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Showing messages 1 through 45 of 45.

• no rpms and debs for x64
  2008-03-05 01:38:58  Arunabh Das Sharma [Reply | View]
  
  
  compiling from source for x64 takes so much longer than installing from rpm.

• RPMs are easy
  2004-09-08 06:01:12  gnoeroe [Reply | View]
  
  
  RPMs are easy. Just read "Maximum RPM"
  by Edward Baily.

• Device Drivers
  2003-11-29 17:02:02  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  The biggest annoyance with Linux is the lack of device drivers.
  
  That's something that Microsoft got right with Windows 95. It wasn't perfect, but worked. (If it didn't work, they would say the problem was the hardware.)

• RPM vs. Packages
  2003-11-01 08:24:31  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Solaris good!
  # pkgadd -d . SUNWcrap
  
  Nice and easy.
  
  Sun go out of business? Make admin cry. Me try
  Linux. Linux like Solaris! RPM bad! Too complicated for tiny brain.
  
  Why RPM hard? Why not use packages?
  

• MIME and application associations
  2003-10-06 09:07:20  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  There are so many different places that store information about MIME types and what applications to use when opening a certain type of document or URL.
  
  There is the GNOME control panel, the KDE control panel (I use some KDE apps as well as GNOME), each file manager and web browser decides to do it differently, then you have browser plugins that need specific configuration, then you have /etc/mailcap (which I discovered recently), and then many apps have their own settings. Where you do have integration, it's often not very easy to work out which system is being or how to change the associations. (Nautilus is an honorable exception, it integrates properly with GNOME, but unfortunately just too bloated to use if you want to actually *manage* *files* and not show off fancy icons).
  
  The worst of all is web browsers - I have mainly convinced my apps to open http URLs and HTML files in galeon, but still a number insist on opening help pages in mozilla, and I'm yet to solve this one!
  
  Next to the general bloat of many applications, this would be one of my biggest annoyances.
  

• Dependency hell - a GNU/Linux specific problem
  2003-09-30 21:04:32  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have to agree that "dependency hell" is the aspect I hate the most. I will not mention the font issue, the GUI issue, the multimedia issue - all those small things that should have been trivial to solve (for which I can only blame the "open source way" of doing things - or of never getting small things done.)
  The stringent denpendencies allows for GNU/Linux to always be a few steps behind others: FreeBSD has solved this, apparently because you can have more than one version of the software (I'm not talking about installing the tarball on /usr/local); and on Windows, there simply isn't any such question - just extract the binary to the directory you want.
  Take Debian, for instance: while you have a system that will update *everything*, every bug that's fixed in every little package you may have that has a fix for it, the "policy" makes you have an outdated box. Now, this may be OK if you're only running a server (but then, why not use OpenBSD?), but it's inadequate for a fully functional box.
  I would like to see a mix of the following qualities: easy dependency checks and full upgrades throughout the whole system, like Debian; the capacity to install different versions, like on FreeBSD and Windows box, while keeping the stability of FreeBSD; and a "roll back" feature in case something goes awry, like Windows ME has.
  "Dependency hell" won't be solved by an O'Reilly book...it'll only be solved if people are willing to face this problem, that is *very* pronounced on GNU/Linux as opposed to other systems. The "leenox Rul3z" attitude won't get us anywhere.
  
  - s
  

• Dude!
  2003-09-25 10:43:12  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  `urpmi XYZ` or `apt-get install XYZ` ...

• Minimised system installaton hell...
  2003-09-19 07:37:10  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Redhat, and probably others, like to compile lots of packages with support for everything including the kitchen sink, so with sendmail you has hesoid, sasl and ldap support build in. This means RPM requires you to install these packages.
  
  This makes it hell to instal *minimised* base systems for servers. The dependencies for sendmail require sasl, LDAP, and scads of other stuff that the server is not going to use and therefore should *not* be installed.
  
