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!"

RTFM

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

Re:RTFM

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

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.

False user experience level dichotomy

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

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

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:RTFM

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.

Breaking scripts is no small thing.

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.

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...

Re:RTFM

"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:avoid the command-line?

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:RTFM

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.

Actually, you're just uninformed.

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.

Re:RTFM

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

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

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

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.)

kernal modules

loading kernel modules

Most Common Linux Annoyance

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

Most Common Windows Annoyance

Where's the command line?

Easy...

What have been your biggest annoyances when using Linux?

Easy - you guys.

Re:Easy...

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.

Mod parent insightful.

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.

Biggest Pet-Peeve?

Gotta be lack of informed mainstream media coverage.

If I hear "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" one more time, I am gonna snap.

Hunting

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

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

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

Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms [fu-berlin.de]. 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

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.

Distros just don't do proper integration testing

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.

Re:Hunting

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Re: Unmounting devices

> 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

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.

Parent point valid despite foul language

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

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

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

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.

Missing the point...

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.

Worst Linux annoyance EVER

I got three letters for you:

S .... C ... O

Now who can beat that?

Here's one.

Setting print preferences so that I can print more than one page to a sheet of paper. I know there's psnup, but it's not that convenient.

Worst Linux Annoyances?

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.

The main difference between Linux and Windows

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

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.

My biggest annoyance...

...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...

Trying to get a Nvidia dual port card to work

After messing around with X for a week, I finally had the insight to download the Nvidia driver from their site. Worked like a charm right away, but there should have been more documentation on this. This book might just be what the Linux community needs. Then again, what does that say about the user friendlyness of Linux? ;-)

Re:DVD Player

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

ogle [freshmeat.net], xine [xinehq.de], and mplayer [mplayerhq.hu].

Re:DVD Player

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

Hardware support

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

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.

from a user's perspective

Lack of easy support for my intellimouse explorer. I'm so used to using the side buttons to go forward and back when browsing the web it's jarring when I move from mozilla on windows to mozilla on linux.

Worst annoyances

Anyhting having to do with USB or Firewire support

dated??

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-

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-

You won't find that with BeOS users.

Yeah, those two guys are nice. =)

Re:Worst Linux annoyance-

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-

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...

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

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.

Too many Scripting Languages

There really are WAY too many half-assed ways to do things in script. Perl, Tcl, Python, Bash, Csh, Tcsh, PHP. I must have 20 MySql drivers to support all of these bloody languages. I have to run several Apache modules because some software uses mod_perl, others use PHP, and all of my In-House software uses TCL.

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.

XFree86

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

CUPS

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:Annoyances

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.

The fact that all these other idiots use Windows

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

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

• 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.

Differences vs. annoyances

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.

Incorrect/buggy termcaps

My god, it's been how many years and backspace and delete still behave strangely and inconsistently between xterm, kterm, gnome-terminal, etc. Half the time, only C-h does the trick. And then there's these terminals' inconsistent ability to deal with unicode and color characters so half the man pages render incorrectly. Someone stop the madness!

World Domination Will Come When Copy & Paste W

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...

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

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

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.

Opportunity?

maybe this is an ideal opportunity to get your pet peeve finally addressed!

It's open source...your opportunity is now. Make the change yourself...don't wait for someone else to address it.

The ability to review and change source code is touted as open source's strongest point. It would appear, from the response to this article, it's also one of open source's least used attributes.

My annoyances

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.

Lack of manufacturer support!

NVidia stands out in my mind as having done a decent job (though they could definitely have a better installer) with this, and I'm sure there are a few others that are doing at least as much.

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 /home filesystem


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

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.

"RPM Hell"

What I've dubbed "RPM Hell" -- you go to install some innocent little package, which has 20 dependencies. You install the first dependency, and see that it has 20 dependencies.

You realize you're going to be there for a LONG time, as it seems your work grows exponentially every time you install a dependency.

Admin issues

What I'm reading is almost strictly related to administration issues: installing the OS, drivers, programs, etc. I'll be the first to admit: this needs a lot of work from distros and from hardware manufacturers.

That said, if you've got someone who knows how to manage it, a friend or IT tech, Linux is usable for everyone. For the vast majority of normal tasks done on a computer, the programs are capable and easy to use. This is why Linux is ready for the corporate environment and for friends of Linux users.

Then again, not many folks do admin tasks on their Windows installations either. The only lacking element is the non-hardcore-but-regular computer user.

I hope this post doesn't get lost in the crowd...

Man files without examples

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

easy: kernel configuration

The configuration of the Linux kernel and version specificity of kernel modules is a major headache. Other operating systems manage to let developers distribute kernel modules that can be compiled and run against a wide variety of kernel versions and that have a lifetime of several years. But the Linux kernel interfaces apparently are not guaranteed to be stable and most kernel modules are just distributed as part of a monolithic kernel source tree (millions of lines!). And configuring a kernel itself is a big headache, usually requiring several tries to get something working.

Many of the things that are in the kernel probably shouldn't even be in the kernel but could easily be implemented in user space if the Linux kernel only had appropriate interfaces. For example, many file systems, PPP, and many USB drivers could be put into user mode programs, but the Linux kernel lacks the interfaces to do it.

Memory leaks

Actually, this is a 99% of all OSs annoyance, I'm afraid, but I notice it most on my RedHat/KDE desktop.

There is no reason my web browsing and window scrolling should get slower and slower with time, just because I've been continuously logged in and hacking for a few weeks. It's not as if something is wearing out and has to be refurbished by my logging out, restarting the X server, and logging back in, really.

