We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
Linux is super cool when everything works out of the box. But once you need to make adjustments, you’re in a world of pain.
I recently had the distinct displeasure of using visudo for the first time and was flabbergasted that this should be the recommended standard app for its purpose. An app which randomly turns mouse and keyboard inputs into random letters, doesn’t have a visible command menu, doesn’t allow you to click to place the text cursor, doesn’t have an easy way of copy-pasting…WTF? 🤯
Now, I am actually a trained IT professional who has installed and managed a plethora of firewalls, virtual machines, file servers, VPNs, etc… but Linux has me stumped way too often when apps seem to lack the most basic attention to usability.
And the lack of standardization leads to absurd situations where to solve one problem you have to first dig into three different underlying subsystems and their peculiarities, spending hours on trial and error using scant & often outdated or non-applicable documentation (it’s for another distro and two years old). 🙄
Is this the first time you’ve had the pleasure of using vi/vim? 😄 visudo is a command that locks the sudo file and just opens vi or vim. It’s not a text editor in and of itself.
Vim is the source of the famous “how do you quit vim”, meme. (:q <Enter>, btw) The interface is completely nonintuitive and has modes. In “edit mode”, all the buttons do different edits to text or move the cursor. That must have been your experience: trying to type in edit mode and getting garbage. You have to enter “insert mode” to type using the
Ikey. Commands to do things like save and quit are started by typing a colon in edit mode. You navigate in edit mode using HJKL as arrow keys.To avoid it, set your default editor to nano instead. Nano’s hotkeys are nonsensical to people coming from Windows, but at least they’re displayed on the screen at all times.
$ export EDITOR=nanoOh yes, nano is what I eventually resorted to using despite the menacing warning in red not to stray from the visudo path.
I had actually used vim before when I tried out Linux 25 years ago or so. Didn’t leave a favorable impression then, either. And no, it didn’t convince me to switch to emacs. 😉Different taste of terrible, IIRC.