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Worst Linux Annoyances?
greenrd writes "Ever spent hours trying (and failing) to get a printer driver to work on Linux? Struggled to configure something ever-so-slightly out-of-the-ordinary? What have been your biggest annoyances when using Linux? Three O'Reilly authors are compiling a book on Linux annoyances - and their suggested solutions - and they've started a mailing list here. I can't help but think, though, that such a book will be dated quite quickly. Sure, some problems do languish unfixed for years - but equally, I suspect many of the problems will be fixed before, or soon after, the book's publication date. Still, increased visibility might motivate developers to create fixes or workarounds for some of the problems, so maybe this is an ideal opportunity to get your pet peeve finally addressed!"
My biggest annoyance is the fat guy in a penguin shirt yelling RTFM lamer.
Pubcrawler.ca
.
loading kernel modules
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
"Where's the Start button????"
What have been your biggest annoyances when using Linux?
Easy - you guys.
Gotta be lack of informed mainstream media coverage.
If I hear "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" one more time, I am gonna snap.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Wine -still can't get it to work
He's so cutesy, looks like one of hello kitty's playmates.
By far, hunting down layer after layer of dependency while trying to install software, only to meet conflicts is my biggest problem.
I am running RH8, and an somewhat of a linux newbie, but i have speant hours trying to get the right versions of software installed, often with two four levels of dependency, (ie Software i want needs x, which needs y, which needs z, which needs a...). I recently installed apt, which made it a bit easier for software it indexes.
Windows software downloads can be big and bloated with DLLs but they generally work out of the box.
paul reinheimer
Not being able to unmount a removable storage device (CD, my digital camera, whatever) because some process had the bright idea of keeping an open file on it, or hanging around with it as its cwd. Nautilus used to be especially bad in this regard.
My worst agony was fooling around in the /dev/ttyS* trying to get my modem to work. This was with Redhat 5.something and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
S .... C ... O
Now who can beat that?
Ñ'
Who, Linus? *ducks to avoid flying penguin toys*
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
My biggest and only annoyance with Linux is SCO!
Setting print preferences so that I can print more than one page to a sheet of paper. I know there's psnup, but it's not that convenient.
The most annoying thing about Linux is that people compare it to Windows and point out the differences as "annoying".
Different can be better, but yes, there may be a learning curve... and that can be annoying for some.
The fact that linux isnt linux, there isnt a unified linux architecture, which will hinder in its growth into mainstream as commercial packages are harder to build for just "linux" rather than mandrake redhat debian whatever
My biggest Linux annoyance is that it doesn't run Windows games. Sure, you can get some 5 year old games to run by sacrificing a chicken to the Winex gods, but if you want to play any decent games you MUST run Windows.
Cripes...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
After messing around with X for a week, I finally had the insight to download the Nvidia driver from their site. Worked like a charm right away, but there should have been more documentation on this. This book might just be what the Linux community needs. Then again, what does that say about the user friendlyness of Linux? ;-)
Using windows for more than ten years (from parents, school, work, etc.) then being dropped to the wolves in Linux. Not than Linux isn't several magnitudes better than windows, just unfamiliar.
Mandrake 9.1:
% ps -ax
ps returned with SIGSEGV 11
GODDAMMIT!!
Also, that $699 modest distribution fee.
May the threads progress competently.
DVD support is the only reason I keep a Windows partition.
Still not going away after 10+ years. :)
:) Scanner? Web cam? These things generally aren't all that easy to install.
:)
Have you ever installed an ATAPI CD burner? Not exactly plug-and-play. nVidia GeForce card? Not bad, but if you happen to have an AMD Athlon with the AGP problem, um, have fun.
When I get a webcam or CD burner and install it on Window, I pop the CD in, click 'Next >' a whole bunch of times and bammo, working hardware, software and all.
On Linux, heh. If you don't know much about configuring and compiling the kernel, kernel modules, etc., forget it.
My journal has hot
When gnome 1.3 grouped similar items in the task bar; (ie all the mozilla browser windows) I was happy. 2.2 doesn't have this feature. I don't like KDE as much as gnome so I'm stuck with this. Also, graphics configuration is a pain especially for ATI.
The Television Wiki
Lack of easy support for my intellimouse explorer. I'm so used to using the side buttons to go forward and back when browsing the web it's jarring when I move from mozilla on windows to mozilla on linux.
Ever spent hours trying (and failing) to get a printer driver to work on Linux?
No, I never tried that. OTOH after my mother had spent months trying (and failing) to get a printer to work on Windows, I got the same printer working on Linux in five minutes.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
The worst annoyance is SCO. Every time I try to use Linux, there's some SCO attorney standing there asking for $699 !
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Anyhting having to do with USB or Firewire support
I can't help but think, though, that such a book will be dated quite quickly.
If I wrote the book, that'd be exactely what I want. If the book's outdated, it means it has brought all those problems to the attention, and that proper solutions were made. What more can you wish?
this sig has intentionally been left blank
Isn't something from the OS itself, but the "1337" attitude from the users. "Use a different distro!", "RTFM!", "l4m3r!"
I gave up on Linux (and went back to BeOS) simply because the attitude of the Linux users I ran across was intollerable. You won't find that with BeOS users.
(And I'm willing to bet money this gets modded as flamebait, but it's the painful truth)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I can't tell you how many times I have tried to install Linux 9.1 and have ran into a roadblock trying to configure stuff.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
Why cant everyone pick a fricking filesystem layout and KEEP IT FRICKING THAT WAY?
Redhat thinks that apache and KDE's developers are idiots so they move the default install, Mandrake has things in different locations, SuSE,Debian,Slackware.... they all think they know where it is supposed to be.
All it does is piss off the Linux user.
This is one of the biggest problems. Leave where things go ALONE!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I tried installing it a year ago, it couldn't use winmodems, so we couldn't get email with it. We reverted to Windows, since then Linux has just been a mysterious blob that sits on half our hard drive.
and I know I'm going to get modded down into oblivion, but I'll say it anyway-
Zealots.
For the last time, it's spelled 'pseudo'... P-s-E-u-d-o...
I can't see why this is a bad idea at all - it will allow potential new users the opportunity to properly evaluate whether or not Linux is for them before actually embarking on the voyage of discovery that is a first-time Linux install. As a top consultant this is exactly the sort of thing that my clients want to know when they're thinking of switching over their servers and desktops to Linux. As the current flavour of the month people hear an awful lot about how great Linux is from fans, but the same people are silent about the flaws in Linux - poor font support, shoddy program interoperability, a lack of graphics capabilities and a lack of any kind of unified architecture above the kernel level. Sure it may go out of date soon, but I'm not sure it'll be all that soon - while minor VM bugs are fixed quickly and promptly, some of the bigger issues for users hang around for years because they're not "cool hacks". Hopefully now that Linux has come under the corporate umbrella these things will change for the better, and in time a book like this will no longer be needed.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The default font (at least every time I installed X) is always *tiny* on my screen. No matter how hard I tried, when I changed settings, it never seemed to work.
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
Red Hat 7.3 --- Lousy video and graphics (buggy driver, SiS 6326), decent audio.
Red Hat 8.0 --- Excellent video (I assume the bug was fixed), no sound. Attempted to configure audio driver, no luck.
That's about it for my complaints.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
1) stubborn/underpaid/not-paid-at-all M$-PR-fanboy who advocates "his" OS like there is nothing else
2) stubborn/underpaid/not-paid-at-all M$-PR-fanboy for whom gaming is everything there is about having a reason to sit in front of computers
3) stubborn/underpaid/not-paid-at-all M$-PR-fanboy who runs out to buy an XBox and get's angry that Linux is already ported to it.
4) stubborn/underpaid/not-paid-at-all M$-PR-fanboy who...
Is there a web based database that does the same job? Surely this would be better option compared to the book?
For me, it's getting the printer to work in Mozilla, Phoenix, compared to AbiWord or some other text editor.
This is PURE EAU DE TROLLETTE
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That's my #1 annoyance. Isn't Linux mature yet? Then why are there so many "supporters" acting like children?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I'm a Windows user who likes open source software but can't get Linux to work. I don't know how to write drivers, work the command line, or program. I guess you have to be an expert at all of these to use Linux.
I've installed Linux (Mandrake, Red Hat, Knoppix) three or four times and always end up going back to Windows shortly thereafter. I can't get Firewire via PCMCIA to work properly, the driver for my mouse makes movement awkward, and XMMS sounds awful on my Sound Blaster. Yes, I can read the web and do word processing, but anything beyond the basics is a hassle, and I'm not given any clues as to what needs to be fix to get things working.
One annoying problem with NFS is that it will not release its hold on a CD, meaning that if you mount a CD, then share it via NFS, you cannot then unmount it unless you stop NFS first. I've found this extremely inconvenient at times.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Cedar Rapids 1974 model HAM radio modem. The driver was a bit buggy but now works perfectly.
i drink, get laid, AND recompile my kernel (sometimes at the same time too!).
all on a friday night. GO MULTITASKING!
Or, at best, only ones that are in perpetual beta.
At least some people are writing working drivers for the high-end audio cards now (Hammerfall DSP). But where are the apps?
Yes, I know about Ardour. And it's still beta too.
My fonts becoming all sorts of sizes once I put my resolution above 1280x1024
The fact that regular Xinerama and nvidia's twinview xinerama extensions don't work together.
KDE having wwwaay to many poorly placed options.
The 'More programs' submenu on (nearly) every KDE menu.
Not having OpenGL across multiple Xinerama heads.
My BT878 tv-tuner card not tuning correctly without significant manual adjustment.
The fact that I have to know I have a BT878 type=78 tv-tuner card.
The fact that I had to spend hours guessing LIRC options for my KWorld remote control.
And the list goes on and on... don't get me wrong though, I do love linux! It's just a difficult love at times.
... while the rest of us are out drinkin' and getting laid
You rather mean being f**ked in the ass and drinking semen?
There is nothing wrong with Linux. This is Slashdot, remember?
Well just by checking out netcraft.com and seeing what Microsoft servers are running, several of them run BSD and Linux still; in fact if you do a search for *.microsoft.com, the first 10 or so are ALL Linux. This has been a running gag for the longest time. Hotmail servers used to ALL run on Linux with Apache. It wasn't until recently that they switched them over to 2003 and still quite a few of them remain on Linux. And on their higher load servers they are running Linux and BSD.
So if Windows isn't good enough for Microsofts high end servers, why should it be good for mine? They are setting a precident by saying that their product isn't good enough to handle their high load.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Too many graphics chips, too few drivers. Blame vendors.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Standardized copy and paste shortcut keys would be cool, too.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Is what that was supposed to say :)
Stupid Windoze box in the next room made me mess it up.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
http://forums.linuxvswindows.com, tell us what you really think!
... are MAN pages which describe the functions and programming methodology of which the command was written...
But has no actual reference as to how to use the command properly, and has a "See Man pages for ****". And the Man pages for **** tell you to read the pages you were just reading.
The only case where RTFM causes an infinite loop!
Mouse, Mice. Goose, Geese. Moose... Moose?
/etc/rc3.d is not really there, but in fact is at /etc/rc.d/rd3.d. I know there's a symlink, but coming from Solaris, it's slowed me down a bit in the past.
Oh, and it needs to be spelled Linnix, so we're all on the same page re: how it's pronounced.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
One of Linux's biggest strenghts is its networking and ability to many, many different things. Unfortunettly every distrobution has choosen a different way to configure their networking. From Wifi, ppp, basic static/hdcp, vpn, profiles, etc. It is all different! This makes it very difficult for end users and anoying for those who want to write frontend to configure the networking (and even if they do write one it is only used by a small set of users and doesn't get the full use/review that a normal app that runs on most distros would). On top of that every distro maker out there puts out an almost ok (but different look, feel, and feature set) network configuration application. This is without a doubt something that should get into the Linux Standard Base and was surprised to find that it was not.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
My biggest pet peeve with linux (distros) is that each application has it's own config file format. Want to configure sendmail? Great... learn it's format. Want to configure apache? Great... learn it's format. Want to configure the plethora of smaller programs and utilities? Great... learn their formats. It gets annoying after a while ... especially when most of the confuration tools available (Redhat) are buggy and aren't really capable of anything beyond the most basic configurations.
Now... I'm not going to bitch without providing a possible solution, so here it is:
I think there should be a standardized configuration API, format, and storage for Linux. Perhaps something the LSB or big distros could put together... basically, the concept would be similiar to the windows registry, but better and smaller in scope. Store configuration data for applications in an XML format with a defined standard layout in a central location. Then, provide an API that application authors can use to manipulate configuration data.
This would make it really simple to write a standardized configuration tool for ALL of linux.
let the flames begin
--csb
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Annoyance #1
I hate apps confusing cut/copy/paste with selection/middle_click.
I want the option to disable selection mechanism and use middle button for scrolling.
Annoyance #2
Big mess in my $HOME directory (.files).
lp? lpr? foomatic? CUPS? Xprt? ppd? pdq?
What the hell do all those things do or mean? I have no idea. As it happens, I managed to muddle through the Debian install process for CUPS, and printing works, but unlike most other things on Linux, I have no idea *how*.
All of the script languages have morphed into accomplishing the same goal, they all just do it with a different syntax. Some scripts are clean looking and easy to follow, others are executable line-noise.
It would make documentation and maintenance a LOT simply to pick one scripting language and develop it into an all-purpose tool. I'm sick of reimplementing script libraries.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
That's the only thing that drives me nuts about Linux. Yes, I don't print ^_^
Mine is definitely trying to be an underdog in a windows-centric world. My favorite CD ripper, CDex, is Windows-only, and I've been trying in vain to find something just as good under Linux to no avail. I've tried RipperX, which seems to work, except that it leaves off the ID3 tags on half of the tracks it rips, can't figure out why. OTOH, cdparanoia is awesome, I managed to get it to rip a CD that had an inch long CRACK in it.
Another thing is the double-edged sword of open-source software. I love being able to compile software specifically for my system, but I don't think it would kill developers to make a static binary for those who don't want to mess with a billion libraries. And sometimes software simply won't compile on my system for some odd reason, even though my system is definitely not unusual.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Throw in - WINE, command line compiling, command line uncompressing, ./make, ./install, command line 'mounting' of network shares.
I'm learing my command line ways, but to make inroads in the desktop community, the masses needs GUIs and lots of them. From downloading and installing software to mapping drives, people needs to point and click to feel warm & fuzzy.
Linux is good for the "geeks" but is not corporation compliant.
Where I work (45000 employees), only SuSe and RedHat have been acknowledged as "reliable".
Exit other flavours (especially Debian).
I don't appreciate RedHat (because of many configuration aspects but also ethically : for me Linux is a dot.org idea, not a dot.com one : RedHat looks like what MS-Linux would be) and I don't appreciate SuSe at all (settings, startup sequence, plethora of useless software, often opening unwanted backdoors on the system).
Now, these are the only versions which'll get adopted because they support both Oracle and HPaq/ITO/VPO/OpenView SNMP agent.
This is the reason why, whenever contacted about installing a SuSe, I gently suggest a SunFire v100 running Solaris 8.
So, Linux acceptance is not as good as it could be because managers do not understand the model, they think in terms of a company, not as an upward-going brownian software-blob (this description is not intended to be a reproach).
This makes this annoyance a non-software but rather social one.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Assuming we're talking about GUI's here....
1. Fonts. I want to drop any font I want into a fonts dir, and be able to use them automatically, in EVERY bloody app. I don't want to worry about a font server, I don't want to build fonts.dir files and all that crap. Plus, I want fonts to look good and I want all apps to adhere to some sort of standard whereby all apps have a similar look.
2. Printing. I want a single printer install routine that allows me to print from every app with no problem at all. I don't want to be bothered thinking about lpr, ghostcript, postscript, etc.
3. Installing apps. I want to download a single install file which contains everything I need to install an app. I am annoyed as all hell by downloads that require me to visit other ftp sites to get pre-requisites, themselves often requiring other things that I have to download and install first. It's a Royal Pain In The Ass (RPITA).
4. Network Config. This isn't too much of a problem, but it would be nice to have a single network config utility which loads whatever networking components you want without having to recompile a kernel or install modules.
5. Dynamic kernel/modules autoloading/configuring. I hate having to recompile a kernel and reboot when adding/changing stuff that requires such.
These things are major hindrances to adoption of Linux by normal users, and my pet peeves!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Now, before the flames come, let me just say that I DO know how to tar -zxvf |./configure |make |make install, rpm -Uvh and apt-get whatever. But not everyone do. The single greatest advantage to be made for Linux is a unified multi-platform install and upgrade system.
RPM is almost there and apt-get is nice to use. Redhat Upgrade is also nice to have. But when a cool program arrives, I should be able to download a single package for WhatEver Linux.
While we're on the subject, dependancies. This must be solved if Joe Blow is to use Linux. I have used Linux every day for three years, and still these dependancies and linkage confuses me. Apt-get solves some of this, but that's only half-way to the solution.
Maybe 2.6 will fix it.
If the book is dated soon after it is published, then good. It will have done its job, by shining a light on areas where Linux needs to be improved and pointing developers to where they can do the most good and are needed most.
Got somethign that needs improving? Then improve it! Then re-write the book and publish again a year or so down the road. Endless upgrade cycles can be good?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Trying to get respectable uptime in an office with a crappy mains power supply and an old dodgy UPS.<br>
--This isn't a man who is leaving with his head between his legs.
is vendor supported drivers.
Printing, video drivers, sound drivers, etc are ALL significantly easier to setup and use under windows. This is reality because windows controls 90%+ of the desktop market.
Until Linux has the ease of use with devices that both windows and macs enjoy, drivers will be my largest annoyance.
BTW I've been using linux since '95 and it has come a very long way, but it has a lot left to be desired.
It's a royal pain to get a DVD playback setup working well thanks to our friends at the MPAA. Bite me Valenti. Thankfully, once you've got the CSS problem licked, Linux rocks for DVD playback.
Also, the i8x0 onboard audio drivers suck. Both the ALSA ones and the kernel ones each have their own set of problems, and I have to keep switching between the two depending on what I'm doing on my Dell laptop.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
So after going round and round with the HBA firware, the machine firmware, and LILO, I solved the problem by chucking LILO on the rubbish pile and using GRUB. GRUB is the man. It got me out of that bind and I expect to move all my Linux servers to it whenever they next need to be restarted.
Second biggest Linux annoyance: misleading prompts in init scripts. The messages is "Give root password for maintenance, or Control-D for normal startup." WRONG! Control-D will not give you a normal startup, it will reboot the machine. This is in Debian GNU/Linux. Debian also has the annoying init issue that when I go from single user to multiuser by way of telinit, the network interfaces aren't brought up. Boo.
Third biggest nuisance: fsck on filesystems marked clean. You can get around this with tune2fs or the equivalent for other fs.
Configuring X is the worst thing with Linux PERIOD.
.. first post? /m
While accustomed users can get it to work - newbies are often left stranded before they even get to try out Linux. A lot of people really want to try Linux but they never get past the X config.
Just think of the improvements in general usability over the last few years (gnome/kde etc.) and compare that to how XFree86 has been evolving.
This is probably going to trigger comments such as: why dont you contribute then?? - well:
1. Lack of time
2. Are contributions actually welcome? we read a lot of stuff now and again about how the XFree86 crowd are blocking patches, rumours of forking etc. When people are forced to fork just to get excellent patches in theres something wrong.
Just my 2c.. oh and
I used to use debian (around 0.93r5 or so, up to about 1.2) --- apt was nice, but I got tired of tripping over and fighting against bugs that had been fixed for months in newer releases of mainstream packages but had not managed to become embedded in the .deb glacier.
Now the path of least resistance in my workplace suggests RedHat. That, of course, implies rpm dependency hell.
My annoyance: there's a reasonable approach to the dependency problem but the folks with the solution have been more interested in geek-ing around than
getting things out there and the folks that are getting things out there don't have the solution.
"Ever spent hours trying (and failing) to get a printer driver to work on Linux? Struggled to configure something ever-so-slightly out-of-the-ordinary?
Whoa thought we had one of those infamous TV commericals that last a half/full hour and talk about some amazing plastic $0.01 tool from China is going to fix it all up for the amazing price of $19.95 with free shipping. I was waiting for the "and wait there is more" moment too.
Thanks for getting my hopes up. Who the hell cares about a book on Linux annoyances.
Just back from a training, more a freshening up than anything.
Main annoyance today:
Updating from the basic suse 6.4 kernel (2.2.12? if I remember right) to 2.4.21 (bad support of the IDE controller in 2.2.12). Compilation went fine. Then i found out that there is no mkinitrd. I thought I'd do it dirty by installing a Red Hat RPM, but that was too recent and I would have needed to install or upgrade 5 other things. I then found out that there is a mk_initrd. Which doesn't work like mkinitrd. And would only make init disks for the 2.2.X kernels. Hmph.
This is one of those rare stories that are impossible to post to without losing karma. A topical comment about what's wrong with Linux will be modded Flamebait, and anything else will be modded Offtopic.
In fact, it seems like the only approach likely to win you karma is to make an insightful meta-comment on posting to the story itself. Making it informative and eppering it with the names of positive moderation options might help as well.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
I've been using linux for a few years now and the thing I consistently struggle with is getting soundcards to work. Either they just work out of the box or they never work despite hours of tinkering with isa pnp and other such delights!
My most infuriating experience with Linux happened a few months back when the University asked me to help on witht he installation of a new data processing centre.
Originally that had wanted to buy a large supercomputer such as a cray (we were modelling weather so there were a large number of quadratic equations to solve) but they ran into probles with snmp and realised that it would be easier (and cheaper)to just get a large cluster of x86 boxes and use linux.
Anyway I got Mandrake 9 put on them ok, but at some point ssh went down on all of the boxes simultaneously. As some idiot had configure them all not to accept telnet (on security grounds!) I couldn't correct the problem and had to spend the next 3 weeks reinstalling. I was not happy at the time, I can tell you.
Still better than windows thogh.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
If this book ends up anything like Woody Leonhard's Annoyances series from O'Reilly, such as Word '97 Annoyances, they'll be useful to more than just your average joe with a problem.
Those books take a critical look at how things work versus how you think they're working, and how to solve that cognitive dissonance. They may not solve every problem possible -- that's a cookbook that you probably couldn't lift. But it will give you avenues to understanding where the problems are coming from. To me, that's even more valuable.
Odds are, it won't have the same authors: Woody is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft addict, with all the usual love-hate (and there's plenty of hate). Hopefully O'Reilly will use the same editorial goals, though.
Design for Use, not Construction!
okay, sure, it's not technically linux, rather it's X. Nevertheless, I've been bitched by fonts. After a great many late hours of fighting and tuning and googling, fonts remain one huge bloody mess on linux. It's pretty awefully documented. Like: Is xfs still necessary on a non-network box (server and display on same machine)? How/where do I install fonts!? And why the hell does *%$ konsole not see any of the available fonts?!
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Though new drivers from begin to support it almost transparently, lack of a standard way (no, esd is not great) to make multiple applications share a sound card (realtime mixing from multiple sources).
Resolution of this great life problem would bring to its knees my second greatest annoyance: when a soundapp crashes and doesn't free its lock on the sound module, you're stuck with no sound until you reboot and/or use black magic to bypass module logic and remove the module by hand, tainting your kernel and feeling bad about it.
RPM dependancy problems can be annoying ... especially when they start cascading, i basically dont use RPMS anymore cause of it, I just compile the source, its much easier
...
....
... especially when you are trying to track down which hardware you have and what chips are on the mother board ... keep in mind most of my PC's are built with leftover parts, so often I dont have all the info I need on them ...
Spent hours and hours trying to get my Logitech USB webcam working, never could even though it was supposedly supported, it was some kind of USB problem, but could never pin point it
And I can't get Wine to run Counter Strike for the life of me
Trying to compile a kernel can be annoying
other than that i never really have problems
I didn't have to spend any time thinking. I want a window manager that's worth the name. The most important thing is that it should be infinitely configurable. Sawfish is almost perfect for that. But it has several problems: its defaults are ridiculous, (which means I have to lug my .sawfish/custom around or waste time configuring it on each different machine), it has some bugs which result in no window having the focus sometimes, and there's no gtk2 version. Well there is one, but it is an utterly bastardized version written by the redhat folks for gnome2 after the original developer left which bears no resemblance to the gtk1 version.
My top five annoyances with Linux right now are CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, and CUPS.
Its features are variously undocumented or vastly overdocumented to the point of utter incomprehensibility. It configuration is totally frickin' opaque. And every day or so it just stops printing anything until I restart both the printer and the server (but only in that order!).
I am baffled that anyone prefers CUPS to the old reliable lpd. It's a nightmarish beast that nearly makes me consider going back to Windows.
--G
There are too many. At home I don't have much use for USB, but when I installed Linux on my brother's computer who uses a wireless USB mouse...that was fun. I personally use a USB removable hard-drive (read: digital camera) and had no problems with it, since the drivers for that worked pretty much without any trouble, once I was able to figure out which device to mount, but getting the input devices such as keyboard and mouse to work are a bit more annoying because you need to have them all working without X and before the OS even has control.
Deciding between the 2 different type of modules to install OHCI and the other one and then trying to figure out all the various HDI and other configuration settings to flip on was a royal pain in the ass. Luckily I was installing Gentoo and had worked with USB before so I was able to get it working using the old make-shift guide in a couple of tries, but this thing should be easier to do.
OK. Granted if I used Mandrake or something it would have worked and using Gentoo basically means that I should know what I'm doing, but the guides out there suck, or just aren't up-to-date, or aren't synced up and give conflicting advice. There needs to be some sort of good unification, and more often than not, I've realized that the Gentoo docs apply to everyone and are generally more up to date because, well, the users are like that.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
The lack of a cookie monster skin for that googly-eye program...
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
If you have an Nvidia card and use Linux it is like second nature to download their drivers straight away... Why must you smash your head against a wall when you have a hammer to do that with?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
is complete consistency across all Linux OSs. It not about the GUI, or the Installler, but the file locations, can't we put them all in the same place.
I got Mandrake 9.1 installed and I use urpmi and I do not run into any of those problems with dependecy issues. In fact anyone using Mandrake should install urpmi sources from TexStar and other sources like MDK's contrib source.
http://plf.zarb.org/%7Enanardon/urpmiweb.php
It's a no brainer, since once you installed a source you just go to the MDK's control panel and then to the package manager and select your source.
Getting Gnucash running on my Slackware systems has to be the worst possible thing I've had to do. I don't want to switch away from Slackware just to run Gnucash, so I fight through it every time I update Slackware.
In fact, the situation was so bad that I put up a page explaining how to do it. I didn't think it'd get much traffic...but I very much mistaken. Several hundred hits a month, and messages galore within the first week. We (some other survivors and I) set up a mailing list to help answer questions.
When I talked to the Gnucash developers on it, their comment was "switch to an RPM-based system" and "it really doesn't require anything other than standard libraries"...for the old version of Gnome, that is; the newer Gnome version won't work. I appreciate their hard work--Gnucash is great, but I wonder what they'd think if they switched to Slackware themselves for development.
--RJ
--rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I like windows installers, i just click next a whole bunch of times and stuff works, none of this make ... compile ... make compile, and then all the paths get messed up and NOTHING works...fix that problem, and i'll use linux
That stupid wide nosed penguin breathing all the human's air...did i mention it STINKS!?!?
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
I still don't own a scanner because, in a former life, I was burned twice by ones that I thought were suppoerted but weren't, and have an old HP LaserJet5L instead of a newer model because of the same reason. Once I get something set up in Linux, I'm afraid to add very much to it.
Put identity in the browser.
See a related argument I had with someone over this topic.
If companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, Lindows and Suse want the lucrative desktop market they will have to work together on a common standard.
The backspace/delete-keys works differently in every program. You never know when the backspace-key prints ~]]2 or ^h or ^\+qw or just deletes the last character. It is very annoying
I don't care if the design for the modem I have was come up by a bunch of evil monkeys in Redmond who only want to control the modem market.
I don't want to go out and buy a new modem to replace one which works quite happily with Win2k (especially when it's in my Thinkpad).
I don't want to run a script, patch some kernel code (after installing it because I thought that most people didn't need to touch kernel code any more), compile it, configure LILO (no, it's grub now - must learn how to do that), reboot, cross my fingers and then clear up afterwards.
I just want Linux to say "You have a modem. There you go, all ready to use".
And my Linux on the internet experience will be perfect.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Setting up X on my laptop. Almost every distro has caused my screen to either not go in to X at all, melt the screen in a cool psycho-drug effect that if I were really doing drugs I'd be thinking I was way beyond being on a high, and finally I do get it setup but hardware acceleration isn't happening.
:) That still didn't give me the hardware acceleration I wanted though.
:)
The best solution I had was from an X configuration file from some guy in Germany, but when I plopped it in I realized I had to change the keyboard to a US keyboard. Ooops.
Dell Inspiron 8000 with an ATI Rage Mobility 4 graphics setup. The distro's I tried were Mandrake and Redhat. Out of the box both of them had troubles with the display, but Redhat seemed to pick it up a little better after melting the screen a time or two. Mandrake 9.1 didn't see any screens till I put that German X config file in.
The driver update I got from Dell was an X config file that was so out of date I'm guessing Dell doesn't care about users choice in OS's. It just didn't work on my laptop.
Anyway that has been my biggest Linux annoyance and I'll be honest, as I get older I don't want to play around with config files. I just want to fire up X and load up Quake3 and kick tail err load up Eclipse and work hard, yeah..
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Sometime ago I had problems running KDE and gnome. Kde ran , but it took 10 minutes to start up and gnome didn't started at all.
It took me a month to figure out what the problem was. I had accidently turned of the the network loopback device. I discovered this when i noticed that disabling my network card solved the problem.
This may sound like a toll or flamebait and I am fine with that... but I think the worst linux annoyances, sort of the existance is linux... has to be either the pub it gets as the only open source OS around or the Linux users who only run linux to feel geeky.
Those users, the want-to-be's to me, are the ones who think the world is just Windows vs Linux and they are raw raw linux supports becasue they want to be indifferent the Microsoft. They neither help the OSS world nor do they effect MS in any meanful way. They just come off, to me, as brain washed drones.
This is not the OS your seeking.
This isn't the OS we are seeking.
SAMBA is crap and should be redone from scratch, half the damn time the shit just doesn't work.
For Novell, it would be nice if you didn't have to putz around with ncpfs and that to get on a Netware server. Novell (hopefully) will fix this soon (now that they own Ximian) and will make a real client for Linux. That would solve that.
X sucks. It should be redone from scratch too. There's so much functionality that they could do but are hanging on to old leftover crap...just junk it and make a new X.
Oh, and the "RTFM," and "read the MAN page..." assholes. Gee, ya think people don't START there or something? WTF? I can't count the number of times I ask a question, telling people I've read the fucking manual already and read the MAN pages and still can't get something to work only to have some felch-monkey tell me "RTFM". It's even cooler when they quote my WHOLE FUCKING POST only to add "RTFM" at the bottom. Your leetness makes me jizz, you fucking cock-snot!
ARGGGGGH! Too many Linux people have head-up-ass-syndrome. For a community of enthusiasts there sure are a lot of dipshits.
Just use perl.
I realize that this is not of primary importance to many of you, but I know that some of you can relate. Here's to the hope that within the next two or three years we will be able to run our home studios with linux!
Getting Xfree to work on an IBM Valuepoint...
Im-friggin-possible!
Thanks,
Steven V.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
The second annoyance is a purely Linux-related one: not even suspending the laptop works reliably under Linux. It used to be almost bearable, but with recent kernel versions and/or recent Xfree86 my machine has started to hang after suspend in about 5-10% of all cases. Why can't this ever work right?
(I'm omitting my Thinkpad model number on purpose; if you look at all those Linux-on-Thinkpad pages on the net, you see that it's a persistent problem throughout the entire product family.)
The most anoying part for me is the cryptic configs and scripts. I still haven't mastered the XFree86 config yet and boy is the system FooBar'ed if I mess something up in there! The docs suck and the Howtos and mini-Howtos are just as cryptic as the comments in the scripts.
Really cool books, say something like "XFree86 for Dummies", would be a great help to the adoption of Linux. A 2-3 page Howto does not go into enough detail for those of us that would like to know how it works, why it works and get a _detailed_ explanation of the configs.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
I don't know about a book like this being dated fast. I installed Linux on my laptop the other week....like I did literally 10 years ago.
So what did I find myself doing now that I did 10 years ago? Editing with vi the XFreee86 config file to get the graphics to work. 10 YEARS....and still the same old shit...lucky for me I remember all the details of getting that to work, but I can't see ol'grandma doing that whenever X kaks on some hardware.
I run Linux on my servers and love it, but the desktop is just not quite there....I'll try in another few years.
Setting up X11 back in the day used to be a complete and utter pain in the ass. All that dot clock stuff used to drive me insane. Not to mention everything you read said that if you did it wrong you could fry your monitor and/or video card. Man, thank god those days are over.
Also, kernel compiling is a PITA. I've been using Linux since Slackware .something and have been custom compiling my own kernels since then. But with RH9 its always complaining of something. Can't find X module even tho its compiled into the kernel. Failure to startup my USB devices even tho those are compiled in as well. I'm not sure what change recently but i've never had these problems before.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
There is still a lack of a good adobe produced pdf viewer. XPDF is ok, but not as pollised as the latest adobe pdf offerings for windows. General web browsing pluggin support is still weak; especially when lots of streaming video is in some sort of MS format these days. I want to be able to go to lame ass sites like foxnews.com and watch the video- not miss out! (side note - please no responses about downloading the file 1st- it should just work the way it can in windows.) Cutting and pasting has improved heaps lately but it still has a little way to go. I suppose the question should be - what part of linux makes you embarrased when your friends pop around? - you know, you do something on the desktop with them looking over your shoulder only only to get burned when it doesn't work - i hate when this happens, and as it stands it still happens way to often. Corporate penetration is one thing, but before linux can be taken seriously by Bozo Joe, stuff like this needs to be sorted out.
