My Linux/GNOME annoyences list
October 6, 2005Random things that annoy me about Ubuntu/GNOME (Breezy/GNOME 2.12):
- Slow boot. Really slow boot.
- GNOME itself loads slow.
- The top menu bar wastes a lot of space. You have the systray/date/time on the right, and menus and a few shortcuts on the left. The space in between is wasted. It’s too small to fit a taskbar in, so it just sits there, being gray and all.
- It is highly confusing and annoying that the size of the window list’s buttons change at will, without a decent set of logic behind it. This breaks so many UI rules and laws, it’s just not funny anymore.
- I cannot set double-click titlebar = minimize anywhere. You can change the titlebar’s doubleclick behaviour in Gconf and/or system/preferences/windows (shade or maximize), but not to minimize. I did a feature request for this once, but a silly discussion erupted over whether or not adding this feature in Gconf would scare away and confuse users. Right. As if any normal thinking person would even want to come near Gconf. You can, however, change titlebar buttons’ positions in Gconf… Isn’t that just as confusing for users??
- Evolution is a mess and it isn’t getting any better. Just like Apple’s Mail, it lacks a vertical preview pane, and finding any option within that jungle of buttons and menus is impossible.
- GNOME-pilot is useless. It doesn’t do anything. Getting it to work requires major cli action, and even then it’s close to impossible. I can find no other reason for keeping it in GNOME other than that they can say “Look, we have a cool Palm icon”. And don’t even dare to complain about it, because “hey, it’s OSS, no warranty”. Fcuk that. GNOME-pilot could just as well be replaced in its entirity by the ZipDisk Mount Error Dialog. KDE is much more ahead when it comes to Palm.
- Some settings/preferences panels should be combined. “Keyboard” and “Keyboard shortcuts”. “Network proxy” and “Networking”, and a few more.
- “Search for files…” and “Recent documents” don’t belong in the places menu. Files are not places. They’re files.
- There’s no direct “Shutdown” option in the System menu– only “Log out” which then gives you the shutdown/log out/reboot dialog.
- Mounting and all that is still a mess in Linux. Audio discs, cd-roms, DVDs, ZipDisks; they regurlarly list as mounted, but in reality aren’t; they regurlarly come out as unmounted, yet the icon on the desktop remains; often they are unmounted yet you still cannot eject the CD (hurray for the paperclip).
- ZipDisk? Support is in the Linux kernel for ages yet no distro in the known universe gets them working out-of-the-box. Don’t even get me started on external/ATAPI ones…
- Redraw sucks ass on GNOME. Probably a Cairo issue.
These were just a few that popped into my mind. Flame away.
Linux | 
1. Agreed.
2. Agreed. At least it’s fixable (and it will probably be fixed in the next few months).
3. Agreed. However, with 1280x1024+ resolutions should be fine to combine both bars into one.
4. Agreed.
5. Agreed.
6. Agreed.
7. Agreed.
8. Fully agreed. ;)
9. Actually, this is ok as it is. You see, then you would need both a Files and a Places menu, and that gets too long and confusing.
10. Agreed. This won’t get fixed any time soon because each distro/OS works differently about this specific thing.
11. Agreed.
12. Agreed.
13. Agreed.
And a few more of my own:
14. Replace the built-in sucky menu editor with Smeg.
15. Support for Synaptics touchpads on the Mouse preferences.
16. Full Bluetooth front-end.
17. Nautilus to ask you for the root or user password when trying to write an root/other folder instead of telling you that you don’t have permissions.
18. Nautilus scripts to become “Actions”, to be enriched with a better API and include 4-5 such actions by default (e.g. Extract Here, Grep, Mass Rename, etc). Right now this feature is hugly underplayed by the developers. Also, remove the “nautilus plugins” from the root context mennu and place them under “Actions” submenu too.
19. Be able to go between the path finder and the text entry path widget on nautilus with Cntrl+L, back and forth (right now you can only go forth).
