July 4, 2025
As I write this I've been using Linux for about four months. There are some differences between this and Windows 7 that I've gotten used to, and other things that are still friction points for me. This post is going to get pretty long, so it's going to seem like I hate it, but this is more bitching and moaning about small inconveniences than anything else.
Just not to the point that I'm willing to go online and ask for help, even if the Mint Linux subreddit doesn't seem too neckbeardy. I'm not a power user by a stretch -- I just use this machine to browse the web, read email and listed to music -- so I'm sure that if I wanted to do more there would be more little annoyances I'd be tripping over. And I feel the need to point out that what I'm used to isn't The Right Way; it's just what I'm used to. Anyway, here we go.
There are a handful of UI oddities that sometimes happen and sometimes don't. The first one feels kind of like in the beginning days of DHTML when events would get missed and a page would start misbehaving. And it's something that really ought to be a fairly simple algorithm: Clicking on items in the taskbar. Sometimes the window I want gets focused, sometimes it gets minimized, sometimes it gets previewed and clicking doesn't accomplish anything. It's just messy and feels like an afterthought (like other things I'll get to later.)
Same with saving files. In Windows 7 the window animations were all smoke and mirrors. I could hit the save button in the dialog, then immediately hit Ctrl-W to close the tab I was on. The dialog was still shrinking and fading out, but as far as the UI was concerned it was already gone. Not so in Linux, I have to wait a split second for focus to return to the browser. About as often as not I mash the keys too soon and nothing happens, and that's with animations on their fastest setting. It'd be nicer to just do away with them entirely if this is the affect they're going to have.
Renaming files is another area that seems simple but isn't. I can set Linux to allow me to "click twice" on a filename to rename it. "Clicking twice" is distinct from double-clicking by having a longer delay between clicks, but not too long or it goes back to just counting as a normal click. Windows treated any non-double-click of an already selected filename as being a rename function, and that makes more sense. Or is at least consistent. And then you have to deselect the file before navigating away from the folder, or you can't use type-to-find in that window ever again.
And even type-to-find is weird. In a "normal" UI window it works the way I'm used to -- start typing, and the first file or folder whose name starts with what you typed is highlighted. There's a small difference in that I have to hit ESC to exit the "search bar" where in Windows I could go straight to using the arrow keys, but whatever. In the file-save dialog, though, typing is a live filter that shows any file or folder with what you typed anywhere in its name. Which is annoying when the thing you want has a name that starts with a common sequence of characters, then you have to scroll a ways to find it.
The way the UI handles alphabetization is stupid. English has a rule when alphabetizing phrases: the end of a word goes before a continuation. So if you had "A Piece", "A Second Piece", and "Another Piece", they would show up in that order. But Linux ignores that rule, and ignores spaces and punctuation -- it would treat those as "Apiece", "Asecondpiece" and "Anotherpiece", and would order them 3-1-2. This is probably the most annoying thing on the list, just because of how wrong it is.
I have no idea what its problem is, but when a folder gets to more than about 300 items in it, it starts taking a long time to render the contents. And while it's doing... whatever it's doing, the window is constantly shifting its contents and jumping the scrollbar around, making it unusable. I'd understand if it was pulling things from all over the SSD to build out the listing, but I'm pretty sure Linux directory listings are stored in the directory's inode: Parsing that should be relatively quick. Instead I get an experience that's worse than a sixteen-year-old version of Windows, running on fourteen-year-old spinning rust storage.
Last, and most random, is the image album viewer, gThumb. At least, I think it's gThumb doing it: Something is creating hidden folders called .comments with a bunch of useless XML files in them. They've all got the same filename as one of the images, and all they say is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<comment version="3.0">
<caption/>
<note>Some MD5 hash</note>
<place/>
<categories/>
</comment>
... I've got nothing.
But yeah, there are my petty annoyances five months in.