He's one of mine. When I tried to learn about Linux I bought a book on it. Now in the first few chapters they tell you stuff like if you want to change setting ABC then edit file XYZ.
Now, the problem was they didn't tell you how to edit text files until chapter 10!
It works - sometimes, but more often than not, i cant copy/paste between applications in X
It annoys me that I can upgrade Linux without having to purchase state-of-the-art expensive PC hardware, so my hardware is always outdated.
It annoys me that I don't have to reboot frequently, so I never know how fresh the bytes of code are in memory.
It annoys me that I can easily solve my Linux problems in the Google groups section, instead of getting to speak with a real live tech support person, who might be a really cute blonde chick.
It annoys me that I don't have a mascot like Clippy the paperclip in the vi text editor.
Flamebait or not all my shit on my laptop works now. Including my neat little media keys on the front, my win modem and my lcd brightness hotkeys. :-P
I will continue running linux on my workstations since they work out fine for what i need to do.
SENDMAIL!
Maybe it's just me but even when I write very simple questions in a newsgroup or in IRC I tend to get flamed more than answered... on occassion you can find a person in the right mood but the OS is sometimes quite hard to get up and running in the first place (obviously for some hardware configs it's simple)... but usually I have a problem or two that I just can't figure out... when google has failed I tremble about the flaming that will ultimately ensue when seeking out help (even in a #linux-help type channel!)... that's my biggest annoyance and is what has kept me away from using it for quite some time... but now I have OS X so... ehhh... I feel just fine...
1. Where is Saddam Hussein?
Damascus.
2. Where are Uday and Qusai Hussein? DNA evidence required.
No DNA evidence required. We used orthopedic identification instead. They're dead and buried in a cemetery in Tikrit.
3. Where is Osama bin Laden?
Blasted to atoms in a cave in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan.
4. Where is President-Vice Cheney?
Right this very minute? The Roosevelt room of the White House.
5. Where is Jon Katz?
Blasted to atoms in... oh, who am I kidding. I'm just wishing on that one.
when writing large files -- most annoying. It's almost like my system locks up when doing the disk write.
Rumor has it that this particular problem goes away in 2.6 kernels. I really, really hope so.
Using a 2.4 kernel for now. (Hey SCO, see my middle finger?)
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I have several books from O'Reilly on Linux and Samba. Still there is one feat I haven't gotten: Printing from Linux to a Windows 98 Inkjet. I've even dropped the password requirement (behind the firewall), and they still don't talk. The only web advise that looks promising is the unwelcome suggestion of putting Ghostscript for Windows on the PC with the printer, so Linux can send it postscript jobs.
.ASP, etc.) that send an Expires header. WINE takes a lot of configuring for it to still fail me in running Windows apps.
Other than that, there are just application bugs that I wrestle with. Mozilla has its bugs, and version 1.4 sometimes gets a corrupted history that kills all Dynamic content sites (PHP,
Setting up Corporate Network IDS Taps is on top of my list.
X is too slow and bloated for what it does. I remember the first time I used linux (redhat 5.2) loading up fvwm95 and thinking, is that it, Windows 3.1's GUI did so much more with so fewer resources. At least configuration has got a bit easier (still cant get the NVidia binaries to work right though).
Linux doesn't seem to be particuarly stable under heavy load, try having a linux box with 100 users logged in, its not gonna like it. Plus there doesn't seem to be any way short of kernel patches to limit the amount of cpu time or ram an individual user can use up. A single user space process can bring down a linux machine without any difficulty. Try doing that to Solaris, Tru64 or AIX.
No decent games (and tux racer doesn't count). I still use windows for games and not much else, Loki had a few promising ones a couple of years ago but then they disappeared.
Printing is a pain, too many different systems none of which seem to work quite right. Having to put everything into postscript slows down printing compared to windows (although I do find it useful at times). And trying to print high quality photos on my Canon S750 is best left to windows, they look awful using the linux drivers.
On Debian at least. apt-get is handy in that it'll help sort out the layers of dependencies, but it's a pain in the rear when something useful declares itself as being dependent on some obscure (or worse, completely nonexistant) library, and it refuses to do a damned thing unless I find it.
----
IANASH - I Am Not A Super Hero
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
And this isn't an annoyance that's limited to Linux -- I deal with it in Windows from time to time. When I hit eject, I want the damn media NOW. Both Linux and Windows will bitch in their own special way about open files or locked files or stupid processes... it's beyond me why someone can't code up an intelligent solution that will close all read handles, and close all write handles with some message along the lines of "Completing write in /dev/cdrw0, please stand by" (of course this wouldn't apply to regular CD-ROMs).
Anyway, the whole point of this rant is that there should be something more elegant than having to manually kill proc's by PID. I don't think Grandma's gonna ever use Linux if she has to do that kinda stuff.
I'm actually kinda excited for this book... take care of the major "annoyances" that come up, whatever they are (now we all know!)
A year from now, we get another list... then those get fixed....
Two years from now, instead of reading articles about how "linux ain't ready for the desktop" we read articles about how "My god, Linux is MORE Than ready for the desktop" for everyone (geek and non-geek alike!)
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
Anyone who tries to install Linux knows that, at the least, the command line is where a good portion of the work will get done. Unfortunatly, many distros stop there, and assume that any more in-depth knowledge will be gotten from a different source.
A good linux distribution should have an easy-to-find reference of the common linux commands. Ideally, this will be in every shell--a list of CLI commands, with a short description of what they do.
Wireless support (for cheaper aka not cisco) cards. I would have moved to linux on my laptop (the only one that hasn't been switched over) a long time ago. If only the wireless networking would work with out crashing. I can get it to work (although a pain), but after a while of surfing (5-15 min) it crashes. I keep installing new distros, but always the same result. When that gets fixed, I'll be all over it.
In AIX, we have the errpt command which is like dmesg on crack and heroin.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
I discussed my experiences with installing various *nixes here:
= tp c&s=50009562&f=48409524&m=4470955075
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a
And the following comments were rather interesting, mostly due to the fact they posters *obessed* over the Win-Modem, *despite the fact I got it to work*
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
If you managed to solve one of these annoyances, you might post the solution on this RTFM site.
Seriously, if Windows just went away, all my Linux problems would be solved. Here are some annoyances:
I can't get support from my cable company because most of their customers use Windows.
I can't use some web sites, especially for streaming media, because most of their customers use Windows.
My boss worries about using OpenOffice.org because it may not be compatible with MS Office.
I have to pay more for a laptop because it has Windows preinstalled or the OEM pays MS even if it doesn't.
Then there's the availablity of apps or clients or drivers, compatibility with Windows networks, Winmodems, kids' games.
Geez, it's so bad, someone should think about looking into whether any other OS could even fairly compete! Oh, wait, there's another annoyance:
I have to worry about Linux being made illegal in one way or another, because Gates has bought up all the politicians!
Damn Windows!
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
will there be a windows edition?
and how many books does it come with:)
Here's the thing that will kill Linux on the desktop, manual configuration of CFG/TXT/Other files. Windows has, for years, mostly been able to run FAIRLY well with all graphical configuration tools. Yes, some esoteric settings do require reg hacks or cfg/ini file edits, but most things are handled through a very user friendly GUI. When I've installed Linux, inevitably, I have to go to a command prompt and edit/gzip/untar/move/etc. something from there. Installation of Java, mouse, GeForce drivers, all require manual intervention, Windows just drops me a WISE package and off I go.
Make Linux updates/installs as easy as Windows, and theirs a chance. Until such time, Desktop Linux will exist solely as a curiosity.
The penguin is always staring at me watching every move i do and im afraid he will run away with my motherboard!!!!!!!!
:(
sorry my paranoia came from using windows
The VIA Ethernet driver lets you choose whether to run it in PIO mode or MMIO mode.. regardless of whether you have Packet Socket: MMapped IO set or not... It doesn't tend to work well if the two don't match. For the longest time, I thought my kernel was broken and that I'd need an eth card on my new dual-cpu VIA board! Oops! Would this file under Linux annoyances or Stupid User Tricks? :p
Microsoft announces new emoticon product ratings, gives latest Windows and Office products XP
I find mailman to be annoying. By default, I can view all the subscribers, but the archive is private.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
What we have here is another "why don't you /. dudes write this book for me?" attempt. Why not pull all the "newbie/help" posts out of those numerous Linux forums to jump start this project?
And furthermore posting lame and incomplete instructions about using a boot.iso image to
do online uploads, followed by the absence of
instructions for using their "manual configuration"
mode for tcpip access to rpms.
the iBox (intel-box) mentality that pervades the kernel. and all the gcc-isms in the kernel code. they learned C by using gcc, so good luck trying to build the kernel with a better compiler, such as Sun's.
Why so much assy. language. Even in '.h' files?
updating a kernel? Make sure you load a "good" kernel. Then, don't forget to load your particular FS drivers INTO the kernel. Finally, don't forget to run lilo.
1. gaming. l33t gamers would probably try for shits and giggles (increasing linux coolness and maarket share) if it ran games.
2. printing 'nuff said
Having to manually modify the C code of the drivers to my network card just to get it to compile (getting it into the kernel was a whole other story). The drivers were only available as source from 3Com, and not included in RH9, this for a somewhat common card that had been on the market since 1995 (3Com Etherlink 3XP, for the curious).
Lack of drivers, even for pretty common products, and hassles installing them is the greatest single problem with Linux, and though the fault lies heavily with the manufacturers of said products, whose responsibility it should be to release such drivers, the installation process could be made one hell of a lot simpler.
The nVidia drivers for Linux are a nice example. Yes, nVidia supplied a nice text-mode installer, but I had to exit X to run it. Which, on RH9, included manually editing a config file (big no-no! end user should never have to do that!) and rebooting(!). Twice. Sure, I could probably have done it w/o rebooting .. but nowhere did it say how (I understand there's a service I need to disable, but the services aren't described in the services manager so I couldn't tell which did what) so I simply followed nVidia's instructions. Funny how installing the Windows drivers for the same hardware is all done via a simple Wizard, from within Windows, requiring just one reboot on completion.
Note, and note well: This was on RH9, possibly the most newbie-friendly distro there is at the moment. I've had working/playing with computers as my primary hobby for 15 years. I know C/C++ pretty well. I did manage to get everything working at last but it was a major pain in the ass to install just two drivers. Had I been Joe Sixpack, I'd have given up when I saw that the drivers were only available as source (for the NIC drivers) or when I first couldn't get X to shut down (nVidia drivers). Suffice to say, in the area of drivers, and installation of such, there's a lot of improvement left to be made.
There's a longer essay about my experiences installing RH9 in my journal.Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
No, people have been taught they are stupid and need to point and click... if there were a "clippy" for terminals watching what you type and attempting to sort out useful information in its own window. So you start typing mount or maybe CD? and the "assistant" starts displaying "man mount", commands related what you are typing (a la results of apropos), and possibly an index of hot topics compiled from the net (channel selectable so you can bias the hot topics for the kind of stuff you do -- think "networking channel", "AV channel", etc) It's kind of like the idea behind the proposed automagic personal information grokker's, only restricted to watching the command line. As long as it's running in it's own window I can minimize it and so long as it's a limited cpu consumer it could be neat.
My worst Linux annoyance is SCO. Someone please make them STFU.
I heard one guy state that "When you're 80% done with a project, you've probably only spent 20% of the time that it takes to complete it with splendor".
I think that Linux is there, it's 80%. Things just don't work out of the box, and they should if we wish to hope to compete with Windows or Mac OS X. Try daisy chaining external firewire drives on RH 9, it just doesn't work. Try changing network profiles smoothly with RH 9/XD 2 - it just does not work. And get your funky i18n characters to display properly in RH 8 and later - it's not as easy as selecting a country during the install process. These are supposedly not rocket science issues, it's finish, it's what makes the difference to the average user, it's the difference between 80% and 100%.
Linux has not really evolved beyond the 80% during the past 3-4 years. Sure, we've gotten GNOME2, KDE3 and so forth, but these still lack the same finish as their predecessors did.
I'm beyond wanting to fiddle with my desktop PC, which is why, after 5 years of using Linux on the desktop, I'm switching from Linux to Mac OS X once the next powerbook update occurs.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Sorry to break party line here, but "everything's a file" is probably the dumbest idea ever to come out of Unix in general (yes, I know this isn't Linux-specific, but it's still present in Linux).
/dev/hda, you don't get anything useful when you cat /dev/eth0.
I do a lot of programming with video capture cards. Some are fairly low end (BTTV-based cards), some are incredibly high-end (custom hardware developed internally). No matter what the card, though, when I want to do frame capture under Linux, I wind up using the same API: Video4Linux.
Video4Linux, in case you weren't aware, is much like every other device access API in Linux/BSD/Unix. You open a file, then you use shitloads of ioctl() calls to do things that no text or binary file ever created could do-- refresh contents, map buffer space to the screen, change device parameters, etc.
In other words, I open up a file, then I never treat it like a file. The "everything's a file" concept hit a wall many many moons ago, so the Unix community decided to drop in a new API that was simultaneously device independent and terribly dependent on what device you were dealing with. You used the same call-- ioctl()-- across devices, but the arguments to the call will vary WILDLY from device to device, kernel version to kernel version.
It is atop this paradox of software engineering that brilliant concepts like "Video4Linux" and its ilk are built. "Treat it like a file, but don't treat it like a file"-- what sort of intellectual schizophrenia is this?
Why do we leave the file abstraction in place? Except for the calls to open and close the files, nothing ever gets treated like a normal file. The abstraction has outlived its usefulness, and it shows-- you can't vi
Please folks! Let's get some useful, legitimate, and flexible APIs! No more of this "tunnel your API through the pseudo-filesystem calls" crap. If it's a video device, make calls like "SetXRes", "SetYRes", "CaptureFrame", "MapCaptureBuffer", and the like.
(Yes, I'm aware that I can write libraries with these features that wrap around the ioctl() calls-- I'm *painfully* aware of that; I've written quite a few of them myself. It doesn't change the inherent stupidity of making me jump through the ioctl() hoops in the first place.)
Those are the main ones I can think of right now. None of these issues prevents me from using linux. Fixing them would simply further my enjoyment of being a linux user.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Is linux. Why can't you all just get a freakin life, and learn to use windows, or solaris, like normal people in the world.
You are not your fucking job, you are not your fucking khaki's, you are not cool because you use fucking linux.
Long live bill gates
I installed RedHat on my compaq presario laptop. I tried to set up PCMCIA so I could use my Intel network card - didn't work at all. I must've spent several hours working on it before I gave up and went back to Windows ME.
no good cross-dsitribution automounter...
I have a PCMCIA/Smartmedia card reader and it could only work on expectedly a 3 year old Caldera distro (which was also the only distro I owned which could be installed in less than 1 gig).
I switched to OSX in December and kept a Linux server at home.
I am *not* looking forward.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Two words for ya.... RPM Dependency
A few thoughts:
1) Your statement assumes - perhaps erroneously - that thick black cock annoys us. It's a big world, fella: it takes all kinds.
2) Warezed? Heck naw. If, indeed, Linus did kife the code (heh!), he and the Linux community are not being secretive or shady about their distribution of it.
3) Isn't the biggest annoyance in Linux hate-spam from SCO?
"Don't matter how New Age you get, old age is gonna kick your ass." - Utah Phillips
The fact that I have a 2.53 Ghz P4 and a Radeon 9700 Pro, yet MP3 playback still skips if I move XMMS around the screen. I mean, c'mon, even Win98 handled this better, and that's 5 years old now.
I realize the 2.6 kernel will correct this, and that there are low-latency patches available, but still...
Also, the fact that I've only once been able to get 3D acceleration on my Radeon (in RH8), but as soon as I upgraded my kernel to have working sound with my onboard i810 audio chipset, the ATI module wouldn't work properly, and I was back to 2D only. I'm in Redhat 9 now, DRI is loaded, using the Radeon module, and still no 3D support.
Software installation doesn't bother me much, so long as I'm in Redhat...APT or FreshRPMs takes care of most of the essentials.
#1: Too many frickin' distributions
#1a: with each one doing things differently from the rest
#1b: and with each one having something seriously wrong with it, to the point that no one distribution is prefect for me
#2: BLOAT - RedHat, SuSE, etc. install so much crap - most of which I DO NOT want. Then, when you try to reduce the size, stupid dependencies force you to install most it anyway.
#3: Linux has become a mainstream fad. I don't care for mainstream fads.
Why oh why is it so fucking arogant? Its completely broken when you specify an rpath to the configure script and refuses to install into a temporary directory. It makes things completely unportable even though this is exactly why it was developed in the first place.
libtool, from hells heart I stabeth thee.
it just doesn't work like it does on solaris and bsd ...
Trying to understand Linux as a "Windows substitute" is a doomed prospect. Their differences aren't just a matter of tradeoffs: they are radically different kinds of system, much as an MP3 player is different from a turntable. If you found two people arguing over whether an MP3 player or a turntable was "better" -- or a turntable user saying that MP3 players were "annoying" due to the lack of an RPM control -- you would of course recognize this as nonsense.
An example of this sort of difference between Linux and Windows is the difference in the handling of drives. Windows uses drive letters; Linux uses mount points in a single filesystem. While there may be advantages to each, they are more a design difference than a set of tradeoffs. Another example is the difference in balance between CLI and GUI. Windows (or, moreso, Macintosh) users who come to Linux looking for that kind of carefully tuned GUI are likely to be disappointed -- and pushing the KDE control panels on them as "almost as good" is inviting their disappointment. There is a difference in design intention between GUI-focused and CLI-focused systems. The new user just has to un-learn old assumptions, just as the turntable user needs not to be looking for an RPM switch if he wants to become familiar with the MP3 player.
Things I would describe as "Linux annoyances" are points which remain difficult, problematic, or simply grating even for the already-familiar Linux user. Many of these will sound entirely foreign to the Linux novice or non-user, since they are matters that only occur to the already-familiar. These are points which seem out of place, or insufficiently regular or predictable, even to the expert.
Some examples of what I mean:
My biggest annoyance is the installers. Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake -- they are seriously annoying. I know, the installers have seen tons of work and improvements, because Linux doesn't usually come preinstalled. And yes, a simple install is really easy with these things. BUT, try running an install on a 100 mhz 486 or a low-end Pentium with 32 megs of RAM. Oftentimes, it won't work, and it's not even Linux itself that imposes the cutoff. It's the installers. They've grown bulky. I believe Alan Cox himself (or another prominent Linux person) was recently talking about running SuSE on an old 32 meg box, and someone asked how that was possible, given the system requirements. Turns out he installed it onto a disk on another computer, then transferred the disk to the low-end computer and tweaked the heck out of it. SuSE would run on lower-end hardware if the installer would get out of the way. I've seen posts here on Slashdot about how an installer would say no support for z or x, but then you would go into kernel config, rebuild, and you have z or x. I wish installers were more intelligent and more optimized to reflect the real requirements of Linux.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Undocumented dependencies suck...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
0) X. 1) Configuring X. 2) Configuring X with hardware acceleration. 3) Getting X to run. 4) Getting anti-aliased fonts to work. 5) Everywhere. 6) Including non-US-ASCII characters. 7) Non-uniform X application look'n'feel. 8) No XCowboyNeal???
I'm comming at this from a systems admin point of view and one of the biggest headaches that we have is the apparent complete lack of backwards compatability. This is more of a gcc grip than directly linux, but I guess that the two are so closely linked that I'm not too far off topic. We've got a network of Solaris and Linux boxs that have shared /usr/local (obviously a different /usr/local for each architecture.) On the Solaris boxes, we've got 10 year old apps that run fine on any of the Suns regarless of OS version. However, /usr/local for the linux boxes is becomming a mess as (as sys admin) I've got to keep recompiling half the applications whenever sombody upgrades to the next OS. Almost nothing in /usr/local/bin is an application, it's all wrapper scripts that check which linux version a user iss running and then calling the appropriate executable
Needless to sat that this is time and therefore money intensive and could, in the long run, be something that stops companies migrating to linux.
move to iran so you can be with all your friends you effing hippy
Yeah, I run Debian Stable. I know it's old. It's also stable, hence the name. I like it, generally, but have a few grumbles.
I use KDE as a windows manager, and ***most*** of the time, when you highlight some text, it doesn't go to the cut-n-paste buffer. Yjis usually leads to me highlighting the text a dozen or so times, hoping that at least once it will work. Sometimes, even then, it doesn't. Whine-Doze doesn't have that problem.
I also use an old 14" monitor, and must routinely increase the text size to make it readable. Yeah, I know, buy a bigger monitor - hard to do that on my disability check. Anyways, some programs allow this, though many don't, and the few that do allow it make you jump through so many hoops it's unreal. In Whine-Doze, it's one setting that affects every program.
I'm also a bit gritchy about the forced-fsck every 27 restarts. See, I tend to do something, then turn my machine off until I have something else to do. It really saves power that way - again, an artifact of having so little spare cash these days. I can run through that 27 restarts in three days, and then I'm forced to endure a full fsck on every drive I have mounted. In Whine-Doze, I only have to endure it's checking when it crashes, which was about every 6 days, the last time I used it regularly.
Yes, I should lose Debian Stable, and move to something written in the last thirty years. What, though? Over the years, I've also used Slackware, and Redhat - Debian is far less crash-prone.
Lemon curry?
Worst Linux Annoyances ? IMHO the linux users attitude.
Thinking that everybody should be as good as you think you are is not the best way to make friends.
____
nico
Nico-Live
perhaps you should try an actual distribution of linux, as oposed to just the generic linux 9.1. i find it installs better due to its actual state of existence
i sell illegal drugs
My biggest complaint about linux is that it's command line is to simple and intuitive.
> 12 ^$d>>4^8 ^$q>=8)+= $f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';x /pack+/g;eval
Commands like:
hdparm -A 1 -a 8 -m 16 -d 1 -c 2
and
dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192
just roll off of my fingertips.
I want a system that takes painfully complicated commands to do the simplest tasks. Like perl from the command line.
$d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])>8^($f=$t&($d>
$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*
s/
And it's not FreeBSD... (j/k)
My worst annoyance is not knowing if I am secure. I came from windows a year or two ago to Mandrake, and everything was fairly easy - except that nagging fear about security. Because I don't know enough about it, I've stumbled through setting up TCP wrappers and IP Tables with the help of How-To's on the internet, I've disabled services and removed packages I didn't think I needed (only to discover that, hey, now I can't do XYZ and I really sorta need to ... now how do I get that service/package back?) Despite all of this, I never really feel *secure*. I've installed Tripwire and I read the reports (understanding a bit more each time), but for all I know someone has compromised me and has replaced Tripwire itself - how do I know?
Maybe I'm just too paranoid....
Annoyed by so many people saying "Linux" when they mean "UNIX". Also by those who apparently use Linux 8.2 and like ilk...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, your post should be the dumbest thing you've ever heard.
We may hear about companys like Oracle migrating all of their developers(8,000) to Linux but these are still end users. Chances are, the majority of them know enough to get their job done and if they do run into a problem they call tech support. Can't do that at home.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
What I mean by finnicky is certain configuration aspects could be automatically filled in for you during the install, but instead it makes you fill out the whole configuration file when installing new software. Maybe this isn't particularly related to the OS but it has a effect on the whole Linux experience. Some might say this is a good thing, look what happens when the system does to much automatically. Like Windows, people install by clicking next the whole time and never give consideration to security. But at the same time do I really need to specify what my library paths are or the like. Can't this stuff be auto detected during install. Though once every thing is running things work great.
I really would love it if someone could explain why Lisa/ResLisa are NEVER set up and working properly.
Honestly...I just want the network browsing and file sharing to work....
I once bought a Linksys network card that had a bright penguin sticker on the front proclaiming that it was Linux compatible. It used the Tulip driver, and came with a supposed driver on a floppy that of course didn't work. I battled with that thing for at least 40 hours, pouring over HOWTO's, web pages, re-compiling the friggin' kernel. I learned a lot, but I think the biggest lesson I learned was not to believe the "Linux Compatible" proclamations.
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
and this isn't meant to flame or troll, but my #1 pet peeve about Linux is its users. I view what Linux has done to the UNIX world as being very similar to what AOL did for the internet. The end result has been a bunch of arrogant 15 year-old boys looking down at anyone not using Linux.
I've since moved on to FreeBSD and my god is it better over here...
there was this jumper on my CD drives. "Tray lock" or something like that. Basically, you could set it, and then the OS could no longer lock your CD tray. Good thing, if you ask me. Even before that, my first CD drive had a fully mechanical tray, which you had to open yourself. No locking there :-)
The only thing really missing is the whole point of using an OS in the first place: applications.
Clearly an economic problem, not a technical one, and certainly something that isn't worth writing a book about.
The most annoying problems are caused by those companies and organizations that make it impossible to use GPL software comfortably, like DVD encryption promoters, MPEG4 and MP3 copyright holders, braindead scanner/winmodem manufacturers, "Buy it now" button patent holders and of course industry behemoths like Microsoft and Adobe.
I can dynamically load and unload kernel modules (cool), but I have to recompile the whole kernel to install a device driver. I suppose if I hacked around enough I could figure out how to compile just the particular module I need, but I really don't have the time and inclination to do so. I need something that just plain works.
Hate to say it, but Windows has a better driver management scheme. If I screw up a kernel compile, I'm looking at a complete reinstall - if I screw up Windows driver installation, I'm looking at restarting in safe mode and uninstalling the driver. It seems to me that Linux driver installation could be made a little easier for the technically uninclined or the lazy programmer.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Hello Team, I thought I would offer my 2 cents. Here are the problems I've had working with Linux on various occasions; 1. Configuring Bind - Why isn't this simple? Seems like I have to fight with this every time. 2. Configuring Acces by other systems - Samba works ok, could be better, but there needs to be a better way to allow Macs to log on. 3. Linux needs to be more "forgiving". In many cases a mistake means starting from scratch rather than just correcting the error. 4. Installing programs can be easy, or a nightmare. More standarization is needed here especially with regard to dependancies. - Sez
=== The road goes on forever
I've tried several version of Linux, including various versions of Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, and SuSE. No matter which version I use, there is always ONE thing that doesn't work right.
If I get SOUND to work, I can't get 3D video to work (poorly supported card). If I get 3D to work, the CD burner doesn't work. If I get the printer to work, sound doesn't work. The hardware auto-detection usually misses one thing that I have to fiddle with.
That's why I turned to Mac. I got to the point where I wanted to spend more time using my computer than fiddling with it.
dochood
If you have a board with a VIA chipset, expect problems. The 686B chipset has the worst built-in USB ever! The 686A series included. Apparently even subrivisions inside the 686B series each have their own little bugs. So much so, Linux USB driver writers have problems supporting and working around all the little bugs. VIA only provides drivers for Windows.
If you have a VIA based board, with ANY 686 chipset on it, buy a USB add-on card. There is no way to get that bug-ridden piece of hardware working under Linux.
I bought a supported PCI card, and now have no problems at all with USB.
VIA built-in USB sucks.
I recently tried to get Hardware Monitoring running under Mandrake.
In Windows I install the program that came with the Motherboard and it sits in the tray and I can access things like CPU Temp, Fan Speeds, Voltages, Etc.
I RTFM for Linux and I had to recompile the Kernel, hand edit several config files, install a program with multiple dependencies.... and well, I never did get it working.
Other problems would be getting a printer to work, sound blaster & zip drives
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The parent contains an insight that many Linux hackers simply don't get. It's better to have some process generate a thousand I/O errors than to have a computer that is not responsive to user input.
Having to use a command-line utility to track down and kill apps that are accessing a given device is a complete *failure* of the OS to just do what the end-user wants it to do. In the case of a disk eject, the OS needs to forcibly unmount the disk and allow the user to eject, and it should be the responsibility of any programs to gracefully fail, or even better, handle the error, if they really needed to access that disk.
It should never be the user's responsibility to clean up other programs so that the system can perform a task the user requested. When the user makes certain requests of the system, such as those of the "give me my disk" variety, the system should be expected to bend over backwards for the user, not the other way around. Anything less should be considered a severe usability bug.
The foul language used by the parent detracts from his argument, however in this case it can be forgiven due to the extreme annoyance of this bug^H^H^H feature.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Changing drive configurations - I recently went from DVD, CDRW, 3.5" to just CDRW, 3.5" and 5.25"
:-)
Can't figure out how to get linux/kde to adjust to the change, windows or mac would just adjust on the fly and the missing drives would disappear, not the case on Mandrake 9.0.
Setting up linux with a Cyrix GigaPro C3 was interesting/non-intuitive (C3 tells linux it's 686 compatible and it isn't).
Font Sizes, and interface consitency, the size, usability/readability variations on any screen are everywhere, really annoying.
The other annoyances are lack of features like a good graphics module (for screens AND printing) for languages.
Text and graphics (bitmap and vector/object) support in the clipboard and apps (yeah, I'm a Mac user, spoiled to the core
More english terms and less slang and better descriptions. ('Less' is 'More', but what is More??)
Better manual program, like QuickHelp on the Mac.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Thomas, you make some good points about some of the shortcomings of APT, but at the same time, you also set up quite a few straw men to knock APT. For example, the "Security and Stability" section criticizes the Debian model of a centralized, high-quality, well-tested software repository for not being trustworthy enough, but in the "APT is not scalable" section, you critize Debian for making it a little more difficult to be part of the repository.
Zero-Install does look interesting, but you really can't claim security advantages over APT, particularly if you're talking about software from Debian's repository...
I can't recall how many times I installed something, had a minor hiccup that wasn't documented, and then spending days learning about a hundred other related factors, like configs, package managers, iptables, gcc, drivers, and worse.... just to get one dumb litte program.
I suppose it's not a bad thing, but it is annoying.
I'd love to switch to Linux if I could get my HP LaserJet 3150 to work... I've tried it with every HP driver I have gotten ahold of and it just doesn't work. It's always "unsupported," and it's not even a "for windows" printer. That is annoying because I printer alot every day.
But other than that, I really love to use it, and love that I ran run PS7 and MSOffice on it now. Works great!
While GIMP's features are good, the UI exposing them has almost nothing in common with anything I've used on Windows. That makes using it a major pain in the ass.
Coming from Photoshop or ImageComposer to GIMP is like going from Earth to Mars. Even doing the simplest tasks requires long tedious visits to the documentation to divine the correct mouse/keyboard incantations -- the UI does nothing to instinctively guide your old reflexes to the right choices.
I do not want to learn a whole new UI idiom for manipulating graphics! My brain is too stuffed already.I had troubles making my hw works correctly:
- my mousewheel had problems!
- the sound never worked really correctly with multiple sounds at the same time..
- installing an ADSL USB modem was a pain: I needed to recompile a kernel: with a Celeron 333, it took a whole night! It took me three week-ends to make it work.
- the interface felt sluggish and ugly: but I've recently seen a PC with RedHat: the fonts are much better than they used to be.
Maybe all this was Mandrake faults, but all the "small modifications" needed to make Linux work correctly annoyed me and I went back to Windows (XP is stable enough for my need), and I am happily using Mozilla, Ruby, IrfanView (etc..) on it.
Now if I could have an XTerm and the Unix copy/paste style (with the mouse) working on WinXP, it would be wonderfull..
Somebody set up you the mod.
Any simple security explanation. For example, I'm interested in using only SSH connections to connect to my computer, with the rest of the connections only made from the computer. After spending hours with IPCHAINS and IPTABLES essentially found ~works, but never sure. On windows: just run zonealarm. There has to be some app out there that when you run, just makes your computer more or less secure. I much more than a newbie on computers but RTFM is not a way to recruit more people to Linux. BTW, if you think something like shorwall is easy to use, get a person from win world to run config and see a big John Stewart's WAAAAAHHHH?!!!
Well since this is ontopic. Here's a couple things. One Linux programmers need better error-handling in their code. How many times have you had to erase the configuration files for a program, after upgrading to get a program to work, or work right. e.g. KDE and Gnome can be especially bad about this. The error messages need to be better. The system configuration data is scattered all over, and is duplicated many times. GConf has the right idea, and Apple's even better. More approachable diagnostic and fix-it tools. How many times has a program gone south, without so much as even leaving a clue (or worse lock up your sytem without even a log entry, mplayer comes to mind, hard reset every time, or XMMS and SB live lockups), or your system is messed up badly enough that you need to haul out the Knoppix disk to fix it (I personally ran into this when a recent Nvidia driver turned on me). Something devoted solely to fixing problems would be nice.
"Are you fed up with frequent fastboots, ineffective NFS, lousy libraries, creeping C++, broken X-Windows, monsterous Motif, mumbling manual entries, mutilated Makefiles, slimey sendmail, and satanic shell scripts? Come and vent polemic with other victims of Unix, and learn that you are not alone: your problems with Unix are not your fault!"
(By the way, I'm not a Unix hater.)
Biggest problem: No coherent look and feel. I install an app and it doesn't use my desktop font. It might not even use the same libs/settings to render whatever font did select. Worse, I might not actually be able to go to file->options/preferences and find a standard font-dialog! Eeew. Unacceptable to me.
No Miranda and the fact that I haven't found a single GUI editor that I like.
I spend 95% of my time in the browser (Opera, no problem there), editor (which really must fit my taste) and use IM quite a lot.
