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!"

Comments

RTFM

[slyxter]

My biggest annoyance is the fat guy in a penguin shirt yelling RTFM lamer.

Re:RTFM

[deanpole]

Why can't tar figure out if the archive is compressed and with which method without me giving the -z or -j option?

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.

Re:RTFM

[_KiTA_]

Ah, I see you've met the people in #Linux on EFNet. :)

"I need help..."
"RTFM you goddamn newbie or go get WinXP."
You have been kicked by Dudrio (Wanker)
Cannot rejoin channel (Address is banned.)

Re:RTFM

[lkaos]

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.

I hate to say it, but you're problem is that you RTFM but not all the way.

rpm doesn't require a -p option. If you're installing, just use:

rpm -i packname.rpm

If you're uninstalling use:

rpm -e packname.rpm

Hell, in Nautilus (the program meant for folks that won't RTFM), you can just double-click on the darn things.

Try burn:/// in Nautilus and that should take care of your cd-burner whining.

file-roller will take care of your tar problems too plus give you a nice little GUI.

These all come by default with RH9.

Re:RTFM

[andrewl6097]

I think that he was referring to rpm -q. You need rpm -qp to query a package file, but only rpm -q to query an installed package.

Also, for those of us to shun nautilus and heavy GUIs in general, his suggestions to tar make sense. Are those who don't use KDE-GNOME not entitled to be annoyed by some of the GNU tools?

Re:RTFM

[FooBarWidget]

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.

Re:RTFM

[TheMatt]

You could use zsh. This is one of the reasons I love it, it's great completion system. You can do: rpm -Uvh [TAB] and only .rpm will complete tar xjf [TAB] and only .tar.bz2 or .tbz2 are completed.

Re:RTFM

[Alan]

Why is the port syntax in ssh "-p NN" and in scp "-P NN"? I'd be less pissed off if the two programs weren't a) based on each other and b) from the same tarball.

*sigh*

In addition to this the host of lameness in GNOME, for example, the lack of ability to paste text after you've closed the application it's been copied from. They are talking about taking over the desktop and this doesn't work yet? WTF!!!

Other things in my list (mostly gnome):
- no easy menu editing (ie: drag to where you want it)
- nautilus views are neat but you loose the functionality to be able to select of rename files in say, the audio (media) view
- mime type editing sucks. make it easier

Re:RTFM

[eln]

Middle-click paste has been a standard part of X11 for ages, and it's awesome. It drives me crazy to have to hit other buttons or right click and scroll down to copy and paste crap in Windows. This is a major reason I find doing anything productive on Windows such a huge pain in the ass.

Re:RTFM

[The Old Burke]

Now why isn't linux catching on again? ...

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.

Re:RTFM

[FooBarWidget]

"RTFM. If you don't like it go use windows."

No! I told him to use graphical desktop apps. Nowhere did I even mentioned Windows.

Graphical archiving apps like File Roller and KArchive detect the file format automatically. Those are the apps you should be using, not commandline apps.

Re:RTFM

[hankaholic]

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.

Re:RTFM

[abradsn]

True, but if documentation were part of the design process, it would get done more often.

kernal modules

[akaina]

loading kernel modules

Most Common Linux Annoyance

[Joe Jordan]

"Where's the Start button????"

Easy...

[ryanvm]

What have been your biggest annoyances when using Linux?

Easy - you guys.

Re:Easy...

[Uruk]

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.

Hunting

[PktLoss]

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.

Re:Hunting

[badasscat]

Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms. Download the Synaptic graphical interface for it once you've got it all set up and configured properly. That should be the last annoying install of almost any package I could imagine you running. These two applications together have solved the dependency/installation issue for me completely, and it was my biggest Linux annoyance too.

Re:Hunting

[finkployd]

Rpm with apt is just as good as deb with apt. Everyone seems to be very confused about this issue, and tries to compare apt against rpm as if that somehow makes any sense. It doesn't. Apt works with both rpm and deb, and works very well with them. If you are using redhat and like it there is no reason to switch to something else just to get a dependancy checking package manager, just hit freshrpms.net and get apt.

Finkployd

Re:Hunting

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Red Hat: up2date

Mandrake: urpmi

Debian: apt-get

Gentoo: emerge

SuSE: yast2


Man, the tools are there, learn how to use them. Dependency Hell is a thing (almost...) of the past.

