I'm an IT pro,so I run Linux servers for my job, but I'm also a gamer, and dual booting is a pain in the ass. Trust me, I would love to make Linux my primary desktop, and every few months when I have some time, I give it another serious shot. But I always end up back to dual booting.
Years ago, I was happy with OSS audio system, but that is controlled by one company so the FOSSies have done their best to replace it with a far inferior ALSA. This caused me so many headaches back in the day and still bothers me with its high latency. But lately my issue has been with the graphics subsystem. For my X1900 I have to chose between open source drivers with terrible performance and bugs or proprietary drivers that don't work with modern kernels.
Finally, X windows and gaming don't seem to mix. Here is a case, where I think Linux needs to change the interface. I think Wayland may be the answer. If not, at least X11 with decent full screen support would be a godsend.
So from my perspective for Linux to make it, it would have to use :
1) OSSv4 Audio Subsystem (FOSSies it's GPL'd already get over it)
2) Stable graphics driver interface ( or FOSSies stop breaking ATI and Nvidia's drivers )
3) Modern Display Server - maybe Wayland or throwing out all the kruff in X11 and fixing Full Screen graphics in games
1) You can actually install it and use it.
Personally I had some difficulties with some missing card-features, but other then that it worked fine.
2) Both NVidia/ATI and Foss is at fault: one should go open source, the other should should do as you say :)
3) X11 is deemed beyond fixable. But you can run Wayland today. (It has X11 server-for-wayland.)
The reason I didn't try yet is because it won't run my WM. (Well as far as I know anyway.)
All good points. You're right, MS did remov hardware accelerated sound support in Vista, but that doesn't exuse Other OS's for lacking it. Back when I was composing and Mixing the "upgrade" to ALSA caused me a major headache, eventually leading me to hacking it out. Where windows has always just worked.
For the video drivers, I'm running Visa driver under Win7. The kernel dev's could take a cue from MS on this one. By breaking the proprietary drivers, they've ensured I use windows for gaming on this setup.
1)No need for that, ALSA works fine now. Windows sound system is not better than ALSA in latency terms and it works just right, they(MS) even removed some hardware acceleration for sound as they considered it was not worth the complexity pain.
2) This will come naturally if Linux becomes an option for gamers and 3D professionals(like architects and engineers). It is not that FOSS are breaking the drivers, but that Windows graphic drivers budget are tens or hundreds of times bigger than Linux.(e.g. nouveau drivers are made with less than 2 full time workers who have to reverse engineer everything, and Nvidia creates drivers with just their special customers[big studio animators] in mind).
3)This is basically dependent on 2. It is way easier to code a display server when your drivers work. They could only use open source drivers for this through, as companies like Nvidia had not collaborated with the Wayland people.
Do you write code that uses ALSA? I do. It is not "fine". It is maddening. By comparison, Core Audio is a dream. Windows is a bit of a zoo but all the pieces are there.
Replacing X isn't so dependent on drivers as you might think. A big part of what makes X so horrible is unrelated to how X interacts with the graphics card -- most of the nasty bits actually sit between the X server and the client application. The protocol was invented in 1987 and was designed around assumptions that just simply aren't true any more. These days, you want to shuffle pixmaps around or get a GL/DirectX context, and you want to do it locally. X is optimized for sending pixel operations over a network.
Let me make an analogy for X: imagine designing a protocol for making phone calls over an email system. That's what doing anything modern on X feels like, most of the time.
Agree on the ALSA comment. I wouldn't wish ALSA development tasks on my worst enemy. Developers these days should target PulseAudio, and tell users without it to get lost. The Pulse API is a poorly thought-out mess, but it at least behaves fairly consistently. ALSA's behavior is a complete crapshoot.
Strongly disagree on the ALSA comment. PulseAudio is the primary cause for most latency in Linux audio. I've written sound playback and recording code in ALSA and achieved low latency without difficulty. I wouldn't wish PulseAudio on my worst enemy.
I'm going to have to agree with this. I was the one complaining about ALSA to begin with, but PulseAudio is just another layer of indirection around ALSA. In other words, ALSA sucks, but it's more widespread than OSS, and it at least gives you some control.
What I found works for me is having Windows as primary installation and running Linux in the VM. Then I can just alt-tab between these two OSs as I desire.
Agreed. I take it a bit further: I have a dual-boot Windows/FreeBSD box, and use VirtualBox to run one OS inside the other, depending on what I'm doing (using a raw VMDK[1]). For me, this is helpful because using Windows as the primary gives me access to games (via working graphics drivers), and FreeBSD as a primary gives me access to a desktop environment that doesn't drive me crazy to work in (XMonad+xterm).
Years ago, I was happy with OSS audio system, but that is controlled by one company so the FOSSies have done their best to replace it with a far inferior ALSA. This caused me so many headaches back in the day and still bothers me with its high latency. But lately my issue has been with the graphics subsystem. For my X1900 I have to chose between open source drivers with terrible performance and bugs or proprietary drivers that don't work with modern kernels.
Finally, X windows and gaming don't seem to mix. Here is a case, where I think Linux needs to change the interface. I think Wayland may be the answer. If not, at least X11 with decent full screen support would be a godsend.
So from my perspective for Linux to make it, it would have to use :
1) OSSv4 Audio Subsystem (FOSSies it's GPL'd already get over it)
2) Stable graphics driver interface ( or FOSSies stop breaking ATI and Nvidia's drivers )
3) Modern Display Server - maybe Wayland or throwing out all the kruff in X11 and fixing Full Screen graphics in games