Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

Just try Ubuntu (6.06 Dapper), perhaps you'll be convinced... ;)

Would Ubuntu have a different version of ALSA? Or does it not use ALSA? And what else would break?

The real issue here is that every single OS upgrade I've ever done breaks things that then take months to fix, assuming they ever get fixed.

Boris: I'm sure that you're in the middle of the mood that was caused by spending a lot of time on such problems.

So I hope it'll make you think better about Linux if I'll say that I had similar problems. Tens of times. I got lost, I saw no hope, I spent months trying to get my sound, flashdrive, camera working etc.
It all changed when I switched from Red Hat. Really. I don't know how to explain that, but my experience with all Red Hat versions (since RH 5.0) was a mixture of love and hate, with a lot of things that I simply couldn't fix there.
I switched to Slackware, where it was much easier, most things just worked, then I switched to Gentoo, which is perfect for me since I love to configure everything, I hate package dependencies, and love emerge/equery. (I don't care of compiling everything).

So, Gentoo is pretty near to be perfect, after spending some time on learning, it just works. But what really impressed me, is Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.06. It's the first Linux ever, that I was able to install, update, configure, modify, personalize without a single look into the console. It just works. I didn't spend my time on wiki's, forums, irc channels for support, it works and it works pretty good. I still use Gentoo, but I installed Ubuntu on 4 different machines already, 3 of them being laptops, and I only once had to install Wifi driver, which is pretty special (for Acer 5020).

I can really recomment Ubuntu as a thing to try, just to see that Linux can work, and can work pretty damn good :)

I tried Ubuntu 6.06 and my monitor was stuck at 60Hz with no other options available, after seeing the relevant help page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FixVideoResolutionHowto) I decided I'd be better off sticking with Windows.

Maybe Linux will be ready for the desktop next year. :-)

Try fedora core 5, I didn't run into any major issues... I don't think I have 3d acceleration working, but I don't use it for the graphics... and my sound works :-)

Fedora Core 5 has the same (non-working) sound driver that I've already tried while getting the run-around in RedHat's bugzilla.

In addition to which, you seemed to miss the point -- what else will get broken with the update?

>>what else will get broken with the update?

That's hard to say. What else will be broken on my system when I upgrade to Windows Vista?

Not all the hardware I have has drivers yet, it's one of those things you just go out and do, run a live CD, or investigate before you go and do it.

I actually use Windows a lot more than I use my Linux or Mac (because I have a slow pre-intel mini), but i do agree that the latest Ubuntu is the closest I have personally been to wanting to switch over to Linux.

A few things like my old ATI TV Wonder I havn't had the time to try and make work (not sure if it will) which keeps me away, but damn it is close.

WRT ALSA: Old chips are better supported by the old OSS drivers. I don't know if fedora 4 includes those, but alsa probably has "priority" over those. Alsa supports much better the neewr chips but it doesn't have support for the oldest, it's possible that alsa's driver for your hardware is worse than the OSS equivalent.

WRT to the display, painting crap in virtual terminals is quite normal. Xorg plays with the graphic chip - it has been always possible to fuck up the display by doing that. The difference is that latest Xorg seems to have a bug that wasn't reproduced with your old redhat 8.

All your problems seem to be driver-related issues. Most of the new boxes have better than some old boxes. Most of people seems to use hardware that linux just supports - you just have weird, badly unsupported hardware.

Jed, I have no idea what would break on Windows Vista. ;) Possibly just as much. But I strongly suspect that the sound card will Just Work, even in Windows Vista.

Diego, I'm well aware that the problem is that ALSA's driver for this chip sucks much more than the OSS one. But the fact remains that when I follow the directions the sound configuration utility gives me I get pointed to a bug database where there is no effort made to suggest how to enable the OSS drivers in place of the ALSA ones. I suspect FC4 simply doesn't ship the OSS drivers.

As for the virtual terminal thing, I KNOW it's a bug in Xorg. What I want is for it to work, though, not an explanation that it doesn't work because it's a bug.

