Why is Matlab horrible on Linux?

Before anything, I do need to highlight that this is my personal experience and it may not be the average result for ordinary Linux users, but I need to confess that working with Matlab on Linux is a nuisance for me... I came across several bugs and incompatibilities I did not have when I worked on Windows.

Maybe my machine has some points that have made it even worse:

• It has a 4K screen, which is well-known for having problems. . .
• It has NVidia graphic cards, it has many Low-Level Graphics Issues.
• Maybe my distro (Majaro) can have some fault.

I can use other scientific languages (`R`, Julia, Python) without any problem... Only Matlab present problems in the installation and usage. I just would like to understand why. Is it my personal computer the guilt, or is it common having so many problems with Matlab on Linux? If it is common, do we have some perspective that things will be better in the future?

Thanks in advance.

[Rubem Pacelli]

@DGM This not answer my question at all. My question is "why", and if we have some perspective that things will be better in the future.

[DGM]

That's why I didn't post it as an answer. Either way, consider it taken care of.

For what it's worth, that was my perspective on the future of these issues..

[Michal]

Try to use officialy supported Linux distribution at first! Matlab is big beast, so the comparison with R, Julia, Python is not fair.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Why? Because Linux is horribly fragmented with competing incompatible implementations and no central institution that is trying to make all of the versions compatible.

There is, for example, no current POSIX certified Linux. The only one that I can recall at the moment is that IBM certified an AIX... 6 years ago.

Do you know which products are recently POSIX certified, which vendors care about standardization? Answer: Apple MacOS is the only operating system being certified these days.

There are practical limits on the number of different Linux versions that MATLAB can be targeted for.

[Walter Roberson]

"If it is common, do we have some perspective that things will be better in the future?"

No, you should expect the situation to get worse.

There are numerous countries in the world where major political parties are crafting policies of blaming some convenient minority as being the key reason for the perceived or claimed decline in their society. Countries where politicians are actively attempting to attack minorities based on factors such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, political party, profession — even hobbies.

You should expect that some of those politicians are going to start to attack various authors of contributions to Linux as being insufficiently loyal to the ideals of the politicians, and thus that Linux contributions from those authors are going to be characterized as being potential "back doors" or "time bombs". You should expect that there will be pressure to produce "purified" versions of Linux based on contributions only from vetted authors. This should be expected to fragment Linux even more.

Linux is licensed under GNU General Public License, which prohibits imposing any restrictions on distributions, so if anyone objected to their Linux contributions being used in such a Linux fork, then their available reaction would be to withdraw from future personal contributions -- anyone who had an existing copy of their software would be able to continue to use it and continue to modify it and redistribute it. Therefore, even if a number of key Linux contributors, even if Linus himself objected to Linux being politicized in such a way, they would be powerless to stop it. The only rights that the Linux contributors retain, are the rights to continue to be known as the author of the software, and the right to sue anyone who used the software in an offering without making the source code available (Free Software Foundation pursued a case along those lines last year.)

Therefore, even if major Linux companies and individual contributors got together to form some kind of standardization committee (to try to control fragmentation and ensure compatibility) and that committee that was explicitly minority-friendly, they cannot prevent this kind of witch-hunt revision of Linux.

Things are going to get worse with Linux.

[Michal]

Just to be precise, there are many different Linux distributions, and certification with POSIX is expensive, there are only two officially certified Linux distributions: Inspur K-UX and Huawei's EulerOS. While most Linux distros aren't certified, many of the major ones adhere to POSIX in practice to varying degrees, but mostly very high degrees!!!

Do not be paranoid ... Things are going pretty well with Linux.

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index2.html

Huawei's EulerOS 2.0 registered 8-Sep-2016 is Linux based

K-UX is no longer on the main list, but is listed at https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3596.htm Registered on: 14-Dec-2012 Valid until: 14-Dec-2018

At least some of Huawei products are banned for use in some governments, due to concerns about potential espionage by a government -- of the same company that K-UX is from.

Things are not going well with Linux. It has already fragmented too far to be rescued -- at least not without some significant distributions going out of business.

[Rubem Pacelli]

@Walter Roberson bad news for Linux users so :( I cannot stand Windows anymore... Linux has integrated so well in my workflow, the unique drawback is Matlab...