what is it you dont like about linux

Okay, I'll chip in with mine too but I'm sure I'll regret it...

Firstly I'm with KiLLaBeE on the installation of software. Unix/Linux is often a fine solution for server environments but what a desktop user wants is to be able to get his/her software on a CD or via a single download, slap in the CD and click 'setup'. Once.
They don't want to have to limbo dance, collect multiple dependencies they didn't know they needed and which mysteriously nobody told them about. Then, when they have installed the thing and it invariably doesn't work, they have to dive off into some arcane text editor that has a user interface that should have been consigned to history with the PDP-II to make unintelligable changes to some config file with an unhelpful name that nobody ever knew existed. Until they sort this, and sort it properly, Linux has no future in the desktop environment.

Secondly, I just hate the way it boots. It vomits out incredible quantities of text so fast that you can't read it, and if you can't ever read it then why on earth is it there? Even if you could read it, 90% of it is meaningless gibberish that is just logging the minutiae of the boot process simply for logging's sake. At least have a silent boot and give me an option to boot with the diagnostics on if I choose to do so!

Third, I depair of the documentation. Now let me say here that I worked as a software technical author for four and a half years so this is not just blind prejudice. The MAN pages contain lots of text but most of it is highly technical and was written by the developer himself, probably in his bedroom. The format is unhelpful and worst of all, each MAN page is dedicated to just one system component with barely any recognition that it forms part of an organism with a complexity greater than the simple sum of its parts. Some components are built-in, some are optional, some are alternatives to eachother, yet there is no guidance on which is which or how to find out. All this is of little or no help to a normal user who wants to understand simply how to make the Penguin do 'x'. Nobody has ever pulled together this stuff into a coherent whole. Nobody has ever cross-referenced it. There is no real user documentation. At all. And no; I'm not going to write it. I'm too busy with Windows...

To continue what TheBishop was saying about documentation...

IMO, it seems as if the documentation is "directions" quickly slapped onto a text editor and then saved. Additional troubleshooting notes are not entered into the doc to tell us what to do if "make" or "make install" doesn't work.....it just assumes that you already know or already have the environment for it.

I think what I hate the most about Tux is resolving failed dependencies when installing a program. This can be a complete nightmare that you just end up not installing the program since you cant find the various dependencies required even after days of googling..

The power of the Linux shell continues to amaze me! What you'll do with 10 clicks on windows, I'll do with a few commands in Linux..Also, I cant complain because I'm not paying for licensing!!

I'm definitely not a linux wiz, I use Windows 98% of the time. Sure I try some distros from time to time but nothing serious, so my judgment won't be really interesting, if not silly!!

So, I did notice some annoying facts here and there. For example, when I login as a regular user (none root), Why the hell can't I run an executable from any folder. I used to compile some C code and run the executable, however, for some reason it won't let me unless I place the executable into the bin folder. Ya permissions, I tried that, as far as I can remember it didn't work. Even if it did work, I believe I should be able to run from my personal folders by default. Again this might be all just because I'm a beginner at it.

And I second KiLLaBeE's on that none intuitive file system/folders naming. TheBishop, MAN pages ya, yyyaaa I almost never understood those.

One thing to say here, Linux seams to use the EXT3 file system (I guess inherited from Unix). Fine, but the permissions/security options compares nothing to what's in NTFS's (Windows's) extensive permissions, muliple groups and users, inheritance. Leave alone the built in compression capabilities. When compared to NTFS, EXT3 seams like an old horse.

...well, i hate the compiling thingy and would like to have some binary packaging.