Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

I have to say I&#x27;m pretty satisfied, even more than I was before when I was using Windows.<p>Everything seems easier to install and I don&#x27;t need gigabytes of space to build my environment. (Visual Studio, I&#x27;m talking about you!) Working with Git and gcc was as easy as it can get right at the beginning of my switch. Back in Windows days, I was primarily using Dev-C++ and a GitHub desktop client (which I really don&#x27;t like btw). Now, I&#x27;m just using Atom with a couple of third party extensions.<p>Although I have to say that I kind of miss the easiness of building desktop applications using Visual Studio. I haven&#x27;t found a single IDE that allows me to create forms with just a few clicks like Visual Studio does. I stopped paying attention to GUIs for my programs primarily because of that.

Lack of good hardware&#x2F;laptops.<p>I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible.<p>I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 &#x2F; 16GB &#x2F; highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

I love working on Linux, running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Lenovo S540 (lightweight, 16gb ram,i7,ssd). The biggest pain point for me are mainly using tools that other parts of the business want to use like:<p>Slack -&gt; No Linux support, Zoom (video conferencing) -&gt; Early beta support, 1Password -&gt; I use last pass instead.<p>Macs have really dominated some areas of the tech scene especially in the non engineering sections of the business, thus collaboration tools and such seem to be Mac orientated or Mac only.<p>In every other respect I&#x27;m far more comfortable and productive on Linux.

What I think really lack in Linux is:<p>- Good hardware that is nice to use (look beautiful) and works well with Linux.<p>- A great IDE that doesn&#x27;t look like shit right out of the box. I know many can be configured and tampered with, but I simply do not enjoy that enough to go through the pain.<p>Otherwise, my biggest pain and why I definately go back to Windows is that I can&#x27;t play my games on my machine. Many games still only work on Windows or works much better on Windows due to bad graphics drivers.<p>I really like Linux, I always use it as a server or to host stuff. But in the later years of my life I simply get too frustrated (often with small stuff) to keep using Linux as my main desktop operating system.<p>At work I use a macbook because it has nice to use hardware with desktop software that is more polished than any linux distro but still keep the unix feel.

The debugging workflow is a mess.<p>The visual studio debugger is great. gdb and various front ends for it are all various levels of not so great. There is a better featureset in gdb for the very skilled users to do tricky things, but it&#x27;s still a bear to learn and get conformable with.<p>Putting the .build-id directory on the network and getting subsitute-path pointing at the right location to debug a continuous integration build from 16 months ago? The hardest part is happening to learn those features exist, and the legwork to make it quick and easy to use is PITA too.<p>Some developers... they just want to open the visual studio debugger and smash &quot;step over&#x2F;into&quot; until their code works. This isn&#x27;t the best approach to development and they should probably do a bit more &quot;sit and think about the code&quot; in their development. But professionally I have to support this workflow, it&#x27;s much smoother in VS than when targeting linux. And it&#x27;s not an excuse for bad debugging tools either, sometimes you do need to spend a day in the debugger to solve things.

Development tools on linux continue to be great. A visual studio quality ide would be nice, but realistically I&#x27;d continue to use vim and the terminal.<p>What really irks me is the desktop environment situation. I haven&#x27;t had a linux install in a couple of years and it seems that all of the desktops have gotten worse in the last few years. Unity continues to add on terrible features and follows the similar ui antipatterns and gnome 3 has. KDE4&#x2F;5 are decent but very heavy. Xfce and lxde are great but you occasionally run into some weirdly missing features (no font manager -- why?) that make you pull in gnome&#x2F;kde and question why you picked a lightweight desktop in the first place. I&#x27;m not sold on the tiling window managers, ya the tiling is nice, but they look terrible, require way too much config, and sometimes I just want to use the mouse damn it.

I prefer developing with Linux. There are generally more tools available than Mac and Windows. Some of the ones I use are xmonad, tmux, vim (nvim), ag, ycm, clang, gcc, gdb, cmake, make, ninja, perf, valgrind, strace, etc... Compared to Windows, even just having a decent shell with coreutils is huge. If there is something that a tool doesn&#x27;t already do, I can generally combine other ones to do it. For example, <i>sed</i> can handle basic refactoring. It&#x27;s also generally easier to install new tools through the package manager (I use Funtoo).<p>I know a lot of people tend to prefer cleanly polished IDEs, and I do use eclipse and eclim for java development, but normally IDEs tend to get in the way for me. As for the specific questions, building definitely isn&#x27;t an issue and there are plenty of cross-platform build systems when it&#x27;s needed. Continuous integration is usually handled separately on a build server (hudson, jenkins, team city, etc...). In fact, a lot of the collaborative tools for things like continuous integration and issue tracking are mostly usable via web applications (bugzilla, jira, etc...).<p>My biggest frustration is when tools that aren&#x27;t usable on Linux get standardized on. Outlook is the easiest example, but for anything where it&#x27;s absolutely necessary it&#x27;s extremely easy to run a virtual machine with kvm and libvirt.