  Of course you can build your own RPM without those dependencies but that takes quite a lot of doing. Updates are also a problem because you have to regenerate your patch that changes the package compilation options to saner values, and update your spec file, every time and update comes out.
  
  (One could argue this problem is much worse on windows but that is a seperate flame war).

• Linux annoyances
  2003-09-18 20:55:27  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  - lack of decent documentation (many utilities do not even have man pages)
  - constant configuration file format changes (old version formats are not fully supported, so upgrading means scrapping previous configuration and starting again)
  - constant API changes (need to have many versions of same library installed, programs compiled on one version are unlikely to work on another)
  - inconsistent keyboard mappings (various Unixes and Linux distributions disagree on what the backspace, delete, function keys, etc.) should do
  

• BS vs DEL keymappings
  2003-09-18 18:20:27  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Some applications use the backspace key to move back over a character and erase it, others use delete.
  It's not strictly a Linux problem, but it certainly occurs with Linux.
  For example, it's annoying to remotely login to another machine and find out the hard way you need to type "stty erase ^h" before you can edit the command line. This also occurs with editors like Emacs.
  

• Huge, slow gnome and gnome-terminal
  2003-09-18 14:45:24  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Another annoyance, at least for the long-time Linux user, is how sluggish and bloated Linux has become. I used to use OpenLook Virtual Window Manager on a 486 with 8MB of RAM. I could open multiple xterms (or, rather rxvt windows) and it's all be rather snappy. Sometimes it'd bog down (I certainly didn't use Mosaic on that beast), but for multiple text windows, it was pretty good. If I compiled an app or displayed a lot of text, X and xterm weren't horrible CPU hogs during the process.
  
  Now, if I leave a gnome-terminal open and compile a large app with lots of small files, gnome-terminal and X take nearly half the CPU, rather than GCC. If I leave a window open w/ top running, I see the corresponding gnome-terminal taking 5% of the CPU and raising X up similarly--just to refresh once every 15 seconds. What? I'm not even using transparency or antialiased fonts or anything. I'm using the exact same features I used back in 1994, only my computer is about 100 times the speed--as is my video card. Resolution and color-depth aren't the issue either--I went from 1152x900 at 8bpp to 1400x1050x32bpp. This is roughly 5x the data to move, but like I said, with a nearly 100x the speed machine. This bloat makes no sense!
  
  Similarly annoying is the sluggish GNOME interface. It's often snappy, but wait until tomorrow. That updatedb run at 4AM pushed your entire desktop to swap. Gee, thanks. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if gnome-cd didn't have a 20MB memory footprint. (It seems to keep growing if you leave it open.) And then there's the panel (20MB), and the volume control (16MB), gnome-terminal (30MB), the settings daemon (17MB), the session manager (17MB), and so on. And let's not forget Mozilla, which seems to grow without bound if you don't restart it every day. (Right now, it's at 120MB on my box.)
  
  And to think I used to run with only 8MB of RAM once upon a time. (I do admit, X was more comfortable with 16MB.) I don't see why a machine with 512MB of RAM should be 80MB to 200MB into swap on a regular basis, just running plain old desktop apps. That old 8MB machine only had ~32MB of swap at the time. (I had installed SLS 1.03 on a 120MB drive. Approx 90MB for OS and /home, and the rest was for /boot and swap!)
  
  FWIW, I don't notice as many of these problems at work. That machine runs RedHat 7.2. My machine at home, though, runs BloatHat 9. Bleh. If it weren't for the fact that RH is end-of-lifing support for 7.x, I'd "upgrade" to the earlier release. *sigh*
  
  

• Wireless/network profile (non)support
  2003-09-18 14:25:02  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  My main annoyance: GUIs that look good, but just suck at covering up the configuration of a Linux box.
  
  I tried setting up my girlfriend's laptop to use our WiFi card in the several settings where it's needed -- college library, Starbucks (w/ T-Mobile), my place, and generic public spaces. Each one of these had different requirements. College needed a specific SSID. T-Mobile required a different SSID. My place requires a 128-bit WEP key. Generic public hot spots require an empty SSID and no WEP key.
  
