Frustrated with Linux, can it really be this user un-friendly?
- Thread starter Ben Cole
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Soldato
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I started out using linux in 2005. Took me a year on and off to get a working distro. I started on opensuse and got it working after like 6 attempts over 2005. My main problem was that I had a dodgy mainboard, which wasnt supported "out-of-the-box" at all in linux. So I learnt terminal commands quickly 
Thats why it took me a lot of time to get working.
I upgraded my system in 2006 and made sure i selected mainboard/soundcard/G-card that would be good for games and work "out-of-the-box" without any terminal bashing. I tried Ubuntu on this system and I didnt have to fiddle with the terminal once.
So, if ** a beginner like me best bet is to accept that it WILL NOT work 1st time and will require many re-formats causing much anger, tears and general grumpyness.
If you biulding a system specifically for a linux distro make damn sure you can find guides to install all ** hardware correctly. If you cant find a laptop/G-Card/mainboard that is widely supported under your chosen distro find one that is.
Thats how I made my Ubuntu transition easier. I still use windows and have a hacintosh partition. Now thats real fun - MAC OSX on intel pc. No drivers at all just hacked up fixes, but I must say it works faster than windows xp/Vista by miles.
Thats why it took me a lot of time to get working.I upgraded my system in 2006 and made sure i selected mainboard/soundcard/G-card that would be good for games and work "out-of-the-box" without any terminal bashing. I tried Ubuntu on this system and I didnt have to fiddle with the terminal once.
So, if ** a beginner like me best bet is to accept that it WILL NOT work 1st time and will require many re-formats causing much anger, tears and general grumpyness.
If you biulding a system specifically for a linux distro make damn sure you can find guides to install all ** hardware correctly. If you cant find a laptop/G-Card/mainboard that is widely supported under your chosen distro find one that is.
Thats how I made my Ubuntu transition easier. I still use windows and have a hacintosh partition. Now thats real fun - MAC OSX on intel pc. No drivers at all just hacked up fixes, but I must say it works faster than windows xp/Vista by miles.
Five button mouse is easy.
Google: evdev mouse
Don't have an M-Audio soundcard and have no use for spdif.... so can't help with that!
I have tried Linux and to be honest it is pretty easy to get up and running, saying that I have pretty much up to date hardware so I think I benefit from that.
I think the publics perception of Linux doesn't do it any favours, it is considered to be un user friendly and a little bit geeky.
Also another area where Linux seems to damage itself in my opinion is the fact that there are so many versions / distros. Now I appreciate that there are different versions of windows but I think most here would agree that the average member of the public would be far happier choosing a version of Windows than Linux.
A big nail in the coffin for Linux is games, yes there is Wine and the like but why go through all that hassle when you can just pop the CD in the Windows machine and bang your away.
I think that Ubuntu is helping the Linux cause, to what extent this will grow the use of Linux I'm not sure.
I think the publics perception of Linux doesn't do it any favours, it is considered to be un user friendly and a little bit geeky.
Also another area where Linux seems to damage itself in my opinion is the fact that there are so many versions / distros. Now I appreciate that there are different versions of windows but I think most here would agree that the average member of the public would be far happier choosing a version of Windows than Linux.
A big nail in the coffin for Linux is games, yes there is Wine and the like but why go through all that hassle when you can just pop the CD in the Windows machine and bang your away.
I think that Ubuntu is helping the Linux cause, to what extent this will grow the use of Linux I'm not sure.
I'm looking forward to hearing your arguments as to why I shouldn't be using Linux either at home or in the office
Personal view here, but I simply can't use a machine properly without a decent terminal.
You may want to click a simple button and have everything work, but I've always found it far easier to troubleshoot things from a terminal and set of log files. Windows especially annoys me in this regard, as it simply doesn't allow acccess to any of the more useful bits and peices, and if things break majorly things usually end in a reinstall. Linux on the other hand, all I need is my standard rescue disk, mount the partitions and fix things up.
Only reason Linux isn't on my main box 24/7 is the lack of a decent media management application. There's nothing yet that'll allow me to build a totally custom library structure encompassing data, video (With thumbs), audio and other bits and peices. The laptop runs Linux exclusively, as does the server, and both have been like that for well over 5 years.
The terminal is an incredibly powerful tool, and if you learn how to use it properly things become far better than trying to repair things through a GUI.
-Leezer-
You may want to click a simple button and have everything work, but I've always found it far easier to troubleshoot things from a terminal and set of log files. Windows especially annoys me in this regard, as it simply doesn't allow acccess to any of the more useful bits and peices, and if things break majorly things usually end in a reinstall. Linux on the other hand, all I need is my standard rescue disk, mount the partitions and fix things up.
