LXer: 24 things we'd change about Linux

LXer · 11-09-2010, 10:00 AM

Published at LXer:

If you use Linux long enough, you'll soon discover a list of things you wished were different. Here are 24 things that we wish were different.

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brianL · 11-09-2010, 10:05 AM

Sounds like they want a Windows/Ubuntu cross-breed.

Jeebizz · 11-09-2010, 10:55 AM

No thanks, I'm not interesting in 'ubundows'

dugan · 11-09-2010, 11:44 AM

What a worthless filler article. A lot of random things that are easy to say, but not a single suggestion on how to start making them work.

Hangdog42 · 11-09-2010, 12:10 PM

Wow. I thought I'd seen bloggers spew mega-loads of garden fertilizer before, but this clown has just set a new record. By a long shot. I mean, look at item 21. This blithering idiot is actually suggesting adoption of a Registry, the single worst idea in the entire history of information processing (and yes, I'm starting with the dudes stamping information in clay).

I don't know what is sadder, the fact that this drivel actually makes it into publication or the fact that there are additional drooling morons commenting how much they agree with him.

Jeebizz · 11-09-2010, 01:26 PM

Since this guy is only good at nitpicking and not offering solutions, I'm going to do the same to his comments:

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3. Guaranteed GUI fallback

Do you remember the old days of installing Linux, when you'd boot from a CD only to see the message in the installer, "can't find CD drive?"

The modern equivalent of that is the graphical installer that, upon reboot, leaves you at a command prompt – we still get emails from people who have just this problem or, worse, never even got to the graphical screen in the first place.

Isn't it about time that failsafe X actually meant it was failsafe? That you'd get a graphical desktop no matter what graphics card you had?

Nope, its not about time. I prefer going to commandline for recovery, because its faster and I don't have to wait for the disc to load the GUI into RAM, or even USB to RAM, fall back to commandline is faster. Why should I wait for a GUI to show up (which chances are would be KDE or GNOME, if this guy had his way) when all I have to do is type a few simple commands and reboot, before the GUI is even loaded in the first place?

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7. A single name for the wastebasket

In the UK English translation of Gnome, it's called either Rubbish Bin, Wastebasket, Deleted Items and Trash depending on where you look, which is silly. Fix it!

This is just fscking stupid, just rename it yourself. I on the other hand don't use Gnome anyhow so this doesn't affect me.

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8. Easier driver install

How do you install a Linux driver? The answer, for most people, is that you don't – you need to upgrade your whole kernel, which usually means changing your distribution. Dell's Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) has gone some way to fixing this, but we want to see it working everywhere.

Really upgrade my kernel? Since when? When my notebook was alive, I kept up with new (stable) binary releases of NVIDIA's driver all with the same stock kernel in Slackware.

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10. Remove Grub

If you've ever seen a dual-booting Mac, you'll have seen the smart, easy to use OS selection screen. So why is Grub so ugly? It's hardly a great advert for Linux when you see eight different Linux options when you boot up – four kernel versions as you've upgraded over the months, plus those same four with an additional "failsafe" option.

I don't use Grub, but why should Grub be removed? I'm surprised this guy didn't say that LILO should be removed, since after all the default LILO screen in his view would be considered 'ugly'. I don't give a shit if LILO's original screen (non-bootsplash) isn't 'trendy' enough for him, for me it does the job thats all I need.

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11. Make every task doable from the GUI

Next time you read our Answers section, take a note of how many solutions start with "open up a command line, then…" It is, frankly, depressing.

Frankly this is depressing, and why should I fumble through menus when I can quickly just type out the right command? Get over it you whiny baby!

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14. Improve the documentation

Man pages are great for reference, but the fact that they are there for reference as opposed to reading means they rarely have examples, they group irrelevant options with important ones, and often do little more than scare people away. If someone wants to start a project dedicated to making useful man pages, let me know!

Hrmm, here's a thought. Join the project then! Since it is OSS software, I am sure that if more people want to volunteer, they would be welcomed, instead of just bitching and moaning about how 'crappy' the documentation is. Plus I would imagine this is an endeavor anybody with decent writing skills can do, if they cannot program but have other technical skills, sheesh.

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15. Replace Gimp

Gimp is great… if you're looking for an example of bad UI design. To be fair, Photoshop is hardly a UI gem either, so we can't lay all the blame on Gimp, but if there's one Linux app crying out to have its user interface burned with fire it's Gimp.

