What Are The Biggest Problems With Linux?

[movieman]

Then, as many users here have pointed out: Compile you own kernel with those unneeded features removed; Linux gives you that right. But "code bloat" is NOT a valid excuse to cut down the functionality of the baseline kernel itself.

Why should 90% of Linux devices have to waste a lot of time cutting out bloat because a few percent want it?

Really? I find it quite an asset. Makes development easy.

Of course it does. It pushes your maintenance costs off onto the OS developers, who have to maintain crusty old crap forever.

Which is why Windows is so full of bloat, security holes and bugs. Microsoft even have to support old, undocumented bugs because SuperWizzoWriter 2000 crashes if they fix them.

Yet we still target Windows. Why? Because we can make money on it. When you look at the time needed to move out application on to linux, test it against all the major distributions, offer long term product support, you often find that its impossible to turn any significant profit.

I think you miss the point.

Most Linux users don't care, and most Linux developers are building custom systems for Linux. We don't need to support crusty old APIs because we don't care that you don't want to invest any time in maintenance work to deal with API changes.

There are only two non-game, non-free applications I run on my Linux box and one of them has a Linux port; I prefer running the Windows version in Wine because I don't trust random software installers with root permission.

[JanC]

simplification of the GPL and official translations of the GPL in different languages.

The GPL already is one of the simplest software licenses around (especially compared with most closed source software licenses?obviously licenses like BSD, MIT and WTFPL are even simpler).

BTW: the only open source (software) license I know that is officially available in multiple languages is the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), which is available in the 22 official languages of the EU.

[JanC]

* Support for Apple's RTFD document format. An RTFD is mostly just a directory containing an RTF file, along with some image files if the document includes pictures. Many OS X apps save documents in this format, and it would be nice if LibreOffice (for example) could work with them as is. Yes, you can open the RTF and import the image files, but the result is something very unlike the way the document appears on OS X.

Seems like "RTFD" is an old OpenStep proprietary format, and you should be able to open it with GnuStep-based applications like textedit.app, which is probably available on all the main linux distro's (certainly is in Debian & Ubuntu).

Support for it in LibO would be nice of course.

[crazycheese]

Linux is a monolithic kernel and just cause it has modules doesn't make it hybrid or a micro-kernel.
+ stuff

Don't trust wikipedia.

Kernel modules are actually lighter forms of modules that make true microkernel. Linux has much lighter inter-process communication, hence no "server" parts and gets advantages in speed and lower complexity. These advantages however, theoretically, end when kernel grows large enough to maintain, so it just NEEDS to be fragmented in smaller pieces.

This is how I understand it, and it is not thing of "worse"/"better", but more thing of "worse IF USED IN" / "better IF USED IN". Kernel developers seems to be ok with current stand of things, so why bother.

[crazycheese]

Yet we still target Windows. Why? Because we can make money on it.

Wrong. You target it because you are cowards. You don't like taking risks.

On hardware, microsoft makes sure drivers are developed exclusively for them. For companies that can get away from that, they (ms) demand at least that release clock is syncronised with windows driver releases - which would guarantee that driver is never more outdated for windows than for any other OS.

On software, microsoft makes sure you not only use only its proprietary technologies, but you improve it for them for free (you mentioned crappy .net, good example of good bullsh!t; also directx).

On user / selling side, microsoft has long history of addiction (where is my start button?) and also Windows is preinstalled on 95% machines via secret agreements with OEMs. Install only windows and get ~70% discount, since everyone does that those who denies have their preconfigured systems at much higher prices solely due to MS software and risk going bankrupt.

You have triangle here. Whoever controls 2 sides of this triangle, controls the third side and makes the monopoly run.

So you run in squirrel cages, microsoft has set up. True developers always take risks, however. They try new things, they never lock up the path and they appreciate independence aka neutrality.

[linux5850]

Here is what a monolithic kernel is

Linux is a monolithic kernel and just cause it has modules doesn't make it hybrid or a micro-kernel.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel:

Linux is a monolithic kernel. Device drivers and kernel extensions run in kernel space (ring 0 in many CPU architectures), with full access to the hardware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_kernel

[Compholio]

...
#2 Windows software compatibility, or in other words WINE. Despite what many people wanna believe about having native Linux software, Windows has been around for a long time and has a lot of software that Linux may never get. WINE compatibility and speed has to be tolerable enough for joe six pack to use. It's the bridge that will bring end users and with them developers.
...

Could you please provide some constructive criticism? I'm responsible for a number of patches for Wine to get programs running, I'd be interested to hear what you'd like to see changed.

[crazycheese]

Linux is a monolithic kernel and that's it!
Guess why when you need a printer driver that the Kernel doesn't have support for you have to compile the entire kernel?

It is only monolithic in terms of internal infrastructure integration. Mechanisms exist that allow to modularize and condition-load almost everything, but it does not really follow the idea to have overgrown IPC that allows you to load older generation drivers on newer kernel and such stuff. Genode is after this.

Btw, printer driver example is very wrong. You should have installed printer at least once before you claim something like that.

BBtw, maybe you should learn linux better... before trying to improve it? Just suggesting.

Stable KBI will never happen ... out of the politically correct technical argument, you have the political influence on it (Yes, it's about out-of-tree modules). pretty much the same applies to ABI

Check what Genode does.

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.

I think you have very unstable argumentation here, as if claiming "most crows are black" means "all crows are black".
Common desktop Linux machines nowadays have 2-16 GiB of RAM and at least 400GiB harddrives, big majority being multicore.
The correct answer would be "depends on specific linux application segment"

Also, good stable kernel ABI is actually practical. But has seen little use, since that would mean all increase in maintenance cost. But this is actually arguable, as even within current kernel there are low quality drivers, unstable drivers etc.

[JanC]

No need to look further. Fedora, one of largest Linux distributions, since its 11th release does have a similar Windows 7 method called ABRT (Automatic Bug Reporting Tool). Documentation is available in plain sight. I am amazed Canonical did not adopt that feature for their Ubuntu releases.

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.

[VinzC]

Get over it people, what's with all this mind limitation. Every simple user should be a geek in order to use Linux and learn of the roots of it? Really? What's the point? There is no need in that stupid nonsense. If you like to learn of the roots it doesn't mean that all should do like you...
I see A Lot of "Selfish" in here(in almost all the posts I mean). "I want a user to learn all about the roots. Oh, that grandpa should not use the internet on Linux, he has first to read the assembly code if it's there!", "I want all the distributions to use old, crappy technology cause I am so nostalgic", "I want Linux to not evolve cause I love the terminal and ugly and featureless stuff", "I don't give a sh** about programmers, I want all the distributions to use GTK and 1 standard for everything even if that standard is faulty by design for the current hardware and ecosystem and needs a replacement".

I'm sorry to inform you that you have totally missed my points. You should read my posts again for it's definitely not about wanting GNU/Linux **not** to evolve rather than making false technical choices and having GNU/Linux evolve in the **wrong** direction.