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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.
I suppose everything he says applies to freeBSD, except in one or two cases more so.
But who wants general adoption of linux anyway ? Look what happened to the internet when it got popular...
graspee
Weird HW detection...sometimes after a reboot i have to rmmod sb/sbawe/soundcore/etc by hand and restart them.
To watch divx5 movies, it is not enough to download a codec like with WMP, but you have to recompile your media player, upgrade your ALSA, upgrade your kernel... in fact, this is the reason i ditched linux and returned to 98. I prefer reboots to downloading endless MBs and recompiling for hours and not being sure it will work.
It is slower. End of story. No matter what you say, no matter what benchmarks or other stuff you come up with, qt/gtk widgets are STILL slower than win32 widgets, watching dvd with XINE takes 40% of my CPU while under windows it takes 5%(five), process spawning is slower (under windows if i run iexplore.exe repeatedly, it pops up new windows at a rate about 5 windows/second. Under linux, the best i could do is 0.5 new windows/sec. Dirty test, i agree, but...
What else?
Lack of Games. To those of you who say that linux is not a desktop os, why do i see all these projects spawning everywhere about SDLs and stuff?
And why instead of getting together and workin in teams, i see a sagan of different apps that are supposed to do one thing, but NONE of them is perfect? Sure, you might say "but windows isn't perfect either!" but don't you want your linux to be?
Lyx owns, blah blah blah, but under windows, to do word processing/type setting, it is 10 clicks away to write in my native, non-english, language. Under linux, i can't even find a faq for it. I don't even want to think what is necessary to actually print.
As i remember new ones i will add them.
IF YOU THINK I AM WRONG ABOUT ONE OF THESE, INSTEAD OF TELLING ME "YOU SUCK!! YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG!!" *PLEASE* tell me what to do to correct them! i am NOT bashing linux! i WANT to use linux! i WANT it to get better!
*sigh*
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
An example is OutLook and OutLook Express. The slimming down of the offical manuals has reduced many functions to the realm of lore, especially if the user does not know the official jargon with which to ask a question in order to get an answer.
The online help is getting better, but is still infuriating.
The situation in Linux basically is that much of the system is Lore Based. It may be superior in all other regards, and some things may be inherently complex and difficult, requiring study, but the bottom line is that it is still Lore Oriented and Lore Based. It is in fact, to some degree a way of life.
Many consumers are not Lore oriented. Some never learn to set the time on the VCR. This forms a barrier to the introduction of Linux to the Broad masses, the "I just want it to work" crowd. Never mind that other systems often never really work right in the first place. Why would people accept the idea that "computers just crash" otherwise?
This is the problem the Lore Masters face: How to make something that is Lore oriented and Lore based accessible to people who aren't
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I work as the IT Manager of a small corporation. Throughout my day, I am asked a number of relatively simple questions, such as how do I find out when this file was last created or altered.
My users, which is synonomous with most users, have to be walked through that process practically every single time. Sure, a few of them know how to use the search feature to locate a document and a few even know how to do a few slightly more complicated tasks. However, for the most part they are quite limited in what they know regarding the use of the computer system.
It is far from their job to know how to do anything. From what I have seen. I could set them up with a fully configured KDE3 desktop with all their applications right in front of them and they would still have the same problems.
Making things easier on a computer does help, but there will always be new features and options that negate that ease of use. More options = more difficulty. Lowering that difficulty allows more features to be added.
A modern Operating System is really no more easy or difficult to use then an Operating System that was in use nearly ten years ago.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Looks like you read the questions but not the rest.
He's saying that these things should be easy+intuitive.
Sure, YOU and I know the incantations, key combinations and so on to get things done, but if Linux is to enjoy widespread use among the not-interested-in-RTFM population this stuff needs to get easier. Like bleedin obvious.
Provided that widespread use is the goal of your project (I think it's safe to say Gnome/KDE has that goal) it's wise to listen to complaints like these.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
You can have multiple monitors defined in your XFree86Config file, and since X v4 detects hardware at startup time, changing monitors should not be difficult (disclaimer: I've never done this so I may be completely wrong).
