[sf-lug] Linux Hater's Blog

[JW]

On Tue, Jul 29, Bill Kendrick wrote:

 > DAMN toothpaste makers and car manufacturers for giving me choice!!!
 > ;)

Bill, as a real newbie to Linux, may I offer my point of view?  Having 
tried several distributions, the real problem is inconsistency, 
flakiness, and reinventing the wheel. Why do we need to have so many 
interfaces that all do the same thing, so many icons and menus that 
need to be re-learned each time?  Why so many applications that do 
almost the same thing and so many different file structures?  Even 
simple things like scrolling and clicking are inconsistent within the 
same distribution, not to mention across distributions.  I have had 
windows plop themselves halfway off the screen for no apparent reason, 
and had no way to recover other than to kill processes.  The learning 
curve for each distro seems annoying and unnecessary to me.  Again, I 
am a newbie, but how many newbies are going to go through this until 
they find a distribution they like?  Is there any effort to make the 
interfaces uniform across distributions, or do developers reserve the 
right to fabricate totally new gadgets and icons every time just 
because they can?  Yeah, I like having different brands of toothpaste 
too, but that's because they all come in similar boxes, and it's 
pretty easy to get the caps off the tubes.  It's just a matter of how 
people want to spend their time I guess.

-- Jim W.