Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today
An anonymous coward sends in this link to a list of the top ten things wrong with Linux today. He's noting things that are "wrong" not with Linux per se, but with a user's experience with Linux; most of his points actually have to do with KDE/X. The KDE 3 bug he's talking about is a user-interface change in konqueror: form elements can be changed by mousing-over them and turning the scroll wheel, which is very bad. Hopefully the KDE guys will roll this change back to the previous behavior.
1. No 'best' browser.
Gosh, how about the nice thing we call choice?
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
Damn, if only this was adjustable, oh yeah...
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
It can't get much easier that printconf (for Red Hat users).
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Yeah, reading a book or taking a class (or searching online) is so hard. When will people realize that a computer it a techinical thing? You have to be willing to do a little homework, even with a mac (if you've never used one).
5. Cleaner redraws.
Ok, sure.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Ever tried ctrl-alt-escape in KDE?
7. Easy way of sharing files.
You like in windows, where I find places like Doctors offices "sharing" all their patient records on the internet? Check out programs like share sniffer if you want to find them too.
8. Sound support.
Ok, if you want professional audio production cards, you got me, but for most other sound cards there just isn't a problem.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Well... pico does this (ctrl-j)
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Actually, it couldn't be easier to change resolutions on the fly. Hold ctrl and alt, then hit - or + on the numberic key pad. This cycles you through all your selected resolutions, on the fly. Just make sure you selected all the ones you want when you setup x (Red Hat users use Xconfigurator to select resolutions).
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
Don't you just hate it when a Windows user, who thinks they know about software better than the rest of the world, starts blabbering about Linux (in this case GNU applications and other free/open source software). Let's just go through this list, for example:
1. No 'best' browser.
Right. So we should only have one browser. Diversity bad, Microsoft good. Baaah. He then proceeds to explain how Mozilla isn't "integrated" (whatever that means) with any "desktop environment" and how hard it was to print. Well, here's a clue, mister: in the literate technical world, it is considered poor design and poor engineering to "fuse" software the way Microsoft does; while there may be no Mozilla analog of a KParts API, the well-documented programming interface it provides allows for third-party applications to use the rendering engine in a straightforward manner, without having to run a friggin browser in the kernel at all times. Finally, am I really the only person who simply used the default Mozilla printer settings, in order to print successfully?
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
Oooh. Oooh. My favorite. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE STARTUP BEHAVIOR, CHANGE THE GODDAMN INIT SCRIPT! If you are unwilling to learn the shell scripting language, and understand how the initialization scripts work, then you have no business messing with Unix, and anything more complicated than a microwave oven, for that matter.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
Well, okay -- I installed Mandrake with CUPS, ran the printer configuration tool (printerdrake), and had a working printer setup two minutes later. Exactly what part of this needs to be improved? In fact, I think that the combination of LaTeX/dvips/dvilj/ghostscript and either lpd or CUPS is one of the best printer setups I've ever used, in terms of flexibility and speed. It was always Windows and its fucked up printer drivers that messed things up with dvips and ghostscript. Now, it's also true that I've only used LaserJet printers with Linux, but for high-quality printing that's what you want, anyway, and things shouldn't be any different with any other PostScript printer.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Please note that both Mandrake and RedHat have big icons pointing to tutorials and documentation on their defaultly configured desktops. Also, learn to be patient, persistent, and studious, and you'll master Unix and the tools it provides. There's no other way to be efficient and productive with computers, just like you can't become a doctor or an engineer in two weeks -- it takes college and learning.
5. Cleaner redraws.
Curiously enough, the link mentioned in this part of the article claims that XFree86 has solved this problem in Linux. Moreover, I disagree with the technical explanation, because there's an extension for X that allows caching of the redraw requests, which eliminates this problem (provided the video hardware and drivers are not slow and/or buggy).
6. Die stray processes, die!
This is actually somewhat of a good point, but the problem is nothing kill/killall can't solve. Just write a cron job that kills all zombie processes every hour or so. Besides, considering how bad of a problem this is with Windows, and how rare it is in Mandrake Linux, I don't see why this even made in Top 10.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Yeah, and I bet you'd like to run always as root, too. There's a good reason for the Unix process privilege organization and it is very simple -- protection of the system. Microsoft cludges like right-clicking on a directory and "exporting it", among others, are poor, insecure design. What part of this are we Unix users failing to enunciate properly enough for Microsoft junkies to comprehend?
8. Sound support.
Well, it says that ALSA rocks, and I'm certainly not going to disagree there! Audio support for consumer-level audio devices has been pretty good in Linux for a long time.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Ever heard of Emacs? That's what I thought.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Yeah, I need to change resolutions on the fly all time in X; that would really improve my productivity. But seriously, this guy obviously didn't even bother the read the damn manual -- use Ctrl Alt + and - to cycle through the various configured resolutions. Why is this so difficult?
Bush Lies Watch
This isn't a bug -- it's a design feature.
Forcing you to change your desktop size when you want to change resolution to play a game or watch a movie is something that Windows forces you to do. It's poor Windows design, but people have gotten used to it.
XFree86 does this right. You set the desktop resolution to the highest resolution that your monitor/video card can do. If that's "too small" then you increase font sizes. Decreasing the resolution and wasting what your hardware can do is *not* the answer.
May we never see th