -l | awk '/^rc /{print $2;}' > pkg-list
Posted May 3, 2011 6:43 UTC (Tue)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link] (4 responses)
Obsolete config files are an issue, but only 1 of the 4 problems I encountered was due to an old config file - the rest are just new features not working properly.
Hence I'm more interested in discussion of why Upstart and KMS are not finished and working well over 18+ months after Ubuntu adopted them and 12 months after use in an LTS release.
Posted May 11, 2011 19:06 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
KMS won't be finished for ages. The job is just too huge.
Posted May 12, 2011 6:04 UTC (Thu)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link] (2 responses)
Apart from the technical elegance, why did the Linux community decide to make the kernel and even typical recovery boot processes dependent on the GPU, which as you say is very complex, fast changing and under-documented?
I have still not managed to get recovery boot working on Lucid, all thanks to some combination of KMS and framebuffer devices - I've tried many boot strings and made some progress, but I gave up after many hours. On this Intel GMA3100 hardware, which should be well supported, KMS has made things much worse than the previous Ubuntu LTS.
Posted May 12, 2011 10:48 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
There was no choice about making the kernel boot process 'dependent on the GPU', if by that you mean using KMS to display the boot process, because the time is coming (and it is not terribly far away) when text-mode support will disappear from these cards. So it's graphics or nothing, and the only non-conflicting way for the kernel and X to display stuff on the screen is KMS, at least if you want to retain any acceleration at all in X.
There was a choice: go KMS, or have almost no improvements in X graphics for the foreseeable future. (Actually it would probably go backwards because the userspace modesetting drivers are not pleasant to maintain.)
Posted May 18, 2011 13:26 UTC (Wed)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
The 10.04 LTS upgrade has been a disaster, the person using has said she wants to stop using Ubuntu as a result. Hopefully going to a more recent Ubuntu (maybe 10.10) will fix the Intel KMS problems.
Can anyone recommend a good Ubuntu or similar distro version (Mint, Mepis, Debian, with reasonably quick security updates) that has KMS working well on Intel GMA3100 or similar, without random freezes? I don't want to try getting a newer Xorg and kernel working on 10.04, as the idea of this PC is to be low maintenance and reliable for the next 2-3 years.
Posted May 3, 2011 15:07 UTC (Tue)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 5, 2011 16:32 UTC (Thu)
by Thalience (subscriber, #4217)
[Link]
Posted May 2, 2011 22:16 UTC (Mon)
by Tobu (subscriber, #24111)
[Link]
Posted May 2, 2011 16:12 UTC (Mon)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
$ $VISUAL pkg-list # review packages to be purged
# dpkg -P `<pkg-list`
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
desktop Linux is now much less stable for many graphics cards than it was a few years ago
Is it? I thought that before I tried KMS, and, y'know, I haven't had a single problem on the three Radeon cards and two Intel that I've tried. (I haven't tried nvidia because I actively avoid them and all their works.)
I'm not that the minor benefits of KMS are worth the apparent years of instability.
The 'minor' benefits include support for any version of OpenGL above 1.5, which is ancient; the possibility to see kernel panics even when X is running (I don't know if this works yet but at least it is possible); much more reliable suspend/resume; and the ability to actually use most of the card's capabilities (it's not a framebuffer anymore, it's a massively parallel computer with an address space partially disjoint from the CPU's, and there is no hope of userspace modesetting modelling any of that).
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?
aptitude purge \~c
purges leftover conffiles and data (don't do it for a database though), and install/remove/upgrade commands take a --purge-unused
flag that purges while uninstalling.
Why isn't desktop Linux "finished"?