JS/CSS/DOM are terrible technologies for producing heavy weight applications. JS is a slow prototyping language, CSS can't even vertically center without hacks, and DOM works fine for documents but is terribly slow for trying to make responsive interactive applications. I don't see this changing until (P)NaCl or some other tech comes along with a nice UI toolkit that's designed for applications and not documents.
Ten years ago, my company had a policy to use PGP and Symantec PGP software installed on all computers. Even the engineers had issues and failed to use it regularly. I remember having to logmein to machine in China to try to figure out why they couldn't read an email with our designs. This is why PGP never took off.
Until the tools take 5 min to setup. And encryption/decryption is as easy as clicking a checkbox in your mail client, PGP will never take off. Things like the public key directory have to handled transparently to the user. It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird. Tight integration with GnuPG + cloud public keys could have made mainstream PGP a reality. -----
In the 3 years I worked in China, I have visited literally hundreds of factories. Not only that, we actually used Foxconn to produce some of our products. Of all the factories I saw, Foxconn by far had the best work conditions. From boiling lead solder to paintiing in enclosed rooms, I saw some appalling conditions pretty much at every factory EXCEPT Foxconn. If you really care about this issue apple is the last place you should look. Don't buy anything made in China.
Simple. In our organization, Sumatrapdf is the only allowed PDF reader. Users could request nitro or foxit but a sysadmin would disable JavaScript on install. Never once had a malicious PDF infect our organization. Little more work to not give users admin rights to their machines. But time and time again, users prove they are too incompent to safely manage their own machines.
Back in the day, all my servers ran NetBSD, but I have gradually migrated to Linux for hardware compatibility. AMD is going to have to write chipset and GRFX drivers for Sony. I hope the licensing terms will let them release them. I would love to run BSD on my AMD laptop. Considering AMD's past Linux support, this is probably just wishful thinking.
"Technically it's not hard to design a phone that can switch off the GSM transmitter, and use VoIP for calls." Android and iOS have had the ability to turn on wifi in airplane mode for years. Don't want to phone use.google services, install CM without the google apps.
During the year I lived in China, I ran into several people whose only means of free and open Internet access was through Tor. While everyone I met only used it for Facebook and Youtube, if there ever is a democratic revolution in Iran or China, Tor will be there to help to make it possible.
NOTE: A bridge is NOT the same as an exit node. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people join the Tor network and are only routing a small amount of internal encrypted tor traffic, so there is no risk of getting into trouble with the authorities.
Yes, Enlightenment is one of the best Desktops for Linux. If it only had the more developer support, it would be my desktop of choice. If just one Linux DE had the polish of a OS X or Win7, I wouldn't care. Until then, I see this fork as just diluting an already over stretched pool of developers.
By consistency I meant disign consistency. I was thinking of annoyances like the app menu bars in Unity.
I've been using Linux since Slackware in 98 and CDE on Solaris before that. I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
A classic example of this is back in '08 I switched to a 16:9 monitor. Well thanks to a 6 year old bug in gnome #86382 this rendered gnome unusable for me.
Unfortunately this was also about the time KDE 4 was released. After giving a dozen other DEs a shot, I joined the the dark side.
To this day that 11 year old gnome bug remains unpatched. In an Apple or MS OS this kind of major usability issue would never make it out if Alpha never mind a "stable" release.
In the early days of Linux when It was for hackers by hackers this was acceptable and expected. They want to add cool features not fix bugs. Fine.
But now there's some serious money in Linux. Between Redhat and Ubuntu How the Linux Desktop can remain in such a sorry state. And I fail to see how another fork will make this situation any better.
Sorry for any grammar errors/typos, this message was written on my phone in topically useless all hands meeting.
So you are saying that cocaine is addictive the same way sex is addictive? You are an idiot. Stop spreading war on drug FUD.