And Oh, something like Virtual Dub would be nice. I've been thinking that it might be able to start porting it to Qt, but I don't know...
use the lazy switch. it will let you umount a device even if there are processes using it. works pretty good for me.
my biggest annoyance is linux's abismal printer support/configuration. i still can't use my work's HP Color Laserjet 4550N.
Hotplug is improving all the time. However I'm still annoyed at the lack of interaction between it and the user. What I want is a wizard that lets me load a driver off a disk. This doesn't exist in Linux at the moment, if hotplug doesn't know about a piece of hardware and can't find the relivent kernel module it doesn't work.
not that anyone cares about AC posts but..
/bin and static libs in /lib. since then i upgraded to some stable libc5, glibc 2.0.6, 2.1.3, 2.2.3 and gcc went from 2.something to 3.something and back to 2.95.3 (my last confirmed stable). /usr/local/bin and check the file dates against the libc date ..
im running from a suse november 95 install (there were no version numbers back then, just the date). i know that there are still some files left from it, like all the a.out shell utils in
since programs and utils are no more staticly linked (damn that "new" elf support) each upgrade of the libc kicks off something thats known as dll hell in the windows world.
once a new libc is installed (2.0 to 2.1 was really fun in particular) i have to recompile everything. this is way too time consuming, although it shows which programs i use and which can be removed by looking in
i really dont understand those that bitch about dependencies. that you need libs to run a specific programm is a no brainer. i have to compile them in this order. this comes down to wait an hour for gimp to compile some stuff and then have ld whine about a missing glibc symbol in libtiff or something.
Steps:
This side up.
My biggest annoyance are the people who know everything about anything Linux, and have no tolerance for those whom may not be so enlightened.
Let's face it, linux hackers don't write the best documentation. Go easy on the newbies.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
I first tried installing GNU/Linux two years ago. I downloaded Debian, burned a CD, and then, knowing DOS and Windows commands, fiddled blindly with a command prompt. Then I tried Mandrake. And a few other random names I found by searching on linux.org. But none of them worked. Why? One word: X.
Of course, once I knew where to look, I found a compatible config file and copied it in, but not really even knowing where to look, and having to use lynx (Which I use all the time now, but it was confusing then) to find things... just not really the way I wanted to spend my time.
The funny part is that Redhat, for instance, you may not need all 3 CDs, depending on what options you choose to install, but there's no clear indication which components come from which CD. If you choose the wrong component, 99% into the install it will ask you for the 3rd CD and then totally crap out if you can't provide it (no option to skip, etc..).
I tried Peanut lunix which is supposed to be user friendly and on one CD, but it wouldn't work with the HD controller on my newest box. It worked on my older machine, but the windows managers were too slow (that machine wasn't connected to the internet, so there were various difficulties in getting a non-standard WM installed).
RedHat's install was by-far the nicest to use (even better than the Windows version I've tried) but I would have liked a single CD version. I haven't looked in a while, so there might be better options that I didn't notice.
Does anyone know if this book will be published in the open book style that ORA have done with a few opensource-specific books? That'd be cool.
In addition to the lack of skins for Xeyes, I can't get any of my VB or VB Script programs to run on it.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Well, there just so happens to be a penguin character amongst the Sanrio stable...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
info bash
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
'fagott' is an anagram of 'stev jobbs'
You are aware that CUPS provides a web accessible port to configure it? Just point your browser to it, and away you go? You can even select who can print, what driver to use, etc? ( Foomatic, or GimpPrint drivers )
http://localhost:631
When I found out about this, I'm never going back to LPD or anything like that. I've set up aliases for my printer, such as High Quality, Low Quality, B&W, etc. It really rocks. It should be the first line in their docs...
It's easy than Windows to set up.
Honestly, it's been years since I installed a Linux distro, but I remember being particularly vexed just getting off the ground setting up multibooting correctly.
Most Linux newbies are going to be transitioning from Windows and are going to want to keep their Windows set-up intact. Most of my gripes are not with Linux per se, but they're issues straight Windows users never have to deal with it. I remember being annoyed about the following:
1) All the nuanced distinctions between the MBR and bootable partitions, primary vs. logical partitions, the magical boundaries at 2gig/8gigs/"1024" cylinders, yadda yadda. Again, features of the architecture not of the OS (and many obviated with modern BIOSes), but still a pain to have keep straight.
2) Getting the bootloader configured correctly. I had some odd set-up where BootMagic was on the MBR of IDE0, which handed things off to LILO on the first partition of IDE1. And even then I think I must have tweaked lilo.conf a couple dozen times before it worked. Oy vey. LILO, GRUB, BootMagic, NTLoader, etc. It's a mess.
3) Keeping straight which version of Windows can live where. Some gotta be on the first partition of the first primary. Some don't care so much. Sometimes you have to "hide" the other bootable partitions, sometimes this doesn't matter so much.
4) Anxiously futzing with fdisk (win and linux versions) and RedHat's Disk Druid, and some apps seeing what others don't (at least back when I did this around RH6). And keeping straight your FAT16 vs FAT32 vs FAT32X (fat32 beyond 1024cyl) vs ext2 vs ext3.
And most how-tos and other online tutorials cover a few specific scenarioes that invariably never apply exactly to you (this is true of MOST intallation issues). So it'd be great to have all the principles, rules of thumbs, and gotchas laid out in one place.
Anyway, just keep a paperclip nearby to shove in the CDROM's manual eject hole to get the CD out. I'm not saying this is a solution mind you -- I totally agree that it's a bitch of a problem not being able to use the normal means for ejecting the CD. Heck, some CD drives come with a nice little MEH key!
But if you need that F'ing CD NOW...
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Cut and paste never works they way you want.
Ok, I like Linux... But, everyone knows that its a pain to get the system to reconize things.. Lets pray that this will help us.. The best part will be if it can help us who already use it more new users will come!
--Matt Fisher
The biggest problem i think Linux faces, is that an End User cannot simply go download software, and have it be self-extracting and installing. Instead they have to fiddle with RPM dependancies, or apt software, that is just another backwards solution. We all hated it when Windoze progs shared dlls and created problems with different versions, so why is Linux going that route? Maybe someday developers will start using programs like Linstall Wizard and shipping static libs, to fix this problem.
My god, it's been how many years and backspace and delete still behave strangely and inconsistently between xterm, kterm, gnome-terminal, etc. Half the time, only C-h does the trick. And then there's these terminals' inconsistent ability to deal with unicode and color characters so half the man pages render incorrectly. Someone stop the madness!
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Copy and paste doesn't work consistently, and when it does, it often behaves in nonsensical ways.
I feel that world domination will come when the following "Just Works" for every Linux user:
- You can copy text from any application that can supply text into any other text application that can receive text. Many Linux applications can't copy and paste between each other, or if they can at all, you can only do it in one direction.
- You can copy some text from any application, close the window to get it out of the way, because you don't need it anymore, then paste the text into any other application
- You can copy some text in any application, activate the window of any other application, select the text you want to replace, then paste the text you copied first, thereby deleting the second text which you had selected and replacing it.
This last thing I try to do quite a lot to paste a new URL into the URL textbox of a web browser, so I can replace the old URL with the new URL I want to visit. However, in X11, highlighting some text makes it "the selection", so a paste will just paste in the text I'd selected, which was the text I wanted to replace.All of these things have consistently worked flawlessly in every version of Mac OS and Windows I've ever used. Note that my first Mac ran System 5 and my first Windows box ran Windows 3.1. Yes, I am an old man.
I've been using Linux since I first installed Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play and I've never been able to get this to work right.
Consider how frequently office workers in a business need to copy and paste text, and consider that this is my main frustration, even though I am an experienced Linux user. I nearly had my Windows-loving wife talked into trying out Linux, but when I explained this problem to her, she said she wasn't even willing to give Linux a chance.
And yes, I understand one reason this doesn't work in X11 is that the fact that this network-transparent GUI sometimes has to work on X terminals with limited memory, so you can't provide a dedicated memory buffer for a clipboard like on Windows or the Mac. But my friend, the PC I'm typing this on has 512 megabytes of RAM, and frankly I rarely if ever run X over a network, so I don't see this as a valid excuse anymore.
It's enough to make you chew your own foot off.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I guess what I find annoying isn't the Linux kernel, per se, but rather the maze of infrastructure around it. DON'T Hate me. I love Linux, but confession is cleansing and most of these are things Linux inherited from *NIX/SystemV and the fact that it was put together over a period of decades by thousands of contibutors, so there wasn't a history of system management to learn from yet when it was initially designed.
I also may be overdue for my meds. (Ahem...)
TWO desktop environments with similar capabilities.
Distros that put things in weird places.
The fact that distros have the freedom to put things in weird places.
The fact that 'weird places' means that there are a half-dozen places for binaries to go (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin/, etc...)
Don't even bring up /opt!
"User-friendly" management tools with a learning curve that is almost as steep as that for the service or feature they are managing.
The same goes for script-based management systems.
The fact that these tools are necessary so I can cope with the management idiosynchosies and conventions of two dudes in Argentina that have been sysadmins of a UNIX server farm for 16 years.
The SH/BASH scripting language. (!!!!)
Configuration files based on archaic paradigms like the SH/BASH scripting language.
Software that uses configuration files that served as an experiment in parsing for somebody's undergrad senior project. (Therefore, it has a unique, confusing syntax with zero readability and requires one of them there "management tools" I mentioned earlier.... I'M TALKING TO YOU, SENDMAIL!!!!)
I'm sure I can think up more, but that'll get the discussion started.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Annoyance no. 1:
Most users won't really be bothered by this, but since Linux is a DIY platform, this is a significant annoyance to developers: most Linux programs give you the source, but they don't bother writing the documentation.
While it is theoretically possible to go in and fix some broken app, many times I just don't bother because it would take too much time just getting familiar with the code. If only developers would bother to at least provide a 'big picture' of the app's structure, it's major subsystems, etc, it would be much easier to track and fix small errors.
This extends to comments. There's lots of good code out there, but too few people bother to comment it, except for the odd mental note. All in all, it would be good if developers keep in mind the fact that their software is _open source_ and other people might want to contribute to it some day.
Annoyance no. 2:
There are too many close-but-no-cigar apps. Very often, several apps do more or less the same thing, but none of them does it really great, simply because they are all developed by one or two people who don't have time to do more than the basics. Such developers would be capable of doing great things for Linux if they would only work together and build one great app instead of five mediocre ones.
You cant configure much from the webmin.
If you dont have all the ps filters and foomatics or whatever the hell hoops you have to jump through for your particular printer, it's useless. It comes out of the box with support for, what, two or three obsolete HP deskjets?
And managing jobs with the webmin doesn't work for shit - at least it doesn't for me.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Well i used to think lack of driver support, but then i learned to make my own drivers, it taught me to code. so basically when i have a problem, it teaches me to fix it.
SimonTek
They can find little, if any time to persue a course in learning how to program... Not that I am not attempting to... It will likely be years before I can look at code and read it as I would a novel or contract for major industrial purchases, which is what I do for a living...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Don't know what distro you're using, but I havn't had to manually configure X for years (at least 2-3) I install it, and I'm done. Old Hardware, new hardware, Laptop, Desktop, Server.
Oh and First Post....DENIED!!!
X windows has got to be the biggest pain in the rear. no matter the distro, no matter the hardware, its always a nightmare getting it setup correctly, let alone the way I want it.
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Although Man Pages do the trick most of the time. I main wish is to get documentation of each file and what package it belongs to and how to use it. I remember loading Red Hat and watching it install they tell me all the apps they load and some of them I go to myself I would like to try this out in the future. But after that Install I forget the some hundred or so lets give it a try apps. Doing a man -k usually helps but sometimes it gets crowded with all the libraries that are installed or other apps with similar name or function. I would love to have a distro that gives you all the installed application, the files, for the application, and documenation for all the files. At least for the Config files and the execuitables.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
it's does wierdos that make HARDWARE!
...
please someone explain to me, why it is
finacially beneficial to make a windows
device driver but no linux device driver?
is it so difficult or what?
considering the open-source nature of linux
it should be easier to make a device driver for linux.
it's not like they are losing cash, since they
are selling HARDWARE.
is microsoft giving them money or what?
so why can't they be friendly and support
linux AND windows?
damn! so much time lost
Lack of native kernel support for CD automounting?
cut n' paste was always the best and standardized in *nix. middle mouse button.
then came along gnome and kde and netscape whom all tried to emulate windoze and now it's all hosed!
sometimes firebird just refuses to copy to the buffer, and other times i have my shell stuff copied to the buffer and evolution just decides it likes its buffer better.
FUCKtards!
Cryptic errors like this seem to happen more to me on Linux than on FreeBSD. YMMV, but if it weren't for google, I'd have given up long ago... http://www.redhat.com/archives/redhat-install-list /2003-July/msg00098.html
I guess this could be generalized into a more significant annoyance that graphics accelerators have crappier drivers on Linux than they do on Windows. For my ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 with 16MB of ram, I get roughly half the framerate under Linux as I did under Windows!
I blame ATI. Next time around I am going to buy an NVIDIA or Matrox card. Note that both actively support the development of Linux drivers, HOWEVER, Matrox's drivers are opensource. This gives them an edge on NVIDIA. With Matrox, I don't have to worry about the company eventually going under or stop supporting the product I bought because the drivers are open source. NVIDIA vs Matrox is about a trade off between higher fps (NVIDIA) and open source drivers (Matrox). How many frames per second does it take to buy out your freedom?
If NVIDIA went under, I would love to see what all of the NVIDIA Linux users would do.
I've struggled for 6 months to get my damn Cisco PC card to connect to my linksys router using redhat 7.3 and 8 and 9. Still can't get it to work. Everything appears to be there but there's something missing. Problem is... and this leads into my next gripe, the documentation available for troubleshooting.... So much that only partially applies, I've found that a way of life for fixing Linux problems is grab all the documentation, digest it, then regurgitate the solution.... But I guess when there's 6 billion flavors of Linux, this is what happens... I feel better now....
The biggest Linux annoyance is that $699 licensing fee / node that you have to pay.
That incessant trolling about GNU/Linux not Linux on LKML is definitely the most annoying thing about using Linux.
Money doesn't grow on trees big guy. You can't pay to have everyone do everything for you sometimes...
In fact, we did that. We chatted with a company about making some modifications to an existing OSS project using PHP and MySQl as the back-end. Needless to say, based on the preliminary discussions they wanted WAY to much money, into the hundreds of thousands, didn't understand OSS as they wanted another few hundred thousand for us to "own" the code... It was silly... This by the way was through a company that came highly recomended and had some people that did understand OSS...
You will understand once you are out of high school or college...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
DEFINITELY the length of time it takes to configure simple stuff.
Sometimes I genuinely find it easier to fdisk, install Windows, have it autodetect everything, note down what I want, then reinstall Linux again, and hope I don't have to iterate over this loop too many times.
Or you go onto the mailing lists and get all sorts of LAMER abuse and RTFM and so on. It just isn't worth it.
Ok so autodetection might not give an optimally working computer. But it would give a working computer, and I can get on with my life and optimise at my leisure.
As the author of Tuning and Customizing a Linux System, I can assure you that people are not going to be making "hella" money on a book. So far I have made roughly $5,000 in royalties on my book (which is amittedly below average due to releasing it in a rotten economy) and don't expect to make much more -- and I am the sole author. In the collaborative works, the royalties are divided.
So, no one is going to be getting filthy stinking rich off of your contributions. You only get filthy stinking rich off a single book if you are Stephen King or Danielle Steel. If you want to make a living writing technical books, you have to put out several a year and do it full-time.
Just my perspective...
Have you people solved the clipboard copy/paste 'incompatibilty' annoyance?
So, linking heterosexuality with linux and windows with homosexuality MUST be the correct logic? Sheesh, they'll let anybody join /. anymore. Are l/\m3Rz gay and hax0rs straight too? What if some dude is watching straight pr0n on a windows machine? or another more _fuity_ machine? is he still gay? I mean this whole thread is nonsense. Mod down, for "DUMBASS".
God its a pain in the arse. Why does it care what maker of monitor I've got? Why do I have to tell it /dev/mouse for itself?? Why doesn't version 4 support my old Matrox card when version 3
... can it?
what damn mouse to use , can't it spot
supported it fine?? Why is installing any extension libraries about as easy as trying to decipher ancient babylonian
while blindfolded and drugged??
I HATE it , wtf can't the config file just consist of screen resolutions I want and thats it??
Why can't it do everything else itself?? I can't be too hard to find out which graphics card is plugged into it
It will rise much more quickly to the top of a developer's TODO list.
It will be much more appreciated if the user with the problem has thought the thing through, rather than just complaining.
It is basic to the spirit of Open Source, where people contribute .
Selfishness has no value here. Ayn Rand would die of hunger in the Open Source world.
Books like that already exist. They are the basic 'Red Hat Unleashed!' and others of its ilk. These books cover general configuration and installation...
The general description of this is a send us your annoyances, this book appears to be geared towards pointing out flaws with Linux and other niggling issues that need a fixin'
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
This pisses me off. Homestar Runner is unwatchable with sound latency of about 2s, let alone my collection of *legally acquired DVD rips*
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
Let this be a small lesson for future Linux advocates.
Back in 95 I started playing around with free software because I just got a new machine but the old one still worked just fine. So it was time for a little experimentation. So with a box of floppies I went to the main computer lab and downloaded Slackware Linux and FreeBSD.
I tried FreeBSD first. I distinctly remember it being a bad install experience. When the system came up it didn't work quite right. That is too be expected since this was a Packard Bell elcheapo machine with proprietary integrated hardware all over. But the level of problems seemed severe so I thought I was doing something wrong. Off to irc and to find people who could help
Me: Hey out there. I installed FreeBSD and got some problems.
Someone: Did you FTFM?
Me: The stuff that came with downloads...but it didn't help. The video just will not work and the logs say there is something weird with the IDE controler.
SomeoneElse: That only happens when you use a POS computer for BSD. Buy better stuff and try again.
Me: That is kind of a poor fix. Is there anything I can do to make the drivers behave better.
AnotherGuy: Yeah but you are clearly too stupid to figure it or you would have done so. So its impossible for you.
Needless to say their attitudes were less than helpful. So the next step was to remove FreeBSD and try Linux. Although it seemed to exhibit the same problems at the start I actually got much friendlier help from people. I was pointed out what files to try and mess with. I got hints on how to work around problems. What I ended up with was a pretty cobbled together machine but I had a much better feeling about it.
So while Linux wasn't perfect it was a far more enjoyable experience. I formated the FreeBSD floppies and never looked back. So advocates on both sides need to take note: cursing newbies is a sure way to drive future users away.
wtf? they used to run solaris, but i think most of them are now iis.
The larger problem, IMHO, is the inability of many apps to communicate and perform consistently with each other. Far beyond the 'simmilar' config files, it would be nice if some programs had at least a 'little' in common.
It would be nice if there was a standard place to put programs, a standard way to cut and paste between applications, a standard way to change a particular option for all programs (say, changing the audio card to output to), a standard way to do most things!
I'm not saying that a particular way should be enforced (Say, Windows Cut and Paste or X-Windows Cut and Paste), but there should be at least some way to let all applications be configurable in the same way, and that the user can then set up the operations to perform in the way 'expected'.
This currently is most noticable in GUIs, but is often present in lower-level ideas as well.
Then again, maybe I'm just being an idealist.
maybe this is an ideal opportunity to get your pet peeve finally addressed!
It's open source...your opportunity is now. Make the change yourself...don't wait for someone else to address it.
The ability to review and change source code is touted as open source's strongest point. It would appear, from the response to this article, it's also one of open source's least used attributes.
There's a partial web copy at:
Unix Haters (hint: click on the login cursor)
It's quite dated (Unix 10 years ago, did suck fairly badly in some ways, although not as badly as Windows 95!), and getting exponentially more so. The book was actually fairly humorous, it loses a lot in its translation to the web. The book is well out of print in both senses of the word 'well'.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"- Inconsistency in the administration tools,
including dropping the linuxconf tool for the less functional controlpanel.
- Failure to include any updates to Netscape.
- Choosing an immature unrealeased beta gcc version for a production release.
- Breaking the NFS client so that acccess times
became 100X slower (way to go guys, great job not testing there!).
- Breaking the install so that an upgrade hosed my Athlon box at home (motivating a quick run to Best Buy to get SuSE, and I've never looked back).
- Numerous Kernel bugs induced during "upgrades" which I need to accept to close security holes. I had 6 months of hell due to a Kernel bug which caused my server to give up the ghost without a cry for help. Sure I blamed it on hardware at first, since I had 1 year of uptime, but then I realized that their updates just didn't cut it, and they finally fixed it this June.
SuSE has some glitches too, in particularI can live with recompiling my kernel for scsi-emulation support. I don't mind wading through the occasional dense man page to find out exactly how some tool works. But what bothers me is the amazing lack of comments in bash scripts. I'm not talking about obvious type of syntax clarification; I can look up certain commands if I don't know them. What I want is simple statements of purpose--why are you doing this? After switching to a new distro (though I won't mention which since I'll be called a Gentoo zealot) I had to sort through a number of scripts to figure out how the boot process worked. I quickly got tired of staring at two different scripts and asking myself what the programmer is trying to do here. The same goes for many scripts designed to check/set the environment before launching a binary. Troubleshooting would be easier if I knew why certain things were done. I can figure out what on my own, but sometimes I need to be told why.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
The multiline strings suddenly being illegal in gcc 3.3.x are annoying too. Much code still uses multiline strings. Yes I know about ANSI concatenation, but I'm not talking about my code here, I'm talking about the heaps of OPC (other peoples's code) out there. Many wasted moments were filles cleaning up other people's mess. Oh well, not really a linux issue, but a gcc one, but what the heck.
The Linux VM swaps an awful lot when it really shouldn't. Well, it doesn't suck as much as it used to, It used to be a whole lot worse, but it still sucks. I have quite a bit of memory in my machine. I bought the extra mem just to avoid the godawful paging to disk. Linux somehow still sees fit to page to disk. Yes I could turn off swapping, but I just want to be safe instead of sorry. The OOM killer isn't very nice to your processes when you run out of mem or swap.
Linuxisms in code. Programmers that write very cool software (e.g. KDE) but fall into the GNU libc-extension and Linux-only features traps, and thereby making their code instantly unportable. Linuxisms are the bane of my (and others') existance when porting stuff porportedly written for linux to another OS. Instead of a straightforward recompile, I have to monkey around to beat all the linuxisms out of the code to get it to function well on other systems. Examples include /proc abuse, library/system calls only available to Linux, assuming the env is little-endian, alignment assumptions, filesystem feature assumptions, and wearing 32-bit blinds. Not really a linux system annoyance, but more a Linux-attitude-towards-other-systems and brainfarted programmer annoyance, but hey, we're on a roll here.
Bash-isms. Yes, I know the venerable bourne-again shell is the "default" bourne type shell in Linux. It's actually quite featurefull, and can do a heap more stuff than the normal POSIX bourne shell can do. Linux coders seem to thing *all* systems use bash as their bourne shell and write their supposedly bourne shell scripts with bash extensions. For someone using systems like the BSD's, IRIX and whetever doesn't ave bash as their default shell it's mightily irritating. Also the linux bash shebang cancer is an annoyance. If you absolutely must have bash, use env(1) to find bash, instead of hardcoding it into your shebang. Else, just stay away from those bourne again extensions. Use the korn shell if you must.
GNU's rabidness against man(1). GNU has deemed the info(1) documentation the "standard". info(1) sucks. It's counterintuitive, bloated, and redundant. It has absolutely no advantage over HTML, SGML or even LaTeX docs. And the man(1) system is nice and lean for a quick reference. For some reason, GNU wants to stamp out man(1). Luckily, many linux developers still embrace the man(1) system and still write manual pages (bless their little souls). But to find any useful docs about say gnu autoconf, you have to interface with that monstrosity that is info(1).
That's it for a while. I'll think up some more concrete really linux application related ones and post them to the list if I have time. FOr now, this is just a small list of some tings I find annoying about Linux and GNU.
I'll preface this with saying linux's annoyances were annoying enough that I use bsd on all systems I run and maintain. (Openbsd for the servers, esp nice for firewalls, and Freebsd on my workstations) 1) iptables SUCKS look if you think it's good then you haven't used pf on openbsd. Besides the fact that it isn't even stateful...it has state tracking...which is not stateful. I rather hoped 2.6 would get a decent firewalling tool but alas. 2) fork bombs. Linus took the stance that fork bombs should be dealt with in the shell. Openbsd takes a better approach...it seems a forkbomb and the kernel kills the parent process so the system can go about it's buisness. 3) LOAD. linux CANNOT deal with load, 2.4, I haven't tried 2.5/6. Bsd time and time again have shown it's ability to deal with high loads, see hotmail and freebsd. 4) distribution fragmentation. I think this is one of the biggest killers of linux. There are basically 3 bsd's: 1 for workstations, 1 for servers, and 1 for embedded devices. Free,open, net respectively. 5) Packaging. rpm's suck...no really who here hasn't dealt with dependencies from hell. Sorcerer and gentoo are basically copying what the bsd ports collections have been doing for years. Debian and debian like packaging are the only packaging systems on linux that don't suck. 6) exploits...kernel ptrace bugs anyone? I mean sure it's fun to recompile your kernel every 2-3 weeks because you're a geek but after a while there are better things to do with your free time...like waste it here. Oh for more on kernel exploits please see the papers/presentation slides from blackhat and defcon. How does one make linux not suck? Don't use it.
:(){
1. USB subsystem. Maybe it's just me, but I've never been able to make it work reliably.
2. ATAPI support for CD burners. The whole passthrough driver concept is a mess. Especially when something goes wrong, and error recovery can't clean up properly because it is an application program like cdrecord tracking the drive state, a function which should reside in an OS driver. Yuck.
3. Sound card support. Probably works fine if you know how to set it up, but I've always found it to be the hardest thing to get right, and the least automated in terms of hardware discovery.
4. Distros that are a little "too helpful", and install stuff that doesn't work, but just gets in the way. Nautilus and autofs, for example.
5. Dependency nightmares. OK, it's probably an intractible problem, since I would reather run a very conservative stable Linux, yet install one or two bleeding edge packages. (Why don't bleeding edge projects build statically linked archive binaries by default, until they get mature enough to be inculded in stable distros?)
I'm not knocking Linux, though. Numbers 2, 4, and 5, especially, are far worse in windows. Still, I'd love to see these fixed.
Yes the ops on #Linux (and even #Linuxhelp) on a lot of IRC networks need a good head thumping. On many occasions the aarogant bastards there have pissed me off for one reason or another, but usually by just being aarogant. I used to pop in and help out, but the ops would occasionally kick and ban people for asking for help in #linuxhelp or k&b people for helping others in #linux. It was just insane. It's a shame, too, because I genuinely liked helping people out -- too bad I'll never do it on IRC again.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
1) Defective CDROM hangs kernel. (2.4.20-18).
2) When (1) happens X bitches about "someone else using my files" on the next reboot, until it can get a clean shutdown.
3) Mouse cut'n'paste often pastes the string twice.3) Mouse cut'n'paste often pastes the string twice.
4) Init scripts try to bring up NFS before NIS.
5) No organization to protect the brand name leaving product and users open to lawsuits. Needs something like a "liberty alliance" to protect user and company investments.
And I've tried to run various bits of free software as my desktop... FreeBSD, Redhat, Gentoo, and they all share a common problem.
Most of the software is half-finished, abandoned, beta, alpha, or pre-alpha. If a program even installs at all, there's Incredibly Important features missing, it's a pain in the ass to install, it relies on dependencies that may or may not work in the first place or are old, or only work with ONE version of the dependency that's hidden away in a closet in Tibet, and the list goes on. I once heard an employer say "Hackers never finish anything," and I think he's right. If developers want to be taken at all seriously, they have to have the discipline to finish the job and do it properly, no matter how dull and boring it is to finish up the not-so-cool bits of a program.
Don't get me wrong, the server side of open source is great, but I suspect that's because the drudgery of making it look good isn't necessary. The desktop is where Linux is completely lacking.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
That ugly black and white screen with all those weird words on it. Where's My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents, My Briefcase, My Music, My Pictures, My Favorites, My Start Button, My Recycle Bin, My Internet, My AOL, My Pr0n, etc.???
It seems to me that my number one peeve is that on Linux, sound is an awkward minefield in which timing is everything, and fonts are tricky to manage and use.
Look at these known issues for Netscape 7.10;
... they boil down to "flash will sulk if something else is making a sound at the same time". Ridiculous! Other operating systems allow programs to throw sound out without making the user jump through hoops.
Sure, we've got various 'better' ways to do sound, with sound daemons in Gnome and KDE et al, but it seems that most software from outside those projects are still written for OSS- and aren't ESD and ARTSD also interfaces to OSS?
How about enhancing the existing OSS (since lots of people use it) so that it looks the same but transparently allows more than one thing to use it? And then gradually make any existing sound daemons merely thin compatibility layers to the new, shareable, OSS?
Am I missing something? Probably...
I'd like font management to be easier, more coherent, too. How about a helpful wizard which will show you all the fonts anywhere in your filesystem and help you organise them together (including removal of duplicates from different foundries, reporting of both file and font names, renaming files to match the font name, etc.) and generate the configuration for X et al?
I haven't seen anything like that on Freshmeat, I'll look harder.
1: Confusing filesystem heirarchy! Where do binaries live? Is it /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/X11R6/bin or /opt? What's the difference between /etc and /usr/etc? Between /lib /usr/lib /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib?
2: Paloelithic cut-and-paste functionality. You *still* can't copy images (or anything other than plain text) between two apps.
3: That #$^!#^&^%#%& GTK+ file selector. Please, someone put that thing out of it's misery!
4: Zealots
5: Lack of developer interest in ease-of-use issues
0 1 - just my two bits
My biggest problem with linux is other people.
If you want Windows, use Windows. If you want MacOS, use Apple. If you want a free Unix-like OS, use Linux.
Perhaps you want an OS where software and hardware installation is run seemlessly (probably should have the default running as root then). Perhaps you want an OS where software vendors tend to give closed sourced drivers of varying reliability (would probably impact stability though). Perhaps you want an OS that decides to be friendly by hiding information (debugging and problem solver will be harder). Guess what, that OS exists, and it is not Linux!
Unix has a steep learning curve. However, once you are past it, many things become possible. Windows does not have that versitility.
If you want an easy-to-use OS, you can break off of a distro and start to code it yourself. I won't stop you. But don't ask me to code it, and don't expect me to want to use it.
Just my $.02
Speaking of the printer example, why not purchase a decent CUPS-compatible printer in the first place? Worked for me.
If you make $10k off of a book from a decent publisher, while holding down your day job, teaching courses, giving seminars... Then that is a REALLY nice bonus...
If I could find some extra time, I would write a book on some small area of Linux that I really understand and be quite happy if all I make is an extra $4000 from the sale of the book...
Besides, it already looks like you have a decent job...
Anyway, let me reiterate a bit...
If they are looking for annoyances, they could scour Usenet and newsgroups themselves to find those... Instead they are relying on strangers to do the bulk of the research for them. Strangers that will receive no pay or credit for their contributions. (VERY LIKELY) All they will have to do is put those submittions into an easily readable format and then bam, find an answer here or there and be done...
That hardly seems like the work you probably went through to write your book. Doesn't that bother you that they will be making money by simply editing what amounts to Newsgroup emails and likely the newsgrous answers to those problems?
I thought about doing that myself, but it just felt wrong to do that...
So, I didn't.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I tried to get several distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, Slackware) to run on my Asus MPX dual Athlon board. I could get it to install, but never to an SMP kernel. I spent hours on IRC pleading for help, but there didn't seem to be anyone around who had any experience with SMP. I would love to be able to drop Windows for Linux, but if I can only use half my system what's the point? WinXP had no problems at all getting the two CPUs up and running.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
On a windows box, I can open a 1024x768 VNC client, and have it work in full screen mode without any decorations or scroll bars. It looks just as though I'm working on the remote computer.
In Linux, I can't do this. I can only maximize the window. There's no notion of letting an app manage the full screen. So to use the remote machine, I have to keep scrolling to get to the 10% of the remote screen that's not visible at the moment.
My problem is the opposite - where there are nice GUI tools for configuring somethign, the resulting config files are:
- Not documented, neither their location nor how they are set
- Impossible to understand, much less mofiy by hand
Big advantage of an open source system should be the ability to peer "under the hood" and tweak things by hand, even if they were set up with a friendly GUI utility.My main example is the KDE setup for PPP. Very useful for getting a dial-up connection quickly, but the resulting config files are a mess. What if I just want to change one value? What if I want to (or need to) run in command line mode and have no GUI to access?
When using a GUI tool, the resulting config files should be absolutely transparent, and well documented. You'd NEVER get this in Windows. You SHOULD get this in Linux.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
NVidia stands out in my mind as having done a decent job (though they could definitely have a better installer) with this, and I'm sure there are a few others that are doing at least as much.
/home filesystem
But... where is Canon's EOS digital software for Linux? Where is the support for my Acer parallel scanner in Linux, so that it doesn't have to sit in the closet any more? Where is the formatting software for my Panasonic DVD-RAM in Linux so that don't have to use mkudffs (since mkdosfs doesn't work on DVD-RAMs for some reason)? Where is the video capture software for my usbvision TV adapter?