Re:Hunting

[KeyserDK]

Don't compare DEB's with RPM. They are just a fileformat. Compare the tools....

What you should compare is up2date(rh),urpmi(mdk),apt-get(debian),portage(gen too) and red-carpet(ximian).

Re:Hunting

[IamTheRealMike]

I read all the responses to this post, and they are all basically "Use distro/OS Foo, and all your problems will go away" or alternatively "This is what apt is for"

I find it rather funny that so many people recommended apt when the author made it clear that they were already using it.

My personal view on this is that the model in which software developers only make available a source tarball and leave packaging to others is inherantly flawed. Packaging and making your software easy to install is as much a part of writing quality software as producing documentation and testing is. It makes just as little sense to leave packaging to third parties as leaving documentation to third parties does, or leaving development of the website to third parties.

The main problem that causes dependency hell is pretty clearly that the programs that resolve dependencies cannot always locate a suitable package to meet the dependency, or alternative suitable packages do exist but metadata mismatches prevent the connection from being made.

One of the reasons for that is that there is no way for developers to produce packages that can install on many forms of Linux. While the source code as a lowest common denominator is required for platforms that are not binary compatible like Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris, generally Linux distributions are binary compatible so there is no need for nonsense like a separate package for every version of every distro.

I also believe it's not feasible for a single (or even a group) of 3rd party repositories to package every piece of software somebody might ever want. Even in extremely large repositories like Debians, the software you want is sometimes missing, sometimes out of date. The effort required to maintain it all is enormous.

Eventually a decentralised model will fall into place, of this I am sure. Thomas Leonard already pointed out the excellent work him and his team are doing with Zero Install, and of course I pimp my project in my sig.

But basically, what both these projects have implicitly agreed upon is that the current model is fundamentally broken - it will take time to shift the inertia of the status quo unfortunately.

Re:Hunting

[Adrius]

Rpm with apt is just as good as deb with apt.

BZZT. Wrong. Debian packages have recommends, suggests, and a whole host of things that RPMs don't, which makes dependency resolution easier.

Not to mention the strict policy debian has wrt to packaging... which is probably the biggest reason debs are easier to manage than rpms.

Re:Hunting

[IamTheRealMike]

Windows and MacOS do have these problems, just not to the same extent. Typically there is not a culture of code sharing on these platforms. That makes code reuse more unusual than on Linux.

Generally apps only use what the OS provides them, then rely on installers to fill in the missing pieces if for instance you need a component that didn't ship with Windows 98 - unfortunately that has traditionally led to DLL hell.

Unmounting devices

[Wumpus]

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.

Re:Unmounting devices

[AntiFreeze]

you don't know about lsof, do you?

"lsof /mountpoint/" will show you exactly what file descriptors are open, and allow you to easily terminate them by PID. lsof has a plethora of options, check out the man page, I'm sure you'll find it remarkably helpful.

Re:Unmounting devices

[nutshell42]

two things:

1. Oh *that's* intuitive - I know it took quite some time till I found lsof

2. what if you don't want to kill that app? Often you're already browsing a completely different directory or -in case of Konqueror instead of Nautilus- you have a number of additional tabs open.

Re:Unmounting devices

[Waffle Iron]

WRONG! Whenever I have to use lsof to find a goddamned open file handle on the CD-ROM, my blood boils.

When I hit that eject button, I want the goddamned CD out of my sytem, Now! No exceptions. I don't care if I get an I/O error. Just give me the damned disk.

How in the hell is any normal user supposed to know about lsof anyway? All he knows is that the CD drive is broken.

Re: Unmounting devices

[Black Parrot]

> Oh *that's* intuitive - I know it took quite some time till I found lsof

The error is in thinking that a computer should be intuitive. Computers are equivalent to Turing machines, modulo the bounded memory; they can go far, far beyond our intuitions. The only way to make them intuitive is to dumb them down, i.e. limit what they can do. So be prepared to choose between having your computer dumbed down to a consumer appliance or else having to learn a lot in order to master it.

> what if you don't want to kill that app? Often you're already browsing a completely different directory or -in case of Konqueror instead of Nautilus- you have a number of additional tabs open.

Yeah, that would be annoying. Next time it happens, write the app developer and aks him/her to fix it so that it doesn't hold stuff open that it isn't actually using, and explain the problem it causes for you. In my experience Linux app developers are very approachable, and though they may be very opinionated about how their application should behave they tend to be receptive about pragmatic suggestions regarding unintended effects.