I don't know if I would be classified as an addict, but I used blow on the every weekend and occasionally to get by at work for about 5 years. I moved cities after a nasty breakup and had to go cold turkey on both. I missed the sex more than the coke. The war on drugs is a sham.
Moving from NYC to Shanghai cured my taste for blow. First month here kinda sucked but not s bad as getting my skull open and having lasers pointed at my neocortex.
Genetic engineering and laser is not how we end this problem. End the "war on Drugs," end the "war on Terror". Use the trillions saved to educate people and provide rehab. Our economy would be stronger, schools better, streets safer, and Mexico could get regain control from the vicious drug cartels.
I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.
Finally,a knowledgeable post. Executives won't be bothered to use burner laptops or fresh installs, never-mind bootable CD Linux install. Any IT admin would be fired for trying such a stunt. As someone who's HD crashed while traveling in Vienam and was forced to use a bootable linux CD for a few days, it was a MISERABLE experience. Anytime you do anything in the OS, you have to wait seconds for the system to respond. No businessman traveling to Asia would put up with that.
Fully encrypted laptop and if you're really extremely concerned with security, give them a system "upgrade" after their trip. That's the only reasonable solution to this real threat.
As someone who switched from a browser based OS, WebOS, to iPhone 3GS, and now to Android, I can tell you I will never go back to another laggy HTML based OS. If anything, I’d like to see Android move away from its VM based apps to something like Apple’s native apps. Many apps ran better on my 3GS than they do on my much more powerful S3. Mozilla is going the wrong direction on this one. Native > Java > JavaScript
The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs like V8 run orders of magnitude slower then Native code, while the JS VM itself takes up a massive amount of memory relative to Java VMs.
Whether it's moving to true native Apps like iOS or just better code optimization, I too would like to see Android focus more on responsiveness and battery life than adding new features. FF Mobile based on HTML5 tech is going to be still born.
You're not alone. I'm also stuck with using the terribly slow and buggy open source ATI drivers. Linux needs a stable driver interface. I wish the kernel developers would stop trying to screw over ATI and nVidia with every new kernel update and start thinking of the end-users for a change.
I was the IT Admin in an office that tried to switch from MS Office 2003 to OpenOffice. OpenOffice could only open the simplest Word Documents. Excel macros were completely broken. I don't think a single PP doc converted properly.We never got embed PP videos working. I wasted hundreds of hours in training and helping users convert and reformat their docs. I opened up over a dozen support tickets outlining new issues on the OO bug tracker. To this day, most are still open. Eventually my boss threw in the towel and we bought MS Office 2007.
I also love Linux. All my servers run it, I'm connected to a SSH session as I write this, and have an Android phone by my side. BUT Linux is still a long ways off from being ready for a gaming. There are 3 main issues video drivers, sound subsystem , and the X WIndows Manager.
Every time a new kernel comes out, they break something in the drivers, so I need to download a new proprietary driver. Yet somehow, I can install Vista drivers from 2007 on my new Win7 machine. Then there's the issue of the Nvidia Optimus drivers. Linux needs a stable graphics drivers interface like Windows or OS X.
The Linux sound subsystem situation is complete mess. There are currently 2 low level audio stacks that apps use OSS and ALSA's. http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html OSS offers great sound and low latency, everything else sucks. But the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's crap that's only good for watching videos and listening to music. Real time apps like music production or music games are impossible to do on Linux with the current situation. Using the PA layer only makes the latency situation worse and added another layer for things to go wrong.
The X Windows Manager issue just came up a few weeks ago. How do they expect us to take Linux seriously when you can crash/freeze your desktop, just by launching a game that tries to run Fullscreen? This issue has plagued me for years, and there was even a Slashdot article on it just last week. http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2339223/a-proposal-to-fix-the-full-screen-x11-window-mess
Maybe wayland will solve the X Windows issue and maybe if Linux does start to talk off, the kernel developers stop being so high and mighty and start doing something for the end users instead of trying to screw ATI and Nvidia every release.
