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

doom on the horizon if linux becomes popular

[Graspee_Leemoor]

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

Re:doom on the horizon if linux becomes popular

[Graspee_Leemoor]

You know, although I was really joking with the original post (well, half-joking- see my other post), I realized something when I read Zenithal's post...

Windows XP is a pretty damn stable OS; it supports a lot of hardware, video codecs, sound codecs, development tool both free and proprietary etc. You *can* hack with XP. You can install mingw32, an Xserver or client, free game-development libs, free obscure programming languages etc...

BUT XP is anathema to the geek, and why? Lots of reasons: a big nasty corporation control it, there is only one UI and it sucks, there are loads of "dumb filters" designed to by default stop you viewing your files properly or do anything complicated etc.

Well imagine new "popular linux". It could be very like XP. Only one user-interface because most people run it so developers target it (KDE could do this), corporations control it (effectively) by providing commercial applications that you just "gotta have", locking you into their customer-base, dumb filters in place on all the apps which it is tedious to take off, etc.

In fact, "popular linux" could be exactly like Windows XP, except for:

1) We would have the source to the OS
2) errrm.

So think about it. If MS released the full source for Windows XP, would it be a fantastic operating system that code-hackers flocked to?

I myself think not.

graspee

my top things.

[gTsiros]

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*

Re:my top things.

[aussersterne]

*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!

<preach>

Linux is not perfect for everything, but it is already damn near perfect for some things. For example, my entire life is managed by a pile of shell scripts 5-15 years old, PostScript-based application printing, and the ability to run legacy X applications over the network.

If we fix a lot of the "problems" with Linux -- for example, radically restructuring the security and filesystem models to be more Windows-like, migrating to non-PostScript-centric applications, changing X to be more Windows-like (i.e. no virtual desktop, color depth switch on-the-fly, no X stream but direct drawing instead), etc. -- then Linux won't actually be useful to me anymore. I'm not a Windows user, but (gasp) this isn't because Windows is put out by the wrong company or crashes too much, etc. -- this is because Windows, even in ideal form, doesn't fulfill >my< needs.

I think part of the problem is that there is an entire demographic of users out there who have been told "Linux is better" not "Linux is different" -- if we make Linux "perfect" by the standards of a Windows user, a lot of existing Linux users will leave, not because the "coolness" factor is gone but simply because some of us actually do live and die by things like backward compatibility of X and shell scripts, the ability to compile our own software (and insert our own set of patches), the ability to use the same hand-built text configuration or script files we've been using for years that are lengthy and cryptic but give functionality not easily duplicated in a click-to-do-the-common-things, no-way-to-do-anything-else environment like Windows...

I think too many people view Linux as a Windows-contender in search of more users, rather than viewing Linux as the correct solution only for a particular group of users. No product is perfect for everybody. If you're looking for a Windows system, buy Windows! For god's sake, there's no need to be embarrassed if the tool used by billions also fits your needs as well.

Linux isn't for everyone, but it is for me. The day it becomes a great system for Windows users is likely also the day I move to BSD or some other system which still retains Unix-like behavior, because that is what I'm looking for!

</preach>

Re:Sheesh

[Mr_Perl]

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.

Re:Not entirely true

[Thorin_]

#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);

You just proved one of his other points. Normal users don't want to have to put crap like this in some file they never heard of just to get AA to work.

Re:Quibbles

[Mr_Silver]

Second, cutting and pasting has never been a problem in the X environment with *any piece of software* but KDE 1 and 2. There have been established standards for cut-and-paste interoperability for X some time (Athena era, at least).

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.

Look what happened to the internet when it got po

[Nailer]

I'm not sure if you were joking or not, but to respond:

• 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?