What do you hate the most about GNU/Linux software?

They announced Wayland for the next release as far as I know. Same with Fedora (again, AFAIK). And all the major GUI frameworks are moving to Wayland too, so they may be able to remove the X compatibility layer sooner than expected.

 

But Windows does provide native controls if somebody wants to use them, that's my point. There's no such thing on Linux.

 

It all comes down to the fact that Linux and Unix-like operating systems force you to become more knowledgeable about your computer and as many people aren't interested about that, they criticize it. The biggest annoyance I see with many official distros/systems is that they're very bloated and their packages are full of dependencies. You know what? It doesn't have to be like that and you have total freedom on your system! If you want the package manager to fuck off, you can ignore it. An example is Slackware which keeps track of no dependencies (you have to keep track of them yourself but on the other hand due to this packages have very few dependencies compared to, say, Debian).

It is pretty easy for someone who knows how to do it to run a Linux 2.4 system in 4 megabytes of RAM on your run-of-the-mill 386sx from 20 years ago. And it even runs well.

Consistency? *nix was never really about that. Think of it as a powerful operating system where you can do everything you want, including breaking a supposed consistency. That's freedom. /bin/ls is just a normal program. Try replacing it on Windows. Try running it over the network. You won't be able to do that on Windows easily, on Linux and *BSD it's a piece of cake.
It is a "research" operating system where new innovative ideas are tried out where experimentation is king. If you something consistent try Haiku, AROS, QNX or something else but not Linux or *BSD... I, for one, love the way Linux and the *BSD are.
I don't need any distribution because I can roll over my own thing. I can run them on a DECStation, on a netbook, on a SGI octane
and on any PC clone and it feels the same way, and I can run (95%, except for ones that have endianness or alignment problems) the same programs.

To new users this is what I say: Don't fight it. At the end you will love and you will never look back. Total freedom and the ability to tweak anything. It is made for people who like to play with their computers. These are the same type of people who don't go "bawww it doesn't work please help me!" when an error happens, the same ones who can disassembly their computer and upgrade/fix/etc. it. Your abilities will save you a lot of time/money/whatever and could even be useful to you even if you are not interested about computers... Windows is an *inferior* operating system and everyone knows that, Microsoft included. Look at their eMIPS project where they ported NetBSD as their operating system on their own Giano simulator... well if you want more proof than that before Windows the big business offer from Microsoft was their Xenix, an *nix-like operating system. And even after it, IBM's OS/2 blew Windows out of the water. Hell, AmigaOS which ran on Supermarket grade machines was way better than Windows at the time...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/emips/

This is Microsoft Research, which is the best of Microsoft.

 

My main beef about Linux these days is that it's gotten fucking slow. The whole thing that attracted me to Linux when I was a teen was that it was better than Windows in pretty much every way. Now, when I compare the latest distros to Windows 7, it's a pretty sad comparison, for desktop use. Ubuntu is significantly slower than Windows 7 on both my systems, and on my 64 bit gateway it often completely locked up for minutes at a time. I'm sure it had something to do with drivers, but that's an excuse. I used to run Linux 2.4 based distros on an AMD K62 with VESA graphics, accelerated, and it was still faster than modern Linux. I'd click an application short cut and it would launch almost immediately, and yet now on NEWER HARDWARE, modern distros usually take at least 8 seconds to launch even the simplest of apps.

At this point I think that Linux on the server is just dandy, but Linux on the desktop is a lost cause and is only getting worse. If there is ever going to be a successful open source OS on the desktop, it's going to be something like Haiku or AROS.

 

All the problems of free software, Linux in particular, come from the "freedom of choice". You'll hear "freetard" saying this over and over as if it is a good thing. As much as it sounds nice and good, it is a bad thing. About 99% (which, as it shows, is also number of people who don't use Linux) people who use computers, wants the things to just work. They don't want to make a choice, they want the developers to make it for them. This "freedom" of choice, keeps the community divided and they keep fighting among themselves at the cost of adopters of free software. It keeps the development efforts divided as well which results in over 9000 barely working applications and libraries (8999 of which are incompatible, uninteroperable forks of the original first one) with almost no documentation. It hurts application developers as, in case of Linux, there 820732544192 distributions which makes developing and deploying for such a system a living hell. Every single to the problem regarding Linux can be traced to this.

With that rant out of the way, lets take a look at GWells' utterly wrong, flawed and plainly false assertion of whatever he is trying to say.

Wrong and wrong. Linux based OS forces you to become more knowledgeable about Linux only, with each version/release, so that you can learn (read: waste your time) to tweak it to print your name at the start or change some other setting that won't be of any real use to 99% users, will probably change with each release, and will later be deprecated. Generalizing that to "Unix-like operating systems" is retarded. OSX is a "Unix-like operating systems" and doesn't force you to know shit about computers.

You just proved my "that won't be of any real use to 99% users" point above :P . Besides, what are you trying to say here? That Linux is lightweight? I could say the same for Windows 95/98 (and it probably supports more hardware of that age than Linux too).

Wrong again. Unix IS ALL ABOUT CONSISTENCY. Down to the programming level consistency. They designed even the APIs in such a manner that everything is done in a consistent manner ("everything is a file"). The userland programs are all designed in a consistent manner (--help for help, -r for recursive operations). And if you still aren't satisfied with those reasons, there are STANDARDS that make sure that there is consistency among various Unix. There is just inconsistency when it comes to the layers on top on standard Unix. This is where everything is fucked, or as you call it, "freedom".