  Under Windows, this is fairly easy. Both Linksys and Cisco provide reasonably intuitive apps for creating multiple profiles, selecting between multiple profiles, and configuring each profile independently. I get fairly instant feedback as to whether a given config is the right one, as well, by looking at the link strength meter. Wrong SSID or WEP key? No signal. Got it right? You get a signal. Bad DHCP lease? Release lease, and reacquire it. ("Repair link" under WinXP, or "Renew lease" with winipcfg under Win98.)
  
  Under RedHat 9, there is an a completely non-intuitive pair of applets for doing the same thing. I remember it having multiple layers -- you define some sort of baseline config and different profiles that overlay on it in some non-intuitive manner -- but it was so oddball it will take me a half an hour of digging through docs again to remind me of how it works. It didn't help that there were two separate interfaces to the same data--one intended for root to configure, one intended for mortal users for selection--and neither was clearly delineated. I initially accidentally created 4 virtual devices for my wireless ethernet card rather than 1 device and 4 profiles, since it was that non-intuitive. Not to mention that simply opening the app and selecting a profile causes the app to consider the profile modified. ("Save changes to profile foo?" it asks on exit. What? I just activated the profile, I didn't change it!)
  
  It was and is a mess.
  
  And when the wireless didn't work, I got no helpful feedback. Don't have my WEP key spelled right? I get a strange kernel message about an invalid parameter to a syscall or something, and then a mysterious DHCP failure. Huh? It gets worse when the DHCP client then decides to try to reuse a DHCP lease from its last successful lease, but that lease was from an unrelated network.
  
  It didn't help that on this laptop, the linksys card I have is buggy and dies after I send too many small files. I can work around it by setting my MTU very small, but guess what? I don't recall anywhere in the GUI can you change the MTU. (It might've been there, but I don't think I found it.) I have to slink around /etc/sysconfig/..... reverse engineering to determine which files are the source files the GUI uses for configuring the network, and which ones are the "do not edit, the GUI copied this here from somewhere else when you selected a profile" files. Grrrrr!
  
  And I've been using Linux since 1993!!!!
  
  If I'd done this the old fashioned way, I'd figure out the four different 'insmod'/'ifconfig' command sequences I needed (with perhaps some additional dressing to kick dchpclient), put them in 4 different scripts, and be done with it. And it'd probably work better, to boot.
  

• Printing
  2003-09-18 10:53:04  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Printing.
  
  Printers, drivers, queue managers and daemons. CUPS, LPRng, PPDs, ghostscrpt, everything to do with printing. It's so easy in Windows and Mac. Distributions try to make it easy, and do OK, until something breaks. Then I try to wade through all those layers. Please explain how it all works in great detail.

• KDE problems
  2003-09-18 01:43:24  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  What do you means re 2? If I want to drag and drop speedily, how can this be improved?

• Reminds me of Unix-Haters...
  2003-09-18 00:06:52  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  There used to be a book called something like The Unix-Hater's Handbook... although many of the complaints in there were unfounded, a lot of them still apply to Linux.
  
  I agree with those who say that most of the Linux annoyances are either deficiencies in the user's knowledge, problems with the user's expectations (it's not Windows so you shouldn't expect Windows behavior), or problems limited to certain distros. Though once those are subtracted, there are certainly annoyances remaining, with font installation/support topping my list.

• dot files
  2003-09-16 19:55:38  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  This is an application problem. There are too many dot files filling up home. A quick "ls -d .??*|wc" shows i've 97 files and directories that start with dot.
  Almost none of them were created manually. They were put there by applications. They should be in a subdirectory. My preference is .etc but the best way would be to use an environment variable. In some cases a .lib would also be appropriate.
  

