Debian Headaches.

[swestrup]

Well, I'm slowly getting to learn my way around Debian, but so far I think I'm going to have to reiterate that Linux does NOT appear ready for prime time. And by that I mean there is LOTS that you cannot do without dropping to a terminal. Lets see if I can enumerate the frustrations I've had so far, running KDE 3.5 under Debian Lenny:

1) During install I was advised to disable the root password and do everything via sudo. Fine, I agreed. Only that means that fully half of the installed KDE administration packages no longer work, as they require the entry of a root password. So, I dropped into a terminal and gave me a root password.

2) Adding a new panel is a royal pain as you can't configure it until you've logged out and back in again. This is a known bug, but one of a class I have found rife in KDE in that changing the preferences on something has NO EFFECT unless you log out and then back in.

3) There appears no way to add a separator object to a panel, to help visually cluster applets. I can find no way to add a menu object to a panel, although I suspect there may be. There are no man pages for most KDE applets, although there are 'handbooks' which are in an incedibly unhelpful format viewable only through a brain-dead viewer.

4) The Menu system provided by KMenu as a default is a royal mess. I mean its HUGELY wrong in that it has multiple 'system' areas in multiple parts of the menu system, doesn't support drag and drop rearrangement, or right-clicking to change object properties, and it even seems to have lots of links to programs that are not installed, or have been uninstalled by me. At least there is a Menu editor that lets you go in and fix things, but MY GOD is there a lot to fix. I also find it very strange that the same applications appear in multiple places in the menus, sometimes with an explanation of what they do, and sometimes not. Note that you need BOTH. Calling something 'File Mangler' does not help you if what you want to do is uninstall the application it points to. Just calling it 'Kxkcd' doesn't help either, if you've never heard of it.

5) Despite there being a long discussion here in my journal a while back where I was informed that yes, modern Linux has a way for you to record the internal positions and sizes of movable sub-windows, I HAVE YET TO FIND A SINGLE WINDOWING APPLICATION THAT PROVIDES THIS FUNCTIONALITY. Synaptic is the culprit that bothers me the most, as I always have to resize all of the display columns every time I open it.

6) Under Debian any attempt to use the KDE tools to change the default login screen breaks the theme system and requires lots of work in sudo to fix. So, now I am stuck with a sucky login screen until I can figure out how to fix theming, and then how to install a theme without breaking themeing. This is also a known problem, but I've yet to find any indication it is being treated as a bug.

7) The default sound player 'amarok' doesn't work, it crashes. It relies upon artsd which keeps hanging. This is again, apparently a known bug. Strangely enough, sound works fine though.

8) I was actually DELIGHTED to discover that changing the default handler for a file association is actually EASIER in Linux than it is in Windows. Right-click on the file you want to modify the handler for, select properties. Click the settings button beside the file type that shows up, and you can now change the associations. However, this delight was tempered by the fact that changing the associations had no effect at all, until I had logged out and back in again.

9) Every time I log out and back in again, the icons on my desktop get rearranged into the same wrong arrangement, and I have to put them back where I want them. I can make them stay where they are by using the 'lock icons' menu option, but frankly I would rather not have to, as then I need to unlock things if I decide to move stuff around, and then remember to lock them again or it will all get messed up.

So there you have it, a huge list of difficulties, and I haven't even STARTED trying to USE my distro yet! All I'm trying to do is arrange the icons, menus and such into the kind of arrangements that work for me.

Comments

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

Blech KDE. Gnome is better, although I use ion most of the time. But I prefer command lines for many things, so I'm obviously not a standard PC user.

[swestrup]

I decided upon Gnome because all reports stated that it is even LESS user friendly in its configuration than KDE. My limited experience with it (on my Mandriva server) seems to bear that out.

As for Command Lines, they're great, if you already know exactly how the system works and what you want to do. GUIs that work are a necessity if you ever want anyone to switch over to Linux from another operating system, and not give up in despair at the steep learning curve.

[sps.livejournal.com]

That's a very bizarre thing to say. We had operating systems before we had GUIs, and I have migrated from one to another several times.... Moving to Unix was indeed a little painful, since unlike VMS it had no wall o' manuals, but the last MS manual I ever saw was my Windows 3.1 ring binder, which can't stand up even to the dismal standard of man(1).

I think we're all getting old.

[swestrup]

I moved to GUIs from the command line under Windows once the GUIs were easier to use than the commands. Linux never managed to cross that threshold.