Uh...what? /bin/ls doesn't exist on Windows, so how can it be replaced? It can be installed on it and it'd work just as fine. Also, listing directories over network is "piece of cake" on Windows too. Nobody does that because excellent GUI exists that basically removes its need. Again, you prove my ""that won't be of any real use to 99% users" point. Also, ls' equivalent on Windows is dir which is a shell builtin. Try replacing your shell (bash, sh, ksh or whatever) builtins "easily". So yeah, WRONG.

What you say holds true for Linux but PLEASE for God's sake don't insult BSD like that. Whatever goes into ANY BSD goes after a rigorous testing to ensure stability, quality and correctness in EVERY way and level. Just look at their code. There is no experimentation going on in the BSD world. The APIs and ABIs have been stable for ages. Their solution to different problems (like audio, driver APIs, hardware even notification etc..) have worked for centuries. Meanwhile, HAL was deprecated in Linux and........*pause*.....someone made a new sound server/API for Linux just now. They have nailed the package management system where the system and userland is separate and you can update them separately to get new stuff. You can have latest stable kernel but keep you current (configured and known working) userland intact. Meanwhile, the best of Linux world, only has half assed packaging systems where you are stuck with either bugfixes updates or ancient "stable" shit and have to update every [insert release cycle of your favourite distro]. The only packaging system that even comes close to what BSDs have is Gentoo's portage and that is based upon the BSDs package system. Linux people just copy ideas from other places, implement in a horrible hackish and broken manner and slap their own name on it. So WRONG again and again.

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That's because it's much quicker to port NetBSD than Windows so you know something can be done ON TIME (like a research) than wasting time "replacing /bin/ls on SGI octane running Linux 2.4 with 4M RAM". At stock, Windows offers A LOT more stuff than NetBSD does. So porting is a lot more harder. Also, MS wanted to release the research into public as well, so they chose something with which they could easily.

Which they quickly abandoned for NT. A wise decision.

OS/2 was made by MS. They abandoned it for NT. A wise decision.

Seriously dude, you are one of those seemingly ignorant and, might I put bluntly, dumb Linux zealots which are the very people keeping others from adopting it.

 

NDISWrapper... And the lack of any decent documentation on it for somebody who just want to set up a basic Ubuntu box and have some fucking wireless internet. The included readme is a piece of garbage.

Except for the one time I did connection-sharing from my Vista computer at the time and my Ubuntu computer, I've gotten to the point of trying to get a damn Wireless USB device to work (Relatively popular ones, too!) and got frustrated and quit.

 

Wait, why are you using ndiswrapper? For actually getting online, you should be able to just use the System > Administration > Additional Drivers (or whatever they call it now) menu.

 

That's true, you should.

Here's reality: On Ubuntu, that step works from the Live Install CD, without an internet connection, but not on the installed system. On an installed system, you must have an existing internet connection, probably over ethernet, and you must run an APT update at least once or else it won't find the drivers. Now that I know this from trial and error I know to have my computer plugged in to the network after an install so I can run APT, but for most people this is convoluted as fuck.

Shit like this, Desktop Linux.

 

Lack of old video game development tools and support for some proprietary formats is really it. :P

 

One that you can learn to use the first time you see it and is simple to use =P (and *don't* change the interface, jeez, what's up with changing interfaces to "improve the experience" when you're forced to relearn it?)

 

I hate the fact that people think that Ubuntu is the only good thing out there when there are alternative distros and the like around. Not everything has to be fed into your mouth, try and experiment with your stuff to get a Linux experience that people want.

Also, the lack of decent video editing software is a pain.

 

I prefer using mainstream distro (I use Ubuntu, previously used Red Hat and Fedora). They usually have a large user base to debug problems and are probably going to stay around longer than some offbeat distro. Also, my workplace has the option to use a corporate supported Ubuntu which gives consistency between my work and play computers.

There is nothing I can say I hate about GNU/Linux software. Any issues I had, are the same or worse in proprietary/Windows software.

 

Oh, I'd forgotten.
It's gotten SLOW.

 

Definitely. This is another thing I hate about Linux these days. Each version of everything gets slower and slower, and requires even more memory and faster hardware.

When I started using it in 2005, a mainstream desktop distro would run well on a computer with 256MB of RAM. It would even run with only 128MB, but could be slow. In 2006, I had an old thinkpad t22 with Ubuntu 6.06 on it. Of course, I tweaked it to use less memory wherever I could, but that wasn't necessary - it was usable straight after installing.
Last year, I tried to install the latest Ubuntu (version 10 or something) on that same laptop, and I was horrified. It took over 5 minutes to reach the desktop, and the hard disk never stopped grinding. It was so slow that I didn't even bother trying to fix it. I think if you need more than 256MB of RAM just to sit at the desktop, there's a serious problem.

 

As far as I can remember (Mac user since childhood) no MacOS has ever given the option of not allowing sleep when you close the laptop, seems a bit stupid when you say it now though.

On topic-

I would call myself a Linux dabbler. I sometimes get my toes wet but it's the lack of clear intructions that I find the barrier. If I could install a usable operating system that I could use as I learnt it would be much more appealing. Fuck, if someone showed me an everyday usuable, more OS9 like alternative, to the cunt that is OSX, I would be very pleased indeed. Is there a Linux for learners type distro?

I really don't think Linux has been fully realised, it could provide specialised enviroments for groups with individiual needs, such as the elderly or very young children. Linux seems to have lost it's focus.