What don´t you like about Linux?
 

Although every guy here likes Linux :), Linux is not perfect. That is the point of the question:

What don´t you like about linux?


Besides I am a little bit curious about your answers.

I hate how much it costs for Linux.... Oh wait ;)

Seriously what I hate has more to do with the fact that there are a limited number of new fps based games for it. Most companies make games for Windows and some for Macs. Very few make anything for Linux.

I guess that is more of a problem I have with the game manufacturers then with Linux itself.

Speaking for myself. If they where to make games for Linux I would end up spending money, lets say 50 USD a month. That would be at least 600 from one person a year. Get 10,000 people (to start with) spending that much a month that would be 6 million USD a year. Then comes the fact that the more people see good up to date games for Linux the more people will try Linux, which in turn would have more people buying the games and in no time the profits for these companies making games for Linux would sky rocket.

But most companies are very short sited these days.

What I don' like, that's a tough question to answer. Why? Because what's not to like with an operating system that's as solid, and a host of applications, compilers, and widgets. For no money! You can't go wrong.

But, in an attempt to answer your question, there are too many distributions to choose from. Which is a bad thing....uh, no it's a good thing. Well, it's both good and bad. There are distros for every imaginable purpose, flexible and not flexible. Some distros are very small and light weight, to be used in micro hardware. Some distros are aimed at creating big cluster super computers used for research. The configurations are endless, and so is the choice each of us have, endless.

It's not easy to pick just one distro. Eventually some will disappear or be assimilated. But the best distros will prevail, as they have for the past seventeen or more years. Innovation will continue to force Linux to evolve and become the most widely used operating system on the planet and beyond.

So the bad thing about Linux is.....I can't decide which I like best.

Enjoy!

Multiple distros shipping with a default graphics driver that causes regular system crashes. (nouveau)

Grub2. It's way complicated. What does it really bring us? (And don't say working on non-PC platforms. There's nothing wrong with each platform having a different bootloader, especially as in most cases different platforms have different CPU architectures and thus need different binaries anyway.)

That I can't have compositing with dual monitors.

Google Earth never seems to work right.

Sound in general being a clusterfork. It's SIMPLE. A program sends an audio stream to a character device file, the sound comes out of the speakers. Why is it so bleeding difficult? It seems everyday desktops are being allowed to gain complications that give features only needed in specialised uses.

Personally ALSA hasn't given me problems...but PulseAudio in particular is (IMO) kinda stupid. There's *always* about a half-second audio delay with everything except maybe videos/music (that's how it was when I used Ubuntu). My guess is that it's caused by some kind of protocol overhead (PA is supposed to allow for audio across networks, right?). :rolleyes:

EDIT: On topic: really the only main thing that gets to me about Linux is wireless support. Granted, I'm lucky enough to have a laptop with a supported wireless card (Atheros AR9285), but that's only because I did research before purchasing. I tried to get my main desktop machine on the wireless with a little USB dongle I've had since before I switched to Linux, but I only ever got it *mostly* working; I still had to reboot the router if I rebooted the system (or if the WNIC lost its connection) and I wanted back online. Then getting my other "freebie" desktop (got it from a friend of my mom's who didn't want it anymore) working with a similar dongle (a D-Link DWA-130 IIRC) was another story entirely: I had to get the driver source off the internet and compile it myself, and even then it would cause the system to lock up after getting connected and staying for about 30 seconds. :rolleyes:

Pulse Audio.

Wait, that's not a Linux thing, that's a some Linux distros thing.

I have never had the audio problems in Slackware with ALSA that I have almost daily in Ubuntu.

Missing drivers.

Wait, that's not a Linux thing, that's a manufacturer thing.

Open Office. It is far too difficult and convoluted to modify the default template.

I loathe MS Word, but, in MS Word, I can modify, say, a list format for normal.dot and it changes the default list format so it becomes the default. I have not yet found a way, in almost a decade of using OOo, to modify, as opposed to "add to" the OOo defaults.

Wait, that's not a Linux thing, but OOo is the go-to office suite for Linux, so, yeah.

Well, at least for me, I have no bad things to say about linux.

What I will say is more of the hardware vendors fault or their lack of interest in supporting linux.

Since I use linux exclusively, I just can't buy any printer, scanner, or some special type of hardware because it may not work in linux. The hardware vendors only include drivers for window$ and maybe Macs.

I have to research before buying any product to be use in linux and if there is no info -- I have to take a gamble and hope that it works, or I just get a refund if it doesn't.

- Cheers

One has to do research before buying anything anymore. With the coming of Vista, manufacturers did not have updated drivers in a lot of cases for practcally new hardware. A lot of these fell under "planned obsolescence".

But I digress, I agree with Amdx2_64. I wish game vendors would port more games to Linux.

that I don not know everything

1. Poor documentation. I would particularly like to see more/better FreeBSD-style user manuals. Man pages, forums and wikis are all well and good, but i'm old school; I like an authoritative and weighty book in my hand. Distros like Slackware and CentOS deserve much better than they currently have.

2. The replacement of KDE3 by KDE4.

3. Being made to feel like a second class citizen by companies like Spotify and Skype. Makes it very hard to convert people to linux when their 'killer app' doesn't work in linux, or is hobbled in some way compared to their windoze version.

The lack of interoperability between certain apps, if that's the correct word. For instance when I open xmms I can't even drag a file from the file selection dialog over into xmms like I could with Windows/Winamp (or Windows/Xmms). And this is just one instance. Almost all other apps have the same limitation.

There's also a problem with cut and paste - sometimes when you select and copy text it won't paste that text. This happens a LOT, forcing me to go clear the clipboard and try again.

Normally, though, I find ways around these nitpicks. Aside from dual-booting into Windows on my laptop I haven't seen a Windows screen on my main PC in a very long time... a year, maybe? And I very much fit the profile of a Windows user.

Edited to add: oh yeah, and games. Linux needs games. But I play them primarily on the 360 and PS3.

Anyone been able to get Windows 7 to network with Windows XP or Linux? Man, what a nightmare.

I'll go with Linux to Linux, thanks!

Ahhhh.... what is wrong with linux???? Everything. It just goes on and on and on... you get my point. Comeon someday I want to be able to complain and in a fit of anger just reinstall linux with windows. Boots into a freaking cli and others looking at the prompt tell me the computer is not booting :). I am looking for a reason to take debian off my pc but then the os runs so good that I do not have the heart to put something else on the computer. I disagree with people who want gaming support IMHO buy a console - my P3 will die if I run heavy games on it. Comeon, I did not install debian to never take it out. The same goes for slackware.
Oh, somehow I am so used to seeing the cli that I forget linux has a gui too.

I never realized how inconsistent GNU/Linux is as an OS until I tried OpenBSD. OpenBSD is not just a kernel with a bunch of utilities atop of it, it is a wholesome OS, neatly designed by one dedicated team. Quite a revelation, mind you, but hard to explain. You have to try it.

My only gripe is 3-D CAD software for mechanical design. There's a couple promising vendors out there, but they're still pretty rough around the edges or difficult to use.