  
  Then there are the things that should be dotted and aren't. Only files that you manage explicitly should be visible. Files and directories managed only by an application should have the option of being tucked out of the way. The Mail directory is a good example. Only rarely do you manage the files manually so they shouldn't be showing up in a normal ls. Fortunately most MUAs allow you to specify the path so i do but some MUAs insist it has to be $HOME/MAIL. Desktop is another. I don't want a Desktop directory so i configure the WMs to not use it and rm -rf the sucker but if i did want such a grab-bag i'd want it hidden.

• too many to list
  2003-09-16 16:44:51  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Some of my annoyances have already been discussed, but I'll list them here again anyway, for emphasis, and in no particular order:
  
  Inconsistent font support.
  
  Lack and inconsistent online documentation. All applications must as a minumum have a man page, that describes everything that the application can do, and all of its options. If you also want to included HTML documentation you can. All of the other online documentation applications are either an unworkable superset of man or a horible subset of HTML or impossible to find.
  
  Inconsistent cut and paste. Swipe with button 1 and past with button 2 is the standard. Oh by the way, click one to position cursor, double click to grab the current word, triple click to grab the whole line (including the newline) so when you paste it, you don't also have to hit return!
  
  Modal windows... It seems like a lot of GUI applications these days are written by MS writers. There is rarely a need to have a modal window, except for maybe an error window that MUST be acknowledged before continuing. But even most error windows don't have to be modal That way you can change to another window, to browse around, and maybe fix the problem right then, or cut and paste the correct solution from elsewhere... but with all the modal windows... you can't.
  
  Why does it take forever (>5 seconds) to repaint your X screen after the screensaver kicked in? (even on a 2 Ghz machine with 512M of RAM. My old 486/66 with 16Meg unblanked the screen much faster under OpenServer than Linux does today on a _much_ bigger machine. This makes Linux feel sluggish.
  
  On the support front, the biggest annoyance are companies that have Linux software done, and working but refuse to release it. ie. Intel Centrino wireless support, Lotus Notes, etc.
  
  
  

• too many to list
  2003-09-16 16:44:34  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Some of my annoyances have already been discussed, but I'll list them here again anyway, for emphasis, and in no particular order:
  
  Inconsistent font support.
  
  Lack and inconsistent online documentation. All applications must as a minumum have a man page, that describes everything that the application can do, and all of its options. If you also want to included HTML documentation you can. All of the other online documentation applications are either an unworkable superset of man or a horible subset of HTML or impossible to find.
  
  Inconsistent cut and paste. Swipe with button 1 and past with button 2 is the standard. Oh by the way, click one to position cursor, double click to grab the current word, triple click to grab the whole line (including the newline) so when you paste it, you don't also have to hit return!
  
  Modal windows... It seems like a lot of GUI applications these days are written by MS writers. There is rarely a need to have a modal window, except for maybe an error window that MUST be acknowledged before continuing. But even most error windows don't have to be modal That way you can change to another window, to browse around, and maybe fix the problem right then, or cut and paste the correct solution from elsewhere... but with all the modal windows... you can't.
  
  Why does it take forever (>5 seconds) to repaint your X screen after the screensaver kicked in? (even on a 2 Ghz machine with 512M of RAM. My old 486/66 with 16Meg unblanked the screen much faster under OpenServer than Linux does today on a _much_ bigger machine. This makes Linux feel sluggish.
  
  On the support front, the biggest annoyance are companies that have Linux software done, and working but refuse to release it. ie. Intel Centrino wireless support, Lotus Notes, etc.
  
  
  

• notepad
  2003-09-16 15:22:29  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  What a bout kedit? or gedit?

• Debian annoyances
  2003-09-16 14:44:23  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  And the packages that are present in a respository, but no physically there. About half a year ago, apt-get install gnome -or- kde was not possible, because not all packages of this metapackage were present in the respositories. The
  same applies today for openoffice.org. If you go to
  http://openoffice.debian.net/ and put a mirror into
  sources.list, then do apt-get update; apt-get
  install openoffice.org, you'll get a nice error
  message.
  

