That goes way beyond OSS. Remember early Windows 95? When every Office release revamped the style guides (button bars are now flat!), Borland applications looked entirely different and there was a plethora of badly mashed together VB5 shareware?
Heck, I remember Amiga-heads complaining about MUI applications…
It's rare that you get something consistent once you throw enough developers at it, especially if different tooling is involved. And this only increases with the age and popularity of the platform…
Most programmers can't design. And designers are only marginally better at it.
Not never as you write but surely very often. For UIs to be gorgeous they should be left to tech savy designers (that is, not painters), not programmers (having the two teams communicate closely though). A programmer usually focuses on functions, bugs, speed, which inevitably detracts the attention from aesthetics or usability, so having some people working exclusively in that field would benefit a lot. Unfortunately not all projects can afford or even find for free a good designer, just like not all FOSS games can get the same amount of graphics primitives as commercial games have.
Consistency is a different problem due primarily to fragmentation (it's thousands developers!) and lack of a central entity benevolently dictating standards also in the GUI field. I was just downvoted by someone who clearly missed my point in yesterday's post about Linus taking some time off: I wrote that Linux would benefit a lot if we had someone like him forcing consistency in the GUI and other fields. It is a necessary "evil" intended to help more developers build a solid single standard until the gap with Windows/MacOS is filled.
The one much more important thing that OSS never did well is managing/making device drivers. I know it's not primarily OSS's fault, but it has made Linux on consumer devices unusable for me and for many others. Unusable or simply non-existant in the case of mobile devices.
And it's a huge shame if you look at the current historical situation, which is, I think, pretty dramatic.
We have a handful of huge, all-knowing corporate gatekeepers taking a ridiculously disproportionate cut of software developers' revenues and restricting what we are allowed to do with our devices.
We are suffering from collective amnesia as to the dangers of the authoritarian surveillance state.
We are struggling with a massive onslaught of organised crime trying to take over our data, our identities, our money and our democracies.
I'm not a computer security expert by any stretch, but it seems pretty clear to me that without controlling the end user device, there is basically no chance of ever being in control of your data.
OSS has failed where it matters most, where it's literally about freedom.
You could argue that it's not OSS that has failed but me not setting the right priorities. I don't deny that, but the choice really shouldn't be that stark.
My girlfriend is far more determined than I am. She does use Linux on her laptop.
But just in the last couple weeks this is what happened:
I had to scan documents for her on my Mac because her scanner driver isn't working properly, creating tiny, grainy images if it works at all.
When I wanted to close the lid on her laptop because we were heading out she shouted "STOP!! I need to switch graphics cards before shutting down or the computer won't boot".
She found her OpenVPN installation to be leaking DNS (again, after fixing it several times).
Her Chrome browser has stopped rendering fonts properly. There are small pixel artifacts, even lines, next to the letters. Before the previous dist-upgrade that wasn't the case but none of the point upgrades since then has fixed the problem (we know what causes this but the fix is tedious to apply and Firefox is working).
Her laptop is running hot. This has always been the case but when the nvidia card is active the heat goes through the roof (hence the constant manual graphics driver switching).
Many days have gone into trying to fix some of these things and some fixes have worked, temporarily, until the next dist-upgrade.
I just can't take this, so I'm withdrawing silently and a bit ashamed into my Apple walled garden.
Device drivers are one of the things I LOVE Linux. Instead of having to install 500 Megabytes of software from a CD or downloading 20 different vendor update tools, it usually is just plug and play. Instantly.
Of course configuration is needed. I doubt that the scanner issue is a driver thing. Are you sure the software is configured to do a full resolution, RGB scan?
Optimus GPU are hell on Windows as well. Never buy laptops with that nonsense. Generally, you cannot expect any random consumer poop laptop to work well. Linux does not work perfectly everywhere but it sure is more compatible than Mac OS when it comes to using your own hardware. Buy a proper business model laptop and it will work 99%. Just like Windows would.
I have mixed experience with drivers on Linux. Recently, my onboard sound card died and I dug out a PCI one. It's about 10 years old but on Linux it just worked. No such luck on Windows 10. Latest official driers were available for Win8 and there was no way to get it to work on anything newer.
But then, anytime I do anything involving printers, it is a huge pain.
> But then, anytime I do anything involving printers, it is a huge pain.