I'm tired of having to dig through spec sheets and deja to find out if the general chipset-oriented driver in Linux works, and to what extent, so that I can decide whether n% is % enough for me in terms of device functionality. I want to be able to go retail and see something like what Loki used to put on their boxes:
Linux Requirements:
300MHz or faster Intel, AMD or VIA CPU
Kernel 2.2 or later
Loadable module support
USB (EHCI or UHCI) support
KDE Desktop Environment support
200MB or more available on
The Linux community has done an excellent job of cooking up software and drivers for some devices (gphoto2 can fetch the photos from my Canon EOS digitals, my DVD-RAM is reasonably well-supported by the sr.c driver) but the bare, general drivers are still lacking compared to the manufacturers' often full-featured software driver-applications.
It's a major peeve to me that not only will many manufacturers not develop drivers or supporting applications for Linux, but many will also not provide information to independent developers to that they can write similar tools. I've tried to contact vendors for development information for a couple of chipsets even recently, and the responses are less than helpful. It seems like peripheral manufactuers are the last great market segment that say with a straight face "Linux? What is Linux? Your PC runs either 'Windows' or 'Mac OS'. Please tell me which you have."
Of course, with all of this said, thanks to the community Linux has much better driver support than other Unixes. For me it's a choice among Unixes and not between Windows and Linux. But I'd still like to someday see an commodity-hardware Unix with real driver and applications support from manufacturers...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
When DevFS came out, I thought, "Wow, this is gonna be great, I'll be able to keep track of my devices a LOT better"
/etc/devfs.conf file. So now I disable devfs on all of my boxen. DevFS is my biggest pet peeve.
Then I figured out that you couldn't use chmod on the devices. Oh no, you have to go edit some cryptic
Especially those that keep yelling "Boycott WineX"
Ungratefull retches..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Back in the olden days, weren't most applications statically linked? Ie, the libraries included in the application linked into the final executable? That became a problem because apps were using more and more large libraries which lead to huge bloated duplication of libraries, bugs in the libraries meant not just replacing a given library version but rebuilding all the executables.
Could it be that we've gone too far the other way? Is it possible to statically link in obscure or highly version dependent libraries but leave common libraries dynamic?
This could be very enlightening, as the listed annoyances could be checked again a year after the book comes out. I would dearly love to see a comparison with other O'Reilly Annoyances books, which are ALL about M$ products, to see what percentage of the problems listed actually got dealt with after one year, two years...etc, and at what cost.
NO! Down, Sig! Bad Sig! Down! Get off the screen...!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Would have to be getting sound and ethernet working. I was using RH 9.1 and connecting to my campus network wouldn't work just fresh out of the install; I had to edit some of the configuration files. Then, sound wasn't working (onboard), so I searched for help on that, found I had to download some ALSA drivers, recompile those, and link them in, and sound still didn't work. I've pretty much given up on it for now.
Installing software is horrible. Windows and FreeBSD has linux beat hands down. Every time I go to install something I run into dependency crap. Why doesnt the linux community come up with one freakin standard and setup a ports system similar to FreeBSD. Then all the distributions and share and contribute to this collection. Installing software on FreeBSD is about as easy as it gets.
Wyatt
you have an excellent "deep-diving" understanding of the inner workings of Linux, but you have also highlighted a very common (and personal for me) annoyance - your solution requires this "deep-diving" knowledge. Its annoying to have to have this "deep-diving" requirement to setup, maintain, and use a Linux system. Like a previous poster said (paraphrasing) - most windows packages work straight from download without issues.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
I honestly don't know how to reply to this other than to say:
/. conformaty...) Yes, I really do use Gentoo. I have for about 2 years now. I used MDK before that for quite a while (3 or so years). Personally, I don't use the two distros you mention in your post. I got my teeth cut on RH, and I sunk the 80 bucks into the SuSE 8.0 Pro-Pack, but since I had decided to try Gentoo, I haven't looked back at anything (other than to suggest to n00bs MDK because of ease of use...).
:-) ), but I end up with a machine that is top notch. Hell it's even "designed" for *MY* machine.
(yes, yes, I know
Really, I know it sounds really cliche and all, but, I prefer to use the UNALTERED souce that the developers released. Sure it sucks rather large moose nards to take so damn long to get a box running (when you compile EVERYTHING from source - but the Gentoo 1.4 Live CD takes care of that part of it...
[/RANT Src="Soap_Box"]
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
i don't get as many "reboot breaks"
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Well alot of people who used to run Solaris are now running Linux. Oracle just finished switched 8000 desktops over to Linux and nearly their entire infrastructure is Linux based now.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I'm running RedHat 7.3 with Ximian and Redhat 9 all using Gnome
Clock: I can't click on the time to change it. I also can't click on the time to connect it to a time server.
Open File Listings or any GtkList item: I can't press a letter and have the list automatically scroll down to the word with that letter.
Gnome Menu Start Items: I don't have a clue how those get added. Linux does everything with a file is there a file hiarchy somwhere? Ximian has removed some of my start items.
Resize my screen size without restarting the Xserver. I beleve this was fixed in X 4.3 but I still don't know how to do it.
Nautalus: It's waay to slow.
If this whole thread IS nonsense (which may very well be true) then why are you posting in it? Personally, I would have modded it as Funny. Can't anybody else take a joke?
Printing in Linux can bite my shiny metal ass.
I really don't know what the problem is, it's not as if printing was all that much rocket science, but I have yet to find something that works, even 90% of the time, for a printing solution.
What in the hell do Linux users use for printing, a 9-pin dot matrix hooked to a serial port? I swear, the hours of my life spent trying to configure printers to work would have been better spent on anything else.
CUPS - nice idea, poor implementation. For once I thought I had found a solution that would work, and work well, for a long time. Wrong. It worked for awhile, then something got farked somewhere in some obscure place and now the thing won't work, and damned if I can figure out why.
LPD and Ghostscript - Look, if I wanted to use something obscure, I'd be running MVS, ok? Using these tools is like configuring Sendmail with a typewriter.
I don't print much, but when I do, I want it, and I want it now, and looking good. It can't be too much to ask, but so far, it is.
Blog,Twitter
The lack of useful DRM. My god, i don't know how i can survive without DRM being incorporated into everything i do! /sarcasm
(Notes, refer to previous /. article on DRM being wanted to boost broadband in England)
Seriously, i don't like that .avi and other crap isn't supported, as it's propietary. Also, it's just not hella easy for dummies like me
There is no bigger annoyance.
NFS is a good example (Devbian flavour):
IPtables itself can be a real pain. While enabling a port is quite easy, dealing with semi-dynamic port assignments, NAT, etc is a royal pain in the ass.
What would be nice is some config tool (maybe ZoneAlarm-esque) that you could enable to prompt when a program tries to open a port, and then have it add the appropriate firewall entry. That, or simply allow specific programs to use ports as they see fit.
Especially with RedHat. They have a commercial interest in you looking at their distro and deciding that it offers something more than the rest.
And really, it's the differentiators that drive development anyway. You need your widget to do something the other one doesn't, and if you're passionate enough about the widget you're developing, you're going to strive to make it stand out. You'll get your believers and haters, and now your product is a choice among many. Do this with a hundred different software tools and one distro looks very different from another... and there's a lot of room left in that pool.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
I think one of the most annoying thing about GNU/Linux projects is all the damn jargon you have to get through. How can the uninitiated be expected to know that vi, emacs and pico are text editors? That tar does archiving? The list goes on and on. Those KDE guys insist on using dumbass "k"nicknames for every app but at least they're somewhat descriptive. What the GNU/Linux world needs is a new naming system based on common sense instead of inside jokes.
1. Fonts (rendering and management)
Need I say more? Between Motix, QT, Mozilla, GTK and an extra Corel Draw and Wine and all that I'd say there's something between 4 and 7 subsystems responible for Fonts on my Desktop just now. If they where understandable and would follow the same or simular setup guidelines and maybe even have the same fontdirectories and naming conventions and thus be controlable I could live with it. But haven't met *anybody* who could atually grasp what's going on with all that font stuff on Linux. And after 1 and a half years I myself have given up.
2. Copy and Paste (not following the X architecture)
The way Linux + Desktop applications handle copy and paste sux big time. And that's mostly due to everybody and everything having it's own approach. XFree's clipboard is very good but hardly used. KDE has it's own, which happens to mix the flaws of X with those of Windows, Gnome probably has it's own, then there's those Java Apps that need hand tweeking for a usable Clipboard integration...it's all just like that font stuff: It basically sux.
These are the two things that I'd like to see improved. I'd like to pitch in myself but I wouldn't know how and where to start.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Some time ago i DLed Slackware 7 (or whatever, im a Linux noob) from the Swedish University Network and installed it. It was not the first time i installed linux so i had some clues on how to get a window manager, sound and the internet connection running. But to my frustration the resolution was always off somehow and everything farked up. SO, i return to my filthy imperialistic pigdog Windows and ICQ my Linux-geek friend. Guess what? Couldnt fix it. After a few weeks in windows, i hear the distro on the SUNet was corrupted and averyone downloading the ISO had problems with X-resolution. The bottomline? Peer-to-peer support is way too hostile in the linux community. Go ahead and tell me i shouldnt run linux if i cant get it running in 10 minutes. I still think the community could use some more happy faces and a friendlier attitude towards noobs like me.
Ok, im gonna duck now and try to keep myself from catching fire.
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Here's an idea targeted for newbies that goes beyond Windows:
Have users identify how they want to use the system at install time, then provide a clickable checklist, available from the desktop after install, of additional things to install/configure. Make the checklist as automated as possible. I.E. first get drivers installed, then then security lockdown, then get the online connection going, then specific user apps, etc.
Linux newbies need a way to get over the technical learning curve easily and get on with productive work.
Linux is so powerful--the potential is there to have "configure; make; make install" happen with a single mouse-click, just like InstallShield.
But it could get better, too: have errors automatically compared to an online database where people have suggested fixes.
My biggest problem is a Back Office alternative. DataCAD will not run with WINE very well either. If I had that working, I would switch this whole office to Linux.
I've installed and ran Red Hat and Mandrake's versions of Linux. Mandrake's installed like a dream but I could never get my scanner, digital camera, and printer to work. But that's not the annoying part, because I know I could have gotten them to work if I tried a little harder.
What I find annoying about Linux cannot and will not be fixed. My problem is that I'm used to doing things the "Windows way" and it's aggrivating having to learn new ways. I guess I'm getting old.
One of these days (I've been saying that for years) I'm going to have to stop using a dual boot as a crutch, install Linux, learning it, and say goodbye to Windows forever.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Dual Monitor support is #1 for me. After getting used to two or three monitors on windows I just can't go back. Also start-menu editing in RedHat should be *possible*.
The big problem for me is available software, drivers, plugins, etc. For example, when my 2 1/2 year old son and I go to the Playhouse Disney website from Linux, some of the games don't work because they need shockwave director. Yea, I can get it by shelling out $25-$30 for crossover plugin (and I may in-fact do that), but the point is that it has to use the plug-in from windows.
Also, I'm really puzzled as to why Apple won't make Quicktime natively available for Linux. If it's working on OS X, how hard can it be to port over? Mplayer seems to do OK as far as that goes however.
Another thing are websites that don't recognize the plug-ins you do have and and won't let you by until they do (Ifilm and atomfilms for example).
Then there is availablity of critical software like AutoCAD, Quicken, Kiplinger TaxCut, etc. Again, not really the fault of Linux, just can't convince the "bean-counters" that a market exist.
What Linux distributions can do, however, is continue to make progress on useability. They've come a long way. At this point, as long as you can follow the README's and research the occasional discussion group on the internet, you shouldn't have too much trouble. Compared to Windows, however, that's a lot of work. You can't blame the end user for going with a better supported and easier to install OS. For him to give those up, you have to offer something compelling in return. For the server market, small research firms, etc. you can often do that. For the average user though, Linux still has a ways to go.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
FreeBSD: /usr/ports
Enough said.
Where's the command line?
yaeh if i wouldn't have had to spend 175 US$ for windows office XP i could have bought :)
a faster AMD Athlon
or a web-cam
or a better keyboard
or a digital camera
or a new MD-player
or a cool scanner
or subscribed to playboy cyber club for two years
1. A lot of people have said it already, but installing new applications is a pain in the tuckus
2. changing the screen resolution. playing with modelines and sync rates at the risk of my display exploding is not my idea of fun. and no, x-configurator is no better.
3. RTFM responses from junior highschool students to legitimate requests for help. Google didn't help, or gave me an answer in Portuguese, and no it really didn't occur to me to read the FAQ on fuzzwurzle.com/blips/linux? You know, the FAQ that is not archived and has been moved to its new home at mxlplix.org/ribbons which no longer exists?
4. General pain in the ass that it is to configure anything, install anything, upgrade anything, or modify anything. Even when I've gotten something to work after hours of effort, the fix I finally get to work does not always work for the next machine I have to do the same thing on, nor do I always remember what that fix was by the time I have to do it again.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"Different can be better, but yes, there may be a learning curve... and that can be annoying for some."
I don't mind the curve, I mind the steep Mt. Everest glacially sub-zero temperature climb.
Windows got a lot of things right from the ease-of-use,Plug and Play,install,uninstall and GUI standpoint. There HAS to be a way for Linux to capitalize on that learning and still preserve the integrity of the OS design.
Us non-programmer types _cannot_ be expected to understand that you have to use (insert acronym here) command line or visit 123.org/RTFMNewbies to figure out how to unmount a CD drive.
My response would be (as you point out) "Well crap, I don't have this problem with Windows."
Its less stress for me to shell out $200 and know that I dont have to stay up at night trying to RTFM on unmounting devices or wgetting this or that... pegs my pain-in-the-a$$ meter quickly.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
That's not being a "writer", that's being an "editor".
What I've dubbed "RPM Hell" -- you go to install some innocent little package, which has 20 dependencies. You install the first dependency, and see that it has 20 dependencies.
You realize you're going to be there for a LONG time, as it seems your work grows exponentially every time you install a dependency.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
is lack of certain software. I'm a proud user of WineX, but it doesn't let me run everything, so I still need to keep a Windows machine around for Quicken, certain games, etc. and there are often no viable native-Linux alternatives.
That doesn't stop me from having my desktop be 100% Linux, though. I use my fiancee's desktop for Quicken, and I just wait for native or WineX-compatible games to come out.
-- Fratz, human
Anybody figure out dselect?
That bad boy scares the poop out of me.
arrgh....
The MacOS has never allowed you to eject a disk while still in use. You have to "put away" a disk instead. The classic MacOS "drag it to the trash" metaphor, while counter-intuitive, works. In MacOS X you go down to the dock and hit the "eject" button.
Actually KDE handles this fairly well...you open the "removable disk" window with Konqui, right click the drive and select "Eject". Usually if you do this, even if you can't physically eject the disk from there you can usually hit the button on the drive and it will cough the disk up. Yeah, it's a lot like how Windows does it, but it's effective.
Did I say I like KDE? ^_^
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Something like being able to pop up a menu of the X apps on my machine, and be able to transfer one or more to another machine:user:display over ssh so someone else can use it for awhile.
Also have some type of recall capability for the X apps I own back to my machine:display, or send them to another display, and so on. Like the same menu would have another tab showing where my apps are exported, and allow me to perform ops on those (request to move it to another machine:user:display, back to my display, etc). Also be able to "return" X apps someone has sent to my machine back to the sender when I am done.
I think this would be pretty f*cking phat. Not really on topic, but as long as we're talking about X and linux what the hey.
CUPS has always given me problems. I usually end up at the web interface trying to figure out exactly what to put it. Lprng on the other hand ALWAYS works perfectly right out of the box.
My biggest annoyance is trying to get my Linksys WPC11 wireless card to work. I've RTFM, read the HOWTOs, downloaded and compiled the various packages that I'm supposed to need, and tweaked the config files like instructed. Everything compiles fine, everything installs fine, the drivers load fine, Linux recognises that wlan0 exists, but I just can't aquire an IP address.
I'll probably spend this weekend starting over and trying again. Who knows... maybe it will work this time.
I've had two scanners completely fail to work under Linux, despite the fact that they're listed as "fully working" in two different Linux distros (SuSE and RedHat.) I've rebuilt kernels, parallel port to SCSI drivers (for the ancient, presumably more supported scanner), userland packages, etc. Never worked. Not once.
Come to think of it, I've never actually seen scanners running under Linux at all. But I've since switched to OS X. Now my little scanner just works.
Just what's so "intuitive" about being able to eject a mounted device when it's being used just by pushing a little button?
Blowing a device away under a running app isn't something done lightly - unless of course you're using a toy computer running a toy OS and like to deal with things like BSODs...
I thought it was funny, maybe off-topic, but Troll? Maybe the meta-moderators will see the light.
Totally disagree. WinXP is a step backward after Windows 2000 Professional, which is what Win9x should have been all along. A lot of the WinXP annoyances are quite similar to Win9x annoyances, actually. If ReactOS is able to replicate the Windows 2000 experience, it will really and truly rock.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'll bite...
I can't get support from my cable company because most of their customers use Windows.
The will always be true for underdog OS's... I'm glad that there will always be choices. I'll continue to use FreeBSD, and I expect that I'll always have this problem.
My boss worries about using OpenOffice.org because it may not be compatible with MS Office.
I would worry about it more because it's less productive. I used OpenOffice exclusively for about 18months. There was a lot I liked about it _personally_, but I could see how it's still not quite ready for prime time (it's getting their though).
I have to pay more for a laptop because it has Windows preinstalled or the OEM pays MS even if it doesn't.
Right, the so-called "M$ tax". An OEM gets a good deal for putting Windows on all of it's machines. Therefore, they pay a very small amount per machine (depending on contract). The IBM's an Dell's probably spend $25-40 (XP Home/Pro) per machine. Now, if this was Lindows, they'd be paying the same amount (Lindows OEM's aren't discounted as much, so the resulting price hardly cheaper than Windows). The point is, it'd either be Lindows, Windows, Lycoris, or some consumer friendly OS that's NOT FREE. And that's what companies care about - Consumer OS's, not YOUR OS (I'm assuming Lindows isn't your OS of choice, but that's not the point). Furthermore, just get an Acer barebones laptop and build it yourself. It's cheaper, and more custom (which is what you want anyway).
Then there's the availablity of apps or clients or drivers, compatibility with Windows networks, Winmodems, kids' games.
Again, the underdogg OS's will always have this problem. You're just forcing your preference to be one of the major contenders. There's really not room for more than two popular consumer OS's.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
CUPS gets distributed with only those HP modules because EasySW (the gang who wrote CUPS) sell their own set of drivers for various other printers. You only need to get a PPD file from the Windows driver of the printer to get it to work, or you can install foomatic/cups-o-matic/gimp-print which already has loads of drivers.
There is something to what the original poster said.
Many, many existing Linux users have volumes of existing scripts that were written to expect certain behavior from commands.
If you fidget with commands break all of those scripts in hopes of gaining Windows users, you will severly break the working environments of the existing Linux users in ways which may take years to repair. More importantly, most of these are the same people doing most Linux application and driver development.
It's the classic "make it so that even a fool can use it and only a fool..."
You see: you "fix" a whole bunch of silly RTFM problems all over Linux, so that the "obvious" (to a Windows user) behavior occurs. You gain a whole bunch of happy Windows users who don't want to learn about "old fashioned" ways of doing things. But you break a whole bunch of older scripts, methods, and tools in the process. Congratulations, you've just lost a huge portion of the original Linux community (esp. the development community) to *BSD, where Unix is still Unix.
You're back where you started. All the interesting development is now happening on BSD because the active technical community now lives in BSDland. But BSD is still Unix-y and so you're back to whining "Why do I have to RTFM? Why can't you *BSD people make this stuff easy and do things the obvious way? How do you ever expect to get any of us Windows or Linux users?"
The answer is simple. Unix developers want Unix. Windows users considering a switch should come to Unix for Unix, not for a cheaper Windows.
My own $HOME/bin directory contains 214 scripts, some of them very long and not seen by human eyes in years. All of them use piles of shell tools. If Linux breaks them, I'm outta here. I don't have time to rewrite and/or debug all of them from beginning to end in some kind of "It's the New Linux!" audit.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Clippy:Microsoft::Penguin:Linux
"I'm beyond wanting to fiddle with my desktop PC..."
You are actually touching on a point that not too many techies really understand: The PC is a commodity. (yes, I said that) Its like a VCR, a microwave, a DVD player, a TV...
Point being this: People and business want to buy this tool and use it. There still is a large techie crowd that likes to roll thier own software and hardware, but the bulk of the users just want a working tool. The OS is part of that tool.
If the OS works flawlessly then its done its job. If it is unreasonably complex or unreasonably hard to use/configure/maintain, then I assert that the OS is a failure.
The great understanding that needs to take place is that it is not the techie crowd that should be the measuring stick for the "unreasonably complex...maintain" part, but the "masses" who use the tools who should be the measuring stick.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
arguments to single-letter options occur in the order in which they are specified. Thus, in tar cvf, f requires an argument, which follows the cvf cluster, but is BEFORE the files to tar.
Similarly, if you were to, say, exclude something, you might do this:
tar -cvfX foo.tar
but!
tar -cvXf
notice the correlation between the order of arguments, and the options that go with them. The files to process are ALWAYS last.
The following syntax are also valid:
tar -cv -f foo.tar -X
tar -fX foo.tar
etc.
Note that each option cluster starts with a '-', and any options are slurped in to "complete" them.
This is the standard for all unix commands. Where've you been?
Note: the LEGITIMATE complain about tar that I can understand is that it always assumes the first option is an option cluster even if it doesn't start with '-'. You would think it'd just collect the arguments and tar them to standard input, but you'd be mistaken. That always bothered me. The first file will be treated as a cluster, with often disastrous results. Yea for POSIX compliance
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While we're bitching about Linux stuff, I might as well complain about X font rendering. This might not be an isssue restricted to X on Linux, but it certainly is visible there. Even with the latest FreeType, Anti-Aliased fonts etc, X font rendering simply doesn't look as good and clear as font rendering on other platforms (yes, this is a comparison, yada yada yada). The spacing between letters sometimes seems too small, to the point where you can mistake "rn" for "m" with some fonts.
;)
The cruddy font rendering is mostly apparent in applications where you have white text being rendered on a near-black background, ie: a terminal or a web page with a dark color scheme. The letters just seem too thin, and are difficult to read.
I have even moved to slightly bigger fonts than I usually use to help alleviate this problem, but it's still not nearly as good as when I am reading text on another system such as Windows or MacOS.
Anyway, I'm confident these issues will get fixed eventually, as the font rendering is already vastly improved since I started using Linux. Right now it's just an "annoyance"
My biggest Linux annoyance is that with all this talk of "free" stuff there has yet to be a Free Hardware movement. I mean, if people can dedicate so much time to writing free software, why can't the hardware folks also contribute a bit? Think of the benefits to society!
I'm willing to pay for the cost of the raw materials, of course -- at least until there's a Free Raw Materials movement.
All those axxx.ms.a.microsoft.com servers are owned and operated by Akamai. I guess you could still razz MS about that, but AFAIK, there's no real alternative for that kind of service.
The Amiga used floppy drives that had different hardware than the PC, so maybe that feature was part of the Amiga hardware. However, I seem to remember that when you took a disk out of an Amiga drive, you'd hear a periodic soft click, like maybe every few seconds. Perhaps that was sort of a 'ping' that looked to see if the disk was present or not, or if it had changed.
What I'm reading is almost strictly related to administration issues: installing the OS, drivers, programs, etc. I'll be the first to admit: this needs a lot of work from distros and from hardware manufacturers.
That said, if you've got someone who knows how to manage it, a friend or IT tech, Linux is usable for everyone. For the vast majority of normal tasks done on a computer, the programs are capable and easy to use. This is why Linux is ready for the corporate environment and for friends of Linux users.
Then again, not many folks do admin tasks on their Windows installations either. The only lacking element is the non-hardcore-but-regular computer user.
I hope this post doesn't get lost in the crowd...
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Trying to understand Linux as a "Windows substitute" is a doomed prospect.
Then why does almost everything Linux do (and I'm talking about the larger scope of Linux, not just the kernal) attempt to emulate Windows? Although Linux itself may not be a Windows substitute, it seems as anything related to the GUI and consumer related functionality is at least "inspired" (lol) by Windows, if not directly copied (please, no "mac"/"xerox" references). Like it or not, Windows is what many Linux developers use as a reference point.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
WinZIP is an application suite that handles many compression formats.
.gz files, imagine that. WinZIP is BIG.
GZIP is a single compression format. It can only handle gzipped files (duh!). If it handled more, it wouldn't be a tiny utility, and that wouldn't be very unix-like, would it? GZIP needs to stay small because it's used in tiny places like initial RAM disks and boot floppies.
WinZIP actually uses the library in gzip to handle
Search freshmeat for archiving utilities (with names that often sound like linzip or similar). These are what you are really looking for. Also note that later Nautulis (gnome-vfs) and Konqueror release can browse into many types of archives as if they were folders.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"Trying to understand Linux as a "Windows substitute" is a doomed prospect."
Although I understand the point you are making, I must say that I hear the "switch to Linux" line all the time from the Linux community. If its not a substitute for Windows (in functionality and ease-of-use) then why would people switch??
I would love to switch, but its too complex and requires too much deep (programmer-type) knowledge to maintain/configure. I quite frankly just don't have time to screw with that.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
What have been your biggest annoyances...
Since I very, very rarely use Linux, the biggest annoyance to me is all you god-damned Linux-loving zealots.
Seriously.
I'm not trying to start a flame war (but it'll surely be modded as such).
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
I always hated
Yes, I considered debian, (and may yet go that route if Gentoo doesn't pan out) and love the idea of the overnight apt-get, but I currently run SuSE because they have a lot more meat on the bones out of the box. In fact, when I installed SuSE, it took me two days just to go through the list of what apps I wanted to install.
Installation ease matters more to me than it used to, I have my home firewall and server nice and stable, and set up the way I like it. Part of me loathes the idea of upgrading, because I remember how long it took to get the partitioning and all the services such as Samba set up just right.
My rights don't need management.
I hate it when that doens't work properly. And it doens't! KDE, Gnome etc have all otehr ways of handling copy & paste. Terrible!
Also, a universal config centre that handles both KDE and Gnome would be great!
One of my biggest annoyances with Linux is the different clipboard standards used by different applications. For example, I wrote a document in KOffice, but wanted to print it in OpenOffice (seems to print better quality) so I thought "just highlight the text, select copy, then paste it into OO". Hmmmm, no cigar. The only way I could get that text from KOffice to OpenOffice was to save the file, then reload it in OO.
Not a major problem, but one of those niggly little things that could so easily be fixed by agreeing on a standard.
Enough rope to hang yourself with. And the kernel module loader seems to take care of most everything nowadays, so they rarely see any action.
If it isn't automagical, point your complaint at the driver author. (Sometimes it's the 3rd party guys trying to help out! Bad! Bad! Buy the O'Reilly book on writing device drivers first!)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I hate GNU "info" files, as well as anything to do with "texinfo" format. I don't want to talk about it because it will just get me all upset.
Larry
The installation process of the OS and apps have improved greatly in recent years. But everybody seems to ignore the uninstallation issue. You try out a piece of software and you do not like it, what know? Reverse engineer the Makefile to figure out what file to rm...
This is why I always do a ...installing the software on a isolated directory so I can ...the directory to uninstall the software. Off course, my path and manpath are growing because I never install software under some generic spot like
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
That's the trouble. Linux often seems to have two levels of operation: omniscient programmer and absolute moron. While I've always been a big Gnome fan, the latest push is to dumb down the default interface to the point of being suitable mostly for users at the "gee, where do I launch The Internet?" level and requiring hacking xml files to reconfigure things to make it work the way you want it to (because everyone knows that options are confusing, right? we can't give users who can't grok xml the ability to modify the way their programs work in non-trivial ways, they'd be completely overwhelmed!). File-roller is somewhat slow, its interface gets in the way, and it doesn't have enough of a range of abilities to be able to replace learning all the CLI archive commands for anyone but beginning users. Why can't GUIs and command-line commands be at least somewhat targeted to the users who generally know what they're doing but aren't programmers and can't remember all of the command line options for hundreds of programs?
My current choice is definitely the whole laptop power management issue. I recently purchased a new Dell D600 Latitude and spent all weekend toying with 2.5.x kernels, -ac branches, ACPI and swsusp patches and what not all so I could get decent power management support. In the end I got everything except speedstep to work, but I still get only about 2/3 the battery life with Linux, and hibernate is flaky as hell.
Of course, this is really a symptom, rather than a root cause. Laptops are kind of a worst case scenario since custom hardware/software solutions are much more common, and vendors obviously only worry about Windows.
(Well, some of these are annoyances with an OS built around Linux, not Linux itself!)
- Desktop managers, GUIs, and icons designed by terrible artists
- USB does not work right
- Archaic technologies (X, old syscall interface, C, primitive access controls,
- Perl
- Constantly upgrading software with buffer overflows
Nonetheless, I use linux all day, every day, at work...
Preferences->Navigator->Helper Applications
mime-type: audio/x-scpls
extension: pls
open with:
I checked around with google and eventually when frustrated (I tried
Now would someone please tell me what the hell the point of documentation like that is? It reminds me of my bios..
AGP_FAST_WRITE: you can enable of disable.
F1 reveals the following help: choose enable or disable
I mean come on, I think we've got the interface figured out in both the BIOS and Mozilla.. if we're smart enough to be changing these options then I think we can handle the elementary interface. I can understand the BIOS with the limited storage it's in, but Mozilla? If you're going to write documentation like that, just write "Sorry, no help available"
Getting a video card has to be the most annoying thing ever! Especially if you have to keep switching the monitor around, and when you just have to hope you're clicking on the right thing and typing the right text... horrible experience...
Gets even worst when after a week of searching, you find that no drivers were released for a Hercules 3D Prophet 9000 64MB PCI (eek)...
Your grandfather was an idiot. When you invest in the stockmarket, you're not getting something for "nothing." You're getting something (a return) for something (use of your money).
The speed of apps is my biggest annoyance. I use icewm so my window manager is not a problem, but the speed of QT/GTK2 apps is considerably lower than windows 98. Im talking about mainly startup speed.
Mozilla has to be the slowest app ever. Not only that, it is the only program that maxes out my cpu often (it has a slow rendering speed and more resource usage compared to any other browser). I know i will get opposition out there, but unless you have a recent computer you will notice it.
I know, linux apps are advancing, while my windows 98 is the same, but why do new programs need to be slower. We need to stop concentrating on quality, and start concentrating on speed. Quality will come naturally with time.
If browser integration, the X window system, or the GUI toolkit need to be integrated with the kernel, then thats fine by me. But until it is much faster im going to use win98 as my primary OS, and linux as secondary.
btw, i got celeron 733 and 128 ram.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
non-distro specific:
-menu options in GUIs, and a way to edit menus
-plug&play-ness has a long ways to go
-GUI file permissions changes
-MS Exchange compatibility (a pipe dream, but hey, I can dream)
-easier security patching (Bastille is good, but something easier would be better still...) an easier firewall config would be fantastic.
distro-specific: .deb package doesn't include my NIC driver. minor PITA, but hey, this is basically a whine-list.
-a chkconfig util in debian, just like in redhat. there's a chkconfig for debian, but few apps work with it (that i know of).
-if redhat could stop changing really big things like GCC and glibc, that would not suck.
-debian stable needs updated packages. no, really
-debian needs a GUI installer. no, no, no, really. The txt install is NOT hard, but a GUI install shouldn't be either.
-i always have to recompile my 2.4 kernel in debian because the
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Clippy isn't there to help me run my life.
SAMBA!
This thing is the most difficult package I've ever set up (although it'd probably be BIND if I have decent experience with that)
# fuser -v
#
Dependencies. Nothing pisses me off more than trying to get application X to work, but in order to do that having to get libraries/apps Y and Z working too. My distro of choice is Red Hat, so normally it's not a problem as I can just install the RPM's, but I have to look on three CD's to find them.
Keep in mind I'm a command line junkie. X doesn't do it for me. IMHO it's still pretty slow and clunky.
SysV configuration files also hold a special place on my pet peeve list. There is no easy way to add new daemons that I know of, so normally I just place daemons not part of the Red Hat install in rc.local.
However for all my complaints the one thing you can't beat about Linux, or Unix for that matter, is that once you have gone though the pain of configuration it runs forever. It will not magically die one day unless you have a catastrophic hardware problem or a breakin.
The problem also might be that I'm simply not aware of apps that exist that make the problems I complained about easier to deal with. So, suggestions are welcome.
-R
The people who argue that GNOME and KDE have to be standardized. I agree that I should be able to use KDE but run GNOME apps, but that's why you have libraries for both.
The people who argue that KDE and GNOME need to merge are amongst the greatest annoyances. It's just like saying "Microsoft and Linux don't play together well. They should be merged into one OS." We need diversity. It's ludicrous to suggest that they should be merged. I have the libraries for both, and think most people do. Apps for both work just fine. Diversity is a good thing.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Jerking off to gay porn is not considered "getting laid" ... SORRY!
Well you can check the hotmail servers as well or just go down the list. The company I work for is right across from Microsoft and 90% of our business relys on them; Steve Ballmer is here just about every morning!
So I had to justify my decision to use Apache, MySQL and PHP (they won't let me use Linux however) so I did loads of research and discovered LOADS of machines running Microsoft.com domains that were on Linux machines. Hotmail still has a quite a few.
Microsoft.com doesn't have as many as it did 5 months ago because they have been trying to move as many as possible to 2003 but they still have quite a few.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Personally, I love X, because it lets you do anything you want, by separating the display from the hardware. Want to run a program on a remote computer and display it locally? It's easy in X (hell, ssh -X will usually do it for you), but you have to use Remote Desktop in Win* (if you can use it/can afford the licenses for terminal server), and you have to see the whole desktop.
