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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:18AM (#470578)

    I think choice is a weakness if and only if there's no better choice directly due to the fact there's too much choice.

    1) More choices is not a significant weakness if the _defaults_ are mostly good choices. Then most people can stick to the defaults and have a reasonably well working system.

    2) More choices is good if most of the choices are good choices. Not if most of the choices are bad choices or pointless choices.

    So the problem is when the system defaults are stupid and so by actual default everyone has to make new choices of their own.
    Then if most of the choices are bad choices, it means by default most people are more likely to screw up and make the wrong choice.

    Picking good defaults is hard and most Desktop Linux developers in charge of various areas don't appear to know what a bad default is even if it bit them and everyone else.