• Ok I'll bite
  2003-09-16 13:31:55  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Here's an annoyance: adding fonts to the system. Sorry, guys, but this is one that MS got right: drop a ttf file into the right directory and kablam! it is instantly available to all apps. Meanwhile we have to su to root, run ttmfdir, mkfdir and xset, and then find out that OOO needs to be set up up separately and that AbiWord doesn't see the new fonts at all, and that ... IIRC Mandrake has a frontend for all this, but if I also RC, it sort of worked when it felt like it.
  
  It's not enough to put me off Linux (I'm writing this on a Xandros box 98% upgraded to Debian testing), but it is an annoyance!
  

• No virus support in Linux
  2003-09-16 13:24:49  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have never been able to install the sobig or blaster virus.
  
  Seriously, there should be an easier way to install programs we want to install in Linux.
  Yes I use apt-get, synaptic, etc, but it's a pain to install most things, and a blessing that nothing "auto-installs"

• notepad
  2003-09-16 10:19:35  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Why can't Linux have programs like notepad and wordpad? Even the fastest basic editor I can find is much slower to load than notepad.
  
  Also, as an ex-windows user, I want something easy to load RTF files - without having to use the bigger & slower word processors.

• KDE problems
  2003-09-16 10:17:37  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Since KDE is probably the most common window manager (if not the most common, then at least the second most common <grin>), it should get these three issues right:
  
  1. very slow to refresh file list when you go to a folder with lots of files - windows is much faster
  
  2. when you move lots of files using Konqueror, it takes forever to move them, whereas "mv ..." would do it almost instantaneously. Poor!
  
  3. Every now and then I have to re-associate files with the right programs. XLS will open with gnumeric for a couple of weeks, and then suddenly start opening with OpenOffice. Same thing with AVI being opened by mplayer, then after a while it tries to use XMovie. Sigh.
  

• Documentation
  2003-09-16 09:19:07  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Now I'm a real beginner with Linux, so maybe this annoyance will lessen with time and knowledge. I'm well aware of the wealth of information available about Linux (or GNU/Linux, for the purists...) The problem/annoyance is the level at which so much of this information is pitched. i can't give chapter and verse, but a humorous example goes something like this:
  
  HOWTO for app XYZ-2.4.11
  
  1. Clear comprehensible first step.
  2. Clear comprehensible second step..
  3. Gee I'm getting somewhere...
  4. "Steps 4, 5 and six are trivial and not worth documenting since everyone knows and understands them...
  
  Except me? So...
  
  $ man XYZ
  $ extremely logical and carefully crafted gibberish incomprehensible to newbies....
  
  $ lynx http:// homepageforapp.org
  
  more very logical advice incomprehensible to newbie...
  
  Maybe I get lucky on a forum....but all this can be annoying....and maybe when I know more I can help by writing a simpler doc for the app in question. In the meantime.....AAARGH!
  
  

• Dependency hell is an outdated annoyance..
  2003-09-16 09:00:21  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  At least for Mandrake users.. Urpmi works much like apt-get for Debian, and figures out dependencies automatically, all you have to do is add sources.
  There are few "annoyances" in Linux because if something's annoying for no reason, it eventually gets FIXED. If it's annoying for a reason, it just means you need to learn something.
  

• error message that could drive you nuts
  2003-09-16 07:33:34  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  have a look at this session:
  
  # ls -l somefile
  somefile
  # chmod +x somefile
  # ./somefile
  ./somefile: Command not found.
  # what the %$&!?
  # file somefile
  somefile: perl script text
  
  what happened?
  
  # head -1 somefile
  #!/usr/local/bin/perl
  # ls /usr/local/bin/perl
  /usr/local/bin/perl: No such file or directory.
  # aha!
  # vi somefile
  fldwx
  # ./somefile
  Hello, world!
  
