My likes and dislikes of linux

[JoeyJoeJo]

You know what I hate about linux. Maybe it's not linux, but xmms or arts or esd or alsa or something, but I'll be using xmms and all of a sudden I get the dumb "Make sure your sound card is configured" error. I'll play the next song without doing anything and it works. Grrr... it "angries up the blood" to quote abe simpson.

Also, I hate how when I went today to reinstall quake 3 from the loki disc with linux binaries it didn't work. I couldn't get it to find my Nvidia geforce. Stupid thing. Grrr, it makes me mad!

I hate how stupid hardware venders (I'm looking at you, VIA and Broadcom just to name 2) don't supprt linux.I know VIA has some linux support, but you have to run a certain distro with a certain kernel, then you can use their binary only drivers.

But for my dislikes, I have my likes. Mainly the stability I get. I mean heck, windows xp doesn't crash that much on me, but if I do something it doesn't like, it will just sit there and hang for 3-5 minutes until it gets itself straightend out. Also the whole virus thing. When I tell people about linux, I always say something like, "you know with your anti-virus you're protected against 60000+ viruses. Linux has none that can cause real damage if the computer is run correctly." BTW, I got the 60000+ figure from Norton antivirus, which lists all of the viruses it protects against.

Oh, and the whole open source thing itsn't that bad either. If you've read this far, thanks for listening to my rant!

[duncanbojangles]

I have some likes, too.

I like being in control of everything. And I mean it when I say it, I'm not just repeating some overused phrase the zealots constantly spew. I like being able to kill a misbehaving process, add or remove processes and daemons that get started when my computer boots, and fixing something if it goes haywire. I like choosing the components, such as ALSA / OSS, gcc versions, KDE / GNOME / *box / all the others, and everything else.

But now that I've been using it exclusively for over a year now, it boils down to one thing. The development enviroment. I'm a coder down to the core of my being, so I like to code. A lot. Linux let's you do that easily. No horrible Windows or DirectX api's, flat memory model (for assembly) and the sheer number of compilers, languages, shells, etc. available to Linux. Even the vast amount of editors is refreshing. Go linux, for being a programmer's dream come true.

[gehidore]

Re-Opened, sorry little trigger happy today. :(

[mmills]

my dad got a virus using norton, could not remove the virus, he did what the tech support site said to do, so nothing worked he called there PAID tech support, still didnt work, then they tried to sell theme there newest ver, needless to say he had to format and loose his company data............ they tried to charge him 160.00 for nothing.

NORTON you SUCK!

BILL you do TO!

[hard candy]

This reminds me of the time Bon Bon had two mules. One was an east mule and one was a west mule. The east mule would only plow towards the east. If you tried to plow west you'd end up with big U-shaped furrows where that stubborn mule tried to turn back to the east. The west mule was just the opposite. Now if you teamed them together you'd end up with straight furrows going both ways. And if you had to plow to the north or the south neither mule would really work since they wanted to go east or west. If you needed a mule and Bon Bon didn't like you, he'd only lend you one mule, so there were some folks with real crooked rows of corn. Those mules eventually got old and passed away, we even had to bury them pointing in opposite directions. We didn't want no mule spirits coming out of the ground to haunt us.
Bon Bon named those mules Linux and Windows. I don't know why- I guess he figured OS's could be as stubborn as mules when you tried to make them behave the same. And if you team Linux and Windows together, you'll get straight furrows. It took Bon Bon a while to figure out which mule worked best in which field, he did have some awful crooked rows for a while.
After Bon Bon lost the mules, he bought some coonhounds that would only hunt north-south. For a while, we had plenty of coons to the east and to the west of us, but none to the north or south.

[Icarus]

Originally posted by gehidore
Re-Opened, sorry little trigger happy today. :( Closing a MS bashing thread is not a bad thing ;)

As for my likes...
emerge
command line...the only way to use an OS
More desktop GUIs then you can find, choice is
good anyone that says too many choices generally has issues making up their own mind
long walks at a beach on a warm summer night
Detailed system logs, never again I get an error that only says "General Protection Fault in 0x020042022"
ssh
That cute little penguin!
Apache, PHP and MySQL...they were MADE for each other!

