Linux Flaws - or Perhaps Features
Today in Linux news, Joel Lee identified 5 flaws in Linux that "need fixing." Some of them sound more like features to me. Elsewhere, the Fedora election results are in and Jamie Watson was pleasantly surprised by SparkyLinux Enlightenment. Michael Larabel laments the biggest disappointments of the year and Maximum PC has a review of Alienware's Steam Machine.
Joel Lee said today that desktop Linux has "some serious underlying issues that need to be addressed." He listed the "rapidly evolving software" as a problem because one can't possibly keep up with all the changes. "Linux changes so frequently that users are unable to settle in and get comfortable." Which is akin to another complaint Lee discussed "way too many choices." Again, that's a feature to most of us, but he thinks it can and does overwhelm the general public.
Lee also stated that Linux is "high maintenance." He means in the sense of little things breaking or not functioning properly. "Things tend to break on Linux — not necessarily in catastrophic ways, but certainly in ways that are inconvenient and frustrating." He may have a point with that one.
There just isn't enough nice and friendly hand-holding for Lee either. "All of the above issues wouldn’t be so bad if Linux had proper guidance for newbie users." Many like Mint put a very easy-to-use new user guide right in the start screen. Perhaps he missed those. He also thinks our software is "sub-par" to Windows counterparts. "As far as software quality goes, Linux is lagging far behind," Lee concluded.
SparkyLinux is a pretty cool Linux system, I enjoyed the gamers' editions very much. Jamie Watson recently tested the Enlightenment edition and said it's greeat. It's based on Debian and uses the Mint Debian installer and Watson said it performed as advertised even handling his UEFI equipment. He enjoyed exploring the desktop and only found a few niggles. Watson blogged, " I would say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by Sparky Linux Enlightenment in the short time I have been using it. I have found [the Enlightenment desktop] to be very easy to use." In fact, he's going to continue using it for a while and even base his next series of customizing guides on it. Chalk one up for Sparky!
In other new:
* Open-Source Linux Letdowns of 2015