Lately I've been left unsatisfied with Linux, or maybe I should say bored. It's been four years since I made the switch from Windows, and although I never regretted it, there are certain issues that bother me. Some of these are distribution specific and others aren't even limited to the linux. Let me give you a short rundown on what is going wrong:

No unity

There is too much variation in the whole linux community. I'm not saying that variation is a bad thing, but enough is enough. I sometimes get the impression that there is roughly one linux distribution for every hundred linux users. It's like creating your own distro is a phase all self-respecting geeks have to go through. Most have their advantages but all of them have their downsides. The component that is causing the most trouble is the package management. No matter what your try, they all break too easily. Portage, apt, yum, all of them go down at some point, and all have outdated and missing packages. Most of them even mess up the very reason they were created: resolving dependencies.

Every distribution has it's own patched kernel, file hierarchy that is just that little different from the other, their own customized glibc, ... I think many of you will agree with me that this lack of unity is the very reason linux is getting so little attention from most software firms. It's like it's forcing you to go open source, because there is no way a binary can run on every linux system out there. You have to release new builds every time a major distro goes changing its libraries.

And look at the drivers. The ones in the kernel are fine, but let's zoom in on wireless networking for a moment: half of the drivers implement their own 802.11 stack, react a tiny bit different to the iwxxx commands and require that little bit of magic from the user's side. You have to admit it doesn't look very appealing to your every day computer user. It doesn't even look appealing to most power users.

X

That's right. X. The aging graphical server. Why is it even still there? Does anybody like it? Linux users like to brag about stability more than anything else, but the stability only really exists if you stay away from drivers not included in the kernel and this huge monster called X. It comes awfully close to Windows Me in terms of crashability. And that's a legend in its field. Applications that need direct access to the graphics card just scare you away half of the time, because you just don't want your system to hang completely. Yet again. Honestly, I just don't understand why people keep extending X. It's slow. It's broken. Dump it and start over already.

Configuration files

We have to face it. Config files are fine tools for setting up a server and maybe even a development environment, but anywhere else they're just a hassle. They're obsolete. No user wants to know where to find the dozens of config files on his system and most of them don't. If you want to be successful with linux, you have to know how to find, tweak and trick these little monsters. And since there are configs scattered throughout the entire filesystem, all with their very own custom syntax, this takes a lot of time and effort. As you know, these two resources are very precious to a power user and are better spent using a system than setting it up and maintaining it.

The license

Most of you will agree with the above points, because as linux users you have faced them all at least once to often. This last point however is something a bit more subtle. Having the kernel under the GPL is acceptable. While I don't like it, I don't really mind either. The linux kernel is fine the way it is and is still going in the right direction. The userland tools from linux however are a different story all together. Having all the libraries and applications under the GPL banner scare away most companies. They themselves have to release their own code that has to interact with these libraries under the GPL as well, which is a bridge to far for most of these companies. Having a BSD license for some core libraries would be much more interesting.

I would like to conclude that while linux is an excellent server OS, and a good choice for many self respecting software developers and expert users, it falls short to appease the other 95% of the public, and will continue to do so for quite some time.