  

• Inconsistent terminology
  2003-09-16 07:14:40  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Use the same term to describe something, don't invent a new term. Multiple distributions aggravate this. I decided to try a new email client and during setup it asked for my mail address. I thought that was irrelevant and left it blank. The email client would not work and would not tell me why it could not connect to my ISP to get my email. After hours of searching and posting to mailing lists I thought I would enter my email address into the "mail address" box and it worked. When I complained to the mailing list about the poor terminology I was told I was the idiot for thinking "mailing address" referred to my street address rather than my email address. I have wasted hours solving problems that were simply terminology problems. RTFM complicates this far more than it helps.

• Just stick with debian and apt
  2003-09-16 00:46:33  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  You'll never regret it, and as long you are ok with 6 cds of packages you can forget every dependency problem.
  
  Let's say you want to install package xyz which requires libx liby and libz, well apt just fetches those, installs them, and then installs xyz.
  
  It'a as easy as to type: apt-get install xyz
  
  I know up2date offers similar services, but I prefer to use apt-for-rpm if i'm forced on a redhat system ...
  
  my 2cents

• The most serious problem with Linux Annoyances?
  2003-09-15 23:10:15  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  When you are annoyed with Microsoft or Apple products you're annoyed with how a big faceless company has implemented (or not) something. Something you will never in a million years be able to change. You are powerless.
  
  When you are annoyed with Linux, you are annoyed with your own inability to to fix it for yourself. Linux is yours, you truly have the power to change anything from top to bottom, ultimately you only have yourself to blame. Sure you can blame all these wonderful volunteers, but uh that seems a bit lame.
  

• How do you fix things?
  2003-09-15 18:45:47  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  When I have a problem, I only find nice utopian how-to's. No where can I find a mention of if there is a problem, how to fix, or a faq. I am having problems loading latest up2date. I follow instructs to download & rpm -Fvh. Doesn't load. I --force, nothing. What steps does one do when a rpm won't install? I guess they don't want to tell you since they make their living off of support.

• linux != UNIX
  2003-09-15 08:06:42  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  It's like UNIX but different...
  
  Linux developers seem to be like M$ developers, they've taken a good idea (in this case UNIX) and complicated it.
  
  Also the lunacy of trying to use wintel boxes in an enterprise setting. Not really a Linux annoyance per se, but it does perpetuate an outdated desktop architecture in a server environment. Even Macs sport openboot firmware.

• my annoyance
  2003-09-15 07:00:19  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have a UNIX (linux too) annoyance.
  When your user account are added to a group
  you have to logout/login to let it take effect.
  
  Anyone who knows a workaround for this?

• vim annoyances
  2003-09-12 18:22:49  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  The authors should have started a forum and not a mailing list, I doubt many people will bother to subscribe just to detail a few annoyances.
  
  in vim sometimes the backspace key will start to work like the delete key for no apparent reason, this is _HIGHLY_ annoying
  
  cut and paste - at least in kde there is the klipper - is there something similar for gnome?
  
  ie only web sites - solution? for the book, include a nice form letter that can be posted to web site admins requesting standards compliance.
  
  open office startup times - yawn
  
  rpm and keeping up2date - rpm hell, need fix - use up2date? propriety costs money, use apt4rpm - still a bit buggy and not 'official', solution? install debian
  
  media playing - its always a bitch, install xine, install crossover plugin install mplayer, install decss - need a default that just works for all codecs - solution? wait for helix player? xine mplayer?
  
  sendmail configuration and vulnerabilities - solution? exim!
  
  not enough native games! wheres the new loki?
  
  lack of colaboration amongst distros, why dont they colaborate more on things like installers and package management tools? mandrake has an nice installer, debians is shit, why dont debain use it? its gpl no?
  
  im sure i'll think of a few more!

• No sucks, no annoyances
  2003-09-12 17:07:24  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  
  Like "Learn Foo in 15 Minutes", or "Foo for Dummies", "Foo Annoyances" is a great title. Almost like "Foo Sucks". "Linux Sucks". It has a ring to it.
  
