What Are The Biggest Problems With Linux?

[plonoma]

Could you elaborate on that please?
I'm very curious to what you are talking about.

Let's take that extra libraries for compatibility would cost us a gigabyte.
How does it compares percentage wise?

I'm talking that it should be possible to do this, not that everybody is forced to do this.

If you don't want bloat, fine, then don't include lots of libraries in your distribution.
And be forced to make sure programs work with the included version.

[WorBlux]

Face it. Linux is not a commercial product...

No, it is a commercial product, look at all the embedded, server, and high-performance systems that it operates on every day. Big money, and they tend to pay to get what they want.

It is not a consumer product, not really cut for the unwashed masses. Certain things that it would need to be are lacking and just need cold hard cash. There are a lot of talented developers interested, it's just that the need to feed a family or pay the mortgage.

[fret]

The biggest problem with Linux is the people who have problems with Linux

Face it. Linux is not a commercial product. It was never meant to amass vast amount of money from clueless people as its sole purpose. Linux doesn't have to cater to the mass. There is no reason to.

It was created to scratch the itch that people had in the computing world. And they formed communities who had similar itches so they can scratch common itches together.

The biggest problem is the people who have problems with Linux. If they have an itch, don't complain about Linux. Form a community to solve the problem. Pay someone to solve the problem.

Linux is not a free handout for lazy people who expect hand holding in every step just like in commercial products. The "free" in Linux is "freedom", not "gratis". Freedom to tinker with it to solve problems. Then share the solution with others, so others can improve it and give the improvement back.

It has to come from the people. If people want freedom in software, work for it, but don't treat it as an entitlement.

The next biggest problems would be software patents and shady monopolistic practices that hinder innovation. But again, these are controlled by those who would like to amass revenues from lazy clueless people who don't care about true freedom.

So back to the biggest problem: The people who have problems with Linux and expect free solutions without contributing anything.

[plonoma]

Ubuntu's bug-reporting tool ("Apport") was first released in July 2006, which makes it about 3 years older than Fedora 11, and it has features that ABRT doesn't have (and vice versa). Until now it did only semi-automatic reporting, and because of that it was disabled in final releases, but fully automatic reporting (in a way that tries to avoid user interaction & useless network traffic whenever possible) is being worked on.

Porting all the current bug report stuff in Ubuntu to work on top of ABRT probably doesn't make sense, and I bet it would also be a lot more work.

Very interesting!!
Hopefully this will help identifying driver problems and fixing them.
Could be a real boom for Linux driver development!

[plonoma]

LOL.

You do realise that 90+% of Linux systems are not hulking desktops with terabytes of disk space? In fact, 90% of that 90% probably have less than 'a few hundred megabytes' of storage in total.

Stable APIs are one of the the reasons why Windows is such a nightmare. I can only presume that Microsoft are pushing people to cripple Linux by imposing the same nonsense on it.

Could you elaborate on that please?
I'm very curious to what you are talking about.

[mememe]

Linux is nowhere near a Microkernel, NT quit being one after 3.51, Mac OS X with XNU was never a microkernel to begin with since the MACH version it was based on was never a mk. There really is no such thing as a hybrid kernel, it just marketing speak.

I agree with you, except that from a purist point of view NT has NEVER been a microkernel. There are no microkernels under end user operating systems, though that says a lot more about microkernels than about the operating systems that don't use them. It is important to notice that consumers don't really care about that extra bit of stability and security when it takes a few tenths of a second for a button to react to a mouse click.

Of course compiling every single bit of kernel functionality into a single blob is awful, but all three operating systems have very decent modularisation.

[Rallos Zek]

Linux, like NT and Darwin, is a hybrid kernel. That's why you have the option to modularise a lot of Linux when you build it from source.

Linux is nowhere near a Microkernel, NT quit being one after 3.51, Mac OS X with XNU was never a microkernel to begin with since the MACH version it was based on was never a mk. There really is no such thing as a hybrid kernel, it just marketing speak.

[madjr]

On the future of Graphics Drivers:

http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/on-the-future-of-graphics-drivers/

[WorBlux]

API's/ABI's are the set of defined interfaces!!
A good programming practice is to separate interfaces and internal workings of components.

That's a red hearing.

Drivers for most purposes are part of the internal workings. Most application you run don't attempt to poke hardware directly. (some exception mentioned earlier)

If some subsystem of the kernel changes, it's useful to be able to change how all the other parts including drivers talk to it. If you constrain your driver to a single permanent set of interfaces, you end up needing a new layer that knows how to translate the old calls into the new calls. You've then added a layer of abstraction which doesn't actually make the codebase easier to understand, modify, share, or re-use.

A benefit of a set driver ABI is not a better program as a whole (in fact it makes fixing bugs harder and improvements proceed more slowly.), the benefit is that you don't have to track changes to the code to keep you own little driver module working. A decision was made not to sacrifice code quality primarily for the benefit of those who refused to play nice for whatever reason.

Good programming practices, are in the truest sense are practices which produce good programs. Programs are different and what makes one program good, may make another poor.

[crazycheese]

BTW, here is mine suggestion, and it has nothing to do with Linux...

Make possible to edit ODF files under Android. There is no such editor now, and those that exist edit docx ...