As for hardware, when I purchased this computer (about 5 years ago), I made sure that support under Linux was perfect. So don't blame the hardware if people have decided to break _existing_ support. It's like the "blame the victim" mentality a lot of people have for rape, and probably for the same psychological reasons.

Boris: Have you tried a plain vanilla (non-distro) kernel? A quick check in my own (2.6.16.16) shows the OSS drivers still there.

As a gentoo user myself, one thing I like is the incremental updating instead of big bangs as a new release comes out. I update any amount between once a day and once a week (there's usually a few things a day that change), and if I see anything scary, like switching from devfs to udev, or gnome 2.12 to gnome 2.14, I put it off until I know I have time. It's not perfect, but it's much easier to set aside a few hours in case something breaks than a few days for a huge update you know will break stuff (and take getting used to).

Nope, haven't gone through the adventure in time waste that is configuring and compiling my own kernel without stepping on any RPMs' feet yet. When I have a free week to kill, I might.

wrt crap in the virtual terminals: have a look at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6472 and http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127608 . It seems there is a bug in xorg-server 1.0.x which is triggered by optimization in the new versions of gcc, and the main symptom is crap in the vt's.

Download xorg-server-1.1 for the fix. Or maybe fedora has a patched 1.0 rpm also...

Boris, I had the same problem with es1371 on FC4. I switched to Ubuntu because of this stupid bug, and the problem disappeared. Remember that Fedora is intended to be a cutting-edge distro.

> Would Ubuntu have a different version of ALSA? Or does it not use ALSA? And what else would break?

Without wanting to sound like Yet Another Ubuntu Advocate, I will just note that, since the installation CD acts as a live CD, you can probably tell pretty quickly and easily what is broken under Ubuntu. The major problem is that there's not much software on the installation CD so you may have some difficulty testing everything.

I hope you have filed bugs for all those trunk problems ;)
Fortunately I can use trunk, just have to have
a patch to fix the google calendar problem.

I also have had bad experiences with recent versions of Fedora. During the past couple of weeks I installed a couple of Linux distributions onto my sisters computer so she could decide which one she likes the most. And Fedora also gave us by far the most problems (including the quite old soundcard not working properly). All others (Mandriva 2006, openSUSE 10.1 and Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.06 LTS) worked great out of the box. In the end she decided to go with Kubuntu 6.06 because it was the easiest and nice looking for her (I would choose openSUSE which looks a bit more advanced, but I guess still not advanced enough for a Gentoo Linux user like me :)).

I was looking for a success story here somewhere. Someone who could say it just works, but this sounds like a complete disaster.

Linux seems to have degenerated into a hundred little garage operations, each trying to support everything and complete feature-for-feature with Microsoft. The resulting fragmentation is lethal.

smaug, I've filed bugs on most of the problems, except for the "crashes all the time without talkback coming up" one, which wouldn't be a very useful bug report. Most of the rest of the bugs have to do with fonts being nigh-unusable...

I decided to switch to Windows XP because I needed the latest Flash software. So, I popped in the install disk, but Windows didn't see my serial ata drives! Hmmm, good thing I'm a techie! After finding the driver, Window installed. It loaded up and here's what I found : my graphics were a horrible resolution and slow and nothing I could click on would change that! My sound wouldn't work! I couldn't connect to the Internet to change anything because my GigE card wouldn't work! On top of that, none of my special keyboard buttons would work and there was no decent software installed.

Man, Windows sure is NOT ready for the desktop. When will someone put some effort into this whole windows thing to get it working for the average joe? I was so angry, I decided to buy the virutalization software that would allow me to run Flash inside linux.

I'm really happy to stick with Kubuntu. I can't see why anyone would consider Windows ready for the Desktop. People must spend years trying of their lives trying to get things working in Windows!

@ Bobsyouruncle:

Windows comes preinstalled on most pc's. So the average joe has no problems at all.

I'll second the Ubuntu fans - try it before installing.

"Installation CD is same as live CD" was a really cool idea.

I don't recommend anyone used to an rpm distro jumping to any debian distro without first spending some time learning whether the differences would annoy or get in the way of habits. Personally I have a big problem with lumping everything into runlevel 2.