Having said that, I see your point. X is one of the hardest things to configure, and the configuration tools for it aren't very good. On top of that, GNOME and KDE are both pretty bloated, to the point where it's hard to run them on older hardware. For old hardware, I usually use either Windowmaker, BlackBox, or Enlightenment, but configuring them would be difficult for a newbie (though E's documentation is pretty good). For fast hardware, I use GNOME, mostly because I'm lazy and I don't feel like configuring the others.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I'm all for the GPL and the sharing of ideas in general but some people just get freakin' militant about it.
As far as I'm concerned, if you or your company want to make a linux driver/program available to me for free but would prefer not to release the source then - hey, it's your program, you should be free to do with it what you want.
If you want to write a program and sell it to me then, if I need it and I think it's worth the money, I'll buy it from you.
To me, free software doesn't mean free as in cost or even necessarily openness but rather freedom of distribution. Personally, I think the open-source model should be adopted for more than just software, but I would not dream of requiring software makers to adopt my beliefs as a condition of making their work available to Linux or any other OS or kernel.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
IMPOSSIBLE!
Ever other article has hundreds of people claiming that everything else suXors. How can it now be possible that Linux is in any way imperfect?!?!?
LOL Micro$oft sux LOL
Congrats, you are now officially part of the problem.
In any society a natural (and sometimes artificial) monopoly keeps other human being from entering the market and it keeps them from contributing to lasting IP value. If M$ doesn't want to use you or you don't want to work for them you are locked out of 99.9% of the OS development market.
One of the great things about the internet is its ability to remove useless middlemen from the market. M$ is one of the biggest middlemen in existance. It keeps many types of developers from being able to participate in the market. So what did they do? They built their own architecture.
Sorry, guy. Linus Torvalds is the John Galt of our time.
IMHO the annoyances for me are:
:) I could write a book or two about that.
1. Lack of hardware support is the biggest annoyance. Specifically from the following for me:
- Canon (I had a Canon usb flatbed scanner which I had to give away due to lack of drivers).
- Lexmark (Lexmark's so called Linux support sucked! If you have a custom built Linux system. Everyone is not using Redhat with lprng. Now I have a large paperweight by Lexmark. There are really no good printer drivers for most inkjet printers under Linux. I am going for a HP laser printer next when I get the money).
- ATI (I no longer buy or consider buying ATI video cards after my Rage 128 Fury card a while back was not supported under Linux for over 8 months. I went and got a NVIDIA card TNT2 card at that time and never looked at another ATI card. Currently my Gforce4 is awesome while I play unreal).
2. I had a lot of grief setting of many of the USB devices under Linux. For example, why do I have to remove and install the kernel module usb-storage in-order for it to determine that I have a CF card in my CF card reader?
3. Why can I not burn CD's using CDrecord DAO mode with my IDE cd burner with speeds past 8x without creating a coaster? Is it due to the ide-scsi emulation which you must use? Maybe this is a problem just affecting me. I have not looked into this one a lot.
4. I wish to see more commercial software for Linux like games. (Yes, I am willing to pay for GOOD software! Even if I get some great software for free.)
I am trying hard but this is really all that I can come up with for Linux annoyances. This is hardly enough reasons for me to quit using Linux now. Don't get me started about my annoyances about M$ Windows.
Can the same library exist more than once on Windows systems and be used more than once?
Let'say I need to use foo.dll for my application, and I provide a copy in the application's directory. Can I use the functions provided by *my* foo.dll, even though some other application is running and has loaded foo.dll from \system32 or wherever?
I guess I personally think on a binary-only system like Windows (where's there's less concern or interest in rebuilding anything from source), that apps should be all static or at least be able to use their own DLLs, even if those DLLs are older/newer versions of system DLLs.
I occasionally search for the ultimate self-updating box, so I installed Debian stable and cron-apt to automatically track the updates. I also added Debian Security, Gnome2, and mplayer as additional apt-sources. At the beginning it was great. By the time I read about new vulnerabilities in apps, my box was already updated.
But after a while, the apt just degraded into a steaming pile. As everyone who has tried to run apt has seen, apt kept saying that a particular version of an application was needed but another one was already installed. "So upgrade it! WTF?!?" Dependency management started out better, but in the end it was a total loss. For GUI desktops, I haven't found a dependency manager better than Ximian Gnome, but I have yet to find a suitable self-updating system for non-GUI servers. I want something that I can hang out there without a firewall and not have to worry about. Ximian's dependency mgmt is much better than Debian's apt, but you can't cron it.
Please, someone show me a box that supports true auto-updating that doesn't require weekly hand-holding.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Computers are equivalent to Turing machines, modulo the bounded memory; they can go far, far beyond our intuitions. The only way to make them intuitive is to dumb them down, i.e. limit what they can do. So be prepared to choose between having your computer dumbed down to a consumer appliance or else having to learn a lot in order to master it.
What the fuck are you talking about? Let's apply this same argument to something where it obviously fails.
Say I claim,
"Man, DOS sucks because every application has access to write over any part of memory."
And you answer,
"Dude, computers are turing machines. Turing machines can write anywhere in their tapes. Do you want us to dumb down your computer and limit what it can do by creating process sandboxes with virtual memory? You'll be left with a consumer device."
And I say,
"Not every time you "limit" what a computer can do, do you dumb it down. Abstractions and controls are critical to making a usable and powerful system."
No i would have to say SCO is a bigger annoyance then Microsoft right now!
And fairy tales are real.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
You should be able to specify an the NFS-related "soft" and "intr" options to volumes that are "user" mountable (i.e. CDROM, floppy, and digital cameras)
For the filesystems that support it, it would be neat if they allow you to kill apps holding the disc open, or suspend the filesystem (while making the disc look busy), allowing you to eject the disc (so long as you don't try to access files on it). Later replacement of the disc with another would invalide the entire VFS cache and "magically" update it with a new filesystem underneath. Not sure would be the behavior of the threads with already open files and working directories (hold buffers until it closes? make readdir fail always?)
Really the bug is with the application. If it must be terminated to properly eject the disk, then you shouldn't use it. (this is no exception, MacOSX and Windows NT have these issues as well).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Stallman?
Cig? No, thank you.
Hate it when I man a command, comes back with 86 cajillion options, but few, if any, examples of usage.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
(Not that anyone will ever see this post...)
My main annoyance with Linux is that almost EVERYTHING is a pre-1.0 release and is still a beta! How the hell can any sane person build an OS using pre-1.0 software? Who decided it was a good idea to make an OS with software that wasn't finished, that lacks features and documentation.
And speaking of documentation, none of it is worth a damn! It's always a few majore kernel or filesystem revisions behind. Thatnk Googness for DKE being able to handle most of the common configuration issues from within the GUI. I hate trying to figure out where the hell all of the revised and no longer working like the How-To's and MAN pages says they do config files have moved with THIS release.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It always bugged me that there were so many cryptic messages when the kernel starts up. Occasionally, one of them is informative or reports an error, but how do you know which one? Do you have to memorize what a good kernel boot looks like so you can compare each time? Also, they flash by so fast that you don't always have time to determine if any useful information is displayed.
(To be a little more mean: there seems to be either excess hubris or insecurity on the part of some of the programmers. Yes, we appreciate your hard work, but do we need to be reminded each time we boot?)
Appologies if this has already been addressed in the latest kernel.
Is this a good idea? Force someone to join a mailing list to register an opinion. Why not provide an email address or better yet a site where the common problems are listed for easy selection with an 'others' category that allows a contributor to specify a problem not listed. Force the user to specify an email address (with confirmation) to keep someone from stuffing the ballot box. Further, the site organizers could provide a tally to rank the most(un)popular annoyances.
I hate redhat's spin on runlevels, with a zillion soft links to S011232StartMENOW and such. It's one of the reasons that I love the bsd's and now I really love gentoo. That and ports. Screw 99% of the distros out there, I could give a rat's ass about .rpm and .deb crap. I just want my ports and 3 or less runlevels.
The configuration of the Linux kernel and version specificity of kernel modules is a major headache. Other operating systems manage to let developers distribute kernel modules that can be compiled and run against a wide variety of kernel versions and that have a lifetime of several years. But the Linux kernel interfaces apparently are not guaranteed to be stable and most kernel modules are just distributed as part of a monolithic kernel source tree (millions of lines!). And configuring a kernel itself is a big headache, usually requiring several tries to get something working.
Many of the things that are in the kernel probably shouldn't even be in the kernel but could easily be implemented in user space if the Linux kernel only had appropriate interfaces. For example, many file systems, PPP, and many USB drivers could be put into user mode programs, but the Linux kernel lacks the interfaces to do it.
Yet another reason to switch to Esperanto...
There is only one way to pronounce each letter, no exceptions (there are no exceptions to any language rules with esperanto for that matter).
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
I listen to a lot of electronic music. It seems like it would not be inconceivably difficult to include pitch control on MP3 players. So yes, that is kind of annoying.
harmonious design
NOT!
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
I know there is a huge thread on this but my problem is much more specific, and not really related to not being able to eject unless processes are killed. In my case, the process refuses to die.
:( If I kill the parent, it simply becomes a zombie process but continues to keep the drive locked. Even when I do init 6, it shows 5 or 6 message saying cannot unmount because its busy.. ultimately linux gives up and forces a restart. I am afraid to put svcds in my drive now :(
I have 3 cdroms on my system and all of them have this problem (I see it on my other system too). If I put in an svcd (using cdfs.o module to mount it) and try something like cp to a local drive, it usually locks up. There is no way to get out of this other than restart.
I have tried everything.. lsof, kill -9 , umount -l.. nothing can kill the cp process during such a lockup
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
that one chip where the company who makes the chip says there's linux support but my cam (and dozens of clones with the same chip) doesn't come with linux driverd nor are there any anywhere on the net
fscking liars!
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
And managing jobs with the webmin doesn't work for shit - at least it doesn't for me.
I don't know about that but I manage print jobs all the time and I work for shit...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I tar -cjf (bzip2 compression) backups for users on my server, and record the result to disc. Rockridge/Joliet screws up permissions/ownerships, and it seems pointless to wrap the archive in an ISO for the sole purpose of compatibility with OSes that can't easily do raw CD IO.
tar -cjvf foo.tar.bz2 backup_dir; cdrecord dev=0,1,0 speed=16 foo.tar.bz2;#to record
dd if=/dev/scd1 of=foo.tar.bz2; tar -xjvf foo.tar.bz2;#to restore
What bugs me is that I can't use a device name, rather than a SCSI address, for my burner.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Some people have learned that Canon makes great printers that don't rip you off on ink cartridge replacements *cough* HP, Lexmark *cough*. The problem is that my Mandrake 9.1 didn't support the i850, but I found a great solution, Turboprint. Check it out at http://www.turboprint.de/english.html. They support most *NEW* inkjet printers, most of which don't ship with Linux print drivers. It's not free, costs about $20, and worth every penny. Nice friendly support via email, too. (I'm just a satisfied customer)
:)
Now my problem is that the printer won't even be detected under Windows 98, and the damn thing ships with Windows printer drivers on CD. I don't really care since Linux is my main OS, just a strange side effect on my box... Haven't spent much time trying to fix it, I don't really care about Windows except for games
pot.kettle(black);
First, the filesystem is described here: http://www.linuxnovice.org/main_focus.php3?VIEW=V
I'm well aware of how it works. (I've been a unix user/sysadmin for years) But it still is an unintuitive and inconsistently used system. Read the rest of the posts. I'm by no means the only one who thinks this.
And second, why should you try to explain this to your wife or mother in the first place?
Missing the point. The point is that if it is simple enough for me to explain it to them (at a high level), then it is simple enough in general. The directory structure of linux has a lot of unnecessary cruft in it. And the distro/application makers do not help matters by each of them having their own opinion about where stuff should go.
"# Dependency hell. This can and should be resolved automatically without needing user intervention."
www.freshrpms.net
Does my SuSE 8.2 installation do that out of the box? Nope. There is no installation system that is universally used. Hopefully this will change, but it will require the distro vendors to cooperate a bit.
If you have a recent distribution (like RedHat 9), all your fonts (including in Mozilla) should be antialiased already. To further improve it, download the Bitstream Vera fonts from ftp.gnome.org, and extract the files to ~/.fonts
I'm using SuSE 8.2. I've got the bitstream fonts, microsoft fonts and a bunch of others. Still looks bad. And frankly, I shouldn't have to mess with this. (hence it is an "annoyance") You're spending a lot of time defending all this stuff but the point is that you shouldn't have to. Just because a solution exists doesn't mean it is the right way to do things. I'm not willing to spend my life hunting for workarounds for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
What kind of documentation? Desktop documentation is quite good and newbie-oriented.
I would disagree with that strongly. The documentation is inconsistent, very often not applicable to the particular problem or distribution you are using and often not easily accessible.
Have you ever read the GNOME User Guide? Yep. Though I use KDE mostly.
As for system documentation: only technical users would want to read them. I don't think it's a problem for technical users to learn a bit more about the system.
Which implies that the documentation is written well enough to actually learn from. Frequently not the case. My time is limited and frankly I can think of better things to do than wade through reams of bad documentation.
Most desktop apps are either GTK+ or QT
So what? GTK+ and QT do not force the software designer to create a great or consistent user interface. That is a design issue. It's only partly a tool issue.
As for Gimp: try Gimp 1.3. It's great. The new UI is much more flexible and sane, and makes the whole app much more productive. There's even an option to enable a "normal" (on-the-top) menu bar!
I have. It's still quite unconventional. Don't get me wrong, it works and it's a great application. But from a usability standpoint it does a lot of things that make it hard to learn and/or hard to work with.
1. KDE/Gnome aren't similar enough to MS Windows
2. KDE/Gnome are too similar to MS Windows
In Moz, center-clicking the link you want to go to works!! You don't need to clear the URL box. Simply center click on the page. I absolutely LOVE this!!
But for other applications, I find that the lack of this feature is a problem. Of course, if you keep the clipboard in the system tray, it is alleviated somewhat..
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
What even happened to the tar -y option anyway?
bzcat foo.bz2 | tar -xvf is a pain in the ass, when I've gotten used to tar -zxvf (and tar -yxvf) for years now.
99% Of the times I've had to hard-reset a box, it's not because the OS itself crashed but because XFree86 decided to freeze and take the monitor, mouse and keyboard with it. I don't care how brilliant X's client/server design is; the dominant implementation is a bloated, obtuse, crash prone pile of decades-accumulated cruft.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
GLIDE!!!! C'mon, make a god damn release and make it compile right. How HARD is this given the fact that 3DFX has been OOB for 2 or 3 years now???????
"You are actually touching on a point that not too many techies really understand: The PC is a commodity. (yes, I said that) Its like a VCR, a microwave, a DVD player, a TV."
We can give you an appliance, and you'll be able to do appliance things with it. You want to do PC things? Well you know what to buy.
"The great understanding that needs to take place is that it is not the techie crowd that should be the measuring stick for the "unreasonably complex...maintain" part, but the "masses" who use the tools who should be the measuring stick.(1)"
Yet the funny thing is that they want the techie crowd to do all the work.
Wonder how much their enthusiasm in the role of "measuring stick" would be checked, if they had to impliment their own ideas?
(1) Big clue, Sherlock. Just because someone has "Masses" in their title doesn't make them HCI engineers. Although it might make them candidates for Jenny Craig.
Supermount ....
wow make up yer mind
are you mounted or not
It's all nice and wonderful having the shell completion of zsh (and bash if you turn it on) but applications shouldn't decide what to do based on the "extension" of a file.
Adding extensions to filenames is just a convention (in Linux anyway), and is not mandatory. I may have a text file called 'README' and would probably get a bit frustrated if my text editor didn't open it just because it doesn't have a '.txt' extension. Along similar lines, why should tar files have an extension of '.tar'? Why should the compressed variants have extensions of '.Z', '.gz' and '.bz2'? Most file types can be detected by magic numbers or some fairly unique header pattern.
What would be nice is if GUIs actually did have decent transparent handling of compressed files. An example from Konqueror in KDE 3 is that a file ending in '.tar.gz' would be viewed as if it was part of the normal directory tree while a 'README.gz' file would not open in the default text editor.
Inablity to assign multiple groups to the same resource.
Moving several thousand files causes the whole system to slow down(think moving a pr0n collection). under Kernel 2.4.21, NForce2 mainboard....
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
i just wrote a check to SCO for $699....i thought this stuff was free?!?!?!?!
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
or distribution info is my pet peeve. Howto guides go out of date faster than the speed of white light. This book will be the same. Unless they state the distribution, version and date of each problem and its solution, then it will be quite useless.
Oh well, what the hell...
Don't forget Postscript (.ps) files. How am I supposed to read these?
Actually, this is a 99% of all OSs annoyance, I'm afraid, but I notice it most on my RedHat/KDE desktop.
There is no reason my web browsing and window scrolling should get slower and slower with time, just because I've been continuously logged in and hacking for a few weeks. It's not as if something is wearing out and has to be refurbished by my logging out, restarting the X server, and logging back in, really.
Maybe, someday, the authors of large programs that tend to run for days at a time will start to take the attitude that any memory leak is a bug. Surely at least one of the major distro compilers could afford a copy of Purify, understand its output, and fix the leaks.
Flame about Lisp machines that never leaked memory, in the early 1980's, deleted - redundant.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
That is often a symptom of having a slightly mentally-challenged AGP controller/northbridge. Your kernel might need to have some option turned on to deal with a CRAAAAZY chipset.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I've got a stage one Gentoo install compiling on a fairly slow PC at work, so I'll tell you when I get back to it on Monday.
btw, I'm fairly new to Linux the insides of Linux, so I'm probably way over my head, but the instructions looked very well written.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
[n/t]
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
you have succesfully illustrated my point concerning the measuring stick. Thank you.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Is there going to be a chapter on SCO?
..took me over a year of using linux as my primary platform to finally discover how to copy from a terminal window & paste to another app {highlight in the term window, switch to the other app, click middle mouse button (or left & right together on a two-button) & voila}.
why, when just about every other frequently used application that runs on linux supports ctrl-c/x/v, does the terminal not do so.
I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet.
I have had no end of trouble with my winmodem. No matter what I do, I can't get Knoppix(!) to recognize it. I tracked what KPPP is doing, and I just can't get the devices to obey. (Yes, I downloaded the correct driver on another computer and successfully installed it.) If I could at least get past this annoyance, I could get online to use Google to investigate my other annoyances.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
You spent $2000 on that iBook. There's a reason for that.
Linux users have no such luxury to be able to test every piece of hardware in every system with all its little ideosyncracies.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This one really bugs me, because, with its ease and flexibility in terms of configuration and use, the Ninnle distribution of Linux is exactly what the Linux world needs to really, properly break out onto the desktop. Yes here on /. it gets all but ignored, usually treated as some sort of joke or troll or something. I don't understand this at all
What exactly is the amiga way of dealing with removable media?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'm not sure if these even count, since they have more to do with X11 and GNOME than Linux in general, but here are two things that I wish my Linux box could do.
First of all, I think it's silly that you are required to restart the X server in order to apply changes in your monitor resolution. When you're running Mac OS or Windoze all you do is pick a new resolution and it instantly changes, so why you do the same with X11?
And second of all, I would really appreciate better cut/copy/paste functionality. Maybe it's just the particular applications that I've been using, but when even gaim doesn't let me copy and paste text I start getting a little bit annoyed.
I suppose these are both pretty minor things, but if they're such minor things then I would imagine they should only require minor solutions....I'm a bit of a Linux newbie though, so I could be totally off about that last bit.
Installing peripherals like flash card readers, scanners, printers, digital cameras etc. USB doesn't work like it does in Windows. When I plug something in Linux should detect it and start up some intelligent install wizard. I still can't get my Belkin USB 2.0 Multi-Card reader to work and can't find any help on-line anywhere.
RH 7.3 Gnome is not very stable. I have to reboot as often as I did Windows 98 because everything locks up. Nautilus is particularly bad.
Applications like GIMP need more work. Things like remembering the last directory I opened the last time I used it. Remembering what compression I like to save JPEGs at. Not erasing EXIF metadata etc.
Mandrake 9.1 RAID configuration requires reboot after adding partitions, then you need to specify a lot of the manual partition setup information over again.
RedHat 9.0 installation corrupts the RPM database frequently so that no further installation is possible. Only found two other reports of this problem; I guess I'm pretty special!
Dependency problems with older versions Linux. For example, wondering if I can updgrade Python in order to install some software that requires the latest version, without breaking something else that requires Python.
We can't do the common task of "select text A, copy to clipboard, select text B, paste to replace with text A"... because the second select copies text B. An explicit copy operation (Ctrl-C, easy to do), fixes this problem. Notice that Mozilla and some other apps handle this correctly themselves.
Backspace key aphasia. I can't believe that in 2003, I'm still having to dick with Ctrl-H/Ctrl-? issues in certain terminal/telnet/ssh situations. It's a simple key, and it should just work.
The terminal bell aka beep. Bash, xterm, etc. beep at me far too often: when I've backspaced too far, when a tab-completion is ambiguous, etc. etc. One of my first tasks at a new system is figuring out how to shut it off.
Emacs. It's still the best out there for me: syntax highlighting, auto-indent, mouse support, tab completion, etc. But it comes out of the box configured for colorblind epileptic monkeys, with horrid colors, broken select and replace, menus full of commands you'll never use, and common ones buried under M-x something something.
It's full of obsolete jargon that should be thrown off the lifeboat: "kill" a "buffer" to close a document, "minibuffers", "window" meaning pane, "frame" meaning window, and so on. It claims to be configurable (if you want to learn Lisp), but the keys modern people want to use (Ctrl-S, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C) are so tightly bound to fundamental operations that they can't be changed. "Cut" in the menu claims to be bound to F20. Where the fuck is that key on any keyboard built after 1978 and/or found outside a university computer lab.
Why does the "Completions" buffer stick around after you've used it? Even if you try it later, it doesn't work. Why doesn't it go away?
Changing the text font in Emacs should be simple, but the "faces" interface is useless, and you end up editing X resources.
Man still lets you down too many times, but it's still better than info, and GNU's jihad isn't helping.
How come when I'm in Workspace 4, and launch a program that takes a long time to come up, and move to Workspace 1 to do some other work, the program pops up in WS 1 instead of 4? CDE and KDE do this.
Time and time zones are still screwed up. You think you have it set, but you really don't, because there are several places apps look in.
I never seem to be able to find internet explorer or microsoft word on those bloody linux. How do they expect people to use the OS if you can't get on the internet or type your papers. I'd thought they fixed that by now...
My definition of annoyance is "something I didn't expect, that impedes my progress". Yes, certain fundamental design differences will always exist, and not all of them will be annoyances. For instance I don't think the lack of drive letters impedes me (though someone else might differ). But there are plenty of differences that do annoy.
You need to go back and read this. But here's the pith:
We as geeks tend to forget this, but many people want the computer to just do its job and stay out of the way. Which really means "do what I expect". What they expect is what they are used to. Checkmate.
Narrowing the differences in the user's experience, within the confines of the existing design differences, is both desirable and necessary if we want to reduce annoyances.
You make the same mistake as the post below yours. I'm not certain were people got the idea that code is the only way to contribute? For a virtual room full of geeks, you guys can be awfully unimaginative. Can you draw? Can you write? Can you understand more than one language? Can you reason logicaly from facts, and opinions to proper conclusions? How about expertise in a particular field?
1) Icons and other artwork. UI mockups.
2) Documentation, both expert and newbie. Help and error messages.
3) Translationing present text to another language (internationalization)
4) Linux advocate, write articles about the pros and cons, amoung other things.
5) Advisery role.
6) Use your imagination.
You know what I like the most about Linux? Besides it's being truly free as in Freedom. The fact that if something annoys you about it you can fix it. And not just because you have the source code, but because it is legal to do so! So all you people bitching about Linux: put up or shut up. Show us the code.
Nathan's blog
Anyway, once I saw the simplicity of a static build, the question certainly comes to mind - why aren't more apps packaged this way?
Agreed, part of the OSS appeal is that if you can't find the binaries for CVS for Solaris 2.7, you can download and build it yourself. Very cool. Which is great when you have some time and semi-experienced Solaris sys admins.
But when you're just trying to get some app working, like a word processor, and you realize it needs the 2.2.10 kernel, and you've got 2.2.4, and it needs GTK+ 2.whatever - I'll take the static libs, if available, I think the advantages (simplicity, and even you're actually able to run) far outweigh any disadvantages (bloat?)
I can't - "LinDVD, InterVideo's Linux software DVD player, is currently available only to manufacturers for evaluation and integration."
One wonders if it might only be vaporware that doesn't really exist.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Dee-Ann LeBlanc? She knows as much about Linux as a pig knows about a holiday. She's a carpetbagger.
I fully agree with the parent poster. Navigating info-files is a goddamn nightmare (two different sets of commands for moving back and forth? wtf?!), searching them - well, I still don't know how to do that efficiently - and in general getting anything useful out of them is just hopeless.
I really, truly, out-of-my-heart wish that info will die a horrible death.
How hard would it be to use HTML instead?!
BOO! TERRO
mousedev.c in the USB HID system tries to coalesce all mouse-type events into the IMPS/2 format so that applications that are used to reading straight PS/2 scroll mouse data from the kernel still work, ala X, or gpm.
:-( Either that or force it to run in "explorerps/2" mode.
/dev/input/mouseev or something like that, because XFree is PERFECTLY CAPABLE of reading raw usb hid frames from a mouse. So then you could have 10 billion buttons and tehy'd all work.
This only gives you three buttons and two virtual buttons from the scroll wheel. The side buttons disappear (examine the code, BTN_3 and BTN_4 "fall through" to middle and right click).
I wish someone would hack that driver to expose the mouse events in
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My biggest annoyance is getting RH 9 to boot. I get stuck at the "checking for file dependecies" and it never EVER gets past that. Might help if I had a boot floppy too.
2 Lettters
M... S...
Beat that.
But how do you X to generate a resolution over 85Hz?
I run XFree8.3 and used XConfigurator to generate the config, but it insist on runnig 85Hz and not 120Hz as it should. XConfigurator does detect my screen correct, and my screen(And my windows install) are able to run 120Hz, but I can't make XFree do that -(
Martin
I agree with your main point, but this particular grievance has been addressed in Mozilla. Highlight the URL you want to copy, go to Mozilla, click the middle button anywhere on the page (forget the address bar).
For me, it was one habit I was happy to unlearn.
"The default font (at least every time I installed X) is always *tiny* on my screen. No matter how hard I tried, when I changed settings, it never seemed to work."
For only $75.00, I can sell you these "Font" enlargement pills.
The command line options of ssh and scp are designed to correspond (where possible) to the command line options of rsh and rcp. This is so that it is easy to encourage people to replace the insecure r-services with their secure equivalents.
So, the answer to your question is that these programs ARE consistent. They're just not consistent in the direction you were expecting, possibly because you never used rsh and rcp (I didn't, I only discovered *nix in 1997 or so).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
While glibc itself doesn't bother me, what really annoys me is the constant updates to it and how it affects RPM-base distributions. Typical example:
About 4 months after I bought SuSE 7.0, I wanted to update the Gimp. But the new RPM required a new glibc package. And installing that meant updating everything.
Another example:
Where I work, almost all the developers use Linux. But some have slightly newer versions of RedHat, and that often means we can't share binaries because of glibc mismatches.
OK, I am getting a bit tired of those melodramatic people writing issues with OSS that was happening at least some years ago. Unless you are building the whole thing from bottom up, every other distribution have automated setup of X. I used Gentoo for a year now, and setting X up is fscking easy, even with a NVIDIA-card, just read the documentation (that is written to be read fast).
1. While we can all agree on lacking time in our life, maybe you should look at your priorities.
2. I can accept that XFree is developed slowly, but not so slow that nobody are using it. The reason thing that happen was that a developer left and created a forum for ideas to X. I think it is monitored by the XFree86 team, and it is really THAT was missing in their project (open forums).
(yes this can be compared with sex)
Everyone wants linux to be used more, but no one wants to help to make it happen. Look at any newbie to *nix going to an IRC channel for help. By them alone going there, they are already in the top 5% of knowledgable computer users. What are they told to do, no matter what they ask? RTFM. You don't need to read a manual to use windows, so why for nix? If you need to for linux, then you've already added a separation from a normal person. But as people have said, there shouldn't be a huge division between regular linux using, and newbie linux using. Over simplification is a disaster. People will be upset because they can't do anything, then some jerk will come along and say "well obviously you can't do that without being in " (insert some cryptic word here) " mode.", they hit a key combo, recompile the kernel, whatever it does't matter, and leaves the user with what amounts to a completely different operating system. Write a script so a program will work? That's less than the half of top one percent of users. That's horrid to make a newbie do. You want to know why linux isn't around? Open up.
My pet peeve is the syntax tar -cvf foo.tar foo, in contrast to the way every other Unix command puts the created file at the end.
;-)
instead try:
tar -cv foo -f foo.tar
See if that syntax is more to your likeing
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Wireless support on Linux is HORRIBLE! Yes I know that's really the fault of the wireless card makers for not providing drivers. I have a desktop at home that used to dual-boot to XP & Linux. I put a Belkin wireless PCI card in it, and could never get it to work with Linux. I eventually raised the white flag and wiped out the Linux partition.
- ACPI doesn't work. I'll check 2.6.0-testX's capability to sleep but frankly I'm not holding my breath. Bloody hell even FreeBSD can do this, and that's more geared towards SERVERS
- Firewire install. I have a Vaio with a Firewire CDRW/DVD drive. It's neat but it's also a total bitch to install from. Gentoo manages, I don't think any other dist does.
There's more but those are my pet hates at the moment
One word: RPM. The only single thing that bothers me about RedHat. If they'd move to a better system, I'd fall in love all over again. But it's not just dependancies, I can deal with that. Has anybody else had RPM totally lock up on you while installing/upgrading packages? Not only does it lock up, but if you re-run it again, it doesn't work unless you delete some lock files in /var. GRRRRRRR!
Also, I'd REALLY like to see some *runtime* autodetection in XFree86.
Example: I unplug my monitor and plug in a new one. X will automatically detect the new one and change the internal configuration.
Example: I have a PS/2 mouse, but I plug in a USB mouse temporarily. X should enable the USB mouse so I can use both if I want to.
I mean, video cards are internal controllers that rarely change. So I understand having to specify or scan for those. But monitors and peripherals should be picked up at runtime.
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
(S+C) x (B+F)/T = V
My biggest annoyance right now is wireless for linux. I run linux on my laptop, and I love my wireless access (when I dual boot over to XP) but I cannot for the life of me get it to work - in that its certainly not even a download tar, ./configure; make; make install type of procedure - you have to read like books full of info to figure it out, and, sorry I dont have time for all that...I wish there was an easy way to do THAT!!!
Does that task belong more to the linux community of developers, or the wireless hardware manufacturers? Probably a bit of both.
An operating system with so many annoyances that is needs a book? Should this not be telling us something?
running apache, server and continually clearing logs, from those worms that decide to fill it, from various windoze users. It's really annoying, even though its not linux' fauld that its not vulnerable the way windoze is.
-D
The biggest thing that's missing is a good
networked filesystem:
- NFS is out of question, it's lacking any kind of security
- Samba is not native, is a pain to set up, and is based on a protocol that is a piece of sh**. Besides, MS wants to charge a lot for access to future protocol versions.
- Coda say themselves that the don't recommend using it for mission critical production systems in terms of stability/reliability. Besides, it has some of the legacy disadvantages of AFS
- OpenAFS is a pain to set up, needs a dedicated data partition or equivalent and can't just use the underlying filesystem like nfs or smb do.
so the bottom line is:
linux really NEEDS a replacement for all these.
A secure, open, lightweight networked filesystem that uses the underlying filesystem (like NFS or SMB do) to store files instead of needing an extra partition (like Coda, AFS).
And if the linux distributions could use it as default, have an easy gui setup tool, that would make it.
Many people are confused as to what "stable" really means wrt Debian. It is talking about the stability of the entire collection of packages with respect to each other. e.g.:
1. Unless two packages are marked as conflicting (sendmail and postfix), they can be installed at the same time, and WILL work properly. This is because there are thousands of packages that are all "officially included" in Debian. No vast cesspool of "contrib." Perhaps as a result of this, people who do have to provide debs "outside" of Debian tend to behave themselves.
2. When security updates come out, you will not be surprised by new behaviour. Bugfixes will be backported to the versions that shipped as "stable", so you only get the changes you absolutely need.
Debian has packages for many tools that originated with other distributions, including linuxconf. You might just want to give it a try.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Well you're welcome. Always glad to let the wind out of the sails of any self-elected "mass" expert, who's willing to paw the work off onto others(1).
Let me know anytime you get another insight as to what you know, that the rest of the planet doesn't(1).
(1) I believe they're called "consultants".
I don't know, maybe it's just me, .conf files?
but I'm new to the whole linux thing, and
pretty much everything I've done so far has
required a crapload of work to get running.
One thing that also struck me was the lack
of centralization. If you wanna do stuff,
you have to know where it is and what it
does first. I know, that seems dumb, but
are there centralized tools that deal with
the system configuration as a whole, or must
everything be done via little utilities and
It seems that everybody who makes things assumes
guru-hood in their users. As much as I'm willing
to learn, right now I don't know so much and
finding it isn't the easiest thing.
LDP is doing a good job, though.
I would actually like to volunteer for a project
or two to simply work on documentation.