Re:Unmounting devices

[Suidae]

users shouldn't be required to learn any command to eject a CD

This is a good point. If I press the eject button while in [common windowing environment] and the CD cannot be ejected because some file is in use, I really ought to get a popup window and warning ding explaining that an application is currently using a file on the CD, a list of what files are in use by what applications, and an option to kill thoses apps, with a warning that that can cause data loss, and etc. and that I should try closing the applications first. Or the apps using the files should pop up and ask if you want to stop doing whatever it was that had the files open.

Worst Linux annoyance EVER

[levik]

I got three letters for you:

S .... C ... O

Now who can beat that?

Worst Linux Annoyances?

[grennis]

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 annoyance...

[cnelzie]

...is that someone will take my annoyances and write a book about those annoyances and then make a hella amount of money from it... leaving me holding my annoyances, until someone fixes it, since I can't code myself out of, let alone into a box...

Cripes...

Hardware support

[Surak]

Still not going away after 10+ years. :)

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. :) Scanner? Web cam? These things generally aren't all that easy to install.

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. :)

Re:Hardware support

[nordicfrost]

This is not a troll.

Just a funny note: I installed an Airport wireless LAN card in an iBook last weekend. It didn't really strike me then, but I realize that something wass odd about the installation.

When I threw away the old cardbord box today I looked through it to see if there was anything to kepp. I then realized that there was no manual on how to install it and no drivers disc (there might have been an upgrade disc accompanying the box but it was never used).

It can actually be made this simple. Open box. Turn off computer. Open keyboard. Read sticker with instructions. Follow instructions. Close keyboard. Turn on computer. It works.

This is so wastly different from my windows - Linux reality that is my daily life.

Worst annoyances

[Enry]

Anyhting having to do with USB or Firewire support

dated??

[sirius_bbr]

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?

Worst Linux annoyance-

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

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)

Re:Worst Linux annoyance-

[endeitzslash]

You won't find that with BeOS users.

Yeah, those two guys are nice. =)

Re:Worst Linux annoyance-

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worst Linux annoyance-

[angle_slam]

I don't know where you've been looking, but I never see any of that. Not even here.

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."

The different distros are the biggest...

[Lumpy]

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!

fonts

[gazuga]

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.

The main difference between Linux and Windows

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:The main difference between Linux and Windows

[IamTheRealMike]

Until Linux has the ease of use with devices that both windows and macs enjoy, drivers will be my largest annoyance.

I'd quibble with the idea that macs enjoy good hardware support. They generally don't, but because nobody tries installing MacOS on 5 year old machines they found in the closet "just to try it out" it doesn't have to jump through the hoops that Linux is expected to.

XFree86

[THEbwana]

Configuring X is the worst thing with Linux PERIOD.
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 .. first post? /m

Re:DVD Player

[kasperd]

DVD support is the only reason I keep a Windows partition.

ogle, xine, and mplayer.

CUPS

[The G]

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

Re:DVD Player

[penguinboy]

Xine is great. Lets you skip sections (FBI warning at the beginning, etc.) that set-top and Windows often won't.

Missing the point...

[Akardam]

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.

The fact that all these other idiots use Windows

[re-geeked]

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!

Lack of finish

[Kingpin]

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.

In no particular order

[sjbe]

• Inconsistent location of files. /usr , /usr/local , /bin , /sbin, and the like are not intuitive and not consistently used either. I shudder at the thought of trying to explain this structure to my wife or mother.
  
• Dependency hell. This can and should be resolved automatically without needing user intervention.
  
• Too much dependance on editing configuration files by hand. While this can and should always be an option, I've had to do it too many times where it was obvious that the feature should have been accessible through a gui. (most recently, getting samba to boot up automatically instead of being started by hand. Not hard but I can't believe I'm the only one who ever wanted to do that.)
  
• Ugly fonts. Particularly bad in Mozilla. This has been getting better, but there still are issues to be resolved.
  
• Documentation. Usually you can find out how to do something but you had better be technically adept. Previous exposure to unix systems helps a lot. Documentation under linux usually sucks big time.
  
