Compiz fails, no unity, Blank desktop after 13.04 update

[schtinky]

its absolutely shocking that this sort of thing is going on at this stage of development.

I couldn't agree more. Linux has been my primary OS since 1999 (mostly RH/Fedora, more recently Ubuntu) and fighting these sorts of battles has gotten tiresome. Yesterday, on another machine with Fedora, upgraded my packages, rebooted and the XFCE login screen wouldn't come up. Today, I sit down to write some Java on this Ubuntu machine and Unity crashes, killing the launcher and window frames. I'm always switching back and forth between distros in an overly-optimistic, but ill-advised search for a distro where everything (or at least the basic stuff) just works. It doesn't exist.

Every time one of these "wrinkles" pops up, that's a few hours of productivity down the drain -- if you can fix it at all (which usually requires insane understanding of obscure text config files or whatever) -- and that's why desktop linux has never gained any significant market share. Enterprise software developers, whether web applications, native software, embedded systems, etc don't allow this sort of thing to happen outside of 99.99999999% certainty because they know it's entirely unacceptable. The company would cease being able to sell products, especially to companies, and the coder/team responsible would be reprimanded and/or fired.

Obviously Linux is a collaboration of free labor and the comparison isn't quite fair. However, this is the reality of why desktop Linux is and apparently will remain a hobbyist OS. No corporate IT department in its right mind would take on the burden of trying to make linux work across their enterprise. It's an expensive and frustrating battle that saps productivity at the macro and micro levels. No one is more passionate about Linux than I am, and I would seriously hesitate to green-light desktop linux across my employees' machines.

So what am I supposed to do? Go buy Windows 8? Hell no. Pay inflated prices for Mac hardware just to get a well-polished linux-based OS from Apple? I'd rather not do that, either. Chrome OS?

I'm sure it's been said a thousand times before, but all this energy exerted in disparate directions (gnome, kde, unity, xfce, just to name the window managers) is detrimental to the overall success of desktop Linux. We need something we can count on to be stable across as much hardware as possible, whose governing team is focused and well funded so they can test out distro changes before putting it out there and crashing a bunch of machines.

People like to talk about open source software in evolutionary terms: "The best software will gain the most developers and emerge as the leader." But the analogy is wrong. In evolution, THINGS MUST DIE so the better individuals can supercede and consume the resource pool. Gnome 3, for instance, was such a complete joke that it shouldn't be around anymore. The programmers (resources) should now be available for -- oh, I don't know, Unity, maybe? Instead, it's still there, sucking up programmer cycles and gumming up the works for better window managers.

The pillars of the open source community need to stand up and talk about the benefits of focusing efforts on 1 or 2 window managers, 1 or 2 compositing managers... even 1 or 2 GUI distros. This hodge-podge nonsense has to stop.

Yes, this is my first post. Feel free to trash me. I don't care.

[cariboo]

Thanks, for posting and welcome to the forum. This sub-forum is meant to be a place where those of us, that enjoy taking part in testing development versions of Ubuntu can get help solving problems we run into. Currently we are using and discussing problems we are running into with Saucy (13.10).

@schtinky, your comments would be better posted in Ubuntu, Linux and OS Chat, but be warned, that your thread will probably be moved to Recurring Discussions, as this topic has been discussed so many times, that it is bound to be reported as recurring.

Thread closed.