[infiniphunk]

1.I really like apt-get. I showed this to my girlfriend and she thought it was amazing too.
2.Choices. GPL. Free software, in the sense that you don't need to feel guilty to use it.(Using windows software, you always have to agree to some long prohibitive EULA; wether one actually reads the EULA or not is another matter)
3.Stability.
4.Customizability.
5.Power. Linux still outperforms windowsXP(on my box, anyway) hands-down.

The only thing that still bugs me a bit about linux is that often documentation could be a bit better. Many man pages are still quite cryptic to a new user. Many README's and manuals seem to assume the user already knows a lot about GNU/linux.
Otherwise, linux rulz!!!

[arioch]

Likes:

Power
control
speed
no compromised ownership

Dislikes:

lack of standards. Locations of files belonging to installed applications vary vastly from one distro to another. I consider that highly annoying. LSB is badly needed. It is possible to standardise the basesystem to ease installation tasks, without making all distro's the same.

In that way, Linux suffers from a "recklessness" that is potentially highly damaging to it's broad adoption. I don't want to be schooled in a single distro. I would rather just have a set of Linux filesystem fundamentals, and have them generally apply across distro's.

[psi42]

Likes:

Stability (my internal server was up for 68 days with no problems, and I only had to reboot it because of a major hardware change (a 14GB RAID0 array to a single 40GB disk, which went absolutely smoothly).

Modularity:
I can pop out my harddrive and put it in another computer (of the same architecture), and in most cases need only change a few modules and config files and be working right away. Try that with windows.

The GPL.

Helpful error messages, like

Oct 20 09:25:34 nevrast kernel: drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: on fire
Oct 20 09:25:49 nevrast kernel: drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: ok


I was working with a win9x box today, and guess what error message I got. Something rougly (paraphrased) analogous to:

Some of your devices are using 32 bit drivers, and some others are using 16 bit drivers.
You can't change this, unless you change the configuration of the parent device.
This configuration is not supported, so all the 32 bit drivers will now no longer work.
Maybe you can fix this by installing new drivers.


It didn't even mention what device was having the problem...



Dislikes:
Bloat issues: Why is bash so slow on my 486 laptop? I press <tab> and sometimes have to wait 25 seconds for completion. Windows-95 will run on this machine much faster (although I can't really get much accomplished with it).
WHY are GNOME and KDE so bloated? If I didn't know better, I'd think the developers only bothered to test out this stuff on dual 3ghz boxes. 3 seconds to open a terminal is NOT acceptable.

:)
~psi42

[bosox79]

things I like about Linux

choice of what is installed on my system and what is not
the Linux community
stability
the fact that it runs will on older hardware
the fact that nothing is hidden from the admin
configurability from the kernel up
and many others


Things I dislike

The fact that hardware vendors don't write drivers for or open source there drivers so their hardware works will with Linux.

but not much else :D

[Dark Ninja]

In that way, Linux suffers from a "recklessness" that is potentially highly damaging to it's broad adoption. I don't want to be schooled in a single distro. I would rather just have a set of Linux filesystem fundamentals, and have them generally apply across distro's.
I have to agree with this. A lot of times, I am very hesitent to help people with other versions of Linux because, many times, I really don't know where the important files are called.


Also, yeah, KDE and Gnome are slow -- this is why you use *box or some other WM on a very slow system (like the one you are running).

[psi42]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja
Also, yeah, KDE and Gnome are slow -- this is why you use *box or some other WM on a very slow system (like the one you are running).

Yeah.... I use fluxbox, for many reasons other than speed. But KDE and GNOME are claiming to be "desktop" linux, and most "desktops" are < 1.0 ghz...

[mengle]

Originally posted by psi42
Yeah.... I use fluxbox, for many reasons other than speed. But KDE and GNOME are claiming to be "desktop" linux, and most "desktops" are < 1.0 ghz...

My powerhouse (lol) is a PIII and KDE runs fine on it. Maybe a little slow but significatnly faster than XP would run on it. Granted fluxbox runs much, much faster but I still like KDE.