  Here is my short list:
  
  Hardware vendors that sell more hardware because new hardware never comes with drivers for older Windows, and newer drivers aren't created for old hardware. This creates business incentive to keep hardware interfaces secret, locking Linux out.
  
  Monitiring CERT waiting to hear that X is exploitable and I need to upgrade.
  
  Linux programmers who don't give a moments thought to portability. Linux isn't the only kid on the block, and like the Solaris/HPUX/AIX/etc wars, all of the Unix venders would collective be much stronger if they cooperatored rather than tried to lock people in and segment the market. Stop including stuff from /usr/include/linux/* if you don't really need to! It doesn't make it work better on Linux, it just makes it a pain to port to other things.
  
  Bloatware. Apache is bloatware. KDE is bloatware. BIND is bloatware. Giant executables aren't the Unix way. That make it hard to get under the hood of something and dink with it. Most dinking done on Unix is done without ever touching source code. Users quickly learn the ins and outs of things and get a feel for their inner psyche just because the plumming is exposed. If X had been designed today, it wouldn't have been client/server. X is argueably bloatware. All of the drawing arcs stuff turned out not to be needed in modern use, and are now legacy stuff. The only way to effectively deal with legacy baggage is not to bloat. Mozilla seems to get buggier in each new release, and the features added are things I don't want. Quality and simplicity have been more a definition of Unix than any other single.. things. This is being lost. More code means more bugs, more exploits. After being a novice for a while and playing with every new toy, people tend to settle in to a reasonable compliement. I use amiwm. Lot of people use fluxbox and the like. KDE itself is an annoyance if it is going to suck up RAM and crash.
  
  People who want you to join mailing lists. Half of the mailing lists I'm begged to join turn out to be dead. The others are off topic, save for a few, which are extremely high traffic. Okey, nothing to do with Linux. I've lost all sense of scope =)
  
  Lack of a standard light weight database. Datacenticism is a revolution. We're seeing database filesystems, logging to database, database this, database that. JET serves MS well. This is up there with cut and paste -- applications should be able to count on a little more of a standard base, otherwise they are free to choice whatever prerequesites they want and a system will wind up with the same idea implemented 40 ways. Poor standard base. Oft cited. Perl has this problem too.
  
  Security. More of an effort is made not to make mistakes, but nothing progressive is done. IBM Japan's excellent bounds checking patches are being adopted by OpenBSD. Logging is useless. A system should do the Tripwire thing by default. Replacing key utilities isn't something an operating system should just ignore. Secure hashes or something should stand in the way.
  
  -scott
  
  
  

• standard gui config file
  2003-09-12 11:47:41  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I use fluxbox with a mixture of KDE and GTK apps, openoffice, mozilla, the standard stuff. I have fluxbox and Gkrellm2 almost configured with a theme I like, but I want to get matching gtk and kde themes etc. Why do I have to configure 5-6 files to do this? Why can't I do one? Would it be too difficult for there to be a standard theme base or something?

• Copy/Paste
  2003-09-12 10:51:13  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  The most annoying problem I have with Linux is Copy/Paste. Copying something out of one application and then pasting it into another is like a dice game, you never really know if your numbers will come up and it will work or not. Then when it doesn't work you have to be creative to find a work around, maybe save as some file, edit the parts you want in a different editor and then maybe reload or copy from that new editor.
  
  The biggest culprits are OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, but most KDE applications I've tried seem to work okay with each other, and OpenOffice.org/Mozilla to/from a KDE app seems to work, but OpenOffice.org to/from Mozilla is up for grabs. A line or two seems to work fine, but for larger amounts it just doesn't work.

• Mailing list posting requires subscription
  2003-09-12 10:05:08  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I'm not interested in signing up for a mailing list just so I can send an annoyance and then unsubscribe from the list. I should be able to send to the list without subscribing because I'm not interested in discussion.
  
  Here's my annoyance. It's a standard Unix annoyance.
  
