What annoys you MOST about the OS you use most often?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There are a lot of critics of windows Vista. But as far as I’m concerned, as long as you satisfy two criteria. It is a good OS. Those criteria are…

Your hardware is up-to-date.
You know how to customise the OS to turn off anything you don’t like. (Or, you know how to use the internet enough to find out)

But there’s one thing that can still really annoy me.

It’s when you get the dreaded “This device cannot be removed at this time” message because something is using it.

It pisses me off for the following reasons.
Other than the app I have used to do whatever I plugged it in for with, I gave nothing else permission to ‘use’ it.

I am suckered into believing that the ‘unsafe removal’ is actually unsafe (I know of times when unsave removal has rendered a drive or the stuff on it useless)

Nothing is even running that could be using it.
A mental patient could work out how to write into an OS the ability to ‘finish off’ any need an app has for a usb device once the ‘safely remove’ button has been pressed. (OK, so maybe I exxagerate. Maybe not a mental patient. But surely a competent programmer could?)
I am curious to hear what annoys you most about the OS you use most.
(ironically - the worst case of ‘unsafe removal’ was when I plugged my camera’s cf card into my brother’s MAC. I took it out again (not knowing how to ‘safely remove’) and my camera reported it as having no pictures on it!)

2

I’m still on XP because I’m far too lazy to upgrade. What bugs me most about XP are the little bubbles that appear from the lower right corner bugging me to do things. As far as I’m concerned, those things should be outlawed. There’s got to be a better way to inform people of stuff.

3

I’m running Ubuntu. For the first time, after many attempts, it seems that there’s a viable Linux option better than the current Microsoft one, concurrent with me being able to run a (legit) XP virtual machine for the specific software I can’t do without.

What pissed me off? Too soon to tell. What initially pissed me off was Vista. Never mind ‘User Account Control’, that was easy to disable. It wasn’t even the random freezes of the entire system for seconds at a time. It was the really shitty interface, bad in so many ways (and I mean simple ‘Save As’ dialogs and the like) that I just couldn’t stand it any more.

4

XP here…

“This file cannot be deleted. It is in use by another program.”

I hate this beyond words. Either give me a “delete anyway, and damn the consequences” button, or say WHAT program is using the file.

5

For Vista: Aero’s transparency is non-consistent. When you maximize a windows transparency goes bye-bye. They fixed it in Windows 7 (neat-o).

For Linux: Having to ndiswrapper everything…

6

I’m using Vista. I just hate its patronizing tone.

I hate it when it a message appears asking me if I would like the OS to check for solutions to my recent problems. Why for? It never finds a solution and I fixed the problem months ago, and yet it keeps asking me.

I don’t like not being able to delete a file because I don’t have permission. I don’t like being told to contact the administrator of the computer to get permission. I am the fucking administrator, bitch. I should be able to delete the file if I feel like it.

I don’t have any real problems. I’ve been able to fix or modify most of its issues.

7

OS X “Leopard” here.

Generally, I find OS X to be a wonderful OS, but every now and then I run into things which are needlessly irritating:

  1. The File Save dialog box is (after almost 9 years) still not as good as OS 9. There was a fantastic utility for OS 9 which kept track of the most recently visited directories on a per-application basis, and let you navigate to your desired location quickly. This functionality is missing from OS X, although it’s improved somewhat from what it started out as.
  2. The default printer setting is global - it should be on a per-app basis.
8

XP. When programs bring up a mini-explorer box (e.g., open, save) there is a default layout – name, size, type, date. I can sort by date or name and it will generally remember that the next time. I can turn off certain columns (e.g., get rid of the type column), but it won’t remember that choice, nor will it remember column widths. GRRRR!

I don’t want to see type every time I’m looking for a file, and I don’t need the widths to be so wide, but I can’t find a way to change the default. Any suggestions welcome, of course…

9

OS X Leopard

Why can’t Apple get network shared drives to work right?
I love the OS and would prefer using OS X at work if it were an option, but even Windows XP handles automatic reattachment to network resources smoother than OS X.

In XP, if you have your MP3s on a “Z:” drive and you have imported them into a Winamp library, when you try to play your music, Windows is smart enough to try to make the connection (assuming you checked the “reconnect at startup” when you mapped the drive). OS X chokes on this. OS X can’t even reconnect cleanly after the machine sleeps and wakes up.

Windows XP

I agree with Athena about those balloons. They break usability guidelines because the “x” (which you almost always want to click) is a very tiny target to click, while an errant click on the balloon body does exactly what you don’t want – it launches some slow lumbering pig of a utility that you really didn’t want to see.

The balloon should vanish if clicked and it should provide a discreet button for launching the balloon’s payload.

10

OS X:
This is more a problem with individual apps, but it’s consistent enough across the system that I’ll include it: “maximize window.” When you click on that option, the software will resize the window to what it thinks is the right size. It’s usually wrong. If I want to have my Safari window fill the screen, I have to manually drag it.

As mentioned, the open/save dialog isn’t so great.

Pressing return or enter when a file is selected in Finder doesn’t open the file but instead renames it. I actually appreciate an easy shortcut to rename files, but the OS needs an easy way to open documents from the keyboard.

Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts: in the save/open dialog, command-d goes to the desktop. In Finder, the same command duplicates the selected file, you need command-shift-d for the desktop. Of course, I always get it wrong when I have that 2GB movie file selected.

