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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
#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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
1. No 'best' browser.
Gosh, how about the nice thing we call choice?
If they were all very good at doing what they do - that's fine. Sadly, they're not. Whenever I'm in Linux I *always* yearn for IE when I'm browsing, no matter what browser I use. The author's point is that all the current options aren't that amazing, and all have pretty big faults.
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
Damn, if only this was adjustable, oh yeah...
Not the most obvious thing in the world to change though - and something IMO the default should be automatically done in the background.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
It can't get much easier that printconf (for Red Hat users).
Ok, in Mandrake it was pretty easy to get my printer working, granted.
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).
Yeah, good viewpoint. Why make things easier and more intuitive when the users could just get off their lazy asses and go study to use the machine!
Please. Most people will pretty quickly pick up Windows, and most things are pretty easy to work out how to do. There are stable, easy to use, tried and tested configuration screens that work. Complexity and a steep learning curve does not bring superiority.
You don't have to lose power and control by making things easier to use.
5. Cleaner redraws.
Ok, sure.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Ever tried ctrl-alt-escape in KDE?
Obvious and transparent, no?
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.
So, because some people stupid, things should be made much more complicated than they need to be for everyone else? Cars should be made harder to drive - keep all those damn idiots off the roads.
Yeah, right.
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.
I can't say I've had much of a problem with my cards, but they've been pretty standard items.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Well... pico does this (ctrl-j)
You'd have thought more of the more popular editors would have it (at least as an option). It's a pretty basic thing to have.
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).
Couldn't be easier? I beg to differ. Once you *know* that you press that combination, and you've already gone through the process of having all your resolutions and refresh rates configured, yeah, it's easy. What really *is* easy is this:
Right click on desktop -> properties -> settings
[or Start -> Control Panel -> Display settings]
Drag the slider to the resolution you want. Select colour depth. Press OK.
No text config file that you need to setup with all the options your system can support.
Yes, Linux should be more powerful and dynamic than Windows - that's part of the whole point of it. However, things can be easier without the expense of control.
amen. I mean, really, all a user needs to do is kill X, run vi, edit /etc/X11/fubarity/XF86Config, scroll down, add a
/dev/tty/Fubaritybuffer = 800^$%^600 @ 76q
Screen
fb=/dev/null.
Then boot X and get ready to pull the plug fast if your monitor starts making sizzling sounds as it is driven out of spec.
Of course, unless you have an Nvidia card, in which case you must rot-13 the entire XF86Config file. I can't believe people say X is hard to use, or that anyone is stupid enough to "misuse the program." There is obviously no problem here.
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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As you are probably aware, cut-and-paste in Unix/Linux desktop environments have traditionally relied on X to do the dirty work.
The problem with this approach (which Microsoft, Apple, etc. recognized back in the '80s but we still haven't caught up with) is the notion that text is not the only thing that needs to be cut, copied and pasted among and across applications.
Thus, there is inherently a different semantic involved when transferring objects other than text, because X doesn't know how to handle those.
X knows nothing of moving a picture between a charting application and a word processor, for instance. Nor should it.
In order to make up for that deficiency, we're faced with a conundrum: do we take the functionality away from X and hand it to the higher-level desktop environment, or do we go with a hybrid approach, letting X still handle the "plain-text" cut-and-paste functionality and letting the desktop environment handle the rest?
I argue that the hybrid approach is terrible for users, as it adds yet another conditional rule users have to follow when trying to complete a task. This, I believe, was what the author was trying to communicate.
- 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?