What?.. How could you generalize this across all of "Linux"? Or did you mean something else?

I know what you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure it's a very GNOME-specific problem (or gdm, or whatever login manager they use by default...) because when I started out on Ubuntu earlier this year, there was a very active bug report about it. I could actually probably find it if anyone was curious.

But I've long since ditched gnome because well, I hate it. On KDE now and never had this problem. I'm pretty sure this is not an "all of linux" problem at all though.