Please be more specific. What do you desire from Firefox memory management?
How about making Firefox it feels as responsive as Chrome when you have many tabs open? How about making FF support multiple CPUs? This is 2012 already! How about making Firefox support WebP? There are many improvements that could make Firefox better for developers and end users.
Until Firefox is a better browser than Chrome, Mozilla shouldn't be wasting their resources on a stripped down version of Android that's can't run any of the 700,000 Android Apps and is limited running their FF browser.
Hairyfeet, I think you and I are pragmatists and pretty much on the same page. 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 mostly due to the reason's you listed above. FOSSies and an lack of stable driver interfaces.
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. But lately my issue has been with the graphics subsystem. I have to chose between open source drivers with terrible performance 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. decent or 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
Yes, but not a single machine on their site can run modern games well, because they are all based off of slow integrated Intel graphics.
Microsoft does not require Nvidia or ATI to release their source code, and yet I can install the latest drivers on my 3 year old nvidia laptop. Hell even my 7, SEVEN, year old laptop loads windows Vista drivers. And you know what? That 7 year old laptop runs circles around Linux in 3D games because of the crappy open source drivers I'm stuck with. AMD released the Spec to my cards years ago, but OpenArena is still a slide slow. Screw you FOSSies!
As people mentioned above. The hard line FOSSies that run the kernel refuse to expose a stable graphics API for Nvidia and ATI to write to. These are the people that have prevented Linux from making it on the desktop. I love Linux, but it will never fulfill it's potential without some pragmatists running the ship.
If people WANT Dirt 2, they will NOT settle for Tux Racer..
Yes, because Tux Racer, crashes their desktop when they try to change it to Full Screen. It does it for me on Ubuntu 12.4 with the latest drivers. Linux still has a long ways to catch up to Win7 or OS X.
I would love to see Linux a viable alternative to Windows, but first the Kernel devs need to get their heads out of their asses and put in a proper audio subsystem, like the free and GLP'd OSSv4 that every other UNIX uses. Also X11 had it's day, back in the 70's, but it's time for a modern windows manager that won't freeze or crash when a game or app tries to run full screen. I don't know if Wayland is the answer, but Linux needs something.
I love Linux. All my servers run it, I'm connected to a SSH session as I write this, and have an Android phone by my side. BUT Linux is still a long ways off from being ready for a gaming. There are 2 issues I see. 1) The sound subsystem is in a sorry state 2) The X WIndows Manager needs to be thrown out
It's true that OpenGL support is not bad, but the sound situation is still a disaster. There are currently 2 low level audio stacks that apps use OSS and ALSA's. http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html TL:DR OSSv4 offers great sound and low latency, everything else sucks. But the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's crap that's only good for watching videos and listening to music. Real time apps like music production or music games are impossible to do on Linux with the current situation. The added PulseAdio layer only makes the latency situation worse. Check out the issue the WINE developers had with it. http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-June/095954.html
Now for the positive. Maybe wayland will solve the X Windows issue and maybe if Linux does start to talk off, the kernel developers will get their head out of there ass and merge OSSv4 back into the mainline. A Linux gamer can dream.....
Slashdot Mirror
JS/CSS/DOM are terrible technologies for producing heavy weight applications. JS is a slow prototyping language, CSS can't even vertically center without hacks, and DOM works fine for documents but is terribly slow for trying to make responsive interactive applications. I don't see this changing until (P)NaCl or some other tech comes along with a nice UI toolkit that's designed for applications and not documents.
Ten years ago, my company had a policy to use PGP and Symantec PGP software installed on all computers. Even the engineers had issues and failed to use it regularly. I remember having to logmein to machine in China to try to figure out why they couldn't read an email with our designs. This is why PGP never took off.
Until the tools take 5 min to setup. And encryption/decryption is as easy as clicking a checkbox in your mail client, PGP will never take off. Things like the public key directory have to handled transparently to the user.