Maybe, someday, the authors of large programs that tend to run for days at a time will start to take the attitude that any memory leak is a bug. Surely at least one of the major distro compilers could afford a copy of Purify, understand its output, and fix the leaks.

Flame about Lisp machines that never leaked memory, in the early 1980's, deleted - redundant.

WIRELESS!!!!

My biggest annoyance right now is wireless for linux. I run linux on my laptop, and I love my wireless access (when I dual boot over to XP) but I cannot for the life of me get it to work - in that its certainly not even a download tar, ./configure; make; make install type of procedure - you have to read like books full of info to figure it out, and, sorry I dont have time for all that...I wish there was an easy way to do THAT!!!

Does that task belong more to the linux community of developers, or the wireless hardware manufacturers? Probably a bit of both.

Some small things might go a long way

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?

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

CD automounting

About five years ago I configured my computer to automount floppies and CD-ROMs when their mount point was accessed, to not cache writes to the floppy drive, and to autounmount those media a few seconds after the last access to their mount point stops. It's been working like I like it ever since.

I'm occasionally stunned, after all that time, to see how many distributions are still fiddling with KDE or Gnome CD-watching daemons, special kernel patches, etc. to try and get reasonable behavior out of removeable media without just putting a couple lines in the config files for autofs.

bash bahavior

Some of bash's defaults piss me off.

Examples that spring to mind:

1. By default, bash (or readline) often doesn't know that [Home] means ^a and [End] means ^e. Sometimes it doesn't get [Delete] right either.
2. readline is not tolerant or verbose about problems with .inputrc. It just grinds on through, usually garbling your key bindings as a result. It's depressing to have to login to another session to run kill to end your previous session because you're unable to type "exit[ENTER]" in that session.
3. While it's true that a Unix text file should have "\n" line endings rather than "\r\n", we do, in fact, live in a world with The Internet and The Microsoft. Both of them use "\r\n" line endings. Some Linux progs silently support reading from "\r\n" files and that's great. bash doesn't though, so on several occasions I've had to deal with weird errors when copying .bash_profile from a Cygwin / Windows box.

Yes, I know there's probably a better way out of these problems than simply bitching--but the question was what annoyed me the most, so there you go.

P.S.
In SuSe 7.2, the way to burn CDs involved setting up the CD-R drive as a pseudo-SCSI device using SCSI emulation. Is this ugly hack still necessary? or can Linux now handle IDE CD burners?

Kind of like RTFM.....

These people who, when you post your complaints, tell you how to fix your problem. For example, complaining about program installation brings out at least 3 know-it-alls who have the answer, all different, and suggest that you should find this and install it and everything will be happy.
The whole point of this is... these are annoyances. One shouldn't have to hunt down a solution to the built-in problems. The solution should be built-in. The problem shouldn't exist. This is my chief annoyance; that for every problem, there are a half-dozen solutions, which you have to track down on your own, which are not standard across distributions.

My top 5

The absolute worst thing about Linux, beyond a doubt, is sound. It doesn't freakin' work. What is it, three different APIs? And none of them work properly on any of the half dozen machines I've tried installing Linux on. Finding out why is hellish too--you have your kernel drivers, then ALSA and OSS add a layer of complexity, then libao adds another layer of crap to deal with, then KDE adds its own set of daemons... If you've got a generic SoundBlaster card everything might work without screwing around; anything else, good luck. The best bet seems to be to go with the latest bleeding-edge kernel and ALSA releases, cross your fingers, and wave a dead chicken over the speakers. OK, I have sound now, at least on my own machine, even if /dev/sndstat doesn't exist the way the FAQs assure me it should. Hopefully some time soon they'll fix that buzzing problem...

The second worst thing about Linux is missing documentation, like all the FSF software that has either no manual page at all, or no useful manual page. Often there's just a note challenging you to try and find the information in their crappy info hypertext system. I don't care if RMS likes emacs, the standard for accessing UNIX documentation is man. It doesn't help that all the info browsers I've tried are godawful. The Debian guys have the right idea here--missing man pages are a software defect, and defective software should not be included in the distribution.

The third worst thing about Linux is KDE vs Gnome. I side with KDE on everything--Gnome was a butt-headed political decision, and should have been abandoned once Qt was made available under the (L)GPL. But no, the obstinate FSF egos had to waste their time implementing an overcomplicated CORBA architecture to provide functionality hardly anyone needed for a desktop system nobody wanted.

The fourth worst thing is the plague of window managers. Every time I look, there's another forking window manager. (Looking at one list I found via Google, it seems there are over 90 of the things.) It wouldn't be so bad, except that almost all of them suck by default. "Yeah," say the handful of people using each one, "but you can configure it to be really good." Yes, but I can configure almost any wm to be really good, given enough time to spend in pointless dicking around. In fact, you can pretty much configure any of these window managers to look like any of the others. What is it about Linux programmers that everyone wants to write a window manager, and nobody seems to be able to get around to writing an MP3 player that's even as good as iTunes?

The fifth thing, suggested by the window manager plague, is that Linux suffers a lot from needless configurability and rampant optionitis. The original UNIX idea (circa v7) was that you wrote a program to do one task, do it properly, and do it well. If you wanted your directory listing sorted into reverse order, you piped it through sort; if you wanted it in columns, you piped it through column.

Take a look at the man page for GNU cat. I particularly like that they've added options -A, -e and -t just to save you from having to type two options, and given you an option -u that doesn't do anything. That's almost as good as the -d option to diff.