Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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
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.
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
Cripes...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
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.
DVD support is the only reason I keep a Windows partition.
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
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
Why can't rpm figure out the next arg is a file (not a package with an illegal package name ending in .rpm) and assume the -p flag?
Why can't cdrecord by default create a sane ISO if the request specifies a directory or file which doesn't look like an ISO?
etc.
Sure, let someone override this behaviour if they give the special flag after RTFM, I propose --literal. I am tempted to implement this using a bunch of perl wrappers.
Isn't something from the OS itself, but the "1337" attitude from the users. "Use a different distro!", "RTFM!", "l4m3r!"
I don't know where you've been looking, but I never see any of that. Not even here. And really, if you are told to RTFM, perhaps you really should have. Very few people want to provide a free helpdesk for people who can't be bothered reading the manual. Most people consider themselves to be worth more than a bit of paper.
How about, instead of asking "how to", you read the manual, and if that confuses you, ask about the bit that confuses you. If you don't know where the documentation is, ask for that. Ask questions the smart way.
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 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.
perl wrappers? Great, just what the newbies need, ANOTHER fucking dependency.
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:
I'm with the original poster on this one....
How many times do you HAVE to read a manual to get a Windows installation to run?
If Linux really wants to make headway into the desktop/home PC market it needs to get to a point where you dont need to read manuals to install your software/hardware.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
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
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.
The problem is, you have to tell new Linux users that Linux is different than windows. I know from my experience, that I had only been using windows as an OS for about 5 years when I started to learn Liniux. The person that was teaching me stuff just told me, "Linux is different than windows, you can do a lot of stuff in graphical mode, but if you want to do anything powerful, you have to do it through the command line. It may be hard at first, but you'll soon find that unlike windows, your conrol over the OS is only limited by your knowledge, rather than being limited by what the OS will let you do." After he said that, I had no problem trying to use the command line.
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.
I mean, really what is computing about? (Not just GNU/Linux) it's a means to an end, NOT the end itself. Computers are really interesting, and that's how I earn my daily bread. I even like them just because they are, not necessarily because of the benefits that they bring to people. Still, I have to acknowledge that the majority of computer users only bother with them because they allow the user to do specific things, like balance their checkbook, order books online, or curse clippy with all the vitriol in their hearts.
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.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Cut and paste never works they way you want.
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.
You've got to be kidding. It happens all the time here. If someone asks a question about moving from Win to Linux, he will get flamed with comments like "if you don't know what distro to get [or whatever simple question was asked], Linux is not for you."
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
OK, try this. Log in as 'guest' and run ROX-Filer. Since ROX-Filer isn't in the main repositary, you'll need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to include a new server (which you might not trust).
But now, when you install ROX-Filer, you're running some of that code as root (not as guest),
possibly risking your whole system.
In Zero Install, you'd just log in as guest and run the filer. Nothing would run as root, and you could test it in safety. Thus, I think both claims are valid.
There's more stuff about this in the security model document, which I forgot to link to before.
Thanks for the comments,
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.
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.
Because they're traditional commandline apps. They're not supposed to do too many things automatically. Doing so can break scripting behavior.
If you want easy and automatic, you shouldn't be using commandline apps in the first place. Go use GUI desktop apps.
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
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?
Wow! You completely made the parent's parent's post's point. What you're basically saying is:
...
RTFM. If you don't like it go use windows.
Now why isn't linux catching on again?
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
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!
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.
That could never, ever be a reality in anything other than propriatary hardware+software configurations. So kiss any hopes of having that under Windows or Linux goodbye.
The only reason that's possible is because Apple knows that "this slot will have an airport card in it if it's occupied. If it's not occupied, just ignore it."
Unless you want your motherboard to have 5000 different slots for every single PCI card made, and then have a bootup program run through each one, detecting which are empty and which are used, and then installing the software for the used ones (a process which would take up yards of physical space and loads of processing time), you're going to have to deal with installing drivers and kernel modules.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
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
If I had to point out one reason why "linux isn't catching on" it would have to be a reason whom is related to the area where Linux is particulary weak, the desktop area.
In my humble opinion the temporarily failure or maybe just a delay of Linux on the desktop area has to do with bad documentation. For end users that are new to Linux, but willing to learn, bad or weak documentation can be real turndown.
