Linux: The Good the Bad and the down right Ugly!

[perduta]

Right that does it! This thread because some people keep derailing a different thread of mine by telling me what I should or should not want from my Linux...
So here the idea is that we get to say what we think is good, and also what we don't like about it and that doesn't necessarily mean that we think Microsoft and Apple haven't done an even worse job, OK ?!

I may come back later and edit this post to add a list indexing the topics as they appear but for now... lemme move straight on to posting my first gripe in the next post

[perduta]

bloatware

Yes... let us start with the boot process... good old grub-pc or whatever it's called these days.

Well I have a gaggle of disk drives and each one has it's own independent self sufficient OS on it such that if my computer packs up, I can take a drive out and bolt it in another machine (as long as it has compatible hardware) switch on... and hey-presto there is my OS with all my data that is exactly where I put it on that drive

I can alter the boot priority in the bios and it will boot whatever disk I choose.
It works great with MsDOS, and every windpws ever since... not so much as a single config file to edit!

Alas not so with grub. No... grub being a 'grand unified' omni-everything-system thinks it knows better. update-grub trundles off trashing all my Master Boot Records on every drive it can find and woe betide me if I should remove one of those drives one day for whatever reason.

Now the other day I wanted to change the splash image I get when a Virtual Machine boots... that's so I would be able to recognize the VM I was booting immediately.
It wasn't just a simple config file change... no it took me hours-and-hours of googling and studying documentation that didn't bare any resemblance to the scripts on my installation.
There are default folders with images and things that take precedence over other defaults. IDK how many scripts to run... there is a whole battery of completely unintelligible ones in /etc/grub.d
There are folders full of ghastly 'art' work that I would never dream of downloading given the choice. A file /etc/default/grub that defines some values... but not a single one could I find for the splash image
Eventually I just gave up, I copied the image I wanted to /boot/grub/grubbg.png and I have NO IDEA what all the other files in that folder are for.

So grub is awarded the label 'counter productive bloatware' from me

[perduta]

Well after grub comes the login and Windows is every bit as guilty as Linux on this... look... this is a PERSONAL computer right? It sits in MY living room in MY house. It only has MY files on it. I don't employ a team of network administrators who will administrate what I can and cannot access. I do NOT want ANYONE to be able to login remotely and mess with my stuff. Under Windows my C: drive has software packages on ot and I don't want ANYTHING to change on that drive unless I say so. I want it to boot up exactly the same next time as it did this time. My D: drive OTOH is my data drive and I don't want any of what is on there to run... it's my work files.

Now Linux doesn't even distinguish one drive from another and it lets me link folders across file systems so ultimately I simply have NO IDEA what physical unit may or may not contain my work. I want a Linux that understands different drives with different properties: read, execute and write (or any combination) and anything else requires authenticated manual confirmation by ME and not by some anonymous corporation on the www. I don't have 'groups' in the house and I don't adminstrators so I don't want those concepts enforced on my PC. They are simply not applicable.

[perduta]

Next well what's with all these frikken kernel updates?
What does a kernel do?
[list=]
[*]Process management
[*]Memory management
[*]Device management
[/list]
There is NO NEED to change this code as often as they do.
These arewell established algorithms that were created years and years ago.
IDK what they are hacking but whatever it is it should not be in the kernel!
Apart from that they did a terrible job and that's why Linux sucks as a real-time system and for handling multi-media.

[zerozero]

perduta,
the forum is not a soapbox for your rants. we can see that you have a lot to learn: ask, search, RTF(ine)M; not this way!