Worst Linux Annoyances? 1918
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!"
RTFM (Score:3, Funny)
Re:RTFM (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RTFM (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
False user experience level dichotomy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:False user experience level dichotomy (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:RTFM (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want easy and automatic, you shouldn't be using commandline apps in the first place. Go use GUI desktop apps.
Breaking scripts is no small thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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:avoid the command-line? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:RTFM (Score:3, Interesting)
the highlight then copy, and the ctrl-c and ctrl-v can get really confusing at times...sometimes I will go to paste something and what I paste is something I pasted an hour before. I will just use the other method of pasting (middle click) and that usually works but having a decent system that works across all programs would be better. I know it's not a linux but a GNU-X11 thing but still...makes a guy wish he could afford a powerbook *sigh*
--Bry
Re:RTFM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RTFM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RTFM (Score:5, Interesting)
*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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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, Funny)
"I need help..."
"RTFM you goddamn newbie or go get WinXP."
You have been kicked by Dudrio (Wanker)
Cannot rejoin channel (Address is banned.)
kernal modules (Score:3, Redundant)
Most Common Linux Annoyance (Score:4, Funny)
Most Common Windows Annoyance (Score:5, Funny)
Easy... (Score:5, Funny)
Easy - you guys.
Re:Easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod parent insightful. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, im gonna duck now and try to keep myself from catching fire.
Biggest Pet-Peeve? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I hear "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" one more time, I am gonna snap.
Hunting (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, 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.
Re:Straw men (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, try this. Log in as 'guest' and run ROX-Filer. Since R
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.
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:Distros just don't do proper integration testin (Score:3, Funny)
(yes, yes, I know
Really, I
Re:Hunting (Score:3, Insightful)
1). Any dependencies should #$#%-well be handled by the installing app. with decent explanation of requirements (warnings) in the install manual (A man can dream...)
2.) When you must descend into Dependency Hell: Look in the parent post. 5 Linux OS's, 5 tools. (There are probably more.) Having a choice is a good t
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Would more static linking help? (Score:3, Insightful)
Could it be that we've gone too far the other way? Is it possible to statically link in obscure or highly version dependent
Re:Hunting (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Insightful)
What you should compare is up2date(rh),urpmi(mdk),apt-get(debian),portage(ge
Unmounting devices (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Unmounting devices (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Unmounting devices (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent point valid despite foul language (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Flamebait)
enviroment should be ditched , right? Get a clue. Not opening a CD drawer may annoy some desktop
user but it could SERIOUSLY impact a business if it happened in a server enviroment. ANd frankly I couldn't give a damn if it makes it
as a desktop OS. If I wanted some all single & dancing user friendly piece of fluff I'd used MacOS.
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (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 t
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, Insightful)
Behavior like this should be unacceptable.
Missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Worst Linux annoyance EVER (Score:5, Funny)
S .... C ... O
Now who can beat that?
Here's one. (Score:3)
Worst Linux Annoyances? (Score:5, Insightful)
Different can be better, but yes, there may be a learning curve... and that can be annoying for some.
The main difference between Linux and Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The main difference between Linux and Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My biggest annoyance... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cripes...
Trying to get a Nvidia dual port card to work (Score:3, Interesting)
Hardware support (Score:3, Flamebait)
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.
Re:Hardware support (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
from a user's perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
Worst annoyances (Score:5, Insightful)
dated?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:dated?? (Score:3, Funny)
2. Annoyances are fixed.
3. No Profit.
Worst Linux annoyance- (Score:5, Interesting)
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- (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, those two guys are nice. =)
Re:Worst Linux annoyance- (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [catb.org].
Re:Worst Linux annoyance- (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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,
Re:Worst Linux annoyance- (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, you have to tell new Linux users that Linux is different than windows. I know from my experience, that I had only been using windows as an OS for about 5 years when I started to learn Liniux. The person that was teaching me stuff just told me, "Linux is different than windows, you can do a lot of stuff in graphical mode, but if you want to do anything powe
The different distros are the biggest... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many Scripting Languages (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
That's Easy. (Score:3, Funny)
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
CUPS (Score:5, Interesting)
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
The fact that all these other idiots use Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Differences vs. annoyances (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
Incorrect/buggy termcaps (Score:3, Insightful)
World Domination Will Come When Copy & Paste W (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Send a fix along with your complaint (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Opportunity? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
My annoyances (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lack of manufacturer support! (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Love linux, but 4 things I don't like (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The worst Linux annoyance? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DVD Player (Score:4, Informative)
ogle [freshmeat.net], xine [xinehq.de], and mplayer [mplayerhq.hu].
Re:DVD Player (Score:4, Informative)
Re:DVD Player (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The non-obvious way in which you have to enable DMA mode for good performance, typically off in most distros, how you switch it on varies between them.
2) The fact that mplayer and Xine have UIs from hell. I use mplayer, but I had to figure out "mplayer -dvd 1" by trial and error, basically. The 1 is for chapter, I think. Not to mention the way you specify crop rectangles manually.
Fortunately the UI situation will be hopefully fixed by Totem, a really delightful video player. At th
Re:Annoyances (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:The worst annoyance... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.