Originally Posted by Xzyx987X

I switched to Linux recently in anticipation of the crap that is Vista (so much bloat, so little substance). I've been a Windows power user for quite a while, but I find the restrictions MS is putting on Windows to facilitate DRM unacceptable. I decided to try Kubuntu after hearing that Ubuntu is a good begginner distro, and hearing KDE had an interface similar to Windows. However my experience with it has generally speaking been worse that I would've ever imagined. Here's just a brief summary of the issues I've had so far:

-I started with 64bit Kubuntu. No web browser plugins, no wine, most programs wouldn't compile without serious tweaking. I switched to 32bit after two weeks of complete frustration.

-Installing new video card driver's made Xorg quit working until I reinstalled the kubuntu-desktop package. Now just imagine how an average user who's been on Windows their whole life but doesn't know much about computers would react to this. They are booting to a command line, in an OS they know nothing about, with no obvious facilities for self-repair aside from a reinstall. I'm guessing they wouldn't be too happy about it. I wasn't either, because it was obvious whatever the problem was was beyond my current ability to diagnose, but that still makes me better off than most users, who might as well throw their computer out the window at that point.

-Xorg fails to enable 2d acceleration for no apparent reason. I had to put up with horrible window drawing performance for quite a while, and no amount of driver switching or reconfiguring made any difference. Ironically, using a composite window manager such as Beryl drastically incrased my performance. Unfourtunately I couldn't use it regularly as it gave me various screen drawing errors and was incompatible with KDE's desktop switching.

-Xorg starts enabling 2d acceleration for no apparent reason. I have no idea why, and if I had to reinstall Linux I'd probably never be able to reproduce the cirumstance that got it working.

-Opera, my favorite web browser, has crap for plugin support on Linux. The majority of plugins won't work or have bugs with it. The only way the mplayer plugins with work on it is by compiling and old version of them with a special configure switch. This information was particularely easy to dig up either. And no, I will not use Firefox. I have nothing against Firefox, but opera has more features, is faster, and hass better standards compliance. If you've never surfed with a trash bin for your tabs, you don't know what you're missing.

-KDE was moving my trash from a seporate partition into my home folder's trash bin. This was obviously extremely slow and annoying. What's more annoying, is that it never warned my the reason for this was that it couldn't access the partitions root folder to make the trash bin unless it was root, therby leaving me guessing as to what was going on. For all I knew, moving the files to the home folder was normal behavior. It was only by reading the specs for handling trash folders on freedesktop.org that I was able to solve the problem. I'm guessing a lot of people would've just lived with it and assumed the problem was that Linux sucked.

-Just in general, Linux GUI apps are not forthcoming with explanations when things start going wrong. Instead of detecting errors and telling you, it seems to think that you'll just automatically know what log file you need to read to diagnose a problem. Ironically, most command line apps tell you exactly what's wrong right off the bat, so a lot of the time you can figure out you problem by using the comand line to repeat what you were trying to do.

-Then again, in one situation KDE made a pretty good case for not having error messages pop up. I had set up KDE to use utorrent running under wine to handle my torrent files, since all of the linux torrent clients were giving me very crappy speed. But whenever I opened a torrent file an error message would pop up saying it failed to launch wine, when in fact, nothing had gone wrong. When utorrent was launched by opening a torrent file, instead of displaying an error message all the icons on my desktop would dissapear. This could only be fixed by closing utorrent, at which point the error message was displayed. So bascially, KDE was causing an error by displaying an error message. That kind of story really seems like it belongs it the Windows world... At any rate, the fix was to disable DCOP registration for torrent files, but I only figured that out by trail and error. No one else I talked to about the problem had any clue.

-I can't get USB flash drives working properly. This is an ongoing problem so I made a thread for it here:
linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=505776

-Things constantly behave counter-intuitively without giving me warning. For instance, after turning off power management, my screen saver was replaced with a black screen until I discoved (linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=2231757#post2231757) some obcure configuration option only availible in one of KDE's settings files. For god sakes, a screen saver is such a basic feature, there is no excuse for it not working. I've had a lot of complaints about Windows, but never that a component as basic as the screen saver wouldn't work.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, more than anything I'd just like to know if this level of inneptitude is common for most Linux distro's. Many people have told me they have had no such problems on their distros, so it's possible KDE/kubuntu just sucks, but I'd like to hear what other people think before I try a Gnome based distro.

Personally though, I blame a lot of my problems on the complete lack of intergration in the components that make up a Linux system. The system is way too dependant on configuration to get things to work, so it's no wonder you get issues like this. With this type of system it's safer to assume things are working than to report a problem (or even try to figure out if there is one), because you can't ever assume anything about the state of your interaction with all the seporate components. Even when all you're doing is writing a cog to fit somewhere in a set of predetermined standards, you can never fully anticipate how other people's interpretation of those standards may be different from yours. All you can really do is hack at something until it works, and hope that your assumptions about why it works are correct.

I really don't want to have to use Vista. With MS pumping up the proprietary features, lockouts, and restrictions, I'd rather just use XP for the rest of my life than "upgrade" to that. But if all Linux distros are as difficult to work with as Kubuntu has been, I may not have much choice. However, while I still think I'm correct in my opinion that Linux's shortcomings are due to deficiencies in the core design principles most Linux environments are based on, that doesn't mean no distro is capable of overcoming these issues and putting together something that really does "just work". I just don't want to waste any more time on something that doesn't work, and possibly never will.

Originally Posted by cjparad

Linux is so hard to understand and to switch to because Linux users dont want to help with the transitioning of windows users. They like to think they are a select few who understand the inner working of the computer world.

Originally Posted by mdg

Just like to point out to anyone offering advice to the OP, the original post is from 2006.