Heck - - - configuring the driver - - - you mean getting that thing to 'work'!

Nvidia has cost me many an hour of work due to their 'my way' stuff!!! And I'm not even running CUDA - - - only multi-gpu and more than 3 monitors!!!

It worked well for over 5 years on an older driver too!

I Agree on this. Whats wrong with good old static linking?

Takes at least less space than a whole WM.

Another thing I have problems with is the deteriorating support/testing of applications on a remote machine running with X-forwarding. This has been going on for many years.

For example a remote Firefox 53.x would hang when entering the Google search result page. Shuffling data at about 500 Mbit/s until killing it. The 45 version worked OK in this regard.

The remote gnuplot 5.0 program will on a slow line sometimes give:
gnuplot> plot sin(x)

Warning: slow font initialization qt_processTermEvent received a GE_fontprops event. This should not have happened

And then all the texts are missing/not displayed correctly, while the 4.6 version never had this problem

...the list goes on.

I currently own several computers. A few use MX Linux and the others use the GeckoLinux fork of OpenSuSE.

The problems I have are as follows:

Wireless printing has been "iffy" with both of these distros. I have an Epson WorkForce 845 and I have the appropriate driver (.DEB and .RPM) installed approprately. However the wireless printing does not work with any consistency.

I should like to "second" the person who mentioned that video editing is not up to par; rather, it is, for the most part, back in the "stone age."

And now --- here is a REALLY unique problem that I have:

I obtain a lot of Blu-ray videos of classic motion pictures and I ALWAYS back them up and install the backups on several external hard drives. I watch the movies from those hard drives, thereby protecting the Blu-rays from damage.

Here is what I do: I first backup the movie with MakeMKV and then I adjust and compress the file size with HandBrake. HandBrake makes the file size much smaller so as to allow more movies to be stored on the hard drive(s) yet it effects this with absolutely no loss of video or audio quality,

Both of these programs work with all video formats and ALMOST all audio formats.

More and more some of these classic movie Blu-rays, especially from Criterion and Kino Lorber, contain an LPCM main sound track and here is my problem. With the GeckoLinux distribution I can PLAY the resultant MakeMKV copy and hear the LPCM track - BUT when I try to compress that file with HandBrake, the LPCM track is not recognized at all by HandBrake.

My "workaround" is to just compress those files with HandBrake used on a computer with the MX Linux distro installed.

This works out quite well but it is a "clunky" solution.

No one seems to know why HandBrake, on a GeckoLinux OS computer (and I have two such), will not recognize the LPCM track even though the computer itself plays that track just fine.

This obviously is puzzling to me and I wonder if anyone has an answer to it ...

Thanks for reading all of this.

Two things: First, I'd like a detailed guide to compiling packages from source and finding dependencies. Second- what is a swrast driver, and why does Steam have trouble with it but no other application?

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/
http://trac.clfs.org/

1 members found this post helpful.

There's a general lack of good documentation at various levels especially in audio applications, which happen to interest me. There must always be an "entry level" tutorial for newbies trying to understand just what it's all about. Less jargon, more common sense. Simple explanations of the basic concepts. Another problem is trying to figure out if an application is still being actively developed or has just been abandoned. Even such a simple thing as a date on the home page to tell when the developer(s) were last doing something would help.

RK

The switch of video from Xorg to Wayland is a problem at present.
Wayland hangs the mouse, sometimes for 30 seconds or more, and you can't get the pointer to move, nor can you tell if your click on the button was received or it hung before the click.
I have 3 PCs and a laptop and I have been forced to disable wayland in order to make the machines usable.

I do understand the security problems with Xorg and applaud the work to improve security but for me Wayland was put in as the default video manager way too soon. I am using Fedora, updated to latest.

I would call that a Fedora issue, not a Linux one. Or, rather, a Fedora "feature" -- it's supposed to be a bleeding-edge testing ground for Red Hat so it would be an issue if it didn't use Wayland as soon as it could.
As a Debian Sid user I've tried Wayland and my issues are that XFCE hasn't been ported to it an that NVIDIA are not supporting it yet.

would have to say porting OpenGL "GLew" to the built in opengl in QT5

I realize that fedora is bleeding edge.
However, the problems that still exist in Wayland do still exist.

My comment really had two purposes:
1: Wayland is supposed to be an answer to the security problems of Xorg, but is not ready for prime time. It still has a considerable number of hardware issues, both with simple devices such as mice, and with video cards and drivers. AND, it soon will be the manager of choice for all distros.
2: Fedora's choice to make that the default video manager with all the remaining bugs that are still being swatted seems to be a little (a lot) early to me. (Although maybe that choice will drive the developers to focus harder on the remaining issues, especially since it exposes more users and hardware to the still existing bugs.)

Any other software packages that might be released as prime time when they are actually still alpha or maybe beta quality would have users screaming.

The problems exists because it's in Alpha.
1: Yes, of course, nobody is denying this and that is why it is still in a testing phase.
2: Fedora is bleeding-edge -- what part of that don't you understand? As I stated if they did not use Wayland that would be the issue.
Fedora (like Sid that I use) is not supposed to "just work" and is supposed to have issues -- that's exactly how the issues are found and corrected! Without Fedora and the like being there nobody would be testing Wayland right now.
If Wayland makes it into Red Hat, Debian Stable, Slackware Current or another stable distribution then it should be finished and I see no indication that it will be released before it is.
And, once again, this is a Fedora "problem" and nothing to do with Linux as a whole.

Microphone not working in Skype Web and new Skype Desktop (based on web).
Mpeg4 not working in VLC.
Kernel for reading internal broadband modem not working properly (Sierra wireless).

on MINT 18.2

Major problems that I've found:

- missing independent scaling on multiple monitors on HiDPI notebooks (solved for now using Mate DE, which ignores HiDPI)
- Nvidia drivers: found several tutorials, but everyone ends up in a not working graphical session at reboot (so staying with Nouveau drivers)
- Skype Web and new Skype Desktop more unstable than Skype 7 running on a parallel Windows 7 on VirtualBox (would like to run Skype 7 on Wine/PlayOnLinux, but didn't work)

My Linux: CentOS 7 + MATE

If I read correctly no one has named the problem explicitly, but as a Devuan user I'd say a very big problem facing the distros in 2017 is that systemd dependencies have become a quite a hydra.

Yes, systemd itself is a political problem, however in this context I'm talking purely of the technical aspects. First, there is the increasing difficulty it takes to roll back a new systemd dependency from a package. Second, there is the increasing frequency with which these dependencies are encountered.