I could do code, but that's not where I
feel all the work needs to go.
I use KDE, and I just tired to copy and past the way I use to in Windows. (Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) It worked fine.
Has Windows changed the way they do it?
I still prefare using the middle mouse button.
Slow and stupid.
Don't give me "well, just use GIMP or WordPerfect or something." I don't WANT to use GIMP, I want to use Photoshop.
H omesite
Don't give me "well, just run WINE." I don't WANT to use WINE, I want the apps to run natively.
I will run Linux, full-time, all the time, when I can get native versions of the following apps:
Photoshop
Dreamweaver
Fireworks
Imageready
Flash
Visio
Word
Excel
The last three, I'll accept something that will at least allow me to seamlessly interact with their file formats, as I doubt MS is likely to produce Linux versions of Office anytime soon...I'm almost surprised that they have a Mac version.
I like Linux. It's a good OS, and a good concept.
I don't use my computer to feel good about my OS. I use it to work, or to play.
Which reminds me...until native versions of popular games, like Star Wars Galaxies, Half-Life, Warcraft, and the like, come out for Linux, I will ALWAYS have some kind of box running whatever OS those games will run on.
Sorry folks. Those are the rules if you want Linux to transition effectively from a "hobby" OS to a "mainstream" OS.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
1. Books always spend 90% of its content telling you how to install Linux but almost nothing on how to use it.
2. People tell you to read faqs on items, but the faqs often make you have to read other faqs as it expects you to allready have a decent linux background allready.
Until Linux apps have easy to use GUI installers it won't make large growth in the desktop area. Just look at the huge growth Windows experienced when it went beyond DOS. Windows 95 was huge for Windows and I believe a huge part of that is apps are easy to install on that and successive Windows OSes. Most /.ers probably don't mind typing in commands to install software but the typical user will not even attempt it. Not to mention dependancies...
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
4 letters, more than yours
S C O X
It would be REALLY COOL IF I could always copy and paste using the same keys, from any app to any other app. For example:
- sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't use middle-click for pasting, depending on the app.
- Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V won't work on a terminal window running midnight commander. And neither will middle-click pasting. You have to actually use the menu!
- Copying from mozilla is a royal pain. Often times the only way to do it is to copy the text selected to kwrite (or sometnig similar), and then paste it into application that was stubbornly refusing to accept the original clipboard contents.
- there are more clipboard woes, but these are the most annoying
Jobs? Which jobs?
Way back in the cretaceous, when I was in junior high, I had this crush on Lynnette. She was the epitome of perfection in my hormone addled mind. But I could never work up the courage to talk to her. She was just too perfect, and mere mortals like I didn't talk to perfect beings. Then one day I saw her pick her nose. Instantly she transformed from an alabaster statue of Aphrodite high upon Olympus unto a human being that I could talk to.
I like handmade rugs because they aren't perfect. They have all of the durability and attractiveness of machine made rugs, but that missing stitch here and there adds a quality to it that says "someone cared enough to make this". I like UNIX for the same reason. Those little warts say that people put their hearts into it, instead of merely following some sterile specs from marketing. It's craftsmanship.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
>> They're not supposed to do too many things automatically....
Says who?
There's no reason a command line app can't offer the same options as a GUI app. The only difference is the interface: The GUI presents options for selection, while the command line app forces the users to enter them manually.
No application should make assumptions and then act on them without getting permission from the user. In particular, a convenient default behavior for a command line app won't break scripts if the app provides an option to override the default.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
It's not possible to do as is suggested on that web-page for our purposes...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Several folk have complained about the lack of drivers from hardware vendors, but I have to disagree here: I don't want vendors to release Linux drivers as they do Windows drivers. My linux boxes are rock solid *because* the drivers weren't written by hardware vendors.
In the Windows model you get a binary-only driver thrown over the wall. Chances of it having a bug are fairly high, making your system unstable even if the core OS is reasonably solid. Tracking down the cause of the instability with binary drivers is much harder. Waiting on vendors to fix the drivers is infuriating, and in many cases fruitless (whooops... they went out of business; whoops... that model is no longer supported; whoops... we contracted that job out, and don't have any more money to spend on it -- no more bug fixes for you!).
I much prefer the linux model. Imagine trying to debug a kernel that has half a dozen binary drivers installed. Good freakin' luck.
I hope, rather, for better hardware docs provided to the kernel developers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
when you're out of a job.
Maybe you can get some mormon chick to marry you. They don't mind fucking as long as you keep knocking them up.
...or other works. If you pour your life into a work and make little and then watch as someone else barely comes close to the path you took, instead they leached off of other people's work, contributing little, if anything and then make a killing... You would probably not be so happy about it...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Does anyone else in the world think that releasing this much anger into the world is a bad idea in general.
It must be having a karmic effect somewhere. Like thousands of cute puppy dogs are being born into the world this very minute. Probably Korea, so they won't get to outgrow the cute stage!
> I don't force my OS choice on you, so shut the hell up.
Well, you're not a Mac user then. So you must prefer Windows?
It's called economy of scale, folks.
I was able to affoard the hardware because there's an operating system that the general public can use. And they can use it even if they don't want to invest a considerable amount of their time and skull-sweat to get it to work.
Don't tell me "Linux is easy". Bullsh|t. There's a learning curve. Once you learn it, it's a hell of a lot easier than Windows. But it takes work. The general public is NOT stupid. They are NOT lazy. They're just not as into computers as you might be.
But if the market for computer hardware was limited to lonely geeks or interested hobbyists with *very* patient spouses, we would not see computers being sold at Wal-Mart.
Home computing would be a hobby for the serious hobbyist. An expensive hobby.
So, all you slackers out there, raise a glass to Bill Gates. He's a rich bastard, and we all love to hate the rich, but he made all this possible.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I think the distinction I'm trying to make here is that many people's scriptbases are working scripts, whose job is to save time and effort, freeing up bandwidth for other uses. A good script library should be managed like a commercial product -- after a strict test cycle, leave the source alone. These are not hobby scripts, or fun scripts. They are grim workaday scripts which ardently want to be left alone to do their work in peace.
Over the past 10 years I've accumulated a massive library of scripts which I carry from job to job. Back to the original point, about "fixing" unix tools for ease-of-use, where is my benefit in breaking my whole library by redefining how "ls" works? If you don't like "ls", create a new command with a different name.
"Not far off the mark. Although I'm a geek myself, it does seem strange that many in the GNU/Linux community automatically assume that everybody else is the same way. It's a total lack of vision on the part of those who are all too consumed by computing."
Well since we're going for an insightful. I'll tell you a little secret. We all are guilty of that. Yea! That includes the so called "Masses". Everyone's an expert on everyone else.
"The people involved in the GNU/Linux community are smart, and intense. Probably too intense. For all of the hacker humor that's out there, it's often suprising just how seriously people take things."
Well lets look at the whole situation. Someone (whom most of us will never meet) is using their skills and knowledge (which they obtained free, of course) to write no cost software, facing obstacles such as, little to no documentation (or it costs a bundle to get). Listening to often ungrateful users complaining that their pet idea isn't being coded right away (I needed that yesterday). Indifferent, or hostile hardware and software vendors. An did I mention, we have to hold down a job as well?
"Intense" is the only way your going to be able to make it through that mess with your sanity intact. Well either that, or form some kind of cabel, but then the people omitted think you're being all "elite". A no win situation.
1. Configuring BIND can indeed be difficult. It has multiple configuration files, and it's easy to make a mistake that will throw off everything. You also have to figure out a way to run it as non-root and chroot, since it doesn't come this way by default.
I tried DJBDNS and it was easy, even with a split DNS setup. And it has never had a security vulnerability. http://cr.yp.to
2. Mac OS X can use Samba for access. OS 9 needs to have netatalk installed. Netatalk is a bit ugly (but not terrible) partially because it's an ugly protocol.
3. "Unix does not prevent you from doing stupid things, because that would also prevent you from doing clever things." Since you didn't give specifics, I can't either, but the GUI apps tend to be "less Unix-y", and maybe that's what you want.
4. To rehash the argument above, have you tried a coherent system of packages such as Debian's?
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
....I'm running Slackware..."Dependancy Hell" can be pretty much *NOW*, if one don't know what he's doing....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
The authors will have to carefully specify which 12 of the 80,000,000,000 versions of Linux they are talking about.
No, I can't say I've had many of those problems on my linux boxes. Plenty of them in windoze though. What a pain in the ass to do even basic things in that horrid UI!
The "mark text to copy and middle click to paste" in X is great. Still it sometimes drives me crazy when have marked a text in one window, swapping to another where the just copied text will replace an existing one, marks the text to replace and middle click. Yep, I know it's my own stupidity, but still... argh!
Why is it so difficult to set up a hardware RAID on Linux? I have a Promise Fasttrack133 RAID controller, what I consider to be a fairly popular brand/model. Setting up a RAID in ANY distro other than Redhat was impossible. I did get it to work in Redhat 9 (which was fairly easy, thanks to Promise's drivers and excellent instructions) but I couldn't get volume to mount in any other distro. I think Redhat is great, but I would prefer to use Mandrake. No love.
It might be a desktop computer, but that doesn't mean I don't want decent speed. Am I alone? Once I went RAID, I would never go back, so any OS I use needs to support it.
Why can't I use the same method of installing the drivers in Mandrake, Debian, etc as I do in Redhat? I can handle different drivers for each distro, but why I different (and difficult) process of installing them?!
I use Windows and FreeBSD.
scott
What's worse is when you try pasting something into a text input box on a web page, inside a web browser, and the page has some bit of Javascript that automatically selects everything in the text box upon receiving keyboard focus. So then you have to erase the text, go back to the program you made the original selection in to reselect the text, and go back to the web browser.
That drives me up the wall.
I seem to recall using a GTK or Gnome program that had this behavior on its own (!), but can't remember what it was.
Yep.
This worked in Netscape 4. This has been around for a long time. Better than that, in my .emacs file I have
(global-set-key [f5] 'browse-url-at-point)
so hitting F5 when the cursor is over a url in emacs automatically loads the page in whatever browser is running.
"If you fidget with commands break all of those scripts in hopes of gaining Windows users, you will severly break the working environments of the existing Linux users in ways which may take years to repair. More importantly, most of these are the same people doing most Linux application and driver development.
It's the classic "make it so that even a fool can use it and only a fool..."
You see: you "fix" a whole bunch of silly RTFM problems all over Linux, so that the "obvious" (to a Windows user) behavior occurs. You gain a whole bunch of happy Windows users who don't want to learn about "old fashioned" ways of doing things. But you break a whole bunch of older scripts, methods, and tools in the process. Congratulations, you've just lost a huge portion of the original Linux community (esp. the development community) to *BSD, where Unix is still Unix.
You're back where you started. All the interesting development is now happening on BSD because the active technical community now lives in BSDland. But BSD is still Unix-y and so you're back to whining "Why do I have to RTFM? Why can't you *BSD people make this stuff easy and do things the obvious way? How do you ever expect to get any of us Windows or Linux users?"
The answer is simple. Unix developers want Unix. Windows users considering a switch should come to Unix for Unix, not for a cheaper Windows."
I just wanted to say. Thank you. I know that people are focusing on the "script" issue while ignoring the big picture. And that is: "What good is Linux to anyone (Former Windows users, or otherwise) if all the people doing the actual work leave? Are all the people moving over willing to fill that vacuum? Will Linux be better when all the "elite" are gone, and people raised on the "other" way of doing it bring both their bad (mostly) and good habits? Sounds like, as you said that people simply want the Windows that Microsoft should have provided all along.[1]
[1] For those in the social sciences. This situation should look familiar. Look up what happens when two different (unequal?) societies have met. One subjugates the other ("White man, Indian"), and the weaker one disappears.
Well I was not sure if I would mention XFree or Alsa, but I think the winner is XFree, myriads of config options, no really good tool integrated (either use a half functioning integrated driver or go for a driver hunt), bloat left and right combined with lousy documentation spreaded over the entire web, and sluggishness and then seeing constantly the comments of the xfree defenders who defend the bloatish design as being fast while my eyes start to hurt comparing XFree to Windows on the same machine.
Then the cause for all this bloat, remote capabilities, seeing xfree being more sluggish over a remote line on a single app than an entire streamed tightvnc desktop.
One word, XFree is the biggest annoyance. Alsa is second due to the weird kernel driver, usermode part handling.
The printer setup problems have been reduced greatly thanks to the work of the CUPS people, my thanks go to them, for integrating a decent setup interface and doing an excellent architecture.
It seems to me Linux is going in the wrong direction. I have messed around with more than my fair share of distros and the one common feature b/w all of them is that they are bloated.
I spend countless hours going through the set up process removing as much crap from the kernel, as many start up processes, and all the useless software, just so when I boot into KDE or GNOME for the first time there is just so much more there.
Secondly, The file structure for LINUX is unorganized to say the least. The Hierarchal file structure in Windows would be really the only true advantage I see over LINUX.
I understand that the concept of LINUX is to give choices (ie ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, etc..etc) and the over abundance of free software), but there is a fine line between enough software (to do whatever) you may need, and to much useless software just for the sake of having it.
Solution:
1) Change the relationships in the file structure, standardize it so that all software loaded follows that structure.
2) Load by default one software title for each category (preferably the best at the time of distro release) for example: GAIM (for IM), GIMP (for image manipulation); gFTP; Mozilla, etc.. One item for each category. If someone prefers a different piece of software let them load it. I am personally tired of deselecting 50 different FTP programs, and 20 different image viewers.
3) Don't sacrifice function, for ease of use. (if people jus want the computer to work for them let the get Windows or a MAC)
These are just my opinions, things I would like to see happen!
I'd have to say that the thing that irks me most is that with each new release of kde/gnome, the window manger gets more complicated in it's structure (just what the f*ck are all those kde/gnome processes doing anyway?) and less configurable in what you can do to change the behavior of the window decorations or keyboard/mouse controls. Not to mention that every xterm "clone" does a worse job of being a friggin terminal than the last. Cut and paste just works in Xterm, but gnome term won't talk to windows through vnc (but xterm does), and kde's terminal often requires you to select paste multiple times. Sometimes I think UI evolution on Linux ended when someone decided that making fvwm look like windows was a good idea and everyone started chasing the MS or Apple UI's....
The worst Linux annoyance I've run into is the Linux Zealot. The only answer you ever get from them is "You wouldn't have this type of problem if you ran Linux."
They of course provide no help in solving problems you run into when using Linux, because the system is perfect and any problems you have are obviously user induced.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Is that you Bill?
to getting acceptance.
I've tried to convince a few people to convert but
when I find out that they have all that wintel crap, well...
Setup of winmodems. Currently that's a hellish task.
I went through a dozen of them trying to build a box
for my dad until I found one that worked.
There's tons of this cheap shit out there but people
do NOT want to be told that they have to buy new hardware.
They bought a Dell or whatever and the video card, modem, etc.
that came with it, well, they expect it to work.
"it worked under M$, why the hell should it not work with Linux?"
You can't tell them, "Sorry pal, your modem (and or video) is a
piece of shit and you'll have to replace them, despite the
fact that they work just fine under M$..
Yeah, that's a no starter.
The Linux for free concept just got a $150+ price tag nailed onto it.
cut/copy/paste is pretty sucky. They really need to work this out.
I'm no big fan of "klipper" but there has to be a better way.
In M$ you can do like codes to get foreign characters.
For the most part I do not want
to totally switch my keyboard from English to German to type a
simple letter when I only occasionaly need to use a German character.
That's just silly. It was easy to do with M$, not easy to do
with Linux. There may be a better way to do it but I've not
found it yet.
Nicer people. I've found that Linux people are brutal and ruthless
when it comes to help.
It usually goes something like this,
nube: Hi, how do I install a winmodem? I'm brand new to Linux.
vet: RTFM!! RTFM!! modprobe !! Damn dude!
nube: Uh, I can't understand all this modprobe stuff, I'm NEW to linux.
vet: RTFM DAMNIT!!
nube: I'm still confused.
vet: man modprobe !!! Do we have to hold your damn hand?!!
nube: Jeez, with windows I just turned it on and hardware wizard
installed everything for me. Maybe I'll just stick with MS..
vet: Well, if he was too stupid to understand man modprobe then he doesn't
need to use Linux. Jeez! Dumb ass newbies..
That's the sort of bullshit that makes potential converts turn away and
stay in la la land and crayolas..
Either Linux needs to get better at hardware handling or the people
that want to convert others need to get off their high horses..
...signed, a victim of Slashdot groupthink.
show of hands: how many of you have ever typed 'rm -r *>class,' or similar meaning for the '>' to be a '.'
On any sane operating system, rm should be able to tell what command-line was passed to it so that it could decide to bring up a prompt "you are about to empty this directory. Is that ok? [y/n]"
instead, rm just gets an expanded list of files (shell expands the *) and so happily deletes everything.
Or, not much better, you have the always prompt option set. Then it bitches about every single file so that it is impossible to use rm -r. Thus, users will always always use -rf which, rightfully so, hapilly does whatever the hell you ask of it.
show of hands again: tar. ever type 'tar cvf myarchive' and meant the character right next to c, 'tar xvf myarchive'
did tar just blow away your archive? yes. Are you screwed? but of course.
I could go on and on, as countless others have (such as here, I find it amusing that MS is hosting this page, but whatever... UNIX Hater's Handbook
My personal pet peeve? why is it that with >75% of apps that I download as source have either configure scripts that simply don't work, or include code that doesn't compile. I know I'm not alone here. I refuse to install stuff from source these days, because I'm not willing to go find the compiler errors in your package, I'm too busy trying to find a piece of software to use to help me with whatever I am trying to make.
"Sure, some problems do languish unfixed for years"
YUP!! Linux is still here.
Most probably you are using Debian or Gentoo or Slackware because it's kwel and 1337. Or maybe you are using a 5.2 Red Hat. Too bad. Because Linux is Linux is Linux. So, Linux + Desktop = Mandrake.
I booted off the knoppix CD (Debian-based) and it detected all my stuff, including setting up 3D support on my ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video card automatically. The CDRW works, xsane picked up my scanner, my USB memory stick works. I can't complain.
And do not have the time to afford to get the knowledge level of a developer.
I've got more comments to add about Gentoo.
First, you don't need to install anything that you don't want to. You won't get a beta version of the compiler unless you specifically ask for it.
Updates exist for all software that is listed in Portage. Every now an then, you could look at the package.mask file to see which programs are going extinct (and very few of them at that).
You have a variety of Kernel source packages to choose from. Each one is different in a way, but even then it's really up to you to make the decisions on what makes it in, and what doesn't. Yes, configuring and compiling a kernel is something that n00bs don't want to do, but I believe that Gentoo is actually providing an auto-compile option now.
X is configured by you for your machine. This can also be a pain in the ass, but seriously... running xf86config from the command line is not that difficult. I remember doing it for the first time, back when I was installing Red Hat 4. Sure, I thought it was odd that X needed the horizontal and vertical frequencies of my monitor, but that information wasn't terribly hard to get. If you can get X working with gentoo, which isn't that hard, it's more than likely that you won't suffer from unusual crashes and such (unless it truly is a hardware problem.)
Lastly, Gentoo user support is excellent. I once subscribed to the Gentoo-users mailing list, and noticed that though there were a pile of noobs asking questions, there was always someone there who replied with a quick solution. I unsubscribed after a couple days, mostly because I ended up with a folder that had a couple thousand messages in it (just from the mailing list). The forums are a good source of info too.
Yeah, it's a dastardly shameless plug of Gentoo. I'm not ashamed, though, because the whole organization offers those services that you usually have to pay for with other distros for free, and the support also doesn't suck.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
KDE and Gnome are bloated, bloated, bloated. Why isn't anyone using GNUStep? Then they might actually have an advantage over Micro$oft in terms of system resource usage.
let see some DVD-R support, like writing images, making images, ripping, copying, all that good stuff.
still not there yet. and some svcd to dvd conversion too.
if you want to do any real video work with dvd you still need windoze for the most part. sigh...
pagemaker for linux would just rock!
I just can't get Clippy to show up on my text console. :(
"I see you are trying to shutdown a system..."
The numerous folks who insist that Linux is the cure-all and be-all for all computer woes.
Asimov had a super-short short story where space explorers in a spaceship complain about setting up equipment that comes unmounted, crated, and with conflicting inconsistent mounting instructions. The resulting hardware never works correctly.
They look forward to using a new equipment-mounting robot. Until they land, unlock the cargo hold, and find the robot. In crates. In parts. With confusing, contradictory and insconsistent mounting instructions.
That describes most of my Linux experience.
IANALS (Linux Specialist), more of an eternal newbie, but I use Linux *everywhere*. Specially since the Linux-on-a-sti^H^H^HCD distros started working.
My great attraction to minimalist CD distros is based on the fact that their documentation actually is *objective*, for the most part. And it even works. With less than a month's worth of frustrated spare time, you can't really spare.
Even if you do eventually end up reading 3000 pages of highly elliptic documentation, referenced to by comments in about 300 pages of supposedly less elliptic documentation, that you had to read in order to collate the less than 2 or 3 pages with the necessary info on how to make something basic work on your setup.
With minimalist distros, that usually happens *after* the system is up and running and productive. And usually, only if you want to install off-option packages. Even then, things are tighter, and work better. Less stuff to break, I guess.
The problem is that, as far as your particular problem is concerned, there is no Fine Manual. It is hidden, buried beneath terabytes of extraneous data spread all over the noosphere. You have to go out, armed with a butterfly net and small pocket-knife, and try to guess where and what is relevant to you, and how to put it together.
The stuff you read is usually dated, or exists only for other configs, or distros, or kernels, or languages, or drivers, or...
And so on.
Yet the funny thing is that they want the techie crowd to do all the work.
... well... it doing things how they're used to it doing them in OSes they've paid for.
Wonder how much their enthusiasm in the role of "measuring stick" would be checked, if they had to impliment their own ideas?
Well, the techie crowd did tell them, up front, and in-your-face that:
a) This is so easy to do, I'm not going to bother with this whole "getting paid for my work" thing.
b) Linux is the best ever, everyone should use it, Windows and Mac OS are for morons.
c) Oh, and did we mention that we're giving it all away for free.
People expect things to work the way they expect them to work. When you given them those things for free, but do not otherwise make it exceptionally clear, they still expect things like
Simply put: choose: you're competing with commerical OSes or you're not. If you're competing with commercial OSes, you have to please that userbase. If you're not, you can do whatever the fuck you like. Don't try having it both ways - it won't work.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
People keep on complaining abuot font support in Mozilla. Why are you using Mozilla? Opera is freely downloadable, and works 200x better.
I'd love to RTFM, but I can rarely find useful information. Most of the HowTos are outdated, some are just plain wrong, and half of them are at dead links. Most of the available HowTos that are current are written in High Geek, and unintelligible to any poor bastard without an ubergeek degree who's trying to figure it all out for the first time. Generally, I've found that people who say "RTFM" really have no fucking clue themselves. The next time you tell some newbie to RTFM and don't provide a working link to intelligible and useful information, I'm gonna reach through your ethernet and choke the living piss out of you. So there.
That's one of my Linux annoyances. The other one is the liars who say the absolutely pitiful and horrible UI that the Gimp has is fine and dandy. It isn't, it sucks ass. It's almost unusable, and it's the most unfriendly and unintuitive UI I've ever seen on a graphics package. Hell, I still boot Windoze to run PSP when I have to do serious graphics stuff, *nothing* available for Linux is worth a pinch of shit. Really.
Isn't it funny when this happens? See, I tihnk its funny because these are the same goons who are saying Linux on the Desktop is not a toy, and saying things that sound an aweful lot like everyone should use Linux
This last thing I try to do quite a lot to paste a new URL into the URL textbox of a web browser..
I run Opera or Firebird. After highlighting a URL, just click your mouse's middle button while hovering over the document part of the browser window. The URL you highlighted will load.
Good luck
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
About five years ago I configured my computer to automount floppies and CD-ROMs when their mount point was accessed, to not cache writes to the floppy drive, and to autounmount those media a few seconds after the last access to their mount point stops. It's been working like I like it ever since.
I'm occasionally stunned, after all that time, to see how many distributions are still fiddling with KDE or Gnome CD-watching daemons, special kernel patches, etc. to try and get reasonable behavior out of removeable media without just putting a couple lines in the config files for autofs.
install Winex and star gaming. since Winex sometimes cause a 30% loss in framerate, it'll be a good reason to buy a Radeon 9800 pro
Actually, the xfree radeon driver doesn't even have 3d support for the Radeon 9800 Pro, and the ATI binary driver doesn't work with WINE(x). They even said in the readme that it's winex's problem! Now I'm wondering why Nvidia's driver just works.I'm sure that if I want to dig into the scripts I can find the cause of this, but considering how often I use the CD it hasn't been worth it so far.
fencepost
just a little off
I am mostly annoyed how there are different binary versions of programs for different linux distro's. If linuxes are basically the same, why cant we have one binary for all distros. This is where windows is easier...
Free speech is getting expensive...
You can use PCRE with VIM:_ id=393
http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip
Use perl instead grep, e.g.:
cat filename | perl -ne 'print if (/myregexp/)'
It's necessary to tell the tty canonical mode code which character one's terminal sends for backspace/erase. This shouldn't be necessary, it's not as if ^H or ^? could mean anything else in that context. I've written about this.
This one is easy;
#1 - RMS!
Redhat kernel 2.4.18-3 with SMP and EXT3...
Anyone who has tried this knows what I'm talking about...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Quite frankly, command line help sucks. In any Windows command line app, you type: /? | more
And you get a useful screen that says to the effect: "if you use this switch, it will do this, if you use that switch, it will do that"
This behavior is completely universal in the Windows world and works, without exception, on every command line app I have ever used.
In Linux, you type --h and you typically get:
-d -l -F -U -C -K -Y -O -U -R -T -F -M
And that's it. No explanation, just a list of shit you can type.
Reminds me of the Microsoft joke about MS Tech support only yielding answers to questions that were technically correct, but ultimately useless.
Don't tell me to man , or google for it. An app *should* tell me what the hell it does, and what I can expect if I use a switch. Otherwhise, what is the point of the --h switch?
Why is it so hard to spend the extra 30 seconds when you are coding the app to stick in a few simple text strings explaining what a switch does? Or am I just a big pussy not used to using the Real Man's OS??
I like downloading binaries.
Its a real shame that many programs are not available in binary form, or that, when I go looking for help, people complain . Oh, well, its probably a bad binary, you should have installed from source.
What if I'm not a programmer and don't want to be manually compiling other people's code
As for the rm thing: there is a difference between obnoxious prompting, such as every time you do everyting, and useful prompting: only when you do something that either looks like a mistype or is really really dangerous
such as the 'rm -r *' that my friend accidentally executed from '/' (his previous command was 'cd/some/dir' -- he forgot the space, so it didn't work, and he didn't notice. His mistake, but... couldn't rm have said 'you sure you want to wipe out everything on every filesystem currently mounted?'
thankfully he did this only 2 hours after that servers most recent backup, so we lost little data and weren't down for too long.
besides, thats what the '-f' option is for. Ask for a confirmation on and 'rm *' command unless -f is present (instead of what many distros now do by default, which is confirm for every single file -- too annoying, so we all just automatically add the '-f' Or what my college campus does: rm always prompts for every file, even if I use '-f'. This is insanity! I end up doing an FTP to localhost and using the FTP delete becuase it takes about 10 hours less
I personnaly never had any problem with any distribution of Linux except... THE FUC*** SOUND CARD (SB in all cases). I never ever saw any distribution that would detect, install and configure my sound card properly so I don't have to play with modules or devices permissions... In fact, I did my own distribution (using the LFS standards) because I was tired of all those itchy details, but fu**, it was a lengthy (but rewardy) process.
Yeah sure, I could say that the fonts make Linux look Mickey Mouse to anyone who uses graphics on, let's say, a Mac. However, what I think Linux desperately needs less of are self-appointed sages of Linux.
Linux needs neither sycophants nor panegyrists. Hell, even people spoon-fed on Win95 and saavy after years of Microsoft exposure get upset about weaknesses in the OS. Why should we suddenly get upset if everyone isn't an apologist?
Flame, ho!
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I think it would lie in changing something like this:
/etc/X11/XF86Config for me)
(in
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "cm771"
HorizSync 31.5-96
VertRefresh 50-160
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
to something like this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "cm771"
HorizSync 31.5-96
VertRefresh 120
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Just a guess. Honestly, XConfigurator is great to get an INITIAL config file, but you'll be much better off if you clean all the cruft out of the file, tidy it up, and play with it a bit.
Also, check your monitor's On Screen Display to see if windows is telling you the truth. I have a windows machine that swears it outputs 75Hz, but when I ask the monitor itself to display mode it says 60Hz, and it is _definitely_ 60Hz.
Also, just WHY do you want to do this? I think it would be a lot easier on the CRT if you ran it in a 'normal' range (85Hz max). The general rule is to use the lowest refresh rate you find comfortable.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Also, forgot to say this:
XFree seems to pick the maximum refresh possibble for a given resolution. Your monitor might be able to do 120HZ in Windows if you're running at 1024x768, but if XFree is set up for 1280X1024 the maximum refresh rate might just be 85Hz. Try running both at the same res.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
If you take all (well, mostly all) the bitches here about Linux, and distill them down into a black tarry mess, the one thing that stands out is this:
"I simply want to be able to double-click a 'Setup' icon somewhere and have my software install without having to worry about configurations, or builds, or dependencies, or anything else."
Which isn't a bad idea. However, for those of you who don't want to (or don't have the time to) figure out how to install software on your systems, I think it's a bit disingenuous to call this lack of software plug-n-play "an annoyance." For some of us, it's a feature. Yeah, we've spent many hours mastering the intricacies involved with keeping a Linux distro updated with the latest/greatest apps, but in the end, most of us look back on our experiences and consider it a learning experience, rather than an inconvenience.
I don't believe there's any book that can be written that will be able to address every idiosyncracy of every Linux app that doesn't have a "Click Me" icon to install it with. Let's be honest with ourselves here: If you want software plug-and-play, Linux is probably not for you. You don't use a tack hammer to drive 8d nails, and neither do you use Linux for all the creature comforts one would expect from Windows or MacOS or [OS of choice here].
What gets me is that there are so many people who ask simple linux questions that people with real problems get pushed aside. And example would be contacting a developer about a kernel module. Kernel modules shouldn't hard lock the system right? I've had one that did. On multiple systems with only the one piece of hardware being in common. I read the module source and found that the card was a slightly newer revision than what was listed in the comments. I e-mailed the author but never got a reply.
Also hardware support for not-so-old hardware. Some hardware seems to get forgotten about. (this may be an X rant) Some older pci video cards don't seem to work well in X any more when they did years ago. The screen fills with static and garbage even though the card is detected (cirrus logic cards for example) You may say "buy a new video card" but when you are trying to use a computer with everything built in as a router / terminal it isn't always easy. Aside from recompiling XFree86 3.0, I wonder what could be done.
now, the recent usability study that showed SuSe catching up to Windows was promising. but, judging from the commentary here, i'd say that most slasdotters do not want linux to become the "captain of the desktop & the queen's navee." they like the idea of somehow being special because of their ... computer operating system??? whaaaat?
my technical peeve is printing. it's ironical that the system that originated as a printing system is horrible on the home front. i've used cups. it's satisfactory for normal office-type printing, but the setup and configuration are nontrivial. but setting up color printing is a freaking nightmare. which is why i do that off the winders machine.
there are other complaints here that are significant and accurate. it's too bad that there are so many users who want nothing to change, because they are a significant blockade to the improvement of the GNU/linux system. "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
I think you pretty much got my point -- the "problems" with Linux won't be solved by mere code or docs or support, but only with time, which is on our side.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
There is a very good reason for this. root's home directory should be on the root device. Many times /home is a different device, i.e. separate partition (so some user does fill up the filesystem and system process choke because the can't write to log or configuration files) or NFS mounted.
/home or networking... I don't know about you but I'd like to have acces to some of my recovery scripts...
What if the machine comes up without access to
Or maybe I'm old school and paranoid...
not necessarily of the Linux kernel, but of the apps on the platform.
1. I want to download an app and it puts me in dependency hell. I have to download 10 other packages in order to actually use that app, and 8 of those packages break other apps I have installed.
2. Inconsistencies in GUI among apps. In some apps, right click pulls up menus, in others it doesn't - or it is some other random sequence of mouse buttons. In some apps, the "normal" menu items are scattered all over hell's half acre compared to where the "normal" menu items are for another application. ("Normal" being file open/save, edit, copy/paste, etc.) In some apps, ones with multiple windows, which window actually contains the menu you want may have no correlation with what you are actually doing in that window.
3. Usability of GUI among apps. In many applications, the GUI appears to have been put together either simply by order of implementation of the features or by some obscure/strange workflow that makes no sense to anyone other than the person who developed the GUI. Many times the GUI seems very haphazardly assembled with no regard for workflow patterns which are normally used in the type of processing performed by the application.
I assume when you say you used OOo for 18 months that you were using 1.0...
Try out OpenOffice.org 1.1
I hated 1.0 and was sad to see so much effort going into such a bad office suite.. but 1.1 is an amazing difference. Now I don't have any reservations recommending it to family/friends who ask me if I can "get them MS Office" (expecting a free--pirated copy).
And my girlfriend actually uses OOo1.1 more often than MS Office.