This "solution" isn't very good. Why should I have to restart all of my apps to change displays?
"You have changed monitors. Please restart for these changes to take effect." This is what we've been making fun of Windows for for years.
People like 0x0d0a seem to think that's acceptable, apparently simply because it's X and Unix. The attitude is, "if you don't know how to handle every obscure option required to do what should be simple things, then you're a moron -- go back to Windows."
I can do all the things that have been suggested. I've used, administered and programmed Linux and other forms of Unix for more than a decade.
The point is, it's stupid to think that a hard-to-use system is somehow a good thing. It's unproductive, elistist, and boneheaded.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
So why don't they make one of these front ends accessible by right-clicking on the desktop? That's where 99% of new users look (often in vain) to find the screen settings.
I find that sometimes I have to use Ctrl-C/V and other times I have to hilight and middle click. It can be a little annoying at times.
I *much* prefer to know if my filesystem might be totally trashed in a minute than to just have it happen because a system blindly started guessing what to do.
Well, maybe you're more l33t than me, but when it asks me if I want to fix inode xxx my questions often are:
- What is referenced by this inode?
- Why does it need to be fixed?
- What will happen if it isn't fixed?
Looking at a bunch of inode numbers and having to go through and say Y/N to them is, for me, pointless.It's like a car mechanic coming to you and saying "your car is broken, shall I fix area 7 of the car?" without offering (or allowing you to ask) anything about what area 7 is, whats broken with it and what will happen if you don't fix it. In the end, you shrug your shoulders and say "well, I guess so".
Bad analogy i know - but it's the best i can come up with.
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A good accountant, knows the tax laws and all standard accounting procedures. It can take a tremendous amount of time just to gain that knowledge let alone to keep up with the latest in accounting practices. Like many professions, there is a continuing education requirement, which puts Certified Public Accounts in schools at least every other year. They simply don't have the time, and many don't have the inclination to learn all the whiz-bang features of their computer, the applications they DON'T use and the esoteric features of their Operating System. An excellent accountant practices only accounting. An Average accountant attempts to be something else at the same time.
A very good engineer spends his/her time practicing their engineering discipline. While some may have a hobbie with computers, it doens't make them a better mechanical engineer because they know how to configure a Linux machine for desktop use. What makes them a good engineer is that they know how to use the standard symbols, which have been altered a few times in the past ten years. They also need to know how to operate the application that they primarily use for their engineering discipline. An average engineer will spend time in other pursuits, while a great engineer will spend his/her time living and breating their chosen field. Most of the time that doesn't include how to configure Sendmail.
As for a marketer... True, they are mostly evil. However, to be a good marketer one needs to know the human mind, psychology and how to handle the media. They may need to know how to create a Powerpoint Presentation, generate a few documents. They have no need to know how to configure the Apache web server. That is what the guys in IT are for. They have need to learn how to program PHP, CGI or any other language that is used in Web-page design. They might come up with a layout, but that is for some IT guy to put together.
Tell me why the above professions need to have knowledge that is similar to what most IT people have? How will that make them better in their fields? How will they find the extra time to keep up with all of the endless data that comes out of IT, when they have to do the same thing for their field?
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
- Access became much cheaper and more ubiquitous. Checking your mail at a net cafe wouldn't have been possible without a popular net. neither would purchasing broadband at current rates.
- Suddenly there was a vast quantity of information and application avaliable through other media that was now avaliable through the net. Your Lord of the Rings trailer wouldn't be visible on the net so easily nobody was watching.
- Monetary incentive meant new and better sites / apps. Google wouldn't exist without their adwards, which in turn wouldn't exist without an audience
- It became possible to meet people outside the geek world on line, and share your mutual interests (cars, ham radio, dessert recipes, whatever)
Imagine an engineer who worked for a motor company in the early days complaining that horseless carriages were ubiquitous and that the roadways were filled with idiots who didn't know how to rebuild an engine.You do know how to rebuild an engine, don't you?