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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.
How is this a troll???
He just voiced his opinion and his personal business experience!!!
Moderators.....please fix this
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I find it odd that Mac OS X is repeatedly ignored and stepped on. Sure, we all want end-users to be using a *nix operating system using all sorts of 'standards'. OS X is exactly this - it's idiot-proof, has never randomly crashed in my experience - let's see how it stacks up?
1. No 'best' browser.
MacOS has every major browser available for it - IE and Mozilla (and that's all that matters)
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
OSX decides to do this stuff automatically whenever it 'needs' to. With HFS+, I haven't had a problem, and I frequently torture the machine by unplugging it without unmounting. I'm still using my original partition tables from 3 years ago.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
There are no widely used standards for printers. I had the unfortunate pleasure of configuring some printers on an antiquated RS-232C network running SCO OpenServer. While it wasn't linux, it was hell - and these were dot-matrix printers. MacOS 9 wasn't much better in terms of support than linux (I eventually got it working using a flaky piece of software, but it wasn't fun). From what I hear, OSX isn't much better. For end-users, Windows wins this round hands down, while people with high-end printers which support stuff like postscript can use 'alternative' operating systems with ease.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Indeed, linux falls down here. OSX does too. While it doesn't provide the delightfull array of software offered by linux, it doesn't offer a GUI for all of the console tools. OSX can easily mount a SMB share from the command line (VERY easily), but has no GUI. Most commercial Linuxes throw you too many packages to deal with - they either need to organize them logically, or not include them at all.
5. Cleaner redraws.
OSX does this quite nicely. No other OS does.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Every OS does this. It's a programming issue.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
OSX should be able to mount SMB shares easily, since it can be done with an embarrassingly simple command-line command. It can't act as a server, though. No GUI yet.
8. Sound support.
Macs use standardized hardware. Even so, linux has this problem (even though most *good* sound cards can emulate a Sound Blaster)
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Huh.... does ANYTHING do this correctly? I have no clue what this guy's talking about
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Shouldn't this be EASY? For crying out loud, we create what has been repueted to be the world's most secure OS, and we can't change the screen resolution easily. OSX does this with flying colors (as does every other GUI-based OS ever created)
this list would be more appropriately named the Top 10 Things wrong with X Windows.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose