Comment by Animats
16 hours ago
If only.
Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse.
- Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box.
- Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about workarounds.
- Can't use more than half of memory before the OOM killer kicks in. The default rule of the OOM killer daemon is that if a process has more than half of memory for a minute, kill it. Rust builds get killed. Firefox gets killed. This is a huge pain on the 8GB machine. Yes, I could edit some config file and stop this, but that tends to interfere with config file updates from Ubuntu and from the GUI tools.
None of these problems existed a year ago.
The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!
These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.
But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.
What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).
They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).