With what? No alternative was listed! Plus GIMP is also cross platform, it doesn't just run under Linux.

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16. Replace OpenOffice.org

This isn't about UI, it's about speed. If OOo were twice as efficient, it would still be a slow, resource-eating monster. Sometimes I think the only reason OOo is such a success is because it's equally poor on KDE and Gnome.

Well LibreOffice is coming up, there is also GoOo; replace it yourself for your respective distro, there are packages/source available!

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18. Graham says...

Simplicity is best. For that reason, I think we should have a single, unified desktop, just like Windows and Mac OS X. Gnome, KDE and the rest are free to continue, but their resources should be pooled into a united front that becomes the official face of the Linux desktop.

Each distro already has their own default DE, either KDE or Gnome and I don't use either. This solution implies that my distro should not only default to KDE, and drop all other WMs. Sorry I like my fluxbox.

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21. Kill off dotfiles

Dotfiles (files that begin with a full stop so they are hidden), have been allowed to run rampant over a user's filesystem, which makes it hard to back up settings easily. It's time either to switch to a Windows-like registry (with GConf being a good start), or to group them together into a Settings directory that can be maintained easily.

Yet also even OSX has dotfiles for hidden files/directories, this is a legacy from the days of UNIX. So on the one hand, you want legacy support (as stated in reason 5: Backwards compatibily dep), but dotfiles have to go? I suppose if you were using windows, you would want the legacy command shell to be scrapped too? After all typing in commands is sooo depressing

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22. Easier closed-source installs

I personally don't use proprietary software such as Nvidia drivers, Flash or MP3 codecs, but I know a lot of people who do, and I know even more who want to but can't figure it out.

Wouldn't it be nice if the first time your distro started up, it said something like "Listen, you can't play DVDs, play Flash games or listen to MP3 music because it's not enabled right now," then gave you the option to do it all with a single click? Yes, it would. Not for me, and maybe not even for you, but undoubtedly for thousands of other users around the world.

Yet Slackware has all this stuff enabled out-of-the-box through the use of ffmpeg/LAME, and flash is already available too.

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23. Standardise use of sudo

Annoying as the divide between KDE and Gnome is, it's nothing compared to something far more simple: root privileges. Some distros use sudo, others use su, and still others use both.

Which is right? I don't care. But I don't see why we need to have a choice about it: make sudo and su work, regardless of the distro, and the problem goes away.

Well I like su, but why should people who use sudo be deprived of su or people like me be deprived of the choice to use su?

honeybadger · 11-09-2010, 02:22 PM

To be honest half of the things stated in the article are simply crap. This is another stupid method to instigate linux users. I do not think the writer ever installed a linux distro. He would have fainted if he saw a non-gui boot

. Comeon grow up. IMHO I think devices are getting smarter but people are getting dumber. Shhheess, this article proves it.

frieza · 11-09-2010, 03:13 PM

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1. Fix sound once and for all

ESD, aRts, OSS and ALSA are all old news: PulseAudio is where it's at, apparently, so why doesn't it work for so many people?

Sound should be a solved problem by now, but rather than focusing on making the majority of cases work, Linux's sound system policy appears to be about reaching 75% compatibility before focusing on corner-case features that a select few need, before tossing it away and starting a new sound system project.

i have never really had much problem with sound myself

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3. Guaranteed GUI fallback

Do you remember the old days of installing Linux, when you'd boot from a CD only to see the message in the installer, "can't find CD drive?"

The modern equivalent of that is the graphical installer that, upon reboot, leaves you at a command prompt – we still get emails from people who have just this problem or, worse, never even got to the graphical screen in the first place.

Isn't it about time that failsafe X actually meant it was failsafe? That you'd get a graphical desktop no matter what graphics card you had?

i agree that such shoul possibly be an option but i also agree that in such a case a command line is much more useful, even the windows recovery console is a command line

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4. Andrew says...

I know choice is good, but the whole point of a package manager is to simplify things for the user. Lets simplify it even more by standardising on one package format and making Linux apps truly Linux-wide.

granted that might help a little but there still remains the fact that different distributions use different versions of libraries and have different softwares available in their repositories so that being said there wouls still need to be maintained distribution specific repositories, which would offset the benefit of a unified package manager

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5. Backwards compatibility dependencies

If you have Glibc 2.11.1 and want to upgrade to 2.11.2 for some reason, it shouldn't break all the apps you have installed.

