What Are The Biggest Problems With Linux?

[sloggerKhan]

Also, too many papercut-type things like this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClipboardPersistence

[movieman]

Bloat is not a problem. Having a few hundred megabytes of libraries on a large HDD or SSD is really not so bad if it means you can run old and new programs.

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.

[vertexSymphony]

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.

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

[gamerk2]

Distributions choose to enable/disable those drivers and rarely run the default vanilla Linux kernel setting depending of the architecture. My point still stands about generalizing Linux as a whole because of variables like distributions. Would you build a kernel with x86_64 driver enabled on an ARM architecture?

I'm not talking about drivers here; I'm talking about changes to the root kernel that have the net effect of dropping HW support to many not-so-old hardware configurations. To me, this indicates the Kernel itself is held together with little more then duct tape and chewing gum.

That's simply not true, because it's a hybrid kernel like many other OSes. It rarely breaks things. If you upgrade your kernel in Windows, OS X, BSD it doesn't break anything? That's kind of bullshit you stop writing about. You should be grateful you can upgrade your kernel while you consider it's something wrong...

...Really? You don't update the Windows Kernel when you do a windows update; heck, even SP releases don't touch the kernel that much. Its the outside modules/drivers that receive updates. And even then, how many people over the years have had problems installing one Windows SP or another?

[movieman]

I'm not talking about drivers here; I'm talking about changes to the root kernel that have the net effect of dropping HW support to many not-so-old hardware configurations. To me, this indicates the Kernel itself is held together with little more then duct tape and chewing gum.

Uh, no. It tells you that Linux won't keep bolting bodges onto old APIs when they could just dump the whole thing and create something better. If no-one cares enough about supporting old hardware to fix the drivers, then it's clearly not important.

Did you claim that Windows was 'held together with duct tape and chewing gum' when many old XP drivers stopped working in Vista?

[gamerk2]

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.

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.

[/quote]
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.[/QUOTE]

Really? I find it quite an asset. Makes development easy. Granted, you occasionally run into that oddball programmer who thought using .COM within a .NET application was a good idea, but when used properly, programs going back to 3.1 can [and often do] run without issue.

That being said, as a Developer, I can't hope enough that Metro falls flat on its face; .NET was the best API MS ever put out, and I know a LOT of people who are not happy about another API being shoved down our throats [and even more furious that only Metro apps will be featured in the Windows store].

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. Combine that with a low market share [few potential customers], and the emergence of OSX as a viable secondary OS, and Linux simply gets forgotten by developers.

[kraftman]

BTW the list of Windows problems will be 10 times shorter. Because other than a few f*ck ups called registry, zero files system hierarchy and no clean state, Windows is more or less perfect - © it just works.

Registry, Service Packs messing with third party drivers, vb and .Net bloat, viruses, dos era flaws, one messed up DE, sound and graphic problems that cause BSoD sometimes, no repositories, no sources, messed up compatibility, less features and worse performance. It's a big mess and Linux just works while Windows just doesn't have any useful software to say it just works. Even if you install such software it can't be said it just works, because of mentioned problems and flaws. Viruses just works in Windows. That would be true.

[kraftman]

@garegin

kde is an unholy mess that gets in the way

Just shut up. It's gnome that gets into way. It's provable and it's a fact!

[kraftman]

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?

What a bullshit. You don't have to recompile the entire kernel, but I won't speak with idiots. Shut up.

[kraftman]

You're pretty much expressing the same thing, but in another different host ... I would expect some significant functionality of the kernel to be offloaded to userland and not the hybrid kernels reduced to only loadable-modules which is stated to alter the kernel image on the fly, but it doesn't change for example that practically all core drivers are still provided in ring 0 except for some cute piece of software (like FUSE, anyone using it for the entire FS? lol ).

But the fact is, that "Linux" (the OS, not the kernel) as it is is flexible enough to provide a edge-case scenario of a somewhat hybrid system ...

Yes, but it seems Linux should be called monolithic and modular kernel. However, it has advantages of different types of kernels as well.