[sps.livejournal.com]

I hear you. Except that at the end of the day I either want to play ... well, most recently it was Oblivion, but it doesn't really matter, only Windows will launch games; or I want to write code, in which case it's make against Visual Studio, and, well, no, the GUI isn't better than the text tool, VS Is still rubbish. So, Windows for play, Linux for work, there are really no options. :(

[swestrup]

Yes, well I have to admit that VS does suck rancid donkey turds when it comes to usability. Since they took most of the command-line documentation away from the suite, its gotten much harder to simply use Emacs, and Gnu Make and have them call the Microsoft compilers and linkers from the command line.

(Evidence is, this is still all possible, they've just made it harder to figure out...)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Especially as they made the defaults for CL.EXE completely wrong, you have to pile in long lists of options to pick the right runtime (debug or not, multithreaded or not, seriously, you can't make this up!), whether to compile for something else than a 286 and who knows what else, as opposed to simply doing "g++ -o foo foo.cc" and being done with it (ok, for production, you might add -O2).

On Windows, you need those GUI tools, they made the underlying system utterly incomprehensible. Programming the Win32 API directly without Visual Studio's "helps" (such as CodeSense and the online documentation) is next to impossible, with the equivalent of strerror(3) taking seven arguments and conflating its error message gathering with an sprintf(3), because, well, I wouldn't be trusted to know where to find sprintf(3) if I needed it, right?

Xcode and Cocoa is pretty nice, if only rather sluggish. If you grew up with Emacs on old school systems, you should be okay (you can set Emacs key binding, and it's faster than Emacs on an old 68000 Sun3). ;-)

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

there are really no options

Ah, but there is an option! Mac OS X! That way you can neither play nor work ;)

Seriously, though, Windows for play and Linux for work is the same conclusion I came to despite having zealous friends who would happily spend several days getting a game to run in Wine or Cedega (once that showed up) and then only spend a few hours playing it. If you ask me life's just too damn short for spending most of it in configuration files...

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Not to defend things too much, but most of these are problems with KDE, not with Linux as such. Though the fact that KDE is so popular amongst Linux users and nobody there seems to consider these things as the serious problems they are is indeed depressing. Issue #4 is the main one in your list that drives me up the wall with KDE, though the equally comical mess when it comes to configuring just about any KDE app runs a close second. It probably doesn't help that they just broke rewrote everything to make it look shinier (and passed up the opportunity to actually make any serious usability improvements while they were at it...).

As for amarok, it works for me (in Gnome and in Ion, at least), using the xine engine. Yes, it's unbelievably lame that you, as a user, have to care which of the eleventy billion different crappy sound APIs your app was written to use, and which are installed on your system, and which actually work. For the record, put artsd firmly in the "non-working junk" category, as you correctly noted. esd is just as bad. PulseAudio is possibly worse, but you can't get rid of it easily. Anyway, try and install the amarok-xine package (if it isn't already) and pick the xine engine in Amarok -> Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Engine, and see if that makes things go. It's worth it, as it's the only sound player I've found on Linux that has the only feature I care about (album shuffle mode).

[swestrup]

As far as I can tell, I would have as long (if not longer) list of complaints if I switched over to Gnome. It just seems that Usability is never considered in Linux display managers.

[swestrup]

Oh, and I can't configure Amarok because it crashes if I try to open it.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Oops. Try removing any amarok-whatever packages (aside from amarok-xine) to try and get rid of the crappy artsd backend. It should be possible somehow, as on Ubuntu I don't even have the option of using artsd (hooray!). Maybe this is just because I don't have many KDE packages installed. Another idea would be to try stopping arts before starting amarok.

As for usability, Sun did pay for a bunch of usability studies for Gnome a few years ago, which led to Gnome 2.0 and their Human Interface Guide. I dunno if there's been much action since then though, and the HIG isn't always followed quite as well as it should be. And yeah, it's still not quite for everybody, though for my money it's way better than KDE for people switching from Windows or Mac.

[sps.livejournal.com]

And, of coruse, I've just lost three, going on four entire workdays, because Windows won't believe its own damned activation key (and the only reason I'm trying to install the damned thing is so I can run some software I don't like or trust, as required by Corporate...). At this point I wish I could get to the point of being frustrated by its usability issues! Crapware beats fuckoffware, if you'll pardon my French!

