Hello, and thanks for coming back for more, much like Zaphod, Arthur, and Ford having ideas back on Vogsphere. I almost completely dropped windows 3 years ago after I downloaded and installed Mandrake Linux 8.2. Since then, I've come across many good things and some bad things. I'm going to chronicle the bad (ie pain in the ass) things here so that I might eventually help fix the problems that keep Linux largely off the desktop. I'm just going to chronicle things that would make it impractical for most desktops to use Linux. Note that this is all done on desktop computers with a wired 10/100 lan, so I can't say anything about wireless or dealing with the power systems on laptops.

Note that I do not at ALL mean to shit on Linux here. I've been using it on my desktop for years, and I've absolutely LOVED it. I've encountered very few problems I couldn't defeat in it. But there are problems, and I want to highlight (or at least bold) them so they can be fixed (As if what I write here means anything). So, without further self-deprecating ado, I present my not-at-all-shitty shit list:

Library and program installation directories
This causes me to scream in frustration at my computer. Program A wants a new version of library B. Fine, I download library B, configure, make, make install... Program A can't find it and I can't either. I can't find it because there are something like 3 possible destinations that software can install itself, and none of the configure scripts ever make it obvious that you can tell it where to install to and most of the installers don't make it obvious what directory they just took a dump in. pkg-config can't find it because the retarded program either didn't create a .pc file or didn't dump it in the right place.

Let me make this simple: I should not have to dick around with copying and hand-editing .pc files for newly installed software to make configure scripts able to find it. I can but I don't want to. /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib: PICK ONE. I'm totally hosed if the old version is installed in one place and the new version installs itself in another and the new version's directory if after the old's in PKG_CONFIG_PATH, and end up forcibly copying .pc files around. And why are core system libraries like glib and gtk putting themselves in /usr/local/lib anyway?

I understand that the fragmentation among several directories makes sense with a traditional unix system, i.e. a local disk with specialized programs and you mount /usr/bin from a central server that's got all the main things on it. But my desktop *isn't like that*. At home, my computers each have their own hard drive, with a complete OS on it. I don't mount remote drives. Make it an option: "Seperate /usr & /usr/local? (y/n)". Just drop everything in /usr/local, since it *is* local. But the current system drives me mad (and let's not get into PKG_CONFIG_PATH!).

Installing odd software
Most of the time, installing new software under Mandrake is painless. You might be able to find it with urpmi, which is about as easy as it gets. If you never venture beyond your distro's prepackaged binaries, you'll never encounter this problem on the desktop. The next step, searching Sourceforge, might turn up a precompiled binary for your system. Barring that, big-name packages will usually compile either without problems or with minimal problems (installing one more library, etc).

However, eventually you WILL run into the program from HELL. Dependency hell, that is. Most of these programs are from either specific areas where the state of Linux in general sucks or are early alphas that use wierd libraries. From there, it unfolds into a masochistic adventure of tracking down one library after another until you forget what you were trying to install. Needless to say, dumb users will give up as soon as it says 'configure failed' or 'dependencies not met' (as will many geeks, but because we know what's coming).

There is no solution to this. It is an inevitable result of a system built by linking tens of thousands of .so files together rather than statically linking everything (which would so balloon program sizes that even modern hard drives couldn't cope). It can be mitigated by ever-expanding libraries of compatible programs maintained by distros.

But is there some reason that 70+% of the time it's something to do with GTK/atk/pango/glib/glib-2.0? That set of libraries is out to drive me insane, I swear. They're in it with the psychotic penguins from Madagascar.

Video manipulation
I don't do very much video editing. Indeed, I hardly do any at all. But when I finally did capture a video that I wanted to digitally alter, Linux fell flat on it's face. The actual capture was painless - plug the camera in, start XawTV, capture to an MPEG, done. But when I wanted to simply cut out all but the 3 seconds of video I wanted, forget it.

Mandrake doesn't appear to come with ANY video editing tools. There are several programs each to play video and use tv cards, but none to edit video. After digging around the Internet, I was able to find one program: mjpegtools. My computer faught me to a draw over dependencies. I can get it to start, but it displays nothing but static.

All I want is to be able to frame-step through mpegs and clip their lengths - is that too much?

OpenOffice start time
My computer is a 1.6Ghz Athlon with a 7200RPM hdd and 256mb of memory. My computer just spent 20 full seconds from clicking the icon to when I could start typing. That is RIDICULOUS, especially when you consider that Linux is quasi-famous for it's ability to run on slow old computers (and 1.6Ghz isn't all that slow, really). Even when I close and immediately reopen it (so the program still resides in RAM cache, like Windows does to make Word & Internet Exploder load fast), it took 12 seconds.

This is not just an irritance, but a danger to the acceptance of Linux in the desktop in general. When I go to my college's computer lab, the computers there (all running WinXP) start MSWord in about 3 seconds. What will people think if the 'superior' replacement to Office takes 4 times longer to start?

I think that the OpenOffice team needs to stop developing for a few weeks, and instead fix whatever it is that's making their program so slowly. It also takes a long time to save a very simple document - why?