Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today

Via OSNews is this article “Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today”. I know that Jason can relate to #9, for instance:

No common editor which supports “soft wrapping.” By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it”s one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution’s message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I’ve tried — Kate, GEdit, and even vi — only support “hard wrapping”, where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. [...]

Is that really the case, though? No soft-wrappable text editors for Linux?

#5 makes a good point as well — one that I hadn’t given much thought to until now:

Cleaner redraws. This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it’s a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. [...]

To his credit, the author also links to “Top N Things That Have Been Solved”.

3 thoughts on “Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today

  1. As near as I could tell from that list the problem with Linux is that it isn’t FreeBSD/Darwin/OS X. However, his list is supposed to include those platforms so I’d have to say his complaints seem to only be valid for Linux distros.

    OS X has soft-wrapping editors like Pepper, and BBEdit. (Although I believe emacs will soft-wrap on all those platforms) Printing on OS X is the easiest I’ve seen on any platform, likewise for the GUI (Even if you are using the Xfree stuff on OS X).

  2. Not quite ;). He says “In just a few years, Linux and the free BSDs have become serious players in every major computing market, from embedded systems up to enterprise-class servers” [emphasis mine]. So, of course, OS X isn’t included in that list.

  3. I thought from the line “If there were no FS/OSS and my choices were Windows, MacOS (not counting OS X, which wouldn’t exist without FreeBSD anyway), or a proprietary UNIX” that OS X was counted with Linux and the free BSDs.

    At any rate, I think the point stands that OS X addresses all his complaints about Linux. Why pull your hair out over Linux when happiness awaits: FreeBSD for the server, OS X for the client. :)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.