What Are The Biggest Problems With Linux?

[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.

[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.

[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 ...

[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.

[Qaridarium]

biggest problem is Closed Source and microsoft monopoly and here is the prove:


Problem caused by Closed Source in this case because of microsoft monopoly:- Many Linux hardware driver issues.
Problem caused by Closed Source:- Regressions happen far too often in different software stacks.
Problem caused by Closed Source:- Too much bloat.
Problem caused by Closed Source/binary only software: - Linux needs reduced complexity of various distributions and software stacks. (P) "I don't understand why for example archlinux already installs three different ciphering libraries, libssl, libgcrypt and another one I forgot if you don't even install a user interface. Of course they don't exactly do the same, but it should be possible to reduce code which was implemented two times (f.e. the des algorithms) and install only one library..."
Problem caused by Closed Source and microsoft monopoly :- Lack of commercialization and standardization. (P)
Problem caused by Closed Source:- No stable driver APIs between Linux kernel releases. (P)
Problem caused by Closed Source in this case because of microsoft monopoly :- Desktop environment problems. "The desktops suck. kde is an unholy mess that gets in the way. gnome is too watered down. unity is like a fugly version of gnome." (P)

[madjr]

On the future of Graphics Drivers:

http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2012/...phics-drivers/

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!