• Lack of formal driver support from hardware vendors. Most hardware these days seems to work, but far too often is unsupported by the vendors and as such doesn't always work as intended. (there are notable exceptions) I understand why they don't support it, but that doesn't mean they couldn't. This is much better than it was a few years back but it still lags windows significantly.
  
• Awkward and inconsistant user interfaces. Virtually all linux applications are guilty of this at some level. Everything from abiword to KDE/GNOME to the GIMP to xv has it's weird interface issues. (I love GIMP but it's interface is bizarre) This has been steadily improving but there is a long way to go still.

Re:Annoyances

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

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.

Differences vs. annoyances

[Frater 219]

I'd like to suggest that any form of It doesn't work like Windows! is a poor example of a "Linux annoyance". Problems of this form do not represent anything wrong with Linux (and often not anything wrong with Windows, either), but rather usually differences in design between the two systems.

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:

• Differences in regular expression syntax. Regular expressions are common enough, but the various programs which make use of them accept different syntax. Contrast vi's regular expressions with grep's, and those with Perl's. They are all different; can you remember which one has which features? Thankfully, most newer software that uses regular expressions (like Postfix's mail filtering) uses the Perl-compatible PCRE library, which makes life much easier.
• Lack of consistent readline support. I use a lot of command-line interactive programs -- programs that aren't just run from the shell, but have their own command prompt and language. Sometimes for licensing reasons, and sometimes because the creator did not think of it, many of these programs don't use readline. This makes command entry unnecessarily bothersome. There is the rlwrap program which makes a good attempt at adding readline support, but it's still irritating to have to remember which programs need it and which don't -- especially when working on someone else's system.
• Inconsistent scroll wheel support. Hey, Windows users -- this is a Linux GUI annoyance! :) Most current X11 applications that I use understand the scroll wheel and support it. Some don't. That irks.

Parent point valid despite foul language

[lordcorusa]

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.

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[Viol8]

And what happens if the person who is opening the CD drawer really has no right to and then completely
screws up whatever some other user(s) are doing. Remember Linux/unix is a MULTIUSER system , its not single user like Windows. Ejecting the
CD is not necessarily the brightest thing to do in all circumstances and shory of endowing the machine with AI how is it supposed to know
which action is appropriate?

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[kasperd]

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.

I don't completely agree, but something similar to what you describe would be a nice feature. (As long as we don't force it upon anybody, choice is the answer). I don't like the Windows way of handling removable media. I don't like the Linux way of handling removable media. I don't like the Machintosh way of handling removable media. I don't like the IRIX way of handling removable media. And I don't like the SunOS way of handling removable media. AmigaOS got it almost right at first attempt. Now if somebody will please tell me how to detect the eject button in software, I will try to make an AmigaOS-like implementation for Linux. I also need to know how to detect that a disc was inserted.

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[KodaK]

It's really more complicated than this, but in simple terms:

The OS constantly monitored the drives (I never had a CD-ROM for my Amiga, so this example is of the floppy) for media. When the system detected that a disk had been inserted, it would automaticaly mount the floppy. When you hit the eject button, the Floppy would automaticaly unmount. A side effect of this was that the floppy drives were always making a soft "click" sound every few seconds. You got used to it.

That's pretty much all there is to it.

Also, I haven't had a real Amiga in a long time, so take this with a grain of salt.

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[jonabbey]

Amiga could do this for floppies. The IBM PC floppy drives were never really capable of reacting when you inserted a floppy.. you had to actually run a program to go and look to see if a floppy was inserted.

On the Amiga, individal floppies were named, and whenever any program wanted something off of a specific floppy, you could put the floppy in any drive attached to the system, and the OS would notice it, read it's label, and any programs wantingg to read that disk could then proceed without further user intervention.

Made floppies a lot more manageable, back in the Amiga 1000 days when hard drives for the Amiga were rare indeed.

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[paranoidd]

You can give a look at the automount kernel feature. Basically it keeps listening to a special directory (say, /Mount/CD-ROM), and when it's accessed, any media is tryied to be mounted. When the user ejects the media or leaves the media's directory, it just unmount it and that's fine (given that there isn't any application executing something on the mounted media).

I didn't read the code yet, but this is the basic idea behind it. I think it makes use of a few userspace daemons to aid on directory detection ().

There's a good sample on how to do something similar (in userland) at linux/Documentation/dnotify.txt.

Re:Parent point valid despite foul language

[HomerNet]

What do you think would happen if the CD being ejected was RW and some process was writing to it at the time?

