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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
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.
S .... C ... O
Now who can beat that?
Ñ'
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had." -Linus Trovals Speaks for itself
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
I don't know if you're a troll or not, and I don't care, since it's on a higher good:
If ps segfaults be careful and check your box, that may be a sign of having been cracked.
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.
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
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
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?
Why is this insightful?
I firmly believe that the very reason open source software (including Linux) is popular on any scale is because of the choice involved.
If I have a task to perform, and there is just ONE solution, I'm stuck with it's quirks and annoyances (present in all software). I would much rather have many solutions, where I can learn of the pros and cons of each one and then choose a solution that works for that situation.
There are precious few software titles I have found that have problems with only SOME distributions (except Oracle, but they're trying). I think problems like this are problems with closed source software in general, and if this hinders growth in the mainstream, so be it.
do you perhaps mean Mandrake 9.1?
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!
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
It annoys me that Linux is inexpensive, because I don't get the satisfaction of bragging to my neighbors about how much I paid for it.
send a $699 check to SCO and come back here to brag about it
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.
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
It annoys me that I don't have to reboot frequently, so I never know how fresh the bytes of code are in memory.
linux 2.6 pre1
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.
pay for it (also answers #1) and call redhat's tech support instead.
It annoys me that I don't have a mascot like Clippy the paperclip in the vi text editor.
vigor. www.userfriendly.org for back reference on it. then apt-get install vigor if you have debian.
What ? Me, worry ?
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 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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 particularThe 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.
Some people expect the world, and when people point out how unreasonable that is, decide to shoot the messenger rather than deal with the problem. Nobody has any sympathy for them.
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
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
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?
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$)
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!
Where's the command line?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
This is by no means foolproof, and I'll bet some Linux geek will slam me for not doing it right or doing it the hard way. See, the Linux geeks out there won't give you a freakin' step by step. They give you RTFM. It's their revenge for having been picked on in grade school.
--
I'm not in a creative tagline mood at the moment.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
Font problems have been solved. You don't have to fight with it anymore. Just get any one of the new distros. If all else fails, read my tiny fonts howto on aerospacesoftware.com.
From this slashdot thread, it is clear that most people who are complaining about stuff are still running old distros, and all they need to do to get to GNU/Linux Nirvana is to upgrade.
Oh well, what the hell...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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..
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.
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.
Look into Gentoo
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 don't need to replace the text in the address line... Just middle click anywhere where there isn't a link -Mary
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?
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.
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.
./configure --help to provide a list of options, could store your selections so they appear on the next compile the way they were on the previous compile (make adding a feature to a complex compile easy), and all in all make sysadmins and end-users alike much happier with installing from source. It is my idea (as disclosed on slashdot) and so if I don't get to it first, I hope someone else does a good job. Just don't patent it ;-)
That is a fair complaint. I have had an idea for a while now that it would be really cool to have a really nice GUI-based source-code installer. This installer could parse the
Anyway, I think this is a tool we need.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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