Hello everyone. Its been awhile since ive been on here, so I thought id drop in. Ive been using linux for about 7 or 8 months now. I really like it, just because it is a challenge to use, and you pretty much learn something new every day. The whole reason why I switched to linux from Windows is because I felt bored with it. Everything was just to easy to use. One of the things I hated was either something worked perfectly, or it didnt and there was nothing you could do about it.

To me, Linux is the extreme opposite. It seems like no matter what, I always get all sorts of errors when using wine or installing from source. But there is always a way around it and everything is fixable, unlike Windows.

But the one thing that pisses me off the most about linux is quality of software. Usually, the programs are very average in features, and are ridden with all sorts of little annoying bugs that have been there for years that never seem to get addressed. It almost seems like the developers release a half-assed program and dont maintain it at all.

For example, Ive noticed with some programs, the longer they are open, the more memory they use. Eventually, the whole computer comes to a crawl and the program must be restarted, which gets damn annoying.

Or the Nvidia drivers. Awful performance and conflicts with 3D programs like Compiz (e.g. black window bug), even though I use a 7800 GT 256MB card.

Ive gotten lots and lots of random xserver freezes and lockups, or just plain weird buggy behavior.

Ive noticed some peoples software installs work perfectly, and others have all sorts of problems with bugs and performance (even with good hardware).

The core system is very stable, along with most all command line programs. But many GUI programs are very unstable, slow, and generally unreliable.

I strongly feel like this problem needs to be addressed. Whats the point of having a good OS with a bunch of bug ridden software that is unpredictable? From what I understand, this never used to be a problem until recently, with all the new kernel development.

I hope people are listening.

Certainly no piece of software is 100% perfect and bug free, but it sounds like you either

• Unfortunately choose the worse application available for a task.
• Choose unmaintained packages for a task.
• Have a problem with your base system.
• User error.
• Some combination of the above.

With 10's of thousands of applications floating around the ARPANet, some are bound to be crap. I've certainly run across a few! In my experience, if an application exists in one or more distro's repos, generally the application is decent. That's not to say that an application NOT found in the repos is no good though. Maybe a different application is what you need.

Once again, with 10's of thousands of applications floating around the ARPANet, some are bound to be unmaintained. These applications may have worked perfectly well three years ago. But, due to the number of incremental changes in the dependencies' APIs, no longer works with the current version of the dependent package. Remember, most people developing applications aren't getting paid and may have neither the time nor the inclination to keep a package up to date. Maybe a different application is what you need.

If neither of the previous two problems are yours, then you need to consider that your base system is borked in some way or user error is playing a role. If you're have issues like these unilaterally, I would suspect user error or a subtly broken system. As of my morning coffee, my box at home as been up for 93 days with the X server running the entire time. No problems like you describe here. Even use an nVidia GPU and Beryl works just fine.

<anecdotal_story>I had a box a little while back that appeared to be working correctly. Most packages built fine, while others failed for odd reasons. Most services would start, but some wouldn't or would start, but then seg fault after a while. After some troubleshooting, I looked at the test suite results for glibc. Lo and behold, there were a fair number of unexpected errors in there. Rebuilding glibc (and checking the test suite THOROUGHLY) solved all of the problems.</anecdotal_story>

And, of course, posting generic gripes in a general forum is unlikely to be helpful in resolving any of the problems you, or others, may be having. Why not step up to the plate and file a bug report? Or head over to the IRC channel for the package that is giving you problems; talk to the devs and users that aren't having problems? Or fix the problem and submit a patch? Or take over maintainership of a good package that has become outdated? People are listening, you're just not saying anything with much content.