I&#x27;m mainly developing PHP applications (Magento, Symfony) And I found Linux much easier. Back in 2000 (ish), when I switched to Linux the biggest confusion was the different format of configuration files and scripts. In Windows, I get used to .ini files and .bat batch scripts. When I switched to Linux (well, it was more like a slow process) I was confused about this. Fetchmail config format, the apt sources tree format (which seemed to be an .ini) and all the config files in &#x2F;etc was all different. I finally managed to get my emails fetched and sorted to different folders based on topic and sender, using Fetchmail, then I was happy to read them in Mutt. The UI looked terrible (well, it was text after all) so I tried Balsa and used it for years, then Sylpheed, Claws Mail, still backed with Fetchmail. I can imagine that the different GUI libraries would confusing others, but I always managed to sort my installation to use only one. If I had KDE, I installed only KDE or at least Qt programs. If I had GNOME, then so that it. Nowadays, I use AwesomeWM mainly with 3 or 4 software only, on 3 screens: the first screen is the terminal with tmux, the second (middle) is the browser, Thunderbird, the third is Sublime, so I don&#x27;t get nervous about installing different libraries.<p>With all of these, Linux felt better than Windows and it&#x27;s openness and community support encouraged me to discover more and more. Back in those days I really tried every programming language I could: Java, Ruby, C, C++ and I had no confusion learning and using these on Linux. I was only confused when sometimes I had to switch back to Windows. The lack of documentation, missing libraries, unpredictable crashes on software upgrades (which came from different sources, absolutely without automation, manually running setup.exe&#x27;s) and different UX, unsought taskbar icons really annoyed me. Now if I sit in front of a Windows PC, I feel it&#x27;s just an useless gadget.<p>Linux was the cause I became a software developer.<p>I have only experience with one IDE, which was Netbeans. I used it mostly for developing Rails applications and I found this was the only IDE which does not get in my way. I just can&#x27;t get used to PHPStorm today and I found Eclipse too slow, so I&#x27;m using Sublime as my primary editor now. Before it was Geany, gEdit or just Vim. I was never able to learn Emacs, but probably it&#x27;s my fault :)

I did the switch from OS X to linux about six months ago and I am pretty much using the same tools for front and back end web stuff. Then there is a huge plus for all the free new knowledge you get from using linux as a &quot;power user&quot;, so if anything, the switch made it easier to deal with all kinds of things.<p>I suppose the question was more about low level development than in my case, where tools depend more on the system it&#x27;s run on, but for me it has only been positive.

Don&#x27;t really have any frustrations to be honest. All my personal projects and stuff I do for fun (both mostly in ruby) I do on ubuntu 14.04. Use VIM, a lot of plugins and some custom CLI tools. Have never tried developing on Mac, though so maybe I just don&#x27;t know what am I missing (windows isn&#x27;t even a thing for ruby devs. And for good reason).<p>Only thing I&#x27;m kind of missing&#x2F;sad about is lack of games on Ubuntu. Upside, though, I won&#x27;t get lost in a &quot;quick 20 minute brawl to clear my brain&quot; that never lasts 20 minutes....<p>For sake of honesty, I do my daily job on windows. Stuff I use there is awesome. VS is nice, Windows domain works well enough and lync, outlook, fiddler, slack etc. are all nice. If, for w&#x2F;e weird reason, I had to do my daily job on linux, I would be sad.<p>But most likely, I&#x27;m not frustrated with linux because I chose to use it for fun etc. If, in any point in my life, I would have been forced to use linux, I&#x27;d probably find a lot of problems with it.<p>&#x2F;&#x2F;EDIT And uhm. I&#x27;ve never really had any problems with linux and hardware. For personal stuff I still run an old thinkpad t420s which hardware gets along with linux a lot nicer than it did with windows 8. Touchpad acts a bit better, touchpads 3rd button actually provides some nice functionality and most importantly, gsm card worked out of the box (something I never got up and running on windows 8). Once more, for sake of honesty, it shipped with windows 7 so maybe the drivers provided for the gsm card aren&#x27;t compatible with win8. who knows.<p>Never had any problems with my desktops running Linux nor my previous thinkpad either.