Did you know that there are applications for Windows 95 using pre-release versions of DirectX 1.0 that still run on Windows 7 using DirectX 11? I don't think we need to go that far, but I think it's time to do away with petty dependency problems.

that does happen a lot already but often times changes in a library's API are not random just to break something, usually there is a solid reason

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6. Get Mac compatibility for games

Wine lets people run Windows software on Linux, and it's a huge project. Mac OS X, on the other hand, already uses many open APIs such as OpenGL and OpenAL, so I reckon with a little work we could make it almost no work for developers to port games to Linux from OS X.

only problem is the osX api, like the windows api is proprietary, not gonna happen anytime soon

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7. A single name for the wastebasket

In the UK English translation of Gnome, it's called either Rubbish Bin, Wastebasket, Deleted Items and Trash depending on where you look, which is silly. Fix it!

as if something that trivial really matters in the grand scheme of things?

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8. Easier driver install

How do you install a Linux driver? The answer, for most people, is that you don't – you need to upgrade your whole kernel, which usually means changing your distribution. Dell's Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) has gone some way to fixing this, but we want to see it working everywhere.

you think hunting a dozen+ sites for individual drivers is easier? often times the kernel is automatically pulled down by the distro's native package manager and requires NO extra intervention

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9. Guaranteed sleep/hibernate

This feature either works out of the box (lucky you!) or works so badly that it can actually screw up your PC. Graham tried it out of curiosity just last week, and ended up having to reset his BIOS to get the networking functional again.

windows has even MORE trouble with sleep/hibernate, what's your point

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10. Remove Grub

If you've ever seen a dual-booting Mac, you'll have seen the smart, easy to use OS selection screen. So why is Grub so ugly? It's hardly a great advert for Linux when you see eight different Linux options when you boot up – four kernel versions as you've upgraded over the months, plus those same four with an additional "failsafe" option.

grub is a boot loader, it appears for like a handful of seconds when the computer first boots and on headless servers is almost never seen, this falls into the same catagory as the label for the trash can, trivial, pointless, and already can be customized to a degree, it does it's job most serious linux users i would imagine care less how their boot loader looks as long as it WORKS

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11. Make every task doable from the GUI

Next time you read our Answers section, take a note of how many solutions start with "open up a command line, then…" It is, frankly, depressing.

frankly impossible as some programs have literally thousands of different combinations of switches and options that would make an impossibly cumbersome gui interface

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12. Rolling releases

If someone wants the latest release of Gnome, why should they have to wait six months for a new distro release? The answer is that they shouldn't, and users of rolling release distros such as Arch Linux have long recognised this. It's time for other distros to get the point!

tehcnically they don't they could switch to a more bleeding edge distro or install it by hand, nobody is pointing a gun to their head saying they have to do it a certain way that is the beauto of linux is choice

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14. Improve the documentation

Man pages are great for reference, but the fact that they are there for reference as opposed to reading means they rarely have examples, they group irrelevant options with important ones, and often do little more than scare people away. If someone wants to start a project dedicated to making useful man pages, let me know!

nothing stopping you from contributing

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15. Replace Gimp

Gimp is great… if you're looking for an example of bad UI design. To be fair, Photoshop is hardly a UI gem either, so we can't lay all the blame on Gimp, but if there's one Linux app crying out to have its user interface burned with fire it's Gimp.

got a better idea?

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16. Replace OpenOffice.org

This isn't about UI, it's about speed. If OOo were twice as efficient, it would still be a slow, resource-eating monster. Sometimes I think the only reason OOo is such a success is because it's equally poor on KDE and Gnome.

again got a better idea

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17. Mike says...

The current Unixstyle filesystem layout is an archaic mess. It's silly that, when you install a program, it's exploded into loads of different directories all over your filesystem. Apps should be standalone, like in RISC OS, Mac OS X and many other desktop OSes. Gobo Linux has the right idea.

as opposed to arbitrary drive letters ala m$ that can end up resulting in having to format and reinstall a windows install and dont say that cant happen because ive seen it personally more then once?

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18. Graham says...