First, your posting is of the tone, "If you don't like it, fix it yourself!" I have heard this from many different developers whom I thought would be generally happy that I was giving them honest feedback about using their software. Many of them simply have no time nor interest in helping their users, and they've made that very clear in their insulting, childish, and condescending responses. You ask that we "offer up fixes" to developers. I've seen how far practically *any* communication with developers has gotten me on multiple occasions, so you can take your "you owe them" attitude and stuff it right up your ass. I'm through with being polite and helpful to developers who have no desire to be polite and helpful in return. The fact that they are writing software is not a license to be an asshole.
Second, there is no such thing as altruism. Every act that a human being chooses to do has a selfish component. There may be many reasons why a person chooses to do something, many of them that don't have a selfish interest. I contend that one of them *must* be a selfish interest or else the person in question will not choose the action.
Third, you have a poor understanding of the selfishness Ayn Rand advocated. It's called "rational self-interest". It is NOT what I call "self-importance", which, to me, implies that my desires take precedence over others' rights, that others (not I) should suffer the negative consequences of my actions, and that I (not others) should suffer the positive rewards of others' actions.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Yeah, middle click is great unless you need to paste over somthing. Frequently I want to paste an url into mozilla, but I have to select the whole URL box, delete it, and then copy and paste my desired url. Ugly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Maybe its the drivers that suck?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
the worst thing about linux is the linux community.. the fucked up anally retentive teenage self proclaimed gurus that never offer any help for newbies (or others for that matter) but only start flamewars on forums or bans/kicks you with STFU and RTFM and similar on irc for asking for help.. thats the no 1 reason I want to exterminate anything called linux!
A lot of people have trouble understanding how to combine a few hundred thousand arguments. Humans primary way of navigating is by VISUAL input that is why GUI's are so important to so many people and even tho the manuals for linux are extensive in many cases it is TOO extensive and contains so much jargon and other things that its very very hard if not impossible to understanding for any new people as you often need to know a lot of things already to understand it and that makes the TOTAL LACK OF HELP from the linux "gurus" even more frustrating..
Get rid of these loosers and linux would have a real chance of becoming and instant desktop HIT but most people who dont care about the inner workings of linux but only USING it just cant be bothered when they have to deal with this crap to solve elementary things like installing printer drivers.
I'm not necessarily taking anything detailed, but SOME in some cases would be nice. And, put up a webpage for your software. Put a description of it up there. A link to a list of files isn't enough. I wanna know what the package does before I download it, or at least see if the dependancies are there. I understand programmers are not writers, but for god's sake, find someone who is and have them write up the docs!
Im sorry, but it shouldn't take Mozilla 15 seconds to load on a system w/ a 2GHz cpu, 512M RAM, and a 128MB T1-4200 Geforce 4 Graphics Card. KDE is as slow as hell!!!
That's right, (on debian) configuring your serial ports to use different devices is about as straightforward as making a faster-than-light spaceship out of plastic sporks and wet-naps!
Its not an issue of not-enough-documentation. There's boatloads of documentation. The problem is the doc just sucks. IIRC it has you:
Its a mess. And my girlfriend's palm III still won't sync.
i hate the cluttering of my ~dir .files should go into a dir, say .conf/ or .etc/ so i can forget about them.
all
but the default settings are saner (Windows tends to "center" the sliders if you haven't set them)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You don't have a slipstream install of SP3? That enables DMA by default, and fixes a few file permission fuckups.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Most little things, but together annoy me really bad: 1. No central authority on customer support. Who do I complain my problems to? 2. No standardized UI look. Everything application looks different. 3. No standardized interapplication communication. 4. No standard method of installation. 5. No standard method of uninstalling. 6. No standard configuration. (this makes tech support a nightmare.) 7. No standard libraries (you can end up installing more and mroe libraries each time you install a new application.) 8. No standard method of updating. 9. No official owners manual. 10.No acepted standards in storing configuration settings. 11.No standard hot keys. Ctrl+A does not perform the same functions in all applications. 12.No standardized behavior of UI components. Eg. All text fields do not have the same context menu choices. That said, now you can see why I'm a Mac advocate. Steve Jobs lays down the law, and we all obey.
It's annoying that the GEEKS in the world claim LINUX is ready for the desktop. Sure, it's stable and completely customizable and defianately more useable... for a GEEK.
I find it highly annoying that there are 10,000 distros out there and everyone has a different way of doing things. Some include support for this, some include support for this if you spend $$$ some include this program compiled with their customizations... you get the idea. Truth is, LINUX leaves WAY too much to choice for it to be "ready" for the average end-user.
IMHO - I think that the upper-echelon of LINUX users should work with the lower-level LINUX users and start a distro whos primary goal is to make LINUX useable... my dad who is not exactly stupid... should be able to sit down and install it. When it boots up, He should immediately be able to begin installing software that he will use. He shouldn't have to learn about some of the more cryptic functions of LINUX, it should just work.
Take OS X for example, they have a VERY solid OS. It's got a stable framework, the ablility to install it and begin using it right away... fully configured. No device drivers, no configuring sound modem ethernet ide usb firewire drivers... they just work. Sure it's built with a VERY small scope of hardware in mind but that's what makes it so stable.
I'm not saying remove the *functionality* of linux just to acheive the goal of desktop usability... That would be outrageous. I saying that until LINUX is able to be installed and it just work - without much command-line - without hassles - and without having to have a thourough knowledge of HOW a computer works to effectively use it, it's not ready.
1. When X Crashes and completely screws up your screen (so that you can't even C-M-F{x} out and restart X) and you have to SSH into the computer and reboot it from another computer located 36.7 miles away. (otherwise it'd screw up the filesystem)
2. When your TTY screws up because it can't display binary files.
3. SCO.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
If you're new... slackware isn't exactly...
Um, hello? Slackware is one of the worst distributions for new users. Download "official" Redhat/mandrake/SuSe ISOs and you'll find yourself so much happier...
I touch computers in naughty places
Look into Gentoo
I guess mine is that I can still bring down a whole system with a single runaway process. I've done scalability tests on sone Java servlets where, when Tomcat hit the JVM's memory limit, the java process pinned the CPU at 99.9% and even a "kill -9" failed to get rid of it. That was the last thing I saw before all my ssh sessions froze and I was forced to go for the Big Red Button. This didn't happen all the time, or even all that often, but there were definitely a couple of times that a hard reset was required.
Sure, Tomcat's poor handling of the out-of-memory condition may be Java'a and/or Tomcat's fault, but locking up the whole system is Linux' fault. I have found Linux to be "very" stable, but "very" is still short of "perfectly".
Maybe I spent too much time at IBM hanging around the mainframe snobs (who are to us Unix guys as we are to Windows guys), but I do consider a "real" OS to be one that will simply never allow itself to be brought down by one errant user, no matter what he's doing.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
And alsa usually fixes it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But why not this behavior if POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set?
test the first argument (if it's the only one), and if it looks like a tar file, untars it to the current directory (if it's - it reads it from standard input). otherwise, it tars up the path/filespec to standard output.
That sounds like the "most obvious" usage in absence of the "command".
other examples besides tar and ar? dump, restore, mknod. All commands I have to pull up the manpage for (that and mencoder and sox, but I digress)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They got Creative to release full exposure on its EMU10k and the Audigy. (I don't know the status of the Audigy 2)
They got fairly exclusive access to ATI's specs. They have Matrox all over the board. NVidia is playing proxy to whatever users want (which is fine).
Intel provides generous documentation, etc.
Look at the Alsa project! They managed to rattle quite a few cages and get support for arguably more sound hardware then Windows XP supports.
In fact, it's the periphial manufacturers who give people a harder time. Getting firewire or serial ATA support is like pulling teeth. Most modems' drivers are reverse engineered from windows drivers and external debugging hardware.
There are companies out there that will build you a fit-perfect Linux box along the lines of an Apple. They'll tell you what hardware works and doesn't. But the PC world is wild and wooly so people will want to roam free and buy unsupported products and try to make them work.
Since OSS is about choice, we shouldn't try to get people to NOT buy things. OSS is not in a position to write most any firmware because the manufacturers often regard such things as trade secret, and sometimes the devices do not meet certain regulations (IE the 802.11a/g drivers). This is unfortunate.
Also, thanks for the recognition. You'd be surprised how easily you get modded up when you coyly represent the elicit fantasy of many a Slashdotter.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They don't use SNMP to manage Crays. I should know, I work for SGI.
YHL, HAND F4GG075-EXP3rT!!1
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Section (not funny): ...
...
() In Soviet Rusia, funny posts moderate YOU!
Section (not interesting):
() It is dull and tiresome, you insensitive clod!
Section (overrated):
() Cowboy Neal has blessed it with an "underrated"
I've had success converting their rescue/install floppy to a 2.4.21 kernel for installing on a machine that needed 2.4.21 to find the scsi card (aic79xx).
Hope this helps.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
... stinks. Where is the FTP install option?
My wife is Korean and I've been trying for quite some time to setup a nice Mandrake box for her. It's really painful.
First of all, I have to dual-boot since writing Korean and having a Swiss-German environement is unthinkable. So she's booting in a Korean environement with Korean language support, while I have to boot my Swiss German partition. Really really annoying if you ask me. ("Can I reboot the computer, I need to write a note in Korean to one of my friends." -"OK, go ahead, but please reboot after sending that note, I need to work on my files")
On a related note some applications still don't know what UTF8 means. The Korean environment is in UTF8, but you should see all those applications that cannot display other than ASCII+Korean characters.
On a related note, why can't she write an OpenOffice.org document in Korean with German intermixed, without always changing font when changing the language?
You were saying?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
you can buy a generic 100mpbs card based on rt_8139 or something similar. I've never had a problem with these cards, and they offload a decent amount from the CPU.
I've always had trouble with 3Com. Did you ever see a 3Com 3C9xx try to talk to 3Com stackers? It ain't pretty.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Linux is a kernel, not a computer operating system with GUIs for adding printers and configuring PDAs. Those that think differently know not of what they speak and should shut the hell up.
Rant on, brother!
I am a hobbyist user so I don't know the mechanics of how this works, but I can relate my similar frustration with this problem and what I've done about it since I banished all Microsoft software from my home a couple of years ago. My success may have more to do with the particular applications I use (Mozilla, kmail, kate).
What I have come to do is use a child directory from home I call ~/snip with Kate, the text editor, and paste everything into a file I save in the snip directory. Most of the time, things will either paste to Kate, or you can write to a file directly (as with kmail) and then pull it up for selection in Kate.
I have been most unhappy about having to do this (I still use windows at work) until I began to grep the directory randomly for certain keywords. It's almost like poetry....a slice of one's history of intellectual efforts at the console.
But, I still do like the centralized clipboard in windows, and the fact that it is only one buffer makes things quick, if repetitive. I can see the evil bits in this, though. Having a buffer that can literally paste directly into any process from any process is a potential integrity/security problem, so it's all a trade off.
The best way to do is to be.
My biggest annoyance with Linux (and other *nixen) has been X11. Admittedly, XFree86 is a fantastic piece of work and it offers great compatibility with every other version of X out there, but at the same time there are so many things wrong with it.
First off, it's slow. Plain and simple. It takes a long time to start up, and drawing operations seem very inefficient - ever tried to watch a movie? I realize that this is a side-effect of X originally being intended to be used over a network, but I have two arguments against this. First off, it would be better to have a snappy graphics subsystem running locally, with an optional networked system on top of it. Secondly, the protocol used by X11 can't be too efficient; at least, TightVNC uses less bandwidth. I think PicoGUI gets it right. The startup time could probably be reduced a bit by using the OS's keyboard etc. drivers - which would also save users from having to configure them once for the OS and once for XFree86.
Secondly, XFree86 is huge. Several megabytes get you a graphical subsystem with keyboard and mouse support - but we already have all of these in the kernel. The kernel framebuffer does just fine on my some have said that XFree86 can be quite fast if programmed right, but the fact remains that I can't watch movies under XFree86 that run smoothly under Windows on the same machine, and Opera/Windows blazes away whereas Opera/Linux is ``merely'' fast.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Don't forget that. For those that don't have the system resources, or time, to compile anything of any consequence.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ack...slashdot plaintext still requires escaping lesser-than signs...sorry for the broken post. :-(
My biggest annoyance with Linux (and other *nixen) has been X11. Admittedly, XFree86 is a fantastic piece of work and it offers great compatibility with every other version of X out there, but at the same time there are so many things wrong with it.
First off, it's slow. Plain and simple. It takes a long time to start up, and drawing operations seem very inefficient - ever tried to watch a movie? I realize that this is a side-effect of X originally being intended to be used over a network, but I have two arguments against this. First off, it would be better to have a snappy graphics subsystem running locally, with an optional networked system on top of it. Secondly, the protocol used by X11 can't be too efficient; at least, TightVNC uses less bandwidth. I think PicoGUI gets it right. The startup time could probably be reduced a bit by using the OS's keyboard etc. drivers - which would also save users from having to configure them once for the OS and once for XFree86.
Secondly, XFree86 is huge. Several megabytes get you a graphical subsystem with keyboard and mouse support - but we already have all of these in the kernel. The kernel framebuffer does just fine on my < 4 MB 486, now try to get XFree86 running on that. Okay, X11 offers a lot more functionality, but often you won't need that - how many people run their X server and clients on the same machine?
Configuring XFree86 can be a real nightmare. Fortunately, starting from 4.0 there's a VESA driver, so now one can be reasonably sure that it works with any modern graphics card. However, the last 4 times I installed XFree86, it wouldn't work with 32 bits color depth. I know I need to configure with depth 24 and fbbpp 32, but the installers I've seen never got it right by themselves.
Finally, I would like to say that I am happy enough to have XFree86. I just wish it would be better. I also know that some have said that XFree86 can be quite fast if programmed right, but the fact remains that I can't watch movies under XFree86 that run smoothly under Windows on the same machine, and Opera/Windows blazes away whereas Opera/Linux is ``merely'' fast.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
GSSE - the Generic Service Supplication Engine.
Do you remember STREAMS? If you've done any Solaris kernel programming you might have bumped heads with it.
Think like the DirectShow API on Windows and you're getting close. It's a bunch of kernel and user space "modules" that have pins that fit into each other, complete with control pins that can pass certain kinds of data. Pins can send interrupts, etc, req/initiate block transfers, etc.
STREAMS is a lot like that, and it'd make sense to make the video drivers and stuff STREAMS interface instead of standard block/char devices.
I understand there was an initiative to brings STREAMS to linux (LiS) but it so far has not been widely accepted.
If SVR4 streams don't catch on and replace these outdated APIs, I am working on a proposal for such a system that could go beyond what STREAMS would provide... a system that combines the features of demand loaded modules, DirectX, GConf, and system libraries. A generic, run-time configurable multimedia/multiformat API and MPI, with hardware/driver support where sensible.
Sigh, if only.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Why isn't there a kernel module for IDE burners yet? I haven't seen a SCSI burner in years, but if you want your IDE burner to work, you still have to install a SCSI emulation module and mount it as a SCSI device.
It seems like there's relatively little documentation on linux CD burning, and what little is there refers to 2.2 kernels, so you can't be sure whether it's still applicable.
The command line utilities are useable, if you're knowlegeable about CD structure and SCSI. The frontends, on the other hand, are largely useless. I must have tried most of them, and they all have their share of problems, and rarely behave intuitively.
Of course, I haven't tried to burn a CD under linux in months (Nero rocks!), and things may have improved in the interim.
This is one of those times I would love to be proven wrong.
Its the stuff you layer on top of it..
.).
That's one of my pet peeves, the lack of understanding of the differences between a OS kernel, a utility and an 'environment'.
And dependency hell STILL exists.... regardless of what tool you use to get around it.. though admittedly its much better. its still not perfect and annoying as hell... which is one of the reasons I went to BSD-land a while ago.. its even more controlled there, using the ports tree..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I can't understand why mailing lists restrict their archives to members only. This is one of the most pointless, irritating policies around. This prevents me from quickly searching a list to find out if someone has already asked my question, without subscribing!
On high traffic lists, this is an insane situation. Even on low traffic lists, it's time consuming and counter to the spirit of co-operation and openness that I expect in the system administration community. Moreover, it thwarts a newbies ability to dig up information without having unravel yet another esoteric oddity of computing. (In this case, it's particularly ironic because the Linux complaints list will have huge volume!)
Anyone maintaining a list, wake up and turn this "feature" OFF ! Open the archives, and help build the public knowledge base. Last I checked RedHat's rpm-list was members only -- it's presumably one of the first places a new user would check for help!
For those are stuck on this problem, take a look at the Mail Archive and the Mailing list ARChives for plenty of list archives.
A Linux complaint?
How about RedHat's installer. They keep ramping up the version number, without doing anything to improve the installer! Anaconda is still garbarge. The resolve dependancies interface needs an option to turn off individual packages that have failed dependancies! Why are the options constrained to "install dependancies to satisfy these packages" or "do not install these packages with failed deps"? If you go through individual package selection and miss something, this is a major pain in the A**! You have to go back, and find the package in the package list!
Also, print the group and category information on the failed deps screen, so it's easy to go back and quickly find the package and turn it off. As it stands, you have a package with failed deps, and have to hunt through the entire list for it! Go on, try to teach all this to a new user. Guess what? In the first five minutes, they've said "Forget it. This is why Linux sucks."
Another one? How about checking the hardware before offering package selection? How many times have I sat for 30 minutes going through package selection, only to have the installer crash when trying to write the new partition table! I have to go through the whole process again! If using an ftp install (or with an network available), why not offer to allow me to upload the package list to another box before bailing out... then I could just download it next time!
What about graphical install for ftp? I install from a local ftp mirror, downloading an X server and libraries over my LAN is trivial, but I'm still stuck with the text install on RedHat 9!
Given that the installer is the first point of contact for most users (especially new users), why not fix it up? Get some UI people working on it, and for crying out loud, stop driving up the release number until you do something decent with the installer.
(And one final rant, why doesn't this Slashdot script comment submit script check URLs for me? Don't we want computers eliminating these mundane tasks? Otherwise, what purpose are they serving?)
Huh?
I think you just need to wrap your brain around the way selections work under X:
left-mouse text light up => copy
left-mouse text light up, delete => cut
middle-mouse click => paste
This isn't the same as on Mac/Windows. Its better, because its fewer keystrokes (none, in fact!).
Its supported by every X app I know. Even ones that try to shoe-horn in the mac way of doing it, still support the above functionality.
However I did learn from this discussion - there sould be a simpler system of deleteing all text in a field and replacing it with the current selection. I'm no gui expert, so I'm entitled to some rampant futile brainstorming! Consider putting either "Clear" or "Replace" in the right mouse menu. The former clears the text area, in preperation for a paste, and the latter does the same and then auto-pastes.
mouse 1 then drag selects the text
keeping mouse 1 down and pressing mouse 2 cuts
pressing 1 then 3 pastes
mouse 2 alone on select text runs it as a command
mouse 3 alone on selected text sends it to the plumber.
plumbing is like file types but instead uses regexes
If there is no plumbing action defined for that pattern and you are using the text editor (Acme) then the text editor tries to open that filename. If this fails the current document is searched for the text.
This system is much better than file associations because you have more control over what happens.
Maybe when you use a particular URL you want to always view the source rather than view the rendered html, no problem. The plumbing rules are per-process so you can have different rules in different windows.
It's great
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I can understand that Linux is case sensitive. I can understand that for programming it's better. I'm not here to say that it should be removed or anything like that. But, I would like to voice that it is a pain in the ass to a Linux newb such as myself. A human doesn't see a difference between A and a, but the computer does, rather literally.
"Derp de derp."
Hmm, I'd have to say my biggest problem with Linux is how it addresses memory and hard drive space.
Not to mention ITS A FUCKING GAY PIECE OF SHIT! FUCK LINUX! FUCK LINUX! FUCK LINUX!
1. Arts/ Sound in General. It's taken me weeks to hodge podge together sound drivers that work so I can listen to more than one sound at the same time. ...
2. CUPS.... Why does it love to cut lines off at the end of the page so much?
3. My digital camera... Yes, a Kodak LS443 is relatively new (8 months).... but it's supposed to mount as a mass storage device.... why doesn't it?
4. People in linux chats who are unhelpful and arrogant.
5. Why doens't java work
6. Why doesn't java/nvidia drivers come preinstalled.
7. Why does installing nvidia make me recompile my kernel (Thankyou SuSE.)
8. File locations....
Now don't get me wrong, I like far more things about linux than windows... but it's got some glaring inconsistancies.
Don't know if it is like amiga, but It is better than the usual linux way imho.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Used Linux as my desktop for a year (the alternative was Win2K, so the choice was easy).
Still, it pissed me off that GNOME gave me 10 ways to change my window manager theme and not one to set the clock, short of opening an xterm and doing "sudo date -s". Which of these features actually matters and ought to be reasonably findable?
I respect Linux, but I choose Mac OS X.
-realinvalidname
Funny. I spent four hours yesterday trying to figure out how to get rid of the Red Hat Gnome main icon and get back to the good old foot. And now this story comes out on Slashdot. The hat had been bothering me for a long time. Finally wrote a page describing the fix. We hate the red fedora
The Amiga way wasn't really that good either, since if you had renamed the disk in the meantime. the system couldn't figure that out anymore (you had to alias the disk, handy feature). and what if the disk was called as the device name, say DF0: ??? then you had to insert it into that drive, and remove the disk that was already in that drive (or else cancel the request).
F/OSS & IT Consultant
are arguing here that everything in UNIX is perfectly comprehensible, but they have been arguing over how tar works for the first 100 posts or so?
/. articles have demonstrated this is possible) and every GUI should include every option for the command.
'Nuff said.
Morons.
A GUI equivalent should exist somewhere in the user interface for every UNIX command (including pipes - and previous
Is that too hard to comprehend? Is that too hard to do? Is there some reason NOT to do it?
No - so get on it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I don't know if it's just my distro, but I have had no luck with usb on my linux (mandrake 9.1) When I first installed the distro, it configured my usb wheel mouse as a serial 2 button. Lately I have been forced to run mouseconfig with each rebootto get it working. Also, when I plugged in my usb pda, this handy kpilot icon appeared on my desktop.. groovy right? Well it was handy for starting kpilot, but not handy for configuring it. I had to manually configure the ports for it which ended up takeing hours of research and guessing. If linux knows when I plug in the pda and recognizes it enough set up this handy icon, why can't et share this information with the application for auto configure? Why does the application have no information on where the heck the port for this thing would be? I had this same experience with a digital camera yesterday, only I haven't had the time yet to actually figure this one out. The icon ops up on the desktop, but the application dosen't see it. I know there are logical explainations to all of this however I do see it all as a big annoyance. On a side note, I am amazed at how great the auto configure is for knoppix. Why isn't this true with a large stable release like Mandrake?
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
Tom Clancey Games don't port to it
You see, in Windows, there's one tool I need to use to add and remove applications.
The binary installer I download on the net.
Dependency hell is having to see a list of different package managers, and then get a smarmy, "Man, the tools are there, learn how to use them" at the end of it all.
And even if you do use the package managers, when they cock up, you're no better off than if you'd just installed from source in the first place.
And people wonder why I want a Macintosh.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I have complaints about linux, but since I can go in and fix things, then its my problem. No so with Windows. I always wondered if Windows has "error messages" that would appear in the console if we could start it up that way, and upon exit, view them. I use FVWM for Debian, Mandrake and Redhat, but I always have Gnome and KDE setups on those distros also. KDE's pretty nice, really, and if I have my
So, I guess my main complaint with Linux has to be those darn error messages.
Linux ought to be something of beauty. It is not. There are too many distros. Too many ways of doing things. If everybody that programmed and tinkered with Linux could focus on improving it beyond Windows it could be done easily. Gates is not scared, Linux is too fragmented. Too many people are doing their own thing and nothing ever gets accomplished. Get rid of that dog ugly and slow gui. Stop trying to see how many different systems you can get to run Linux. I have installed distro after distro and they all lack polish. Linux, the way it is today is retrocomputing with new hardware. The linux people ought to look at Beos. Load the free version on your new machine. Hunt down all the tweaks and patches to get it up on your new hardware. Look how fast the gui is. You need to look at how beautiful 0SX on a Mac is. Now, you linux people need forget the whole x11 rubbish and the countless window managers you have. You need to focus. It is pityful that one man, Klaus Knopper, and his Knoppix could accomplish so much. If all you would create a lightning fast gui(Beos) in Linux with some taste (OSX) that could run on anything (Thank Mr. Knopper), Mr. Gates would in fact lose quite a bit of sleep.
my thoughts
maudite
There's something awkward about bringing the system down to runlevel 3 'simply editing XFree86' Then bringing her back up to runlevel 5 to get, say, a simple pointing device like a Wacom tablet (or any other device for that matter)to work.
[Rant]
:(
;)
Yeah, speaking of problems that just won't fix no matter how long you mess with them:
I have three separate video cards, two ATi's and an NVidia and XFree86 refuses to run them correctly ever, I've put countless hours into finely configuring every configurable configuration file and yet to no avail.
Oddly enough, I can install BSD and it will work fine right off the disc... unfortunately, it did me no good for linux concerns. Linux simply hates my video cards and refuses to use all three in any resolution above 320x480
I've checked tutorials, manuals, howtos, the necronomicon, and all have left me with nothing but headahce and some pesky daemons running about
[/Rant]
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
My annoyance is a lack of any good way to deal with bandwidth throttling. I run a webserver on my Linux computer, but I also have several other computers on the LAN that I play games with, surf the web, etc. I have ADSL, so if someone is downloading anything of reasonable size from my webserver it sucks all the uplink bandwidth, which raises the latency on everything else. And of course this means my web browsing and games playing turns to shit. Bandwidth throttling already exists in most Windows download/upload apps, so why can't they add it to Apache?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
This happens because, with all floppy drives, they will not update their "disk in the drive" status flag unless you step the read/write head in or out.
:)
Normally, the Amiga steps the heads constantly between track 0 and track 1. However, with later models, they realised they could issue a command to the drive to step to track -1. The drive would refuse to step the heads (so no clicking sound), but would still update the disk inserted status.
The reason this couldn't be used universally is because some of the older drives used in really old Amigas would actually try and go to track -1, then break
Does my bum look big in this?
/rant
/rant endeth
Man, I have this IBM Thinkpad 390X and the onboard ESS Solo soundcard works sweet with Windows 98, but under Linux no way. Alsa and the Kernel 2.4 (esssolo1) have their own drivers for this card, they load fine, but all I get is distorted garble. Just crap! Nothing that resembles recognizable sounds.
So I try Knoppix incase it' something wrong with my config. Woohoo cards is detected, same distortion that bears no resemblance to anything sane.
I tried SuSE 8.1, woohoo Alsa driver auto-installed. Same problem!
The only person I know of who figured out this soundcard, had to load DOS then the DOS drivers, and then use LOADLIN to load Linux. What a gip!
There is nothing worse than giving someone hope that a driver exists, then dash it with this nonsense. Does one need to know the secret handshake to get this driver to work? It's not exactly state-of-the-art soundcard technology. Surely if the thing is auto-detected, then the autodetect should figure out IRQ's and DMA stuff too?
Well, actually yes I believe I can: IBM!
;)
And the reason is software patents, so maybe I should have said that instead, but I thought I would provoke a little
Seriously, I see software patents as a much bigger threat to open source, than SCO will ever be and IBM is the company with most software patents...
The fact that all those things you listed and more are the same goddamned things people have been saying for years and years, and yet it never changes. And then people flame you for bringing it up.
"So why don't you contribute?"
Okay, so let's make Linux an OS only for programmers. Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
But.. After reading the list of annoyances people have been spouting out.. you have to realize.. some of these things are how they are because it gives us more control over what's going on with the system..
An example to this is.. pressing the eject button on the cd drive.. You'd expect it to pop out your CD unless you were using it somewhere on the system. You would be compromising the ability to trace down what process is using the CD if you were to force an eject whenever the eject button is pressed..
Maybe my thought process is flawed?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
My Grandma runs linux, Gentoo at that. She is doing perfectly fine. My family members who only use windows are actually able to help her with it also.
Yeah she bairly knows that the command line exists but it fits all her computing needs. All she needed was a few scripts to automate stuff and she was set.
When she first started using her computer with linux on it she didn't know hot to make a space, I had to teach her about the space bar.
-Mary
the $699 licencing fee, windows is only 99 (or cheeper if you get it at the Barras, glasgow's most famouse market for counterfiet goods and pirated software)
I am pissed off at trying to get UT to work behind an IPFW and NATd firewall. I tried opening the firewall for udp 2000-2009 and 7777-7787 and then forwarding all those ports via NATd. I'm not having any problems with RTCW, so WTF!!!
I don't care about gamespy ports.
is having to keep purchasing my SCO license.
cups, having to emulate scsi to get a cdr drive to work, a lack of decent audio apps, oss, insecure services. Yeah ssh, apache, qmail rock, but why does ftp, pop3, and smtp have to be so god damn insecure. iptabels can also be a bitch some times.
Don't get me wrong I love Linux and all it's plesures. Fact remains that I can't write techno (easily) in linux, or do any pro-audio studio work.
I find my self rebooting to the dark OS to run buzztracker, soundforge, and cubase.
-makoffee
There's a little problem I like to call theft of focus. OK, it's not a Linux problem, it's a GUI problem, and it's not unique to X-based GUIs, since Windows does the same thing.
A typical scenario:
You are composing an e-mail message and you need to include some information from a spreadsheet, so you launch Open Office to read that document. Since Open Office takes a while to load, you go back to writing your message for a while. Some time later, all of a sudden, you are typing at the Open Office screen, which has stolen focus away from your e-mail.
Maybe this behavior is overrideable in KDE, but if so I've never found the option for it.
I was sneered at, thanks to /. moderation, regarding my criticism of Larry Wall's creation of yet another incompatible regular expression syntax in Perl 6. I think I just answered my question: yes, he is crazy. Crazy like a Bellevue inmate.
Dog is my co-pilot.
An important concept learned over time: It may take 10 hours of your time to get 80% through a project, and 100 more hours to get through the last 20% for that "stellar" finish.
At the speed with which software is written and distributed, rarely does anyone have the ability to do the final 20%. The question is, is that 80% enough to do the job without causing major issues? Or, can the last 20% be wrapped into another dev cycle later on down the road?
Obviously this doesn't work for systems which are depended on in life/death scenarios. But, I personally don't care if KDE (for instance) squashed 100% of their bugs before a release. Don't tie up a release for another year to finish off the last 10%!
Microsoft itself (BGates) has stated that new releases aren't there to fix bugs, but rather to provide new functionality. See, the problem is that while you're expending infinite hours troubleshooting that last 20%, the world is moving foward around you.
I worked on Apples during the Performa years and OS7.x years (shudder) and it was a freaking nightmare. I don't believe for a minute that if you peeked under Apple's code hood [today] things would be stellar and shiny.
Mac OSX has its problems - you'll just find a nice different set of issues that it has and Linux doesn't.
You have annoyances with Linux? It's uncomfortable to you that some things work right in Windows/MacOS and not in Linux?
OK. I won't give you the lame old answer "fix it yourself", because peerhaps you are not a programmer, or don;t have the time to fix Linux. How much did you pay for your Windows/MacOS software? $200 to $500 (not only the OS, the apps too)? Send your list of annoyances and probably I (and/or other competent programmers) can fix them for that amount, if you pay us.
Perhaps your annoyances are bigger problems, and $500 is too little money to fix them. But if you have 5 friends with the same problem, $2500 could be enough. Anyway, asking it's free.
[Actually, I don't think I'm competent enough to solve several of the annoyances posted in this thread. But you can very probably find somee programmer interested. More if he/she lives in the 3rd world, wheere your money probably is worth a lot more].
Subject says it all..
:)
That's what I hate.. I wonder how many with identical names have already been overwritten
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
However it now looks like this is being solved in a better way, by realizing that "middle mouse paste" is really drag and drop. For instance Mozilla middle-mouse goes to the url, which is what happens in DND systems if you drag some representation of a url and drop it on the window.
Everybody should stop thinking about this as cut/paste but instead as a better method of drag & drop. Why better? Because you can rearrange the windows before you drop, or open new ones, or do lots of other GUI things that are impossible while dragging something in Windows.
All modern programs support clipboard as well as selection, this uses the ctrl+xcv keys. This also makes more sense if you think of the middle mouse as drag&drop.
I agree with your statement that the last 20% of the work takes the longest. However linux is now at about 81% complete. A lot of work has been done to make it the last 20%. There is still a lot more to do. I give windows about 82%, but they have done work in different places than linux so you can't directly compare.
Lunix sucks -- just see what the lusers on ./ say.
Linuxconf had it's own problems. I was happy to see it dropped.
Breaking the install so that an upgrade hosed my Athlon box at home (motivating a quick run to Best Buy to get SuSE, and I've never looked back).
Tip: Select another kernel from the boot menu or insert the boot floppy you made before.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
And while we're at it... how about just copying any
text you can highlight, even if the webpage author has
done some crazy script to keep you from copying it.
I know, I know... dmca and all that jaz. blah.
My biggest problem is getting "Linux" software to run on Windows, and run correctly!!!
For starters "Linux" software is a stupid concept. Linux is a kernel... blah... blahh... blahh.. o O ( oh,.. yep right - you mean software that runs under Linux?)
Well fine, but sometimes you're working for a company and they want this functionality that's in a Linux program, say a network service of some kind. Someone has ported the Linux software to Windows, but never really got round to completing the project, in fact many of the features that just seem to work out of the box under Linux just seem to be broken under Windows. Damn! and the project always seems to be pretty much dead too, no further development going on.... usually seems like the Author gave up on windows altogether and turned to running the original software on it's native Linux platform.
So there, my greatest annoyance about linux software is it's lack of support for the Windows operating system.
