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.

Comments

Changing resolution on the fly..

[XaXXon]

10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.

I'm not running X right now, but I do believe, you just hit ctrl-alt-[+-] (maybe only on the number pad?) to switch between available resolutions on the fly...

Re:Changing resolution on the fly..

[damiam]

When you do that (at least in every X version I've ever tried), it doesn't resize your desktop. It zooms in on your desktop, but it's still using a "virtual desktop" at the original resolution, so you have to scroll around to see your entire desktop.

I've read a while ago that the RandR extension was supposed to fix this, but I haven't heard anything about it recently.

Re:Changing resolution on the fly..

[1010011010]

Let's say I want to connect my laptop to an LCD projector that supports only 800x600 display, but the laptop is normally configured for its native resolution, which is 1600x1200.

Yeah, I can crtl-alt-whichamafuckle until I get the right res, and hopefully the refresh rate is acceptable. But now, I have to be careful about banging the mouse against the side of the viewable area, to avoid shifting my presentation off-screen. I also have to manually, carefully, size and position windows to make them as large as possible on the projector display.

Pain in the ass. It's much better to just change the size of the desktop, and click "maximize."

Just because you don't get it, doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Keith Packard is even working on the problem, with his R&R extension.

Re:Changing resolution on the fly..

[Unknown Lamer]

Yeah, I can crtl-alt-whichamafuckle until I get the right res, and hopefully the refresh rate is acceptable. But now, I have to be careful about banging the mouse against the side of the viewable area, to avoid shifting my presentation off-screen. I also have to manually, carefully, size and position windows to make them as large as possible on the projector display.

Actually, you can run X without modelines if you have a monitor that reports the modes it supports. The only thing you have to do is put the modes you want to use (e.g. "1024x768" "800x600" ...) in the screen section where you already have them. If you want to hook up to a lcd projector (I did this before) or any other display device, just restart X and it will automatically configure the refresh rates and use the highest mode support by the projector (if the project reports its supported modes using vbe (? I forgot what the name is)). The invalid modes (e.g. if the projector can't do 1600x1200) are ignored (a warning is printed during startup). If Windows will automatically configure it, then XFree86 more than likely can. I don't think it is too much hassle to have to restart X because it isn't like Windows where you have to restart the entire machine.

Re:Changing resolution on the fly..

[Unknown Lamer]

If all the apps I'm running are GUI apps, and since I'm trying to use a projector this is likely to be the case, then restarting X and all the apps is inconsequentially better than rebooting the whole machine.

There is a little things called "session management"...most of the programs I use can do session management, and will automatically start after I restart X if they were running before I exited the windowmanager (windowmaker in my case).

Besides, one other nice feature of Winders is that it will ask "does this display setting work," and then revert if you don't answer YES. On X, the equivalent solution is to switch to a console, re-edit XF86config-4, (or not -4, depending), switch back to X, ctral-alt-backspace and hope.

When configuring X, stuff like dexconf will start X for a few seconds with a prompt "Does this display setting work" and will exit after 30 or so second if you don't hit ok, doing basically the same thing.

Re:Changing resolution on the fly..

[Old Wolf]

in vi it looks like:

the quick brow
n fox jumps ov
er the lazy do
g

but he is talking about:

the quick
brown fox
jumps over the
lazy dog

soft wrap

[mathematician]

nedit does soft wrap.

Not entirely true

[damiam]

#1: No best browser He claims that Mozilla/Galeon can't do AA. This is untrue. Add the following to your prefs.js:

pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", true);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
pref("font.antialias.min", 16);
pref("font.directory.truetype.2", "/usr/share/fonts/truetype");

// AA with Bitmap scaling.
pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.enable", true);
//pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.always", true);
pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.min", 16);

#2: Prompting for a FS scan I'm using Debian sid and ext3, and I've never seen this problem.

#5: Cleaner redraws GTK2 implements double-buffering, and I've yet to see any flicker in GTK2 programs.