20. Change the “System” menu category to plain “Utilities”.
21. Gedit needs speed up.
22. Important: the several dev tools are under-par (and not in one place — confusing for new devs), and dev documentation is pretty much NON EXISTANT.
23. If they could fork Gaim to make it HIG-compatible and add A/V support to it, the better. We are not in 1998 anymore.
24. Add mono and python to the main distribution (as long as they don’t break compatibility every other moon). Having Beagle and Revelation to the main gnome distribution would be great.
25. Gnome-Terminal is SLOW. Metacity is a monster too.
Generic Linux gripes:
26. ACPI ACPI ACPI. I want automatic laptop sleep support! No freaking scripts anymore!
27. Don’t break the damn binary/source compatibility every so often. I want the wifi driver that I compiled for 2.6.11 to work on 2.6.14. I have better things to do than compiling the same driver every month!
28. A better way to change networking profiles. Just like Apple’s (distro-specific).
Comment by Eugenia — October 6, 2005 @ 9:16 pm
That top bar stinks. I hated it until I found this:
http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/06/17/1538223.shtml?tid=130&tid=2&tid=82&tid=94
Great article. I now combine the top bar into the bottom bar and get more real estate. It’s kinda windows like but better than the way it is by default.
Oh ya and Gnome Terminal does suck. I was wondering if it was Solaris that made it dog slow. Konsole is so much better.
Comment by Chris — October 6, 2005 @ 10:40 pm
>I now combine the top bar into the
>bottom bar and get more real estate
I always combine them too, even on my 1024x768 laptop. But things are tight there.
Comment by Eugenia — October 6, 2005 @ 10:56 pm
21. Leafpad is much better as a generic notepad. Gedit should not be positioned this way anymore IMO.
23. Gaim IMHO is nothing compared to GIMP and its annoying UI.
Mine follows
29. I started to like spatial before latest Gnome releases. What now makes me scream sometimes is Metacity randomness in placing windows on screen, and I am not refering only to Nautilus windows.
30. I have an older machine than current standard, and I noticed that placing a little .doc file at the desktop makes the OS unuseable. It is due to gs & convert started in background to make a preview of it. And no, you cannot turn off previewing of .doc files, I had to turn off previewing of any files.
31. Icon and filename placing in Nautilus sometimes looks very awful. Just look at this.
Nonetheless I still like GNOME.
Comment by Piotr Smyrak — October 6, 2005 @ 11:19 pm
>21. Leafpad is much better as a generic notepad.
>Gedit should not be positioned this way anymore IMO.
I fully agree. I even mentioned that a few months ago to d-d-l. Gedit should go under “programming” and have leafpad on “accessories”.
Also:
32. Have Gnome work better on 128 MBs of RAM. This way more PCs in the third world would be able to use it and help on its adoption.
33. When you trying to select an icon for a new shortcut, hitting a character on your keyboard should move the selected icon to the first filename that starts with that character.
Comment by Eugenia — October 7, 2005 @ 12:30 am
33. Create an “Administration” menu above the ‘Desktop Preferences’ one, and offer a back-end API so distros put their gnome-friendly system panels there and use that API. Gnome should become more of an OEM as well as an ODM.
Comment by Eugenia — October 7, 2005 @ 3:02 am
3. Sticking deskbar applet in the grey space improves things a lot.
8. Duplicity is solved a bit in Ubuntu Dapper, but there’s still two keyboards and some other flaws.
10. There’s a ‘logout/shutdown’ icon on the menubar in the default Dapper install (that you’ll probably get rid of)
11. Seems to work perfectly for me these days.
14. This was done for Ubuntu Breezy I believe, it’s certainly done for Dapper
24. Ubuntu have always shipped python, and I believe the mono runtime etc have all been in ubuntus ’supported’ section from breezy onwards.
26. Fixed for most laptops in Ubuntu from breezy onwards.
28. net-applet and NetworkManager mostly fixes these issues for me.
33. Isn’t that what gnome-system-tools does? It’s also easy for the distros to add menu items to existing menus.
Comment by Dean — March 26, 2006 @ 1:32 pm