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from the it's-already-perfect-is-not-the-right-answer dept.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:21PM
I was going to say that I hate the way Linux handles groups on files vs the BSDs. It makes so much more sense to me the way BSDs handle them (like SGID is always set). The alternative has created numerous problems for me due to the multiple users that can fiddle with things on some of our servers. If Linux were BSD, those problems wouldn't exist.
But then, reading the comments made me realize that I have had other problems over the years. I've either had to fix the problem myself, someone else makes it disappear, or I get used to it. When we first started using some servers that had systemd I would rail against it with the best of them; but now the problems have either been fixed, disappeared, or I'm used to by now, so it isn't worth the effort. When I started using ARM, I hated uBoot's dichotomy between super simple setups and God-awful complexity; but now the boot stuff is mostly set up so I no longer have to fight it.
The one thing I constantly fight though is the way they seem to handle bug reports. I have a problem, give a detailed bug report, crash dumps/tracebacks, etc. and then someone closes it 30 minutes later with "WORKSFORME." Uh, ok but what about my problem? Any insight or way to help? Hell, even an "I can't reproduce this because it seems dependent on the OS/libraries/etc" would provide some modicum of help.
Or, they sit there completely untouched. Days, even months, pass and no one seems to even acknowledge a bug has been filed. Even worse is when multiple users do a "me too" or you see notices of "bug was closed as duplicate of this one" but no one from the actual project even commented on the original bug. At least change the default priority or something.
Another peeve of mine are inactive or dead bugs. There will be a flurry of activity and then the bug just sits there, completely untouched for months (except, maybe, the occasional "ping"). The problem with that is the longer you wait to fix or deal with a bug the harder it gets. At least have a timeout that automatically closes them after a period of inactivity, if that is your implicit policy. Even better is what we do here, which is rank all the bugs by priority from 1 to the number of open bugs and move bugs up and down the ranking based on activity. Beyond manually adjusting priority, it also changes based on classification (security always rank highest, FRs from non-whales default to lowest) and activity. You are also expected to claim bugs and make some progress on them by priority and move them around as necessary. At least that tells you what sort of movement is being done.