Only reason Linux isn't on my main box 24/7 is the lack of a decent media management application. There's nothing yet that'll allow me to build a totally custom library structure encompassing data, video (With thumbs), audio and other bits and peices. The laptop runs Linux exclusively, as does the server, and both have been like that for well over 5 years.
The terminal is an incredibly powerful tool, and if you learn how to use it properly things become far better than trying to repair things through a GUI.
-Leezer-
Soldato
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I would like to use Linux entirely, I have a server running it, but can't put it on my main desktop for a number of reasons. Like Leezer, I agree the terminal is much more useful in finding out why something has gone wrong. Or just generally editing some settings. My main grumble at the moment is the lack of support for my phone to connect and G15 tools are still primitive.
Nowhere near close
I use nearly 20 custom defined library fields over any of the standard bits, for both video and audio.
Second, no real video support. Yes it'll import and play them, but there's no facility for thumbnail browsing.
Majorly custom viewschemes are also out the window there- I use a separate view for pretty much each genre.
FWIW, I use J.River Media Centre ( http://www.jrmediacenter.com )- Play with the custom fields in that to give you an idea of just how tinkered my library has evolved to over about a 4 year period.
-Leezer-
I'm looking forward to hearing your arguments as to why I shouldn't be using Linux either at home or in the office
Likewise
I use Ubuntu as a home desktop and rarely if ever touch XP now. (Admittedly I'm not a gamer, which tbh is the only reason I can think of for keeping windows)
Soldato
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Likewise
I use Ubuntu as a home desktop and rarely if ever touch XP now. (Admittedly I'm not a gamer, which tbh is the only reason I can think of for keeping windows)
Agreed
I'm not sure what experience you have with Microsoft products but they are more flexible than you think. Yes Microsoft products are probably not as breakable and fixable as Linux (my Linux experience isn't as strong as my MS). Microsoft have great support with a centralised and reliable support site which is always good.
Looking at forums on ones experience can be scary with Linux if you don't know what you’re doing. Which brings us back to the break it and fix it issue.
I can't wait for the next five years for Linux. Ubuntu is certainly leading the way and brinking Linux to the home. Apple are also working hard and are chipping away a little at the MS home desktop.
That's driver support for you. Because Linux is free hardware manufacturers aren't making the Linux compatible drivers for the hardware.
Again that's driver support.
Unfortunately, Linux isn't Windows as it doesn't "just work" Linux is based on a different code to Windows therefore it will be different to Windows!
I think the only way to escape Bill Gates' monopoly is to dive into Linux with some background knowledge of basic Terminal commands and know how to manipulate these commands.
You might be better to try various Live CDs for now.
I'm not sure what experience you have with Microsoft products but they are more flexible than you think. Yes Microsoft products are probably not as breakable and fixable as Linux (my Linux experience isn't as strong as my MS). Microsoft have great support with a centralised and reliable support site which is always good.
Looking at forums on ones experience can be scary with Linux if you don't know what you’re doing. Which brings us back to the break it and fix it issue.
I can't wait for the next five years for Linux. Ubuntu is certainly leading the way and brinking Linux to the home. Apple are also working hard and are chipping away a little at the MS home desktop.
Plenty of experience with MS products, thanks
Delete the wrong set of things, and you'll end up with a re-install on your hands. There's no real way to fix Windows if the whole system is broken to the point of unbootability- With Linux, its possible to load a rescue system from a CD etc. and completely rebuild the system from the ground up.
Windows also relys far too heavily on the registry. I'm not saying that its not a good idea, but this centralised storage of just about anything to do with the system is again something that necessitates a reinstall when things go pear shaped.
I've been using Linux since 1997 on a near daily basis, and MS stuff since the days of DOS 6. No formal sysadmin experience, but I run a personal network of 7 machines, plus related support bits & pieces including a server (File, webdev, downloads etc)
Tell me for instance how I can build a completely custom menu system without resorting to third party apps, or one incredibly simple problem- There's no way to mount network drives in a folder, they have to have a drive letter.
Another example- Windows had no concept of properly restricted user accounts until Vista (Admittedly not 100% MS's fault, too many people designing the simplest of apps to need admin priveledges), and even then they horribly messed things up with the abomination that is UAC.
Windows simply doesn't cut the mustard where I'm concerned.
Just to get my desktop to what I consider to be a usable state, I need 4 third party apps. (ObjectBar- Menu bar replacement, ObjectDock- Runs three different docks across my two monitors, Ultramon- Makes multiple monitors work halfway decently, Firefox & 13 extensions- Self explanatory!)
