Yes, Linux has issues; let's work on them
What's Wrong
maddog reflects on the fact that Linux is not perfect, but it's still arguably the best.
In the past month, I have found two people who have stated that Linux is not the best operating system in the world.
One person was at SCaLE, a Linux conference recently held in Pasadena, California. This person has made presentations several times with a title along the lines of "Linux S*cks," but as he goes down the list of topics, he typically exposes the concept that although GNU/Linux does not do everything perfectly, it still is preferable to a lot of the alternative operating systems, and he still uses GNU/Linux every day. Having heard his talk several times and read articles from him, I have now become used to the hyperbole, and I even gave him some pointers on how to make his talk more accurate.
The second source is a paper called "Major Linux Problems on the Desktop: 2016 Edition" by Artem S. Tashkinov [1], and it is a very detailed list of issues that the author has gleaned from bug reports and comments in forums on the Internet.
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