I've not had great luck trying to get random printers to work with Linux, but it's also not something I've attempted in a long time.
For those times when you can choose the printer, the OpenPrinting compatibility database ( https://www.openprinting.org/printers ) is very good. And if you don't want to bother with that, any PostScript printer will work fine.
If you are already stuck with a printer with poor compatibility, you might be in for a bad time, though. :-(
Eh, as far as consumer-priced printers I have 0 issues with any of Brother's printers. I have a basic MFC-J4420DW inkjet at home connected to Windows, macOS and Linux devices - they even provide .rpm and .deb files with their CUPS and Sane drivers.
macOS is definitely the best experience when it comes to printing though, the moment I pop the IP for my printer in and hit add the driver package gets automatically downloaded from Apple and installed.
Let's see it in another way. You aren't permitted to run MacOS (or what's called today) on HW of your choice but only to HW chose for you by Apple. If you try the Hackintosh route, you'll probably find enough little issues like your girlfriend's laptop and you'll next update will always be a leap of faith...
There is a bunch of HW vendors that sell devices with Linux support, like Dell and System76 (the only two that I recall at the moment), I'm happy with a Dell XPS running Debian Stretch.
And having bought one with Ubuntu pre-installed (ASUS 1215B) they aren't without their own little set of issues, like non working wlan drivers 'cause lets just replace the existing working one by a WIP FOSS variant on an OS update,or GPU support that gets removed because AMD decided to reboot their drivers development.
Well, I would say then that Asus after sale support is kinda bad... ^__^;
I think I've read that Dell send all their drivers patches upstream, so you aren't stuck with devices that use a kernel blob that stops to work next time you install a new kernel.
I've an Asus EeeBook (NetOne?) hidden somewhere, I bought it because I wanted to show demand for Linux supported HW but it had too little RAM for my taste and I also had to replace the "NVME" like SSD because it was unbearable slow.
Those two issues were caused by Canonical and AMD.
The wlan driver was when they decided to replace the proprietary one by the FOSS variant, without taking care feature parity was achieved first.
The other one when AMD replaced their drivers, but the new open source one for older cards doesn't provide 1:1 feature parity with their former one, thus preventing the same level of hardware acceleration and OpenGL support.
In both cases the only solution is to dig out old unsupported kernel versions.
I'm thinking about switching from fglrx to AMDGPU with an old Radeon HD 7870 atm. Mind sharing more details? Anything I should watch out for?
Btw there are two open-source drivers for older AMD graphics cards; one is their current, officially-supported open-source driver which had support for a couple of older generations added, and the other is an independent open-source driver which is much older (and supports the _really_ old cards).
The new open source driver for older cards does not have the same OpenGL support level, nor video acceleration. I had to force enable HW acceleration on Firefox, and sometimes it does bring X down when watching videos.
> The one much more important thing that OSS never did well is managing/making device drivers. I know it's not primarily OSS's fault, but it has made Linux on consumer devices unusable for me and for many others. Unusable or simply non-existant in the case of mobile devices.
This isn't OSS's fault. It is Linux's fault, plain and simple.
Because Linux refuses to have a stable driver interface, and goes out of its way to make binary/out-of-tree drivers difficult, we end up in this situation.
Let me guess: your running Ubuntu. I say that because of your reference to "dist-upgrade". On Ubuntu that happens every 6 months. For Debian it's more like 2 years.
Ubuntu is of course mostly Debian, just released 4 times faster. So it runs runs the latest shiny and but has 4 times less testing. It shows in the ways you would expect.
For what it's worth, we are moving to Debian from Windows on our most common install for very similar reasons you say you are ditching Linux: we are sick of things like WiFi drivers dropping out, the latest buggy Chrome being automagically installed. Well that and these are low end laptops, and Windows is very slow, occasionally taking second to response to a click on the start button (or whatever it's called now). Lxde is always instantaneous.
Oh, and why do you expect OpenVPN to be different on the mac?
Exactly correct, I have similar issues to your girlfriend but continue on with my personal machine on Linux. However these driver issues prevent me from ever recommending Linux to anyone else, it's a very poor UX.
I'd take just consistent. Linux userspace people seem to have a culture of doing things different from each other just for the sake of it. How many distributions are there? How many of them are just a change in the default package install list of Ubuntu?