-Leezer-
Soldato
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In my experience, (I have been using Linux since the mid-90's and am LPIC certified through work (I support both Linux and commercial Unixes for a living)), I find that driver support on Linux has improved enormously in the last few years. It did used to be the case that you would have to jump through all sorts of hoops, like rebuilding kernels etc, in order to get the most relatively standard bits of hardware to work properly ... even having to run a few commands in a terminal now is a vast improvement and having compiled KDE from source when it first came out I can say that the modern methods of installing applications through things like apt-get are a great improvement!
You do still have cases where you are doing something out of the ordinary or you have hardware which is not supported, probably due to specs not being released for it, where more work is required. Laptops tend to be edge cases where non-standard hardware can be difficult to get working ... if I wanted to put Linux on a laptop I would be investigating it a lot first to make sure that the one I bought would be compatible. A couple of examples recent issues ...
- this week my home Linux server ate its OS for some reason, (I suspect a kernel patch update failed which ended up corrupting the / filesystem). Hence I had to reinstall the OS and ended up fighting with it for quite some time to get a working GRUB configuration, (due to the installer getting confused due to the number of disks in the system and that I am booting off the PATA port on a Gigabyte P35 chipset board with a pile of SATA drives also in the system and it was using the wrong (hd#,#) in the configuration files) ... but it was fixable and most importantly my linux software raid array was imported fine so no data was lost.
- I did a desktop install of OpenSUSE 10.3 on my Linux PC yesterday, (twice actually as the first time I screwed it up and managed to corrupt /boot whilst trying to guess at how to fix something), everything on the machine was detected and working fine on the system and it would make a fine replacement for ~90% of the things I do on my Vista box if I wanted to do that. The only reason I had issues here was that I want to try and install onto mirrored system disks and swap didn't work the first time ... did the second time after I investigated the fix instead of guessing what was wrong and breaking things further
You do still have cases where you are doing something out of the ordinary or you have hardware which is not supported, probably due to specs not being released for it, where more work is required. Laptops tend to be edge cases where non-standard hardware can be difficult to get working ... if I wanted to put Linux on a laptop I would be investigating it a lot first to make sure that the one I bought would be compatible. A couple of examples recent issues ...
- this week my home Linux server ate its OS for some reason, (I suspect a kernel patch update failed which ended up corrupting the / filesystem). Hence I had to reinstall the OS and ended up fighting with it for quite some time to get a working GRUB configuration, (due to the installer getting confused due to the number of disks in the system and that I am booting off the PATA port on a Gigabyte P35 chipset board with a pile of SATA drives also in the system and it was using the wrong (hd#,#) in the configuration files) ... but it was fixable and most importantly my linux software raid array was imported fine so no data was lost.
- I did a desktop install of OpenSUSE 10.3 on my Linux PC yesterday, (twice actually as the first time I screwed it up and managed to corrupt /boot whilst trying to guess at how to fix something), everything on the machine was detected and working fine on the system and it would make a fine replacement for ~90% of the things I do on my Vista box if I wanted to do that. The only reason I had issues here was that I want to try and install onto mirrored system disks and swap didn't work the first time ... did the second time after I investigated the fix instead of guessing what was wrong and breaking things further
There are rescue and repair cd's for Microsoft products, they are standard on windows 2003 and XP. I've successfully restored broken systems with them. I’ve also restored broken registry settings and parts of Active Directory to get a system back online.Plenty of experience with MS products, thanks
Delete the wrong set of things, and you'll end up with a re-install on your hands. There's no real way to fix Windows if the whole system is broken to the point of unbootability- With Linux, its possible to load a rescue system from a CD etc. and completely rebuild the system from the ground up.
Like I said Microsoft products are flexible. It’s all relative you your experience with said products. It’s very likely that if I broke a Linux system I’d reinstall because I don’t have the experience to fix a very broken Linux system.
Linux consists of loads of third party apps that are simply bundled into a distribution. I fail to see how having to install software to change a menu bar is bad?
Using drive letters for network paths is Microsoft’s way. Just as Linux mounts network shares as folders. I wouldn't personally say either are bad, just different.
I'm not disagreeing with you that Linux is better as I use both (primarily MS products mind) and everyone has a choice and opinion. Which is what makes it interesting.
I’m looking forward to seeing Linux (and apple) develop over the next few years.
Soldato
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If you could boot to a shell (most likely Bash) then you already had Linux working!
The rest is learning...I suggest you try Gentoo.