It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird. Tight integration with GnuPG + cloud public keys could have made mainstream PGP a reality.
-----
In the 3 years I worked in China, I have visited literally hundreds of factories. Not only that, we actually used Foxconn to produce some of our products. Of all the factories I saw, Foxconn by far had the best work conditions. From boiling lead solder to paintiing in enclosed rooms, I saw some appalling conditions pretty much at every factory EXCEPT Foxconn. If you really care about this issue apple is the last place you should look. Don't buy anything made in China.
Nitro and foxit now display JavaScript. You can disable it in options. Unless you want to use old versions, your best bet is sumantraPDF.
Simple. In our organization, Sumatrapdf is the only allowed PDF reader. Users could request nitro or foxit but a sysadmin would disable JavaScript on install. Never once had a malicious PDF infect our organization. Little more work to not give users admin rights to their machines. But time and time again, users prove they are too incompent to safely manage their own machines.
Back in the day, all my servers ran NetBSD, but I have gradually migrated to Linux for hardware compatibility. AMD is going to have to write chipset and GRFX drivers for Sony. I hope the licensing terms will let them release them. I would love to run BSD on my AMD laptop. Considering AMD's past Linux support, this is probably just wishful thinking.
"Technically it's not hard to design a phone that can switch off the GSM transmitter, and use VoIP for calls." Android and iOS have had the ability to turn on wifi in airplane mode for years. Don't want to phone use.google services, install CM without the google apps.
All this speculation about Intelligenct has me wondering why they didn't test mice to see if there were any noticable changes.
During the year I lived in China, I ran into several people whose only means of free and open Internet access was through Tor. While everyone I met only used it for Facebook and Youtube, if there ever is a democratic revolution in Iran or China, Tor will be there to help to make it possible.
If you want to help people in China, Iran, and possibility Japan, where Tor is being blocked, you can run a obfsproxy bridge to circumvent the block. There is currently a shortage of these bridges,
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for-help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/
so every little bit helps now. The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page
https://cloud.torproject.org/
Or for a general Linux setup, [detailed instructions can be found at:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-debian-instructions.html.en
NOTE: A bridge is NOT the same as an exit node. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people join the Tor network and are only routing a small amount of internal encrypted tor traffic, so there is no risk of getting into trouble with the authorities.
Yes, Enlightenment is one of the best Desktops for Linux. If it only had the more developer support, it would be my desktop of choice. If just one Linux DE had the polish of a OS X or Win7, I wouldn't care. Until then, I see this fork as just diluting an already over stretched pool of developers.
By consistency I meant disign consistency. I was thinking of annoyances like the app menu bars in Unity.
I've been using Linux since Slackware in 98 and CDE on Solaris before that. I hate to admit that for past 4 years, my primary OS has been win7 and OS X to do my much of my work on Linux servers. why? I need a Desktop Envirment with a consistent UI that's free of bugs.
A classic example of this is back in '08 I switched to a 16:9 monitor. Well thanks to a 6 year old bug in gnome #86382 this rendered gnome unusable for me.
Unfortunately this was also about the time KDE 4 was released. After giving a dozen other DEs a shot, I joined the the dark side.
To this day that 11 year old gnome bug remains unpatched. In an Apple or MS OS this kind of major usability issue would never make it out if Alpha never mind a "stable" release.
In the early days of Linux when It was for hackers by hackers this was acceptable and expected. They want to add cool features not fix bugs. Fine.
But now there's some serious money in Linux. Between Redhat and Ubuntu How the Linux Desktop can remain in such a sorry state. And I fail to see how another fork will make this situation any better.
Sorry for any grammar errors/typos, this message was written on my phone in topically useless all hands meeting.
So you are saying that cocaine is addictive the same way sex is addictive? You are an idiot. Stop spreading war on drug FUD.
