Kubuntu & proprietary driver management
Quoting: Kubuntu & proprietary driver management —
So, here we are. This little incident illustrates the general "approach" in the Linux desktop world quite well. Lots of partial solutions, all thrown together, without cohesion, without cross-checks, without any real attention to a higher goal: user experience. For twenty years that I've been using the Linux desktop, this has been an issue, bigger or smaller, but always present, always there. Someone makes a utility that install drivers. Great. It does a bunch of task-specific checks. But the problem is, the tool has no awareness of the system, no integration. Every nerdy tool does its own thing, and not always as well as it could or should. The dev-centric approach only works for the tiny, thin stratus of ultra-enthusiastic hardcore users, and no one else really.
My first failure was in relying on system output - clearly wrong as the utility is there, just the search could not find it, which is a major problem, but hey. My second failure was relying on the quality of provided utilities to satisfy the requirements without, let's face it, totally wrecking the system. My third failure was not anticipating the convoluted approach to a simple, cardinal need: third-party driver management. Hey, if anything, this is probably the most important element of the desktop usage. Drivers. Hardware. People don't buy expensive kit to have it run at 1/5th its capacity because of ideology. That maybe works in isolation, in idyllic scenarios, not in the real, cruel, pragmatic world. Anyway, you have everything now. My admission of error, a tutorial on how to get past the issues, and a wealth of functional bug statements that could be translated into making the desktop experience significantly nicer, friendlier. We can only hope. See you around.