No gripes since Linux is by far the best development environment for most technologies. I am running Ubuntu desktop(Gnome) vms inside my macbook pro and macbook mini but going to install Ubuntu on metal itself. I like apple hardware not much their OS(especially for development). Use quite a handful of Ubuntu server edition without GUI for development and testing too. CLI can be as ease for development but with right tools and config.<p>Tools: vim&#x2F;nano, curl, grep, rsync, find, mitmproxy, autossh, tar, syslog, seige, top, wget, netstat, lsof, sed, df, du, ifconfig, iptables -L, ping, dig, traceroute, strace, screen, tcpdump, telnet, history<p>Dev setup config: pathogen.vim, ssh custom host config, ssh keyless entry, ssh tunnel, .bashrc&#x2F;.bash_profile, alias, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;init.d&#x2F;, .gitignore, vurtualenv(python), vagrant, docker, bash script for automation, supervisord<p>As a desktop user - I am a big fan of Gnome but just don&#x27;t see GTK going anywhere. My bias towards Gnome is due to it&#x27;s design principle. Wish for a Qt Webkit like layer on top of Gnome for native application development. For some reason KDE seems cluttered to me but to their advantage they have Qt.

Personally, I can&#x27;t find a text editor I like. The closest I came was acme from plan9, shown here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M</a>.<p>I would love to see an editor which clones acme, but follows a few of the modern ui conventions.

* Having to make efforts to keep the system working smoothly after regular system updates<p>* Hardware vendors not showing much love

1. Fragmentation. Getting something as simple as a bluetooth speaker is a challenge depending on which distro you are on.<p>2. Package management. Again, a package may be available under vastly different names or config depending on what your distro overlords decided<p>3. Second class Citizens. Games and software that I want to use is very often never available for Linux. Companies that used to develop are dropping it (ynab). Indie game devs are picking it up, but companies like GitHub are still to even commit to a linux client. Google Drive for Linux was announced more than 3 years back to be under development, but is still unreleased.<p>I still love Linux, and refuse to switch to Mac (despite almost everyone around me doing so). This is mostly because I love how easy and straightforward it is to develop in Linux.

From my experience several years ago:<p>Distributing binaries for Linux was complex. libstdc++ compatibility across distros or different versions within a single distro wasn&#x27;t great.<p>(Compared to Solaris, it seemed like libraries were always backwards compatible. Running old binaries always just worked.)

Using xubuntu, switched from crunchbang a year ago after a drive failure.<p>It has some weird problems like forcing gnome-keyring-daemon to run which breaks ssh-agent. The only fix I have found to to create a wrapper script that always disables its ssh component.<p>I sometimes get focus issues requiring me to tab through the windows to refocus the correct one.<p>I dislike the practice of littering my home directory with dotfiles. I prefer them to be put in .config. I have 10 directories in $HOME and another 85 dotfiles&#x2F;dirs there at the moment.<p>New ubuntu versions start you out with capitalized folder names which is annoying.<p>NetworkManager often bugs out. displaying in a tiny one line box you have to scroll through or disabling wifi when i attempt to start a VPN connection. I cant be bothered to learn wicd though

I develop applications in C++ on Linux and Windows. On windows I can enable heap tracing and have leak detection included in my test cases (Google mock&#x2F;test). On Linux I need to run my app under Valgrind for leak checking as a separate process.

Unstable virtual box networking on my arch machine that requires occasional suspend and resume of a vm. No good looking and stable gui client for mysql.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing dev with linux for most of my carrier and I honestly don&#x27;t know why would someone use another os. Windows dev looks very weird to me with trillions of popups, little windows and checkboxes. Mac looks like it&#x27;s trying to replicate linux tooling and while it&#x27;s pretty good you still need to jump some hoops

My biggest frustration with Linux development is how poor it has made windows development env look in comparison. Every time I have to fire up a windows VM to do some work for some of our clients that still use MS tech I hate it. Before using Linux as a dev environment I honestly thought windows and the associated dev tools were really good. Now using anything else seems like a huge chore.

Anything sysadminy like building third party libraries or configuring tools and getting them to work. I just want to write code, not fight with installation and configuration. Editors and dev tools are all fine after they are installed and configured.

Thinkpad running fedora, a dream come true.

Dealing with lazy people asking stupid questions and making everyone loose time and resisting the urge to pick on them.