What is going on?

Here is a submission for your Linux annoyances.

I bought SUSE 7.3 Personal, installed it with basically no trouble, and
started looking around at it.  I got the important stuff going, web
browser, Star Office, email.  Eventually I started trying some of the
other programs linked into the KDE start button.  

Many times I would select something in the start menu, click it, see
the mouse pointer turn into the "wait" indicator, and then...nothing. 
No results, no screen, no error message.  It is very difficult for a
novice to help himself with absolutely no hint about what might be
wrong.

If a program is going to be available on a GUI menu, then it should
respond in some sort of GUI way.  If it a command-line program, that's
fine, but there should be some indication that it is.  Maybe there
should be, in the documentation for a distribution, a summary of all
programs included in the distribution with some short explanation of
what each does, where to find it, how to run it, where its documentation
resides, and so on.

In general terms, there seems to be some sort of implied unix
philosophy that it is a good thing to beat one's head against a wall for
a while to earn the right to use a computer.  That doesn't apply any
more.  There is a lot of programming genius wasted and unappreciated
because no one can figure out how to use the fruits of that genius.

Steven White
City of Bloomington
2215 W Old Shakopee Rd
Bloomington MN 55431-3096
USA
952-563-4882 (voice)
952-563-4672 (fax)
[email protected]