This and all arguements like it are clever little distractions, but one should remember that Linux has a nice little feature that Windows or even MacOS does not, total and complete customability. So some code is added that allows you autounmount and eject a CD from a drive just by pushing the drive button. 24 hours later, someone else adds code that makes it a script option in the automount/unmount program so you have to "manually" unmount it in a server environment. 2 weeks later, this is incorperated by yet another programmer into a nice GUI interface for one of the Window Managers, and within a month it's incorperated into all the WMs. By the end of the year, all *nix variants have it, and by second quarter of next year, there's access security built in.
Write the damned code and the users AND programmers will come!

umount -l /cdrom

[engine matrix]

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.

World Domination Will Come When Copy & Paste W

[MichaelCrawford]

Here is my #1 annoyance with Linux. It's the main thing that keeps me using Windows or Mac OS X to do a lot of my day-to-day stuff like email or web browsing.

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.

Here are a few...

[Asprin]

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...)

... in fact, I find the whole /usr heirarchy annoying. Why was that necessary? Weren't the six other folders for binaries enough?

Don't even bring up /opt!

...or /usr/share!

"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.

/root is not under /home.

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.

Send a fix along with your complaint

[ishmalius]

People so often forget the best way to get their problem addressed in the Open Source environment. Along with your problem report, send in a suggested fix. Not just "here's what I want," but "here's how to do it." A person will get so much more respect if he exhibits a little altruism. Maybe he should even send some candidate code to acomplish the feat.

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.

Re:Send a fix along with your complaint

[Speare]

My biggest annoyance with Linux is this attitude that

• all Linux users can code,
• all Linux users want to code,
• all Linux users know every api to code,
• all Linux users want to join every devel mail list,
• all Linux users know every application's architecture,
• all Linux users have infinite time to solve obvious problems.

I am a software developer by trade. I know a fair amount of user interaction design principles. That doesn't mean I have the lifestyle that affords me ninety hours a week to add nothing but polish the nits out of the hundred different Linux applications I use every week.

I submit suggestions when I can. I even submit code when the problem is isolated in such a way, and the existing codebase is conducive to productive spelunking. Most software annoyances I have are conceptually easy to explain but require in-depth knowledge of the codebase before I could hope re-architect or retrofit a solution.

This isn't about selfishness or altruism, it's about specialization: people can (and do) have legitimate issues without having the capability to fix it, even in so-called Open Source projects.

Distros just don't do proper integration testing

[HidingMyName]

I've got a lab, and we rolled out redhat due to popularity and have stuck with it since 1998. Since then, Redhat has been suprisingly sloppy in their distributions, and I'm just about ready to drop them for another distro (maybe SuSE). Among my beefs (these occurred in different versions) are:

• 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 particular

• My X server leaks memory (allegedly due to Anti Aliasing of fonts), so I have to close my X windows and restart it every few weeks.
• SuSE doesn't properly listen for the hostname my ISP assigns so ssh can't set the display variable correctly when remoting in.
• Many of the installed games don't start up when I select them from the menu.
• The drivers for the video card sometimes hang when my daugther plays tux racer.

My annoyances

[CoolVibe]

GNU libc is a godawful bloated mess. Why most Linux vendor ever stepped away from libc5 is beyond me. When I write code that's totally posixly correct which compiles perfectly and warningless on most other platforms, I have to use GNU libc specific defines to make glibc conform. (_POSIX_SOURCE, _GNU_SOURCE and _BSD_SOURCE spring to mind). Having code break on me in Linux while it works fine on almost everywhere else is pretty annoying.

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.

Re:Distros just don't do proper integration testin

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

I honestly don't know how to reply to this other than to say:

(yes, yes, I know /. 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...).
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... :-) ), but I end up with a machine that is top notch. Hell it's even "designed" for *MY* machine.

[/RANT Src="Soap_Box"]

Mod parent insightful.

[iLEZ]

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.

Most Common Windows Annoyance

[C_nemo]

Where's the command line?

Love linux, but 4 things I don't like

[Phoenix666]

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.

Breaking scripts is no small thing.

[aussersterne]

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.

Re:Breaking scripts is no small thing.

[Matrix272]

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.

This is definitely going to draw a lot of fire from the *nix people here, but I can't hold back. Fixing things that break over time is called PROGRESS. Keeping everything old-school just for the sake of saving time (and admittedly money) by avoiding the task of re-writing scripts isn't going to further the goal of the Linux community.