[Loki3]

Things I like about Linux:


Stable
Flexable
Portable
Portage & Apt-get
A Real Command Line
A Real Filesystem
A Real Development Enviroment
Real Errors
Choice of GUIs
LAMP
Pretty Secure by Default
Community
Active Development (as in bugs get patched, within days)
Open Source
Free or Inexspendsive


Things I don't like about Linux(although not all of these problems can be blamed on Linux):


Lack of Hardware Drivers
Supermount and Totem
Printing
Getting nice fonts
Portage hickups
Lack of Standardized Directory Tree
The fact I'm too stupid to use/understand Linux

[gehidore]

Originally posted by Icarus
As for my likes...
emerge
command line...the only way to use an OS
More desktop GUIs then you can find, choice is
good anyone that says too many choices generally has issues making up their own mind
long walks at a beach on a warm summer night
Detailed system logs, never again I get an error that only says "General Protection Fault in 0x020042022"
ssh
That cute little penguin!
Apache, PHP and MySQL...they were MADE for each other!

Hmm, I think I like that...

[Parcival]

Originally posted by Loki3

Things I don't like about Linux(although not all of these problems can be blamed on Linux):


The fact I'm too stupid to use/understand Linux


Amen to this one, man. I haven't managed to have my Palm sync with KPilot yet, I still haven't put any effort into networking my box, and since my last "emerge world" most of my games suddenly don't produce any sound anymore after it worked flawlessly for three months. Oh, and the six months before these three various games didn't have any sound either. I have no clue what portage is really doing with my game sounds/music. :)

[Loki3]

I hear ya, my brains got about a total of three switches in it. Food, Sleep, & Sex. It just can't handle the complexity of simple task such as tieing my shoes or running two subnets on differenet interfaces. Sorry just wasn't built that way.

I always get the feeling I'm dumbest guy at the LUG meetings. I think my history of concussions has something to do with that.

[hariseldon99]

Mandrake 10.0

Likes:


Open Source nature

HUGE volume of free software (if it can be done, somebody somewhere is doing it)

2.6 kernel xconfig is quicker & easier, & compiling is easier


Love KDE (love dcop, kicker, kde apps)

Multimedia support (vlc, mplayer, xmms)

Security (iptables, portsentry, hostsentry, psad, snort, not have 2 worry abt viruses or spyware or all that crap)

No microsoft/Gates/antitrust/vendor lockin/EULA's/$$$

rpms and urpmi for auomatic dependency tracking and downloading

Nice perl GUI's for system admin (+ webmin, also in perl)

better driver for my scsi card (faster HDD)

perfect USB support for mass storage & printers & webcams

powerful logging/monitoring thru syslog daemon

evolution email client

audacity for audio editing

mp3 & dvd ripping using lame & mencoder

OpenOffice

Familiar linux works in my PDA, I have linux in my pocket


Bidwatcher for ebay


gkrellm for monitoring


superkaramba


Everybody helps out in forums and IRC and LUG's whenever I'm in difficulty


lots of other reasons....









Dislikes of linux:


Still often painful to configure individual applications (particularly when security is concerned) unless defaults set in the files when in rpm packages works or if there is a nice GUI.


unresolvable rpm dependency problems/conflicts (getting less common with newer verisions, though)


Firewire & NTFS write support still spotty


No native drivers for 802.11G wireless cards (used ndiswrapper, crashed after a while & module won't load after that). This is not Linux's fault, of course. Those bloody chipset builders are too chicken to hand out their specifications so developers have to build drivers the hard way.

Gaming technology is still backdated in Linux (though people run win games using wine, but that's too slow)


Haven't found out a good backup/restore strategy/software that works properly


Cross-application portability of data is not perfect (though very good in KDE)


Sometimes (rarely), my SCSI HDD just shuts down 7 automatically restarts. In windows, when this happens, it freezes for a while and the OS starts to work again. In linux everything hangs and can't access HDD even after it starts spinning up. Have to hard reset and then start. Journal recovery is ok, though Also have to boot to knoppix & e2fsck HDD to see if this created bad blocks)


People make fun of me for not using windoze.

edited by moderator for content