I don't know if I would be classified as an addict, but I used blow on the every weekend and occasionally to get by at work for about 5 years. I moved cities after a nasty breakup and had to go cold turkey on both. I missed the sex more than the coke. The war on drugs is a sham.
Moving from NYC to Shanghai cured my taste for blow. First month here kinda sucked but not s bad as getting my skull open and having lasers pointed at my neocortex.
Genetic engineering and laser is not how we end this problem. End the "war on Drugs," end the "war on Terror". Use the trillions saved to educate people and provide rehab. Our economy would be stronger, schools better, streets safer, and Mexico could get regain control from the vicious drug cartels.
But does it run Linux?
NO!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/42
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/43
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/58
Mostly stemming from this 10+ year old GNOME bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382
I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.
Finally,a knowledgeable post. Executives won't be bothered to use burner laptops or fresh installs, never-mind bootable CD Linux install. Any IT admin would be fired for trying such a stunt. As someone who's HD crashed while traveling in Vienam and was forced to use a bootable linux CD for a few days, it was a MISERABLE experience. Anytime you do anything in the OS, you have to wait seconds for the system to respond. No businessman traveling to Asia would put up with that.
Fully encrypted laptop and if you're really extremely concerned with security, give them a system "upgrade" after their trip. That's the only reasonable solution to this real threat.
As someone who switched from a browser based OS, WebOS, to iPhone 3GS, and now to Android, I can tell you I will never go back to another laggy HTML based OS. If anything, I’d like to see Android move away from its VM based apps to something like Apple’s native apps. Many apps ran better on my 3GS than they do on my much more powerful S3. Mozilla is going the wrong direction on this one. Native > Java > JavaScript
The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs like V8 run orders of magnitude slower then Native code, while the JS VM itself takes up a massive amount of memory relative to Java VMs.
Whether it's moving to true native Apps like iOS or just better code optimization, I too would like to see Android focus more on responsiveness and battery life than adding new features. FF Mobile based on HTML5 tech is going to be still born.
You're not alone. I'm also stuck with using the terribly slow and buggy open source ATI drivers. Linux needs a stable driver interface. I wish the kernel developers would stop trying to screw over ATI and nVidia with every new kernel update and start thinking of the end-users for a change.
I was the IT Admin in an office that tried to switch from MS Office 2003 to OpenOffice. OpenOffice could only open the simplest Word Documents. Excel macros were completely broken. I don't think a single PP doc converted properly.We never got embed PP videos working. I wasted hundreds of hours in training and helping users convert and reformat their docs. I opened up over a dozen support tickets outlining new issues on the OO bug tracker. To this day, most are still open. Eventually my boss threw in the towel and we bought MS Office 2007.
I also love Linux. All my servers run it, I'm connected to a SSH session as I write this, and have an Android phone by my side. BUT Linux is still a long ways off from being ready for a gaming. There are 3 main issues video drivers, sound subsystem , and the X WIndows Manager.
Every time a new kernel comes out, they break something in the drivers, so I need to download a new proprietary driver. Yet somehow, I can install Vista drivers from 2007 on my new Win7 machine. Then there's the issue of the Nvidia Optimus drivers. Linux needs a stable graphics drivers interface like Windows or OS X.
The Linux sound subsystem situation is complete mess. There are currently 2 low level audio stacks that apps use OSS and ALSA's.
http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
OSS offers great sound and low latency, everything else sucks. But the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's crap that's only good for watching videos and listening to music. Real time apps like music production or music games are impossible to do on Linux with the current situation. Using the PA layer only makes the latency situation worse and added another layer for things to go wrong.
The X Windows Manager issue just came up a few weeks ago. How do they expect us to take Linux seriously when you can crash/freeze your desktop, just by launching a game that tries to run Fullscreen? This issue has plagued me for years, and there was even a Slashdot article on it just last week.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2339223/a-proposal-to-fix-the-full-screen-x11-window-mess
Maybe wayland will solve the X Windows issue and maybe if Linux does start to talk off, the kernel developers stop being so high and mighty and start doing something for the end users instead of trying to screw ATI and Nvidia every release.
