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Linux Usability Improvements

posted by on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-already-perfect-is-not-the-right-answer dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

We all know about Microsoft's latest OS, so I won't rehash. A lot of us intensely dislike it, to put it politely. Those of us who can, use other operating systems. This is Soylent, so let's focus on the one that is the most important to us: Linux.

I have been using Windows as my OS since right after Atari times. A few years ago I bought an ARM (ARMHF/ARMv7) netbook and put Lubuntu on it. I had problems with my first Linux experience, mainly in the area of installing software: missing packages in Synaptic, small dependency hells, installing a package at a time by hand, some broken stuff. I put it down mainly to the architecture I have been using, which can't be supported as well as x86-64.

Now, we all know that no software is perfect, and neither is Linux, even though it is now my main OS. We support it in spirit and financially, but there is always room for improvement.

So, the question is: What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them? How do we better it? Maybe it's filesystems, maybe it's the famous/infamous systemd. Let's have at it.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:19PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:19PM (#470213)

    There is probably a setting in your window manager called "focus follows mouse". "Click to focus" is also common (and what Windows generally uses).

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  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:18PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:18PM (#470363) Journal

    There is probably a setting in your window manager called "focus follows mouse".

    Could be. It must be well hidden though. I tried to get the settings as best I could, but some texts are logically backwards and English is not my first language. I get lost with things like "Disable focus stealing prevention for XV", because it's a triple negative to me without explanation what "XV" is, so I don't even know if it's relevant here.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:54PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:54PM (#470385)

      Xv would be X video. Probably only relevant for media players.

      "focus stealing prevention" presumably prevents other applications from drawing on top of a video, but am not sure myself.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by WillR on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:46PM

        by WillR (2012) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:46PM (#470441)
        It's been a while since video output didn't "just work", but from memory... Xv is a hardware overlay - it's always on top of everything, so if you drag another window on top of a media player that's using Xv, it will appear to be between the player UI and the video. Some media players tried to preserve the illusion that the video and the player UI were in the same layer by bumping themselves to the top of the window stack whenever that happens, which would be blocked by "prevent focus stealing" if there weren't a special case for Xv windows.