Meanwhile, Ubuntu is teh pretty, and it least lets me do some work, which is a step up in this situation, even if (I have to agree with Sti) configuring it to the point of not wanting to vomit every time I type is difficult to impossible.

[sps.livejournal.com]

...Please don't ask me why I've resorted to XP 64 (!!!), but it just told me:
- that to do updates it needs to install an ActiveX control;
- that this control is not to be trusted and should not be run;
- that in order to proceed with the installation of SP2 I must close all applications;
- that IE cannot be closed because it is busy installing SP2;

Not nice not nice not nice. No usability here!

[sps.livejournal.com]

But XP 64 running inside Virtual Box running inside Ubuntu is, at least, blazingly fast. Oddness.

[swestrup]

I haven't gotten as far as trying to install WinXP inside Virtual Box yet, as I've been trying to get a good working base system first. As is, I'm still not sure if all my hardware is being recognized or not.

[swestrup]

Yes, actually that is a very good set of problems with windows. Or, more precisely, a problem with the Microsoft Windows team and the Microsoft Web team disagreeing on some basic defaults.

But if I were to enumerate all user dialogues I've been presented with under Debian of the same (or more) lameness as 'Close all applications' meaning 'close most applications', the list would go on for many many pages...

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess the moral of the story is, as ever, that Computers Suck.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I'm currently switching from Gnome to Ion, which some might argue is more usable, but certainly has the discoverability of the proverbial council plans in the disused lavatory in the basement, down the broken stairs with no light, behind the door saying "Beware of Leopard." When your config files are written in a programming language, you know you've lost any chance ever to get a normal person on board. Oh well, Ion doesn't get changed much, I just have to make sure to never ever lose my config files.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, it is possible to have files written in a programming language and still have normal humans use them. The trick is to never let them know.

[swestrup]

I once told sps that Emacs wouldn't be usable until you no longer had to learn a programming language in order to set a permanent configuration parameter. At least Emacs has now passed that hurdle, although there are common problems I have with it (such as figuring out how to tell it the minimum type size I want in use in a window) that are so arcane I usually give up before figuring it out.

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

I hear that wmii is promising, although you have to drink the Plan 9 kool-aid to enjoy it.

[swestrup]

That worked, thanks!

Do you have a preferred video player for watching movies and DVDs under Linux? I had assumed I could just use VLC (my favorite under Windows) but the Linux version seems to have a wonky seek-bar.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

"Preferred" would mean I actually like one :) No, really I mostly don't hate Totem, the standard Gnome player. It has a play/pause button, a playlist, next/previous file buttons, a seek bar, and a volume control, and that's it. Oh, and unlike most other players, when I ask it to play fullscreen, it's always managed to scale the video, and has never just played the video at the same size in the middle of four giant black letterbox bars, unlike mplayer. Stab. Still, I wish I could just click on the seek bar and have it jump to that location. Come to think of it, I don't know of any Linux video players that get that right.

Otherwise, if Totem doesn't work for some reason, or if the audio loses sync, I just fall back to mplayer. It may be annoying, but at least it's got an audio delay control.

[swestrup]

Well, at least ONE of the video players I tried had a seek bar that could jump to arbitrary locations, but it didn't have contrast/gamma controls, and I need them for playback.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Oh, to be clear, you can drag Totem's seek bar wherever you like (modulo the occasional snap to the nearest keyframe or something, depending on the codec). I'd just like to do so in a single click, like on YouTube or Windows Media Player. Unless that's what you were talking about.

[swestrup]

Ah, that I don't know about. I wasn't testing for that.

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

I remember a few years ago around the time, I think, that KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 came out. Okay, so they didn't come out at the same time, but it was "back in those days"

Neither of them were any fun to configure and use for me since a) I never really used the menu system and b) I didn't use the desktop. While searching for alternatives I came across Fluxbox which simply places windows on the screen and gives you the equivalent of the "Start" menu if you right-click anywhere on the background.

Sadly, though, the configuration was still a matter of editing the configuration file by hand as the tools for setting up stuff were limited. The "good" thing about it, though, was that the config file was fairly simple and limited and was in the form of "item = value" and not a programming language.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Another recommendation for Fluxbox here. Been using it for about 5 years now, and have customized it into something very fast and easy to use.

I actually prefer configuration being in a file; you can make backups of it, you can search for things instead of going through a click maze, and the documentation is often better.

I'm told there is a tool called fluxconf that you can use to get things configured.