Now, I will admit that a lot of things shouldn't be changed. I personally don't see any problem at all with the operational use of the command "ls" or "cd". However, do a man on any choice of commands, and you'll see all kinds of "obsolete" and "outdated" remarks about options that no longer work, or have been replaced. At what point in the future can we FINALLY get rid of all those things that were obsoleted 8 years ago? What if they finally did remove that option and break some of your precious scripts?

Say it's a very simple change... like changing "ls -l" to "ls -z" (for example). A very simple sed command can change all the ls -l's to ls -z's. Voila, all your scripts work again.

I haven't even gotten into the fact that every now and then it's healthy to go back through all the scripts you've written to find errors, omissions, etc. I wrote a bunch of scripts about 6 months ago, and just went back through them this week to make sure everything was running as well as it could be. Re-writing scripts is one step of optimizing your system. If you never revisit the work you did 10 years ago, you never know if it could be simplified. What would your response to Microsoft be if they announced they were going to keep DOS commands around for all future versions of Windows, just to make sure that everybody's batch files worked properly? There'd be a massive Microsoft bashing session on /., I can guarantee you that...

Actually, you're just uninformed.

[Ayanami Rei]

WinZIP is an application suite that handles many compression formats.

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 .gz files, imagine that. WinZIP is BIG.

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.

False user experience level dichotomy

[jensend]

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?

Re:False user experience level dichotomy

[benjamindees]

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?

Let me make sure I understand your complaint: Gnome is too easy/featureless. Most CLI commands are too hard/feature-filled.

You want to make the easy things harder and the hard things easier.

You basically want Linux to target the "Middle 50%" of users that Microsoft writes their software for.

This will make Linux better?

Re:False user experience level dichotomy

[8string]

You basically want Linux to target the "Middle 50%" of users that Microsoft writes their software for.

This will make Linux better?

It's funny how slashdotters always want linux to replace windows, but shun targeting the same user level which MS has successfully exploited. Umm, if we want to take over their market share and thereby users, don't we have to target them? I sometimes think that slashdotters think that the rest of the worlds users should learn to program and understand their computers like a geek. Most people don't have the time, patience, or inclination to delve into it so deeply.

Re:False user experience level dichotomy

[seraph93]

I think that the previous poster just wants more configuration options to be available via GUI. It might threaten the exhalted status of all the CLI Ninja out there, but it probably won't, and other than that I don't see what would be so bad about it. All the more advanced options for whatever could be hidden behind a tab or button marked "Advanced" or whatever, to keep Grandma from getting too confused.

You talk about targeting the "Middle 50%" like it's going to just ruin Linux entirely for the "Ninja 10%" or whoever. But it hasn't ruined anything. Certain distros are already well on the way to that Mid-50, with lots of GUI and ease-of-use and what-have-you, but you don't have to use them. Gnome might be dumbed down, Red Hat might install with a single mouse click, but my Slackware box is still as obtuse and difficult as ever.

I know that if I could install a printer just by clicking on something instead of digging through man pages and HOWTOs and screwing around in vi for hours, I'd get miserable. Linux is the greatest text adventure game ever written, and letting some GUI play for you just isn't any fun. But I also understand that most people don't feel the same way. They just want their computers to work. Why do so many people think the needs of the Mid-50 and the needs of the Ninja are mutually exclusive? I thought Linux was all about choice and customizability, why should this issue be any different?

Man files without examples

[Le Marteau]

Hate it when I man a command, comes back with 86 cajillion options, but few, if any, examples of usage.

Exactly

[Epistax]

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.

Some small things might go a long way

[pair-a-noyd]

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..

The worst Linux annoyance?

[DerekLyons]

The numerous folks who insist that Linux is the cure-all and be-all for all computer woes.

Re:avoid the command-line?

[FooBarWidget]

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.

Re:Please don't break the scripts!

[pyite]

The GUI is a layer of abstraction that DOES NOT require changing of a perfectly working CLI in order to advance it [the GUI]. If you want a GUI, make a GUI, but don't screw with my commands. Make new commands. If someone is in a position where they need an "easier" to use CLI, then they probably don't know any of the existing CLI anyway, so inventing new CLI utilities is not a problem. Embrace and extend, don't cower and remove.