Half-right: Linux Complaints

Actually, he’s only got one valid complaint: big projects are never fixed, they just keep releasing new versions with a whole new set of bugs.

The GNOME Desktop has never ever been crash free since the birth of 2.x series. Every Linux distro, every GNOME release they used and promised to support, have always been buggy enough, at least the window manager crashed on me and made it unusable. I don’t know enough about the underlying technology, but the whole thing seems generally unstable at all times. Stuff keeps disappearing from the Panel, this or that simply doesn’t work as it should, or some major necessity can’t be adjusted, even if I use the arcane Config Editor.

KDE is no better. While stability hasn’t been much of an issue, it’s always something buggy which matters to me. Kedit and Kwrite both have the same flaw: When the text on screen gets beyond the first page on the screen, the application starts taking bigger and bigger bytes of the RAM, and every time I type a word or two, the CPU spikes. They never did fix the kerning issue with TrueType fonts through the end of the 3.x series. Not only do they display wonky in Koffice, but they print just the same. People complain of cluttered menus and configurations, but there are still too many critical items not available in any settings menu. For example, how about letting me choose smaller icons in the menu? No, I have to manually edit the right config file. Why did they have to invest so much energy making 4.x a silly over-wrought toy? Why not just fix what was wrong with 3.x?

Tell them to both to stuff it. You should refuse to use either one. In the next reinstall, I’m going to pick GNOME just for the tools, but will run IceWM. You can’t use any KDE tools without running those resource hogs MCOP and DCOP. Oh, and they don’t easily die when you are through.

Everything else the guy said is just a matter of taste or misconception. RedHat and clones do support any release for five years. Ubuntu has several selected releases which get long-term support, too. And I can use the screensaver and power config to get my desktop to drop down to low power overnight. The real advantage remains, though, the far greater security of Linux. We’ll never know if Linux is simply harder to crack, though, because there is insufficient stability in the major desktops to allow for a wider adoption.