Actually I think the bad documentation is related to the hacker culture and the "do it on your own" attitud. This also influences the developers whom often take easily on the commenting and documentation of their code. All this is a vicious circle that can lead to a not very newbie- friendly environment.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
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.
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?
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"
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
That's against the point of such command-line programs.
Many UNIX command-line tools are meant to do one job, and do it well. There's no reason for tar to know about compression formats -- what about UU-encoded stuff? Should tar have to know about ARJ, LHA, ZIP, gzip, various encoding formats (BASE64, etc.), and other issues?
This isn't an RTFM thing -- you don't really want to be using tar or rpm or cdrecord in the first place, because these are programs which are meant to do things very literally, without room for misinterpretation.
Strict behavior is better than undefined behavior.
The ideal solution is NOT for GNU to add all sorts of heuristics into tar to figure out what you want it to do -- that addresses the wrong problem. The ideal solution is to have front-end programs which invoke tar, gunzip, rpm, cdrecord, and such. Perhaps a "suggest" script could invoke "file" to determine what the file contains, and suggest things to do with the file based upon its contents.
Simplicity is key to having bug-free programs. Let front-ends handle dealing with people who don't want to learn how to get a specific program to do a specific task for which it was designed.
Besides, what is the best default action for tar? To uncompress an archive? To list the contents? To add files to it? What if the user specifies two tar files on the command line? Does tar add the second to the first? The first to the second? Does it list them both? Does it create a third with the merged contents of the two on standard output?
It sounds to me like tar should have command-line options to let the user tell it EXACTLY what to do, so the user isn't surprised by something unexpected happening.
Oh, wait, it already does.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
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.
From scp(1):
-P port
Specifies the port to connect to on the remote host. Note that
this option is written with a capital 'P', because -p is already
reserved for preserving the times and modes of the file in
rcp(1).
I left my
Senerio:
It's often easier to just go away and brew and drink a pot of coffee.
-Rusty
You never know...
No, I don't think that bad documentation is caused by the "do it yourself" attitude. Bad documentation is caused by the fact that good documentation is so damn hard to write and so damn hard to maintain.
Go ahead, go write some documentation, publish it on your web site, and help reverse the trend. Every bit helps. But again, it's not that easy and it takes more work than people realize.
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.
Ya, there's no shame or anything in using graphical apps in Linux (OH NOES IM NOT LEE7 ANyMORE!).
The way I see it, those basic commands like tar, cdrecord, and oggenc provide raw and broad functionality. Taking that functionality and making it normally usable are programs/scripts like Ark, xcdroast, and dekagen. When these two things come together, you have something easily usable and intuitive, which is the goal for a desktop operating system.
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 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.
I see it happen every day under windows xp...time for you to move on i think....
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.
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..
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.
You only call that sane behavior because that's the behavior you're used to.
Unix commandline apps assume that you know what you're doing, and do *exactly* what you tell them to do. This behavior is very useful in scripts or graphical frontends, because you know exactly what they will do. And this is the correct behavior because these apps are meant to target users who know exactly what they're doing.
The less technical people should use graphical desktop apps. They make sure (more or less) that the user won't make big mistakes, like Windows. Those users wouldn't use commandline apps in the first place. So why modify commandline apps to target them if they won't use the apps anyway? It's not worth losing the scripting flexibility.
Don't use rm, hit the Delete key in Konqueror or Nautilus. Don't use tar, use File Roller or KArchive. They're easier to use *and* won't let you make stupid mistakes.
"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."
Then you must be running some weird or outdated distro. 90% of all source code here compiles and installs out-of-the-box.
True, but if documentation were part of the design process, it would get done more often.
You don't need to replace the text in the address line... Just middle click anywhere where there isn't a link -Mary
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
No, it's NOT. And it's especially not when the thing you want needs to be simple, easy to set up and you don't want to spend many hours having to learn all sorts of things you really aren't interested in just to get that thing to work.
One of the things that annoys me is when people accuse those who don't want to have to learn all the ins and outs of a Linux system of being lazy. I'm not lazy - I just don't have a great deal of time and have far more interesting things that I'd like to be doing with it.