That said, your new laptop whenever that happens should have enough HD space to allocate 5-10G to each of 2-3 distros and still have a mega-sized /home and/or /usr/local to hold all those trees and tools you use. Put FC4 or 5 on it, and SuSE 10.1 and/or Mandriva and/or Ubuntu and/or Gentoo and use whichever makes you least upset. Once you've settled on something, you can scrap all but one of the others, and use the saved one as fallback first, then for the next version of whatever you settled on.

I have FC, SuSE, Debian, Mandriva, Xandros & Ubuntu installed on a bunch of puters. SuSE is the only one besides OS/2 run I run 24/7.

Is that es1371 a PCI card? Why not throw it away for something better supported that costs only $5-$13? Why does any computer used by any post-grad need sound anyway?

The new laptop, whenever it happens, will not be my primary machine.

The es1371 is an onboard chip.

And I need sound because I want to do minor things like listen to music, listen to BBC news clips, and so forth.

"I want to blame Xorg" - You have nobody to blame but yourself, to me, it looks like you don't know what you're dealing with.

As posted above, try dapper 6.06, out-of-the-box it works great for mostly everyone.

But man, for real, giving your post a headline, "Why Linux is SO not ready for the desktop", based on your own little, teeny, unnoticable experience is just to weak, no offence, just stating my opinion.

Stian, I've been using Linux for about 11 years now. So I do have a general idea of "what I'm dealing with". I'm not sure that counts as ""teeny experience".

When I say "I want to blame Xorg", I say so because the virtual terminals are clearly showing stuff that Xorg pushed to the video card and then never reset when I switched away from the X server VT.

Maybe the live CDs from Mandriva, SuSE, Knoppix or [K]Ubuntu would work right off with your 1371, maybe giving some clues how to fix Fedora. If not, maybe the mobo or sound chip have fallen out of spec and need replacement. Lots of motherboards from 4-6 years ago have cap problems. If you don't want to do any experimenting with the laptop, you probably still could with the main system without disturbing what you have now by adding a HD. They're plenty low enough in price any more, and usually easy to add if you don't have one of those itty bitty cases.

I've only ever had VC corruption troubles with Corel long ago and Breezy last fall. The Breezy was on i810e chipset onboard video. I don't remember fix details, but ISTR there was a ubuntu bug or wiki page with a workaround for those with the problem that helped either immensely or totally. Lately I've read about various problems with VCs that IIRC were usually fixed by going back to generic from ati or nv proprietary drivers or vice versa.

Felix, when I reboot into RedHat 8 sound works wonderfully. The ALSA folks have just broken es1371 support pretty badly -- see the several bugs in their database on the issue.

As for hard drives, there are already 3 in the box; adding another is impossible unless I disconnect something (one of the 3 or the CDROM) or get a PCI card to give me more IDE connectors.

The proprietary drivers for my video card had a nasty tendency to bring down X about once every 3 days when I last tried them a few months back, which is even worse than the generics that come with Xorg. ;)

Nothing you wrote indicated to me your RH8 was still functional after the FC4 upgrade. Sounds like path of least pain is a (cheap) PCI sound card for which drivers work, and disable the onboard chip.

bz: it sounds to me like you've got a perfect excuse to purchase new sound and video cards. You don't need to spend a whole lot of money on them, and you can call them business expenses and they become tax deductible :)

My experience with ubuntu is that it works with hardware that other distros fail with. Maybe you should give it a go. It's a much more pleasant distro to use anyway. :)

I feel I should give some proper examples and not just talk about "experiences": Ubuntu was the first distro to properly detect my screen's native resolution of 1680x1050. Ubuntu was the first distro to provide sound _unmuted_ by default. Ubuntu was the first distro to provide access to my built-in SD memory card reader.

And for the record, I test and evaluate distros on a regular basis. Just search for my Linux reviews on my blogs (except my current blog is down).

db48x, they're not business expenses if I'm not self-employed (which I'm not).

And in any case, I'm not very interested in changing either the video card (which I changed already in the past year) or the sound stuff (which would require a free PCI slot that I do not have). I'm interested in the software not breaking things that USED TO WORK PERFECTLY. That's really not that much to ask... When that happens with changes I make to Firefox, I generally make fixing the regressions my top priority...

