Worst Linux Annoyances? 1918
Posted
by
michael
from the don't-be-shy dept.
from the don't-be-shy dept.
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!"
Re:Unmounting devices (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Unmounting devices (Score:4, Informative)
"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:Crashing (Score:2, Informative)
If ps segfaults be careful and check your box, that may be a sign of having been cracked.
XFree86 (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:DVD Player (Score:4, Informative)
ogle [freshmeat.net], xine [xinehq.de], and mplayer [mplayerhq.hu].
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Informative)
What are thinking? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Informative)
Finkployd
Re:Hunting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hunting (Score:3, Informative)
Once more people start using Zero Install [sourceforge.net] these kinds of problems should go away.
There are also systems like Debian's APT, but they have some serious shortcomings [sourceforge.net] for ordinary users.
Music Studio (Score:2, Informative)
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!
Re:DVD Player (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Worst Linux annoyance- (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.justlinux.com/
http://www.pclinuxon
You may not get the answer you were looking for, but I've never seen anyone post a RTFM at one of these sites.
Enjoy,
Redefine The Fine Manual (Score:2, Informative)
If you managed to solve one of these annoyances, you might post the solution on this RTFM site [dyndns.info].
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Informative)
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.
umount -l /cdrom (Score:3, Informative)
my biggest annoyance is linux's abismal printer support/configuration. i still can't use my work's HP Color Laserjet 4550N.
Re:The main difference between Linux and Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Distros just don't do proper integration testing (Score:5, Informative)
- 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 particularRe:RTFM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language (Score:3, Informative)
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:RTFM (Score:2, Informative)
"RPM Hell" (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Hunting (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RTFM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The main difference between Linux and Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Next is Linux. I use it on an HP laptop, and a "generic" desktop machine. No problems with any of the hardware, everything just works.
Windows 2000 Professional was the MOST problematic. First, I had to get drivers for the NVidia card. The "latest and greatest" drivers caused the machine to not boot up (and, yes, I had the version that corresponded to the chip on the card). I then had to backtrack to a driver from last year; the older driver did work. The sound on the motherbaord was AC97 compatible, but Windows didn't recognize it. Downloaded specific chipset driver, and that didn't work either. Had to take the case off the computer, and check the motherboard manufacturer, and download drivers from their website. These drivers worked.
Yes, if the computer is pre-installed with Windows, you are in luck. But if you EVER upgrade Windows, or have to re-install from scratch -- good luck.
The biggest annoyances *I* have with Linux is:
1 - missing certain Sys/V features (message queues). Makes portable code between Solaris and Linux a pain.
2 - Redhat 8 and 9 don't allow (easy) configuration of the "Start" menu.
3 - OpenOffice under Redhat 9 allows installation of fonts, but there is not system-wide font installer.
4 - 802.11a support. I have the Intel 802.11a and need to use a binary broadcom driver for Linux. It works, but I can't seem to get more than 6mbits with it.
There are more; but these are the ones that I have come across in that last few days. Item (1) is the only pure Linux issue -- the others are comments about a specific distribution (so don't tell me to use another distribution; I have other reasons to standardize on Redhat). If they bug me enough, I may actually fix (2) and (3) myself.
As to the "driver" issue, only (4) stands out. And I can only pray that will be resolved quickly (either with new hardware, or a better driver). But I blame broadcom/intel for this, not Linux.
PS. As to the vaunted "Windows support" -- try using stuff like a DLink DMP-90 under Windows. I dare you. When closed source software and hardware becomes "uninteresting" and is abandoned, you get stuck. With using much older systems. Netgear 900Mhz wireless Aviator would be another example. If the drivers for these items were open-source, then you could use these devices under Linux or another F/OSS system. As it is, these items become junk when/if you upgrade your computer.
Level your driver complaint at the manufacturers, not at Linux.
Ratboy.
When using Unix commands... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Amiga Disks (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you're just uninformed. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:RTFM (Score:5, Informative)
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:Parent point valid despite foul language (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Kernel Startup Messages (Score:1, Informative)
(To be a little more mean: there seems to be either excess hubris or insecurity on the part of some of the programmers. Yes, we appreciate your hard work, but do we need to be reminded each time we boot?)
Appologies if this has already been addressed in the latest kernel.
Re:Wine (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language (Score:3, Informative)
Now, in regards to how the Amiga handled it versus the "Windows Way[tm]" is that, as another poster pointed out, you could put the floppy in any drive and reference it by a name, not a drive letter. So a program would look for lemmings2: and you could put it in any drive and find it. This is something you *still* can't do today with Windows (or Linux for that matter). My daughters Sims can't function if I don't put it in the optical drive it was installed from.
Re:Hunting (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Smooth r to s transition (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Re:Fonts and xfs. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Debian stable (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Here are a few... (Score:3, Informative)
The structure of the Unix filesystem is aimed at professional computing centres, not home use.
The reason for the separation of */bin and */sbin is simply the distiction between user commands and system administrator commands.
The distiction between (/bin,
If you put everything in
If you put everything in
Now, both
Sometimes the size of third-party software justifies an entire directory tree of its own right. These massive packages are usually installed under
You see: to every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong
That said, it is very delicate to decide which program goes where. Take for example GNOME and KDE. Basically all distros include them, in this sense they're not third party software - so some distro makers put them in
It's really not that easy.
You should ask yourself this question, though: why do you bother? Why do you even care? Although I'm about to celebrate my tenth year of Unix, I still have to which(1) many executables because I don't bother to remember actually where that particular binary resides. The PATH handles this just fine, and the package managers take care of the package integrity.
Same reason here:
The SH/BASH scripting language. (!!!!)
Though they all are more or less inconsistent compared to a properly designed language liek eg. Python, the Bourne shell family is a very powerful tool (don't get me started on (t)csh...).
Configuration files based on archaic paradigms like the SH/BASH scripting language.
The shell languages are more or less historically (hysterically) grown and offer quite some quirks, but the paradigm, procedural programming, is sound.
This is, of course, no excuse for ad-hoc or "defining-by-writing-a-parser" configuration languages - these are a royal PITA indeed!
The worst Linux annoyance? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy... (Score:2, Informative)
GNU is not an OS. Linux is an OS. I can remove GNU from my system and still use Linux.
Next.
Re:In no particular order (Score:2, Informative)
Note that I am not your average user, as I do do things like compile my own (leaner,meaner)kernel, and so on. I just think that until I can have my grandparents sit down and just use it(reguardless of what platform they are used to), there is room for improvement. For this, KDE is best overall, but things like OpenOffice look different(especially if you use the Mac-style menu bars).