I'm sure this will get rated as flamebait, but I am simply quoting a real world situation - we only have three boxes that can operate as server systems and two of those have to run Windows, the other acts as a firewall (and runs Linux) so I would rather not host services on the firewall box as it is exposed to the public world.
Ext3 is Ext2 with journaling; any Ext2-capable kernel can read an Ext3 file system and bisa-versa.
Using either a boot floppy or another kernel would have worked. The boot failure was annoying, but wasn't the end of the world.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Mostly I like linux but here's what I don't like.. some have been mentioned before, but if anyone is taking a tally, it won't be bad for me to mention them...
/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin/, /usr/sbin, etc inconsistiencies
-The whole
-A lot of X window managers were messy. None had a really good flow, although the latest window managers are much improved.
-Fonts, they're OK but they just aren't as good as windwos
-Office Suites.. I like KOffice, not a huge fan of OpenOffice.. but I still think MS Office is the best.. so thank goodness for wine.
-Boot time... surely it could be optimized somehow..? (Not too sure though)
None of those that I mention really bother me unless I give them thought.. but what REALLY BUGS ME IS...
WIRELESS SUPPORT... It's horrible! I've tried endlessly to get one of two of my wireless cards to work under RH 9 and I've had absolutely no luck whatsoever. Maybe it's just me.. I dunno.. My linux skill is somewhere between novice and intermediate, but I've a decent understanding of computers in general (and quite advanced skill in windows, but that doesnt count here), and I'd like to think I could've got something working by now with my wireless.. it's the only thing that I can't get to work.
I really want to be able to use Linux at school this upcoming semester on the wireless network there, and not windows.. but we'll see..
The path to dominating the desktop market does not go through requiring the end user to recompile the kernel!
Joe and Jane everyman have no skillz and simply will not do it. If they can't get their brand new xxx or yyy peripheral working within 1/2 an hour maximum, Linux will be dead in their eyes. You can also be sure they will tell their friends about it.
I am a seasoned programmer, and I just spent the entire day trying to get my @#$% USB video camera to actually show any pictures. Still doesn't work. damn...
f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.
I'm probably a bit late but here goes.
Kernel modules: Its stupid that something compiled for say 2.4.19-43 won't work with 2.4.19-44. I don't see why they can't be compatable aross the whole stable release eg, 2.6.x. I'm not just thinking of binary only drivers. It would make installing 3rd party and updated drivers much easier.
KDE/Gnome/X: Various core parts of these still crash semi-regularly.
But the biggest one has to be simply installing software: Its not the package formats that are the real problem, its the people who make packages that require "libsometing == 1.45-beta5" when "libsomething >= 1.0" would have worked.
There must be a reasonable common denominator amongst all recent distros. I've actually found commercial software to be the easiest to install because they have a moativation to do this.
As for all the different locations for configuration files etc. Just fscking pick one, flip a coin if you have to. I'm sure your way is a million times better but thats what you get with standards.
EXCELLENT post!!!!!
Hear hear!
In response to all the "but you just do this in this application...":
Not all applications do things the proper X11 way, so while X selection might work for one thing, it might not for another. It's no good crying "But the standard says..." because it's the end result that matters... If I select something in one window, paste it via middle button, then select something else using Edit->Copy, Edit->Paste in the other application pastes the OLD selection, not the one I just did. Sorry... that's broken, no matter whose fault it is.
Windoze and MacOS have it right, X11 has it wrong. Any time you select something, it should be copiable, and whether you use right-button, ctrl-C, or Edit->Copy... it should end up in the same buffer. Likewise, middle-button, ctrl-V, or Edit->Paste should always paste whatever went into that buffer last. If that breaks X11's network model, then that model needs to be extended.
I fought with this for years with all sorts of different window managers and finally just gave up. I use a windows workstation as a desktop, and open lots of ssh sessions and a couple cygwin shells. It works, and it works consistantly. If the Linux community can force that sort of consistancy and stop the X11 team and all the app developers from throwing the ball back and forth for another 10 years, maybe we'll get somewhere.
n/t
I'd flame you if you weren't so fucking correct
You shouldn't need to rename an extension to make tar or gzip work.
gunzip -c ungzipped_file
works OK, without extensions.
Also:
weird_command_spitting_out_tar_format | tar xf -
works fine for me too....
In fact:
gunzip -c funny_stuff.tgz | tar xvf -
Or even better
tar xvfz funny_stuff.tgz
Don't give up yet!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I'd download a new application, and either install the packages, or build it myself and install it. Except...it would give me an error that it needed lib-whatever-0.4.i386.tar.gz, which itself needs lib-devel-whatever-0.4.i386.tar.gz, and so on. Then, after installing all these, I find that somethings broke.
I'm also annoyed by the numlock behavior. I'll fix it every time, then when I upgrade or reinstall, I have to remember it all over again.
My biggest gripe is the linux directory structure. Going from windows(or even DOS) to linux is very frustrating when you have stuff scattered all over the place.
I like my directory structure to be more organized. The OS and it's stuff goes here, my installed programs go here, etc, etc.
The linux structure just seems too chaotic.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
tune2fs -c 0 /dev/hda1
Do that on all your filesystems and you're set!
With my ATI Radeon 9000, I get exactly the same performance playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory as I do on my Windows 98SE partition. These are damn good drivers IMO.
Well duh! It's not a problem with Linux. Win-modems are not modems. Period. They have minimal hardware function, and primarily driven by leaching on your cpu and other resources.
The real problem is that you bought a modem that was designed solely for Windows. Some companies have been good by releasing Linux drivers (eg: PCTel) and some people have reverse-enginneered drivers for other modems. However, if you have bought a hardware modem (an actual modem) in the first place, then you wouldn't have this trouble.
I have Mondo Rescue working on RH 7.3. After upgrading to RH 9.0, it would be nice if I could get Mondo Rescue working again before fall. When a program depends on a dozen other programs implemented by other groups of people, it's a little like building quicksand castles, isn't it?
I tend to hate the way that all your free linux games clubber me. Never made it past level 1 in TuxRacer, never beat the Reversi game either.
I'm not just talking about linux games. Freecraft and Freeciv beat the sh^t out of me all the time. Man!! Aren't I supposed to be enjoying building my civilizations? Hordes and hordes of things just come at me and kill me! He he.
Chromium is the only one where the Difficulty button seems to work when I insist to let me in as a newbie. How come noone has made the AI just a bit easier on us?
Well, I happen to prefer the X way of doing it to the Macintosh way (which is the same as the Windows way, but only because Windows blatantly stole it right down to the keybindings...).
But, I do agree that what you're describing can be annoying. Fortunately, there is a handy tool that makes life much better in that area. Go download and install a program called xcb (which stands for "X11 cut-buffers"). It's a very simple program. It gives you a temporary place to store some text you want to copy/paste in the rare case that you want to do something like you're suggesting. Basically, there are like 4 boxes, and you temporarily paste stuff into the boxes. You can then keep several items around, and if you want to select one to be the next-to-be-pasted text, you click on it with the left button. VERY easy, very quick to use, and unlike in the Macintosh model, you can actually see what you're going to paste (rather than having to remember when you last typed pretzel-C).
Use a paperclip :)
That is, if you don't get in the habit of first deleting anything already existing where you plan to paste, click in the dialog box, hit ^A^K, then paste with a middle mouse click. ^A is "position pointer at start of line", ^K is "kill like". Clears the buffer.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
And in the meantime, the documentation is scattered to the four corners of hell. Ask where anything is and it's either confused mumbling or getacluenewbie.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Some of bash's defaults piss me off.
.inputrc. It just grinds on through, usually garbling your key bindings as a result. It's depressing to have to login to another session to run kill to end your previous session because you're unable to type "exit[ENTER]" in that session. .bash_profile from a Cygwin / Windows box.
Examples that spring to mind:
1. By default, bash (or readline) often doesn't know that [Home] means ^a and [End] means ^e. Sometimes it doesn't get [Delete] right either.
2. readline is not tolerant or verbose about problems with
3. While it's true that a Unix text file should have "\n" line endings rather than "\r\n", we do, in fact, live in a world with The Internet and The Microsoft. Both of them use "\r\n" line endings. Some Linux progs silently support reading from "\r\n" files and that's great. bash doesn't though, so on several occasions I've had to deal with weird errors when copying
Yes, I know there's probably a better way out of these problems than simply bitching--but the question was what annoyed me the most, so there you go.
P.S.
In SuSe 7.2, the way to burn CDs involved setting up the CD-R drive as a pseudo-SCSI device using SCSI emulation. Is this ugly hack still necessary? or can Linux now handle IDE CD burners?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Good point. I just reinstall Linux from a distro that auto sets it up. Seriously, I find it's the easiest/fastest way.
Random is the New Order.
Trying to understand Linux as a "Windows substitute" is a doomed prospect.
Both Windows and Linux are OS's that will run on my computer. So are BSD, Solaris, etc.
One will always be a substitute for the another. Yes they are designed differently, but there are only so many things you are going be able to do with a given amount of computing power, regardless of operating system is running underneath.
I think that most people who go to the trouble of making a switch from Windows to Linux, are expecting to have to do things somewhat differently; it's just that they get annoyed when something that used to be a trivial task in Windows becomes a monumental task in Linux.
To me, most of these annoyances don't involve day-to-day use, but involve getting the box configured into a usable state in the first place. These annoyances are getting resolved one at a time in Linux. First it was installing Linux itself. That has been for the most part taken care of (with most distros). Next was installing software. Pretty much taken care of as well as long as the software has been packaged, and nothing is better than apt-get IMHO.
But there are still little lingering problems.
Like multimedia on the web, for example. Linux distros in general are ridiculously clunky a dealing with this. Either the file, stream, whatever requires a plug-in that isn't (easily) installed, a mime type that hasn't been configured yet, or a player that you don't have. Every one knows that mplayer is the one player capable of playing almost everything right now, including Windows Media streams, yet most distro makers out of pride, prejudice or whatever refuse to make it the default player for media files. I say the player that just works wins. If I want to use something else let me change the default. Mozilla plugger is a kluge that sort of fixes some of this stuff for the web, but it doesn't always work, and other browsers like Opera and Konqueror rely on Mozilla plugger instead of writing their own plug-in handler, so now you have a kluge for a kluge as a sort-of solution to the problem.
I know this stuff sounds superficial, but what do most people do when they first fire up a computer at home? They browse the web, just like they would if they were using Windows!
Thing is, I've used Linux since about 1994. I've watched it grow from an almost unusable state to something that is seriously challenging Windows for the hearts and minds of computer users. I think much of this is due to KDE, which emulates the best features of Windows, while adding quite a few innovations of it's own. (Sure wish there was fish:// in Explorer). But I still get very annoyed by the amount of time I have to spend configuring minor things just to get a Linux box usable everytime I set one up.
Mandrake has the supermount patch in by default, so you can press the eject button and it just comes out. Woohooo!
I am not sure why even a server would need 24/7 access to its CD-ROM drives. Generally any important files would be copied to the hdd first. In any case, a file server should be able to, and can, go down without waiting for all remote processes to close open files so assuming that no drives will be forcably umounted is never really 100% safe.
Did any of you ever tried to install Qmail? I know a bunch of experienced sysadmins who spent many hours with it and just concluded there should be something else easier to install that did what they wanted.
-- 404: sig not found
A) Linux is great.
B) But it doesn't do foo or bar, and I need foo and bar.
A) Well you should spend the next year of you life deciphering obscure code and learning C so you can fix it your self, pay $50,000 dollars to some other programmer, or shut the f*** up.
At which point B thinks "Oh, well then I'll pay just pay $5000 and use Windows/AIX/Whatever which has foobar."
True B has no right to complain to Linus Torvalds, but he does have a right to complain to Linux Advocates who insist that anyone who doesn't use Linux is an idiot.
I spent two hours reading and posting to Slashdot today, as a computer programmer I could have earned $70 dollars in that time and donated it to Debian. Given the average value of Slashdot posts I recon that my contribution was worth about 0.004 cents to the Linux community. Even at $5/hr I think that Linux Advocates would better serve the cause of "World Domination" by getting a job to donate the proceeds to Debian/FSF/whoever to fix common complaints than going to zdnet to flame Neanderthals who refuse to use Linux.
BTW. I have donated $800 to Debian so I am even kind of practicing what I preach.
What other documentation is there?
Personally, I can't comprehend this idea that 'Linux documentation sucks'.
I mean, sure, there aren't any 'Idiot's Guide to Linux' books that show you where to click and whatnot. But, it's not like it's that hard. Windows did just fine for, what, like almost a decade before *any* documentation existed beyond the Help File. I don't know about you, but I remember those sucking huge ass.
Are you, like, an administrator or just an end-user or do you want to learn how to program for Linux or what? Where exactly is Linux documentation lacking?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
# Choosing an immature unrealeased beta gcc version for a production release.
I'd like to make a commet o this, and I don't happen to have a link handy to back up my facts.
Redhat took code from the GCC cvs and merged it into an older GCC (2.95 I believe), and called it gcc 2.96. The gcc project immediately disowned it (or at least as soon as they found out about it), and Redhat took a lot of shit over it. I understand that Redhat apologized and promised not to do anything stupid again.
Not to defend Redhat, or anything, but they didn't actually put a beta gcc as their production compiler in a distribution. They put a completely broke gcc that was subsequently disowned by the project in a distribution, and pissed off a whole bunch of developers in the process.
Just to clarify. :)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Gnome.
You're right, newbies do tend to get treated somewhat harshly. But they need to ask a good question.
Help us build a better map!
Why the hell can't CUPS or Foo just install the fucking printer? Why the hell do I have to go through a dozen steps just to add the damned thing? Why have a "Search Local/Network" if it DOESN'T WORK? This is pretty much the same as alot of stuff for Linux IME. Eevrything is a battle. Install an app/game. It comes with a menu entry but because whatever distro has fucked with the directory placements, it doesn't get installed so you go hunting for the executable then launch a dozen apps just to add the menu entry.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
2. Rewrite the file I/O system so it's permitted to unmount a device in use, by unmounting the block device but holding the filesystem in stasis, so the list of open files and other state is not lost.
3. When any program tries to read/write an unmounted device:
With this behaviour, it is now no longer a problem if you eject the cd-rom (or unmount a disk) at any time, even if there are open file descriptors locked onto it.
Does my bum look big in this?
... no user will be pushing the damn CD button.
Ever.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Get you head out of your coding a@@ please....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You know when a topic is close to the bone on slashdot :)
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I have had terrible luck with linux on a laptop. Red Hat will not even attempt to install. Slackware 9.0 was decent, and SuSE 8.2 is the best so far.
Actually, I had heard that linuxconf had problems, but I never actually heard what problems lead to it being dropped? Was there some deep seated problem(s)? Why did they drop it?
Thanks, but that was not really the problem. My problem was that my XF86(which I installed myself on redhat 7 now use /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and not /etc/X11/XF86Config to configure the XServer.And XF86Config-4 did not have any modeline at all. So I pasted the modelines from XF86Config to XF86Config-4 and now it works. Wierd
OK, I've been doing this for years, and am a full time kernel hacker. So this is not "I'm a newbie", these are IMHO just *broken*. Some of these are Debian, since that's what I use. The other distros are IMHO more broken in some other way (depending on the distro).
/proc/pci to find out what I have.
... scary. Deal with it.
1. Debian is a pain in the ass to install. People, get it together - put a standard, official netboot ISO up for download for each version of Debian that actually works, and supports more than 2 network cards. And try to actually autodetect the net card so I don't have to grope around flicking to another window and cat'ing
2. Debian has far too many packages, and 10 solutions to everything. Have recommended packages for things like "audio mixer". Oooh, politics
3. X is still a pain in the ass to set up. I've been doing this since 1993, and it STILL takes me over an hour, and the loss of a bunch of hair every time.
4. All the window managers are either fat & bloated or flaky as hell. And normally both.
5. X permissions (xauth, etc) are just CRAP.
6. "scp file foo@bar" just does a normal cp,
without objecting to the fact that I ommited
a ":" at the end. Why the fuck would I use
scp to do a local file copy?
7. File compression is not transparent. I hate
doing "bzcat patch-file.bz2 | patch -p1". Would be much easier to do "patch -p1 patch-file.bz2". And don't whine about wrappers. The right place to fix this is probably the fs layer.
8. We need less "oh, but you can fix X by doing Y then Z, and standing on your head", and more "it just works. Out the box. without fiddling with shit".
9. Fonts. Enough said.
10. GNU's fucked up arrogant attitude to man pages. No, I don't want a fucking info page, at least for the basics. You shouldn't have made it such a bloated piece of featuritus'ed crap in the first place.
There are a lot of good reasons to put binaries in different places on mulituser (/usr/bin, /bin , /sbin) and networked (/usr/share , /usr/local) systems with specific large appications that justified buying the system in the first place (/opt). Linux tries to be like those, unstead of just throwing the binaries wherever the user wants to put them (MSDOS) or in one single directory (C:\Program Files\). /root is not under home so that you can always get to it when even when /home is on another machine down the corridoor that is not accessable right now.
I suppose I see this because I look after machines running linux, solaris and AIX - with csh, ksh and bash. If something is in sh it will just run. The expensive software that runs on these machines is cross platform - and is written to use sh and other things that it can expect to find in the same spot on all those platforms.
pinfo is usable and behaves like a web browser (specificly lynx) - hit an arrow key on a link in pinfo and you go there, no odd commmands you forget between uses.
One thing I dislike is project like grub - where they have a lot of text on thier web page saying how bad their competitor is and why the manual is in info format, but the links to documentation are all broken.
Okay, #linuxhelp does not ban people just for asking questions. You have to either be repeating a question over and over regardless of somebody attempting to help you.. like you ask a question, somebody asks you a question because you need more info to help and they just post the same question again 2 minutes later. If this keeps up for a half an hour you'll get banned. Sorry.
... this sometimes goes on for 15 minutes, the user gets flustered and just gets plain inflamatory and eventually booted. Sometimes after a half an hour of free help the opper will log off because they have something better do with their time and they get huffy with whoever picks up their "support contract".
People ignoring suggestions like they know better are banned. Sorry, we're here to help but if you don't take our help get the heck out of the way and make room for somebody that can.
People that are known problems get banned. When you're asking the same question for 5 days straight they get sick of it. You're hopeless at that point. Don't waste our time anymore.
Being impatient doesnt' help:
newbie: I need help getting my nVidia card to work.
op: Well, what have you tried doing so far to make it work?
newibe: I just want it to work damnit!
op: Well, did you download the drivers from nVidia's site?
newbie: How the hell was I supposed to know how to do that? Where are they?
op: I don't know, but Google could tell you. I don't use the card personally.
newbie: Well how the fuck do I find the drivers without X running?
It's hard to get baned from #linuxhelp, at least it was for the 3-4 yeras I frequented there in 1998-2001/2002. I still pop in occasinally as 'pi_rules'.
It's a good support chan. Questions like "How do I find out how much diskspace is free from the command line?" go over well. You get four-five friendly 'df' 'df -h' responses and things move on.
When you ask something like "How do I get two DSL connections connected to my machine to share the load on a web hosting comapny" we will assume you have basic networking knowledge and don't get huffy when we tell you that you're trying the impossible sometimes.
These people who, when you post your complaints, tell you how to fix your problem. For example, complaining about program installation brings out at least 3 know-it-alls who have the answer, all different, and suggest that you should find this and install it and everything will be happy.
The whole point of this is... these are annoyances. One shouldn't have to hunt down a solution to the built-in problems. The solution should be built-in. The problem shouldn't exist. This is my chief annoyance; that for every problem, there are a half-dozen solutions, which you have to track down on your own, which are not standard across distributions.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Why on earth should someone help you with a problem, if the answer is on google or in a man page? These things are easily searchable.
Google is good for searching for something one knows the name of, but "how do i $foo" where the nouns and verbs in $foo have several synonyms may rule out a page because the newbie doesn't know the one synonym that was used in the canonical HOWTO.
How would a newbie go from "how do I get this video card to work on $distro" to a Google query that returns a solution in the first 20 hits? Please document your thought process. And how would a newbie even know how to operate Lynx (often the only installed web browser that will run when X11 won't) in order to get to Google?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am not sure why even a server would need 24/7 access to its CD-ROM drives.
Perhaps not CD-ROM drives, but if it's a CD recorder in a backup server, on the other hand, I don't want to give any loser the ability to force the computer to make a coaster just by walking up and pushing eject. I also don't want any loser to step up, press eject, pocket the CD, take it home, load up what did get recorded properly, and read trade secrets.
Generally any important files would be copied to the hdd first.
In the old days, before multigigabyte hard drives became affordable, InfoTrac servers at public libraries had an array of CD-ROM drives.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Physical access implies authorization.
Try telling that to the administrator of the computer lab at your local public library.
Will I retire or break 10K?
if the person has phsyical access to the system, then they might as well be root.
I wouldn't always assume this. Is there a "second rule of security" that accounts for the restrictions placed on users of computers in Internet cafes?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If someone can physicly touch the system, isn't it safe to assume that the he/she is the system admin?
Not under the DMCA and foreign counterparts. Look at what happens to companies that sell devices that connect to the Xbox game console to open up administrative access.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I like to use Gnome and KDE because they are visually appealling, feel nice etc.
But my biggest gripe is the lack of good old text-bsed config files. I know those files are there somewhere, but it's almost impossible to work out how GUI-configured options map to those files. I would like to see a separate file for each cluster of prefences, e.g. keyboard shortcut file, virtual desktop file, etc.
The problem is everytime I upgrade OS, I have to set things up again, e.g. set up my virtual desktop dimensions. And it often works in a slightly different way for each new version. The config files, even if I could find them, will probably change format too.
So keep the GUI tools for changing preferences. But back them by a meaningful collection of config files.
The situation right now is no better than Windows, ie. you're forced to waste copious effort for every upgrade because there's no way to save your preferences.
Besides how do you easilly find the volume name of a media with an unknown filesystem?
man 1 file
The 'auto' file system in Linux /etc/fstab does something similar.
So it goes like this: Detect that a disk has been inserted (most drive types provide a sense bit that can be polled twice a second), discover the type of file system, read the volume label (in some systems, it's the name of the root directory), and then create a symlink. Then, when the user holds down the eject button for more than half a second, sync and unmount the file system and kick out the disk. Notice that the last step won't work for disks that use completely mechanical ejects (e.g. 3.5" floppy), so I'd suggest syncing a second after a write and then unmounting based on polled drive door signals.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The absolute worst thing about Linux, beyond a doubt, is sound. It doesn't freakin' work. What is it, three different APIs? And none of them work properly on any of the half dozen machines I've tried installing Linux on. Finding out why is hellish too--you have your kernel drivers, then ALSA and OSS add a layer of complexity, then libao adds another layer of crap to deal with, then KDE adds its own set of daemons... If you've got a generic SoundBlaster card everything might work without screwing around; anything else, good luck. The best bet seems to be to go with the latest bleeding-edge kernel and ALSA releases, cross your fingers, and wave a dead chicken over the speakers. OK, I have sound now, at least on my own machine, even if /dev/sndstat doesn't exist the way the FAQs assure me it
should. Hopefully some time soon they'll fix that buzzing problem...
The second worst thing about Linux is missing documentation, like all the FSF software that has either no manual page at all, or no useful manual page. Often there's just a note challenging you to try and find the information in their crappy info hypertext system. I don't care if RMS likes emacs, the standard for accessing UNIX documentation is man. It doesn't help that all the info browsers I've tried are godawful. The Debian guys have the right idea here--missing man pages are a software defect, and defective software should not be included in the distribution.
The third worst thing about Linux is KDE vs Gnome. I side with KDE on everything--Gnome was a butt-headed political decision, and should have been abandoned once Qt was made available under the (L)GPL. But no, the obstinate FSF egos had to waste their time implementing an overcomplicated CORBA architecture to provide functionality hardly anyone needed for a desktop system nobody wanted.
The fourth worst thing is the plague of window managers. Every time I look, there's another forking window manager. (Looking at one list I found via Google, it seems there are over 90 of the things.) It wouldn't be so bad, except that almost all of them suck by default. "Yeah," say the handful of people using each one, "but you can configure it to be really good." Yes, but I can configure almost any wm to be really good, given enough time to spend in pointless dicking around. In fact, you can pretty much configure any of these window managers to look like any of the others. What is it about Linux programmers that everyone wants to write a window manager, and nobody seems to be able to get around to writing an MP3 player that's even as good as iTunes?
The fifth thing, suggested by the window manager plague, is that Linux suffers a lot from needless configurability and rampant optionitis. The original UNIX idea (circa v7) was that you wrote a program to do one task, do it properly, and do it well. If you wanted your directory listing sorted into reverse order, you piped it through sort; if you wanted it in columns, you piped it through column.
Take a look at the man page for GNU cat. I particularly like that they've added options -A, -e and -t just to save you from having to type two options, and given you an option -u that doesn't do anything. That's almost as good as the -d option to diff.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
NTFS Write capability, and better interaction with NTFS in general. I only use OBSD and RH9 but I know NTFS isnt a Default partition type.
1.create new distribution
..., gimp - NORMAL interface) /something/paint for easy paint editing.
-find people that want what you want to,kde - copy paste, packaging...
-outline all you want in it (kde - copy paste
-packaging. - if you can download setup.exe in windows, run it and start
program without downloading 10 more files, linux can do it to.
I do not mind if file is bigger for few mb. I might not have modem, or
modem working in Linux so forger apt, urpmi , up2date...
-put apllication files in one dir, if possible. (gobolinux )
-find one application for each job. xmms = music, mplayer =video,
gimp = advanced paint processing,
Define what needs to be done in each sofware. Accept programs, that are
closest to what you would like. Ask the programers/contributors/developers
of the software if they are willing to add features your group of users
would like. if not, change program. If all else fails, write the changes
yourself.
As a group send mail to hardware vendors asking for support. If vendors
do not want to add support, point that out on your website.
One more thing. Programs should work for you, not you for them.
If there is obvious way for something to work make it, so it works
out of the box. If all else fails, write it in short consize way
with the examples in readme file in quick start. Do not put your whole
life history, what you were doing when you got the idea to write the software
and such atleast in the first part of readme.
Don't say: it's free. If it is not working / w. correctly it does not
matter. People will buy something else that does the job.
People use cli because the CAN NOT set xfree refresh from gui.
If Windows can do it, so can Linux. You ARE comparing with windows and macos
on Desktop market
http://vuks.host.sk/linux/
IBM distributes copies of the Linux kernel and much of the GNU user environment under the GNU General Public License. Per the conditions of the GNU GPL, IBM grants a fully-paid-up license covering any patents that read on the software to all recipients of the software. (A patent "reads on" a device if all the elements of at least one of the patent's claims are present in the device.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
In English, that would be `The Linux DNS client is called the resolver. This is its configuration file'
That's right kids, all of your machines should be running local DNS servers. Ever get the feeling that this documentation is unmaintained? (and yeah, I'm doing something about it, but that's irrelevant to the fact its currently annoying).
Oh, and slave name servers saving zone files to tell expiry times in millions of seconds, when `1D' would suffice.
People who haven't used Windows recently but feel free to demonstrate their lack of knowledge AGRESSIVELY IN ALL CAPS.
Windows has been multiuser for ages. It also does local mutiuser a lot easier than linux does (yes, even more intuitive as `ctrl alt f1, login, password, start --
Linux has the LSB. But not all Unix OSs do. Many of the apps you've mentioned installed across a variety of different Unix OSs, and hence when building from unpackaged source (which should never be done, but anyway) might suggest a different location.
/etc/init.d, documentation in /usr/share/doc) and lack of comprehensiveness of those standards (eg, there's no standard for removable media, because Rusty Russel removed the agreed location from the FHS before publication on a personal whim).
There's two main issue: lack of standards support (initscripts should always go in
Yeah,
I tried copy-and-pasting a table from Mozilla into OOCalc, and it just worked.
Thanks for the data point. Now please try copying and pasting a bitmap image from one app to another, preferably between two apps using different toolkits (e.g. a GTK+ app and a Qt app), and tell us whether it worked.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If i want to change only 1 value, i can find that faster in a form than i can open a terminal window, than an editor, the file, search the correct line and than save it.
What's faster of the following?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Having supermount installed doesn't mean you have to enable it. In a server all sorts of crud included in the main kernel source such as sound drivers, fb, video acceleration are kind of pointless. My vote would be to merge supermount into the main source tree. You could always compile it out or just not use it. Still, I am quite happy patching the kernel myself, or using Mandrake's prepatched binary.
Configuring X is the worst thing with Linux PERIOD.
Closely followed by reconfiguring it.
If you change monitors on Windows, it detects the change and takes care of the horizontal/vertical refresh frequencies. Change monitors on RH Linux 9.0 and the graphical logon messes up. You can only get past it with a boot disk or an intuitive key combination like 'ctrl + alt + F1'. And guess what? The graphical setup program takes it's settings from the same - incorrect - config file. So you have to use a text editor to change the configuration file.
Hardly new user friedly, hmm?
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I can't speak for Red Hat (don't work for them), though at the time Linuxconf had many odd problems over a couple years. I'd be stunned if these nagging persistant issues weren't the reason for Red Hat looking for a substitution. That was a couple years ago (???).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Does a simple calculator require training to use effectively? Likewise a user will expect the same from a PC.
There's a lot of difference between a machine with possibly 256 bytes of memory and one with 256 megabytes. One will be more complicated than the other, just as a tractor-trailer is more complicated than a tricycle.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, just like I do when I bring my car in to the service centre. Just like I do when I call in a plumber. Just like I do when I call in a roofer. They just can't believe I would use those features and not be able to take care of them myself. In another decade or so I'll be able to do it all on my own. Then I won't need anyone else. Which will be good because I'll be so stinkin' busy how would I have the time?
... WELL YOU SHOULDN'T BE HERE THEN, SHOULD YOU !!!"
"Hi there. Welcome to Open Source. If you need help
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Put a CD with a bit of fscked sectors, and turn your Linux box in a complete unusable state.
People ignore Ninnle Linux because they believe it doesn't exist. To prove otherwise, please provide the URI of a publicly accesible web site where I can download Ninnle ISOs or purchase Ninnle CDs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can double click an exe, get an install shield wizard, and have something that lets me run an app within a couple of minutes. I can remove it through an unintstaller, as well. Most of the time, make uninstall doesn't exist as a target in the packages I deal with.
Plus, how exactly am I supposed to educate people on using Linux as a desktop if they can't just get a nice install wizard every time they want a new app? The plethora of package manager formats is one problem, the lack of help from them is another.
You can critize the obvious flaws in install shield applications all you want, but they have more pros than the Linux equivalent currently does. If you want to help Linux on the desktop, you will understand what pros the Linux equivalent lacks, and address this.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Windows installers can quite happily break your system too."
Yes, but at least I can install an application quickly. All I have to do is download a file, double click it, follow a couple of instructions, and delete the installer. With Linux, you have to find the apropriate package. Then you have to either use the installer tool, and hope it isn't broken (I've never had good luck with RPM), or uncompress the tarball. If you've uncompressed the tarball, you'll have to manually put the files into place. You'll also have to manually check dependencies.
Do you want to remove Mozilla later on Linux? Better to wipe / and reinstall your distro. Windows at least has a control panel applet for removing applications quickly and easily.
What Linux needs is a standard across all distributions for self-extracting tarballs that will do dependency checking (and include the versions of shared libraries they depend on, just in case), and which will add an uninstall script to a central removal database.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Just turn off javascript in your browser. Or Save the page as.... text only.
I'm a relative newbie but when I start an application, either from a desktop icon or from alt-f2 (in KDE on Slack 9) and the app fails to start there is no feedback.
After a couple of attempts I have to open a (k|c)onsole and open the binary there to get the feedback. Like last night doing an install and needed to put a couple of soft links in to actually start the app.
My ha'penneth
pbhj
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I care that it's doable, period. There is a certain maximum level of effort that should be required to use a computer at a certain level. Installing applications should not require the level of user involvement it does now. The tools should be well developed enough that it Just Works (TM).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You must be real slow at typing (first post)! :)
Anyway, what are newbie's doing with distros that want them to configure X? Why don't they start with distro's that already come with autodetection features - Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, even Knoppix. Why not?
yeah.. hmmm.. ok.. 2000th post!! :-)
- The people I've talked to who've tried and failed obviously must have answered something wrong when configuring x, had a new graphic card or something similar. Basically they get everything installed and x fails. After this they have all given up since reconfiguring is beyond their knowledge. If configuring X or reconfiguring X was easy, I'm convinced that a lot more people would use Linux. Instead, they get the impression that Linux is simply beyond their grasp since everything must be as hard as configuring X (ie editing obscure config files etc.)
Some of the people I've been talking to are Solaris admins - but they seem to hit that XFree86 wall anyway. This is not good. I handed one of them a copy of Knoppix today.. will see what happens..
...nothing to be embarassed about. Not everyone in the company is required to attend the Intermediate Windows Basics class (last time I checked, ours was 4 hours minus the coffee break - attended mostly by secretaries, assistants, clerks, you get the idea).
...and granted that any sysadmin, developer, or dataminer type can do the same thing near instantaneously at the shell prompt.
...or Slashdot.
The Windows XP Find/Search process is indeed cumbersome.
But not every user has had the chance to undergo the degree of training or the time to attain the knowledge and experience of the fortunate few who have even heard of Unix/Linux.
I got three letters for you: S .... C ... O Now who can beat that?
.... M .... S
I can! I can!
R
You say, "I hate to say it, but you're problem is...". Expand, and that becomes "I hate to say it, but you are problem is...".
Doesn't that look silly?