You seem to ignore all the comments advising you to try out Dapper? Why is that? As a lot of people have said, it won't cost you more than a download, a disc and a liveboot to check what HW works and what does not..

I understand you have checked the sound system code and found that your chipset has been broken, but did you think of the possibility that the Ubuntu people have made a patch for this? You could always search the Ubuntu forums for that specific chipset aswell.
I found several posts, but this seemed the most relevant :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=174872&highlight=es1371+dapper

I meant chip of course..

Denis, I plan to try out Dapper as soon as I have time to play around with a full reinstall, since trying it before then is kinda pointless. I estimate that to be sometime in mid-September at the moment, if nothing new comes up.

bz: true, but on the other hand I doubt anyone has enough different sound cards for adequate testing.

Boris,

About Dapper, you don't have to plan to make time to play around with a reinstall AT ALL. Download the LiveCD, reboot, and you can find out (without the effort of a reinstall) whether sound, video, ethernet, etc., works or not.

If it doesn't work, fine, you've not wasted more than a few minutes and after another reboot, can go back to work as you were. If it works, then you have an incentive to do that reinstall, and you will know it will work.

Just a comment -- I'm having problems with sound also, none in Windows Vista, but in SUSE 10.1. Yes, I can try a zillion distros -- that's how I wound up buying Suse to begin with. I didn't have this problem with 10.0, but I'm not sure where the disks are. The upshot, if you've got lots of time to try stuff and you don't need the major things that don't have a real Linux equivalent (Dragon Naturally Speaking, Dreamweaver), Linux makes a great hobby!

Windows Vista, on the other hand, I had no real problems with. The same with earlier Microsoft versions -- I installed beta versions of NT, etc etc, and they all basically worked fine. Linux, on the other hand, has always worked fine for me, after months of setup problems.

I'm not asking for help here, just complaining :)

I think that people here are perscribing solutions here (Dapper! Gentoo! FC5! IT WILL JUST WORK!) without understanding Boris' main complaint: that we break the shit out of stuff all the time.

And he's right. In the linux desktop world we do have a terrible track record. We introduce real regressions, especially in the area of kernel drivers. Things break all the time. But over all we've also gotten a lot better, it sounds like Boris just happened to stumble over a pretty serious bug.

Things like sysfs and HAL have started to make it easier for applications to find and work with devices. So a lot of the user space issues are being resolved over time.

But it's also important to note that this isn't all bad. We're changing because we want to improve things. Our story on hardware support has gotten an order of magnitude better in recent OS releases thanks to HAL and great GNOME work. But sometimes we break things in doing that. You can insert a USB key into a machine and it just shows up on your desktop. You can plug in a (supported) webcam into the back of your laptop and it just shows up in ekiga. I can walk into a room that has wireless, unsuspend my laptop and associate with a wireless access point in a way that is a much better experience than what I have to go through in windows. You couldn't do any of that 2 years ago so we're growing by leaps and bounds.

I will point out that sound, as a subsystem, is still pretty grotty. ALSA hasn't stabilized, is missing a decent software mixer and has questionable driver support in our experience. In FC4 my personal experience with sound was similar to what Boris experienced. If I remember, and FC4 was quite a while ago in my hind-brain, it was because of some daemon that got turned on. But when I installed FC5 on the machine it "just worked." So we fixed it post-FC4.

Now, if you're talking about _changes_ to UI - a complaint I hear often - that's something we have to do. Go look at a desktop of 2 or 4 years ago compared to FC5 today and you can see how much progress we've made. Along with the added hardware support we've added and solid suspend/resume support, my laptop works really well. I love using Linux, something that I wouldn't have said a couple of years ago. It's largely stopped getting in my way.

On a personal note, Boris, if you have problems like that - something that's clearly a driver or OS problem - let me know. I can drive issues to resolution.

blizzard, it's good to know that the people who matter understand what I'm talking about. :)

It's looking like the ALSA folks are making some progress on this, at least, so maybe it'll get fixed in general (it's fixed on my box by a nasty hack in the driver)... So there's hope.