Simplicity is best. For that reason, I think we should have a single, unified desktop, just like Windows and Mac OS X. Gnome, KDE and the rest are free to continue, but their resources should be pooled into a united front that becomes the official face of the Linux desktop.

i use windowmaker, i installed it by choice, been using it for almost 8 years, linux is about choice not making it easy for the masses that is again the beauty of linux

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19. Less screen clutter

When Ubuntu connects to a Wi-Fi network, it feels the need to pop up a box in the top-right corner telling me so. Every single time. Whenever I plug in a USB stick, it feels the need to open a new Nautilus window to show me its contents. How about you keep out of my way and let me decide how I use my computer?

then turn off the notifications, you CAN do that, nothing is stopping you

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20. Better organised settings

KDE's ever-growing control centre is a sprawling mess, but I'd rather have that than Gnome's peculiar split between Administration and Preferences where you end up having to hunt through various options trying to find what you want to change – until you usually decide that the option isn't there and needs to be tweaked in GConf directly.

then use gnome

21. Kill off dotfiles

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dotfiles

Dotfiles (files that begin with a full stop so they are hidden), have been allowed to run rampant over a user's filesystem, which makes it hard to back up settings easily. It's time either to switch to a Windows-like registry (with GConf being a good start), or to group them together into a Settings directory that can be maintained easily.

the registry being a central point of failure for windows was one of the worst mistakes microsoft made

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22. Easier closed-source installs

I personally don't use proprietary software such as Nvidia drivers, Flash or MP3 codecs, but I know a lot of people who do, and I know even more who want to but can't figure it out.

Wouldn't it be nice if the first time your distro started up, it said something like "Listen, you can't play DVDs, play Flash games or listen to MP3 music because it's not enabled right now," then gave you the option to do it all with a single click? Yes, it would. Not for me, and maybe not even for you, but undoubtedly for thousands of other users around the world.

would be nice but not included by default in many distros for copyright issues, the operative word being proprietary/closed source

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23. Standardise use of sudo

Annoying as the divide between KDE and Gnome is, it's nothing compared to something far more simple: root privileges. Some distros use sudo, others use su, and still others use both.

Which is right? I don't care. But I don't see why we need to have a choice about it: make sudo and su work, regardless of the distro, and the problem goes away.

su and sudo both have slightly different purposes, they compliment each other IMHO

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24. No more open core

Put simply, open core means that the basic part of some software is open source, community-supported and all that good stuff. But an increasing number of businesses are looking to cash in on open source by making closed-source software that sits on top, which you pay for.

MySQL, for example, has an open database core, but if you want the enterprise build with more features, you have to buy it.

sorry but the open core is one of the main purposes linux was written in the first place

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/softwa...#ixzz14ouxOdbt

rich_c · 11-09-2010, 04:26 PM

I knew this one would start to generate comments, much like the Techradar article from a few weeks back that started the whole intimidated by cereal thing. :LOL:

MrCode · 11-09-2010, 08:43 PM

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2. No more infighting

Some people seem to get really angry if you use a distro they don't like. In fact, here at LXF Towers we get more letters from Ubuntu haters than any other group of reader!

As most people know, Ubuntu places only a teensy layer of polish over a default Gnome or KDE install, so we're not sure why people get so enraged about it. But we are sure that it doesn't help: as a community we spend too much time telling people what they should use, and not enough time letting them actually exercise the choice that we promised them in the first place.

Sorry, but Ubuntu does quite a bit more than just "place a teensy layer of polish on top of a default GNOME/KDE install"...the security model is also dumbed down ("sudo says", anyone?), and (at least with the newer versions) there's a lot more tie-in with "the cloud".

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-10-2010, 04:17 AM

This article has to be one of the worst and stupidest articles I've seen in quite some time. I don't even feel like replying to the posts like has been done above.

I would like to mention that #1 is an Ubuntu-specific issue. As for the rest, they seem to be coming from someone who uses Window$ most of the time or tries to get Ubuntu to be a Window$ clone ... it's close.

igadoter · 11-10-2010, 04:29 AM

As anyone is free to make its own Linux distro I presume that this article is a todo for a
new Linux distro - which is funny because one of the point of that article is that it is to many Linux distros. I didn't understand the point 'No more open core'. Properly saying almost each
Linux distro except Enterprises is a Gnu/Linux.