Marc Abramowitz » Linux annoyances

The fact that it’s very tricky to undelete files. People have created LD_PRELOAD hacks that modify unlink to move files to a trash can - e.g.: libtrash, litetrash, delsafe. AFAIK, these are not default in any distributions.
The mkdir command in GNU coreutils supports a -p option to automatically create parent directories, but other utilities like touch, do not. I have tried to remedy this with a shell script wrapper and a patch to touch.
The most convenient tools tools for managing packages and their dependencies - apt-get, yum, etc. are based on lower-level tools like dpkg and rpm that understand the underlying package formats (deb and rpm). As a result, you can click a web link to install a .deb or .rpm package with a low-level tool, but the dependencies will not be handled.
It’s unfortunate that there are so many different package formats, deb and rpm being the most obvious, and then others like various tar.gz variants for Arch, Slackware, etc.
X - It’s unfortunate that you can’t disconnect a running X program from an X server and then later reconnect it or connect it to a different X server. You can sort of achieve this kind of effect by using something like NX, but that only deals with an entire desktop; not individual programs/windows.

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