Pourquoi Linux ne fonctionnera jamais sur un desktop

Des gens sérieux ont étudié le problème, et on fait la liste ici

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.html

Pourr faire court, on voit que les problèmes sont gravissimes, d'ordres

- Fonctionnel
- Multimédia
- Défaut majeur de l'interface et des technologies utilisées
- Pas de standardisation des API pour des logiciels fenêtrés
- Des incompatibilités entre les différentes versions
- Des gros bugs, d'énormes problèmes de régression dans le dévelopement
- Pas d'outils de gestion pour le déployement, etc... etc...

Enfin un article qui va jusqu'au des choses et qui montre que ce
système est vraiment un tas de caca lol

D'ailleurs, le marché le dit bien < 1 % d'utilisateurs de ce machin, et
encore généralement en trial boot pour s'ammuser une semaine ou deux

Mais bon, c'est un bricolage et un passe temps pour certain lol



Linux major shortcomings and problems:

0. Premise: proprietary software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You
may argue eternally, but complicated software like games, 3D
applications, databases, CADs(Computer-aided Design), etc. which cost
millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be
open sourced. Software patents are about to stay forever.

1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing,
many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output
exclusively causing major user problems and headache.

1.1 Insanely difficult to set up volume levels, audio recording ... and
in some situations even audio output.

1.2 Highly confusing, not self-explanatory mixer settings.

1.3 By default many distros do not set volume levels properly (no audio
output/no sound recording).

2. X system:

2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications
(like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break
backwards compatibility.

2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers
on top of OpenGL).

2.3 Many GUI operations are not accelerated. No analogue of GDI or
GDI+. Text antialiasing and other GUI operations are software rendered
by GUI libraries (GTK->Cairo/QT->Xft).

2.4 Font rendering is implemented via high level GUI libraries, thus:

2.4.1 fontconfig fonts antialiasing settings cannot be applied
on-the-fly.

2.4.2 Fonts antialiasing only works for certain GUI toolkits (see 2.1).

2.4.3 Default fonts (often) look ugly.

2.4.3.1 (Being resolved) By default most distros disable advanced fonts
antialiasing.

2.4.3.2 By default most distros come without good or even compatible
with Windows fonts.

2.5 No double buffering.

3. Problems stemming from the vast number of Linux distributives:

3.1 No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and
system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these
utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system
locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most
users mad.

3.2 No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb,
portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.

3.3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source
software. User should never be bothered with using ./configure && make
&& make installer. It should be possible to install any software by
downloading a package and double clicking it (yes, like in Windows, but
probably prompting for user/administrator password).

3.4 Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use
a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c)
different compilers. This leads to a number of problems raised to the
third power.

4. It should be possible to configure everything via GUI which is still
not a case for too many situations and operations.

5. Problems stemming from low linux popularity and open source nature:

5.1 Few software titles, inability to run familiar Windows software.
(Some applications (which don't work in Wine) have zero Linux
equivalents).

5.1.1 No equivalent of some hardcore Windows software like AutoCAD/3D
Studio/Adobe Premier/Corel Painter/etc. Home and work users just won't
bother installing Linux until they can work for real.

5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.

5.3 Incomplete or unstable drivers for some hardware. Problems setting
up some hardware (like sound cards or TV tuners/Web Cameras).

5.3.1 A lot of WinPrinters do not have any Linux support (e.g. Lexmark
models). An argument that user should buy a Linux compatible printer is
silly since that way Linux won't ever gain even a traction of
popularity. Why should I install an OS where my printer doesn't work?

5.3.2 A lot of web cameras still do not work at all in Linux.

5.4 It's impossible to watch Blue-Ray movies.

5.5 Questionable patents and legality status. US Linux users cannot
play many popular audio and video formats until they purchase
appropriate codecs.

6. Poor or almost missing regression testing in Linux kernel (and,
alas, in other Open Source software too) leading to a situation when
new kernels may become totally unusable for some hardware
configurations (software suspend doesn't work, crashes, unable to boot,
networking problems, video tearing, etc.)

7. A galore of software bugs across all applications. Just look into
KDE or Gnome bugzilla's - some bugs are now ten years old with over
several dozens of duplicates and no one is working on them.

8. Poor interoperability between applications and their components.
E.g. many kernel features get a decent userspace support years after
introduction.

8.1 Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g.
such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where
all users are virtual. LDAP is a major PITA. Authentication against
MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.

9. General slowness: just compare load times between e.g. OpenOffice
and Microsoft Office. If you don't like this example, try running
OpenOffice in Windows and in Linux. In the latter case it will be much
slower.

9.1 Slow (libraries) linker. Braindead slow linker. Intolerably slow
linker. Win32 OpenOffice being run from Wine starts in a less time than
native Linux OpenOffice. Microsoft Office 2003 starts from Wine in a
matter of few seconds even on 1GHz CPUs with a slow HDD.

9.2 (Being resolved) No parallel boot of system services. Questionable
services for Desktop installations (Fedora, Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu). No
delayed loading of system services.

9.3 (Being resolved) Huge shutdown time.

10. CLI (command line interface) errors for user applications (see
clause 4.). All GUI applications should have a visible errors
presentation.

11. (Being slowly resolved) Poor documentation.

12. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard
keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses
free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to
circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause
4.).

13. A very bad backwards and forward compatibility.

13.1 Old applications rarely work in new Linux distros (glibc
incompatibities (double-free errors), missing libraries, wrong/new
libraries versions, GCC source level errors). Abandoned Linux GUI
software generally doesn't work in newer Linux distros. Most well
written GUI applications for Windows 95 will work in Windows 7 (15
years of compatibility on binary level).

13.2 New applications linked only against lib C will refuse to work in
old distros. (Even though they are 100% source compatible with old
distros).

13.3 New libraries versions bugs, regressions and incompatibilites.

14. Enterprise level problems:

14.1 No software policies.

14.2 No standard way of software distribution.

14.3 (Being slowly resolved) No SMB/AD level replacement/equivalent
(samba doesn't count): 1) Centralized and easily managable user
directory. 2) Simple file sharing. 3) Simple (LAN) computers discovery
and browsing.