#7: Easy way of sharing files. The Ximian Setup Tools have an easy NFS/Samba shares config tool. Not exactly what he wants, but quite good.

#9: No common editor which supports "soft wrapping." I've never had a problem with the way wrapping is done in Linux editors. If you really want it "soft", you can use Abiword.

Number 4 is done

[cameroncase]

at least, on Mandrake number 4 has already been taken care of. i have a menu that says "What to do" and the nested choices (which each have more choices) are:

administer your system

enjoy music & video

play games

read documentation

use office tools

use the internet

view, modify, or create graphics

find files

the programs under these headings are the same ones you can find elsewhere, but the menu entries have been renamed to something descriptive (e.g. "change your password" or "listen to a CD")

its hard to get much more straigh-forward than that, and it is all right there on the "start" menu in plain sight. no reason why other distros couldn't do this, and should be easy for a user to add entries to the menu too.

Re:Everything is a PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well, that's what happens when a non-hobbyist tries using a computer hobbyist OS.

Besides, if you're a newbie, why are you using *Slackware* of all things? Use Mandrake or RH -- they provide a much more comfortable environment, and if you don't like poking config files, you have GUI frontends.

not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Some comments:

2. Prompting for a filesystem scan. . . The introduction of journaling filesystems has greatly helped this (it happens only 1 time in 20 on an unclean shutdown)

This is like saying that it should be easier to overhaul the engine in your car: if you'd just stop pushing it past the redline and change the oil every now and then, you wouldn't have this complaint in the first place. In other words, if you have much more than 20 unclean shutdowns in the entire life of your computer, then something is wrong with you. Or your computer. Either way, it needs to be fixed. Also, if the journaling filesystems for Linux are that amazingly bad (where 1 in 20 times you have to run fsck anyway), they need to be fixed too.

9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."

It's true, vi doesn't support this and perhaps other editors don't either. But a big part of the Unix philosophy is to compose functionality from tools instead of building functionality into monolithic applications. Point being, you can just drop

:map [f {!}fmt^M

(where "^M" is a control-M, typed in vi by doing control-V control-M) into your ~/.exrc and from that point on, you just type "[f" to redo the word-wrap on any paragraph.

And if you don't like the way that works, there are numerous similar commands (some based in Perl) that have more intelligence, in a sort of do-what-i-mean way.

Re:Quibbles

[Obiwan Kenobi]

I think you may have gotten a bit carried away with yourself here. I have a few counter-points to discuss:

Second, cutting and pasting has never been a problem in the X environment with *any piece of software* but KDE 1 and 2.

Um..I don't know about you, but I have yet to find a desktop that can correctly cut and paste text correctly 100% of the time. At best it's a 60% success rate. From KDE, GNOME, Browsers, consoles, etc, rarely will you find a reliable cut/paste system between the apps.

There are tons of front ends to configure X. It's terribly easy to change resolution on the fly in X -- ctrl alt kp+ and ctrl alt kp-.

But, how many people actually know this? Why isn't there a simple little GUI that runs this command for the user? It's unbelievably sad that one has to SEARCH to change the desktop resolution on their computer. It's silly at best.

Perhaps *you* don't like it, but for some of us that have special needs, having a dumbed down printing system would be incredibly frusterating (I'll give you a pass on this if you just want a new front end).

Wasn't that what he was complaining about? A crappy front end? The program itself has always been frustrating, but a nice, stable, secure, and easy to use front end for sharing printers and the like...well, that's what Linux Printing has needed forever.

the funny thing is...

[mangu]

...there IS an easy way to change resolution on the fly: press CTRL ALT + or CTRL ALT - to increase and decrease resolution.

Re:the funny thing is...

[mgkimsal2]

eh? the desktop is resized to match the new
resolution.

Are you saying that the desktop manager (KDE/Gnome/etc) adjust their taskbars and other niceties to the new viewable dimensions when ctrl/alt/+/- are hit? They certainly don't do that on the Redhat, Caldera, Mandrake and Debian installations I've used over the past 3 years.