On 10/30/2017 06:14 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote:
El 30.10.2017 a las 08:29, Scott Kostyshak escribió:
> Do you still have access to Linux?
Yes. I work with Linux as testing system for 3 months now. Long story
short, I am a bit disappointed. Linux is OK for Internet, office and
email. But that is it. I mean I even cannot fill out a PDF form on
Linux because poppler doesn't yet support everything. (You can test
this by filling out LyX's PDF-form.lyx after exporting it as PDF
(pdflatex).)
Sorry to hear you're having problems with Linux. I agree that it
requires more technical tweaking than Windows typically does (or did,
back when I was still using Windows). That said, I've been happy with my
move to Linux Mint.
I tried the PDF-form.lyx experiment. The default PDF viewer on my system
(Xreader) seemed to handle most of the form features. Acrobat Reader
handled all of them (other than those I could not test because I do not
have the insdljs LaTeX package). The version of Acrobat Reader available
for Linux (9.5.5) is not the latest, but I've never found it lacking.
My camera doesn't work, my scanner doesn't work, WLAN made problems
(see below), CAD is not working well...
My USB web cam worked out of the box, as did my HP
printer/scanner/copier. There's a bunch of HP packages for Linux,
including a printer driver (that plugs into the Linux CUPS printing
system) and a control panel that pops up when I use the scanner feature.
I realized that Linux's monolithic kernel is a problem. Every device
driver needs to be part of the kernel. This is hard for small
manufacturers of e.g. USB microscopes. Also for CAD the monolithic
kernel is a problem. I mean at work things just have to work because
every minute counts. So if for example a CAD program has problems I
can easily switch the driver (go back to an older version usually) and
after only 5 minutes of reinstalling I am productive again. With Linux
I cannot do that.
An example: I bought a laptop with a built in Wifi chip from Intel. In
Linux kernels 4.8 to 4.12 the Wifi driver iwlwifi had a bug. A fix was
already available and I could download it. But I could not get it to
work. Someone in a forum explained me that the kernel needs to be
compiled using the fixed driver before it will work. But compiling the
kernel as a normal user? No chance. And indeed I had to wait until
Linux 4.13 was released until I had a stable WLAN connection with my
laptop.
(I could not use an older kernel because the components of my laptop
required kernel 4.8 or newer.)
Drivers can indeed be an adventure, although the WiFi on my laptop
worked out of the box with Mint.
That is sad because I really like KDE. This is a much more versatile
desktop than the one of Windows 10. But doesn't help me if I cannot
use devices I need every day like my scanner. I even managed to get
help from a student who administrates Linux PCs and also he failed to
get my scanner to work (I own an 8 year old scanner/printer and the
printer part worked fine out of the box.)
You've probably already done this, but I always start with a Google
search with the make and model of a device and "linux" or "ubuntu" (Mint
is a derivative of Ubuntu) to see if any additional libraries or
proprietary hardware drivers are recommended. There are at least some
proprietary drivers that can be installed without recompiling the
kernel. I'm using a proprietary NVIDIA driver on the PC on which I'm
typing this, and installing it just involved telling the system to
install it and then maybe rebooting. I've never compiled a Linux kernel
in my life (a streak I hope to maintain).
Nevertheless I will continue using Linux as second OS. I hope that in
future things like filling PDF forms will work. I also hope that
developers of Linux applications unite and not split. I mean there are
now about 8 proper Linux desktop environments while the libraries
everybody uses like e.g. poppler lack manpower. I tried many desktop
environments and all are poor when it comes to searching in the file
explorer for filenames and for content in files. But searching is
essential. Windows is here much better and provides therefore more
productivity.
Linux leaves a lot of functionality to third-party applications, rather
than baking it into the operating system. The primary advantage is
variety: if you don't like the way something is done, find an
alternative package that does it more to your taste. The disadvantage is
that you need to do more customization. For file searching, I can
recommend SearchMonkey
(http://searchmonkey.embeddediq.com/index.php/download), which can
search both file names and content, understands regex expressions and
generally does what I need (pretty easily).
Cheers,
Paul