Please be more specific. What do you desire from Firefox memory management?
How about making Firefox it feels as responsive as Chrome when you have many tabs open? How about making FF support multiple CPUs? This is 2012 already! How about making Firefox support WebP? There are many improvements that could make Firefox better for developers and end users.
Until Firefox is a better browser than Chrome, Mozilla shouldn't be wasting their resources on a stripped down version of Android that's can't run any of the 700,000 Android Apps and is limited running their FF browser.
Hairyfeet, I think you and I are pragmatists and pretty much on the same page. 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 mostly due to the reason's you listed above. FOSSies and an lack of stable driver interfaces.
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. But lately my issue has been with the graphics subsystem. I have to chose between open source drivers with terrible performance 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. decent or 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
Yes, but not a single machine on their site can run modern games well, because they are all based off of slow integrated Intel graphics.
Microsoft does not require Nvidia or ATI to release their source code, and yet I can install the latest drivers on my 3 year old nvidia laptop. Hell even my 7, SEVEN, year old laptop loads windows Vista drivers. And you know what? That 7 year old laptop runs circles around Linux in 3D games because of the crappy open source drivers I'm stuck with. AMD released the Spec to my cards years ago, but OpenArena is still a slide slow. Screw you FOSSies!
As people mentioned above. The hard line FOSSies that run the kernel refuse to expose a stable graphics API for Nvidia and ATI to write to. These are the people that have prevented Linux from making it on the desktop. I love Linux, but it will never fulfill it's potential without some pragmatists running the ship.
If people WANT Dirt 2, they will NOT settle for Tux Racer. .
Yes, because Tux Racer, crashes their desktop when they try to change it to Full Screen. It does it for me on Ubuntu 12.4 with the latest drivers. Linux still has a long ways to catch up to Win7 or OS X.
Exactly!,As a Linux gamer, managing Linux servers, sitting next to an Android phone, I couldn't agree more. The audio stack is a complete mess. Not to mention the X Windows situation.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2339223/a-proposal-to-fix-the-full-screen-x11-window-mess
http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
I would love to see Linux a viable alternative to Windows, but first the Kernel devs need to get their heads out of their asses and put in a proper audio subsystem, like the free and GLP'd OSSv4 that every other UNIX uses. Also X11 had it's day, back in the 70's, but it's time for a modern windows manager that won't freeze or crash when a game or app tries to run full screen. I don't know if Wayland is the answer, but Linux needs something.
I love Linux. All my servers run it, I'm connected to a SSH session as I write this, and have an Android phone by my side. BUT Linux is still a long ways off from being ready for a gaming. There are 2 issues I see. 1) The sound subsystem is in a sorry state 2) The X WIndows Manager needs to be thrown out
It's true that OpenGL support is not bad, but the sound situation is still a disaster. There are currently 2 low level audio stacks that apps use OSS and ALSA's.
http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
TL:DR OSSv4 offers great sound and low latency, everything else sucks. But the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's crap that's only good for watching videos and listening to music. Real time apps like music production or music games are impossible to do on Linux with the current situation.
The added PulseAdio layer only makes the latency situation worse. Check out the issue the WINE developers had with it.
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-June/095954.html
The X Windows Manager issue just came up last week. How do they expect us to take Linux seriously when you can crash/freeze your desktop, just by launching a game that tries to run Fullscreen? This issue has plagued me for years, and there was even a Slashdot article on it just last week.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2339223/a-proposal-to-fix-the-full-screen-x11-window-mess
Now for the positive. Maybe wayland will solve the X Windows issue and maybe if Linux does start to talk off, the kernel developers will get their head out of there ass and merge OSSv4 back into the mainline. A Linux gamer can dream.....