  Write a program called foo, which links to the bar library.
  
  Move the program to a system without the bar library and try to run it. You get a message like:
  
  foo: does not exist
  
  This means that the bar library does not exist. The foo program sure does exist.

• Bad idea!
  2003-09-12 09:58:04  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Moreover, Alex points out, if you do need a package for which no RPMs are available, try the following:
  
  Take the source RPM for a similar distribution or from a later version of the same distribution.
  
  Adjust any explicit dependencies in the .spec file.
  
  Rebuild the binary for your distribution.
  
  Step 2 is a really stupid thing to do. Whoever packaged the rpm put those dependencies in because the program won't work right without them. The correct sequence of steps is:
  
  1) Take the source RPM for a similar distribution or from a later version of the same distribution.
  
  2) rpm --rebuild <rpm.src>
  
  If this dosen't work upgrade your distribution. You're going to have to do it anyhow sooner or later.
  
  

• That darned cat...
  2003-09-12 09:48:42  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Many Linux Annoyances cease to be annoyances when you learn more about what's possible with the various Linux tools. For example, in your article you show us the following string of commands:
  
  $ cat install_cd_1.txt | grep libxml | less
  
  Since the grep command can take a filename as a parameter the cat is entirely superfluous, and the string can be rewritten as:
  
  $ grep libxml install_cd_1.txt | less
  
  So remember: if the cat's not doing anything, boot it out!
  
  --
  Garry Knight
  garryknight@gmx.net ICQ 126351135
  Linux registered user 182025
  

• scratch the itch
  2003-09-12 08:59:22  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I wonder if Oreilly misses the point of linux and open source. If something is annoying, it usually gets fixed. The only annoying things about linux are the things you can't fix...And what is that?

• scratch the itch
  2003-09-12 08:57:20  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  

• rpm annoyances (and others)
  2003-09-12 08:19:20  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I agree that rpm is annoying. That is the main reason that I switched to gentoo. Gentoo uses source code builds.
  So my rpm annoyance is now listening to people complain about rpm hell, but refusing to use a better alternative. As one consultant said, "you know, there's zero call for gentoo training."
  
  One annoyance that I have is java. But this is actually partly a windows annoyance. My browsers will not work on java sites, because the java sites are coded to work on windows. (at least that's as far as I can tell).
  
  Another annoyance is that manufacturers do not yet support linux. They don't provide accurate hardware specs, they don't provide software drivers, they only provide windows.
  
  So my annoyances (to sum up) are that linux is an underdog in a monopolystic market.

• RedHat Annoyances
  2003-09-12 07:48:53  avdi [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have to agree with previous posters - this is purely a RedHat annoyance (or, really, an annoyance with any RPM-based distro). I remember going through dependency hell back in my Mandrake days - a major part of why I switched to debian. I remember all to well hunting through RPM listings, desperately trying to find combinations which would work, always using --force because there was always some file which conflicted. I've never looked back. People aren't exagerating when they rave about dpkg and apt-get. Unlike RedHat or Mandrake, where only certain packages are packaged officially and the rest have to be hunted down across the internet, Debian's archives have practically every package known to man. And each one is packaged according to Debian policy - which means no file conflicts, no nonstandard file locations, almost no missing Man-pages, and sensible out-of-box configurations. Even for complex mixed stable/testing/unstable systems, judicious use of the /etc/apt/preferences file and a good tool like Aptitude make it easy to arrive at a working mix of packages from various archives and release levels.
  
  As an example of apt's power, when I started with Debian I was using the now-defunct Progeny variant. When I decided to go pure Debian, all I had to do was replace my sources.list lines with the official debian servers and run apt-get dist-upgrade. A few hours later I had a standard debian system, all progeny-specific packages replaced with their debian counterparts. All without breakage or signifigant downtime; all dependencies worked out automatically.

• dumb
  2003-09-12 04:27:28  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  you can rename your book 'redhat annoyance'
  
  rpm sux big time