Leopard broke the updater. Nowadays, you a window pops up at the worst possible time to ask you if you want to update your system, which requires an immediate reboot. Previously, you could first download, and reboot later at your leisure. There’s probably a good reason they’re doing it this way now, but from a user’s perspective, it sucks.

Incredibly geeky and probably annoys about 5 people in the world: rather idiosyncratic interpretation of the IIDC specs, which causes Quicktime to not play well with some otherwise standard imaging equipment.

Windows XP
There are too many, and thankfully I don’t use it much anymore, but here’s what sticks out:

In the start menu, the program list frequently obscures the shutdown button, if you’re not careful. The new items added notification also does the same. This is tremendously bad UI design.

As mentioned, the bottom right corner bubbles are awful. No, I don’t care that I have icons on my desktop I’m not using. Stop bothering me.

Stupid and inconsistent keyboard shortcuts. Alt-F4 quits an app. Splendid ergonomic design. However, Ctrl-W closes a window. Please make up your mind, which scheme are you following?

Antediluvian search functionality. It takes Google 2 milliseconds to search the entire web, but Windows takes half and hour to look through my hard drive.

Windows update runs in a background process, sometimes causing your system to run at a tortoise pace without you knowing why (or seemingly being able to do anything about it). This always happens when you’re demonstrating performance improvements to CPU-intensive multimedia applications to a group of 500 people.

The awesomely bad Japanese keyboard layout. Macs have two extra keys, on either side of the keyboard. One switches to roman alphabet, the other to Japanese. You’d think this is all you would need, but no, the Windows keyboard has no less than 5 keys related to language toggling. The one you use the most is of course, in the hardest to reach place.

The registry, which invariably ends up filled with junk that somehow slows your system down.

The too-frequently-used Device Manager is hidden in sub-menus. Which leads to the next item…

The absolute worst, is the utterly incompetent driver model. For several devices, I’m forced to go through the new hardware found wizard every single time I plug it in. Seriously, whatever happened to plug and play?

11

Use Default Folder. It’s great and I can’t figure out why Apple doesn’t license it.

What I hate about the OS I most use:
STOP STEALING MY FOCUS!
If I am about to hit the return key on a word processing document, I do NOT want some other bogus window popping up, stealing the return I didn’t have time to stop. I don’t know what the damn window even said, because just as I realize that stupid window stole my carriage return, the window disappears! Damn you, Mac OS and Windows! You are the OS writers. You can prevent this stupidity! It’s my computer; I want it to act predictably! The computers are supposed to do OUR bidding!

12

I got this program a while ago for exactly that situation.

As for me, I totally agree with groo about an app stealing focus. I’d also like to add all of the updates for Windows (I’m using XP Pro) or third party apps that need me to re-boot in order to work.

13

Oh, and with bash on unix/linux:

Not having a desktop. I’m sorry navigating by command line still isn’t quite logical to me yet.

14

Filebox eXtender is what you’re looking for.

15

If we include “horrid aspects of your OS that well-known 3rd party utils fixes quite nicely”, this would be top of my list, too, but as groo already said, DefaultFolder is wonderful. I can’t imagine OS X without DefaultFolder.
•After all these years, the Dock is still intrusive and annoying. Is it so damn counterintuitive to provide the option of a Dock menu item in the menubar, such that the Dock stays the hell off your screen unless you deliberately invoke it by selecting it from the menu? And the unalterable Command-Tab. A simple preference pane to switch that behavior to something else and free up Command-Tab seems appropriate, insofar as many venerable apps use Command-Tab internally, including FileMaker and Quark. My Dock remains exiled to limbo (yanked out of CoreServices); I just won’t use it until they fix these things.

• The often-cited “Stupid Copy” file copying feature. Drag 299 files from Folder A to Folder B which contains many identically-named files, and there is no option to “Replace older files with more recently modified files of the same name”; instead only “Replace them all regardless of modification date” or “Ask me one bloody file at a time, I’ve got nothing better to do”.

16

My main annoyance is with Ion, really. When your application is mostly 1 window, or 1 window per “document”, it works perfectly. When your application uses multiple windows for multiple tasks (GIMP, I’m looking at you!) or uses a lot of modal dialogs (which are the mark of a program “designed” without any consideration of keyboard input) it starts to suck. A lot.

Frankly, the program that works best with Ion is Emacs. Luckily, it’s the program I use the most.

17

1 - Right-click on your desktop and select “Properties” to open the Display Properties dialog.
2 - Click the Desktop tab.
3 - Click the “Customize Desktop” button to open the Desktop Items dialog.
4 - Clear the “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard” checkbox.

18

1978 called, they want their unix bash back. =P

Personally, the balloon thing on XP is what does it for me. On Vista 64, the biggest issue is the fact that my sidebar gets hung up on loading sometimes when I first log in–there’s no reason for it, and then I have to either logout/login or close manually and reopen every individual app to clean up the graphical glitches it causes.

19

Why can’t there be an OS-wide spelling checker? While all the Office applications have their own spelling checkers, a lot of third-party software that uses text entry does not, and it would be nice to have spell checking in Notepad.

20

Heh. After almost 20 years of GUIs, there’s still stuff that is better done by the command line. I drop to the DOS prompt at least a few times a week. It’s ultimately logical, at least when you spent the requisite year or two with it as the only interface you had.