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

[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...