Linux Needs More Haters 617
Corrupt brings us a ZDNet column by Jeremy Allison, who says Linux could benefit from more "tough love" in order to improve its functionality and popularity. Excerpting:
"As Elie Wiesel said, 'the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.' LinuxHater really doesn't hate Linux, despite the name. No one takes that much time to point out flaws in a product that they completely loathe and despise. The complaints are really cries of frustration with a system that just doesn't quite do what is desired (albeit well disguised). A friend pointed out to me that the best way to parse LinuxHaters blog is to treat it as a series of bug reports. A perl script could probably parse out the useful information from them and log them as technical bug reports to the projects LinuxHater is writing about. Deep down, I believe LinuxHater really loves Linux, and wants it to succeed."
just one thing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)
Most bug trackers are smart enough to send e-mail to a developer, or a list of developers.
I think 99% of all submitted bugs are read (or at least glanced at), however the bug trackers are often way behind and (gasp) sometimes those e-mails are just ignored or forgotten.
Sometimes its as simple as a language barrier, sometimes just very busy people .. or sometimes you happen upon a developer who is 300x more sick of the program than you are :)
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)
There are far, far less unique drivers needed than there are printers. In many cases, several models from the same line will actually use the same driver, but you have to list all of them because the average user won't have any way of knowing they're all the same. For that matter, there may well be cases where one companies printers simply use the same control codes as another, better known brand. As an example, years ago I had a dot matrix printer from Star Micronix. Even though it was a minor brand, I never had driver issues because I knew (having taken the time to RTFM) that it was Epson compatible and that the standard Epson driver was all I needed.
Re:THE most important thing to make linux easier.. (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, I bet you have tested Ubuntu.... because your feelings are such....
I have used Mandriva and what I do, is I right click the directory and select "Open as root".
Re:What linux really needs (Score:2, Informative)
They also provide no guarantee that anything will work for anyone. You get that with MS, even if it doesn't mean much.
No, MS and pretty much every company with an EULA explicitly states that you are by yourself if something fails.
At least with linux you could always hire a small army of developpers instead of a small army of lawyers and fix whatever the hell needs fixing.
OH SHUT UP (Score:0, Informative)
You are so full of shit. Just the other day, 2 days ago, I went about on the adventure of installing Firefox 3 on a friends Mandriva 2007.0. How do you think that went? ./configure ... giant checklist. GTK+ isn't installed. rpm -q, oh it is just not a recent enough version. Oh look more garbage that's not installed or not recent enough. Well let's start with GTK+. ./configure oh look it'll install, but it's missing 5 more dependancies. Interesting, pango appears to be part of GTK glad they didn't include the libraries with the package that uses it. Smart thinking. Well let's search for pango, apparently this bullshit is what I'm doing today. Mandrake 0ther, Pango 1.6.blahblahblah.x586mdk. Well let's roll with that. rpm -U, no pango is needed by these other programs. Awesome rpm doesn't know what Upgrading is. Or at least is pretty sure that the other programs aren't supportive of it. At this point I remember what makes windows so great. This shit. Widows either doesn't have it, or has so much less of it as to be inconsequential. Package management in linux is ass. Well yum might be better, it'd almost have to be better than rpm, and it's why next time I go the alternative route it's going to be BSD.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:2, Informative)
Now, I know that there are alot of apps for Linux...
That's about as far as you got before you stopped making any damn sense at all. It seems to me that you proceeded to list off a bunch of things that are already happening in the free software world. Let's review. ...but the installation and use of them are not as seamless as those for Windows or OSX.
We've had that for ten goddamn years. It is called apt. There is absolutely nothing that is more seamless and braindead simple for installing, removing, and managing your system than apt. Nothing. There's nothing in Windows or OSX that's even in the same ballpark. And why not? Is it a technical problem? Obviously not. The answer is "they can't, because they are not free."
a set of agreed upon application practices
Rebuttal the first: Yeah, because application developers for Windows are sooo conscientious about coding to desktop standards. They never use their own ugly widget sets, or dump a bunch of horseshit in the system tray, or make you run as root, or force you to waste resources to run their own super-special update mechanism. It might sound silly at first blush, but a large part of why I initially came to Linux in the first place is that I wanted more uniformity and general neatness.
Rebuttal the second: It is called freedesktop.org, and it has been around for eight years.
Finally, on a more general level, what the hell are you talking about? Are you making reference to any particular project(s)? Because I can't figure out what they could possibly be.
Re:Why I still have to boot into Windows. (Score:2, Informative)
you shouldn't be getting random crashes in ubuntu. that's a sign that something's wrong. if you're hardware is supported and you don't play around with configuration files, ubuntu should just run.
i've never had this sound problem myself, but it's been reported a lot, so i know it exists, and i presume it depends upon the hardware. 8.04 has a new sound manager called pulseaudio which is meant to fix this problem once and for all. try it with a livecd, maybe it will work.
for internet telephoning i tend to use openwengo. it works okay. seeing as i've never used skype, i couldn't give you a comparison.
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OH SHUT UP (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's an awesome blog (Score:2, Informative)
You may be thinking of listening on port 25, not connecting to a remote host's port 25.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:2, Informative)
You won't see packages for the more minimalistic WM's like fluxbox, as they really are just that, window managers with minimal fluff. Occasionally they'll include a graphical settings utility, but these will be written with some other readily available toolkit. Even xfce, which is really a full-fledged DE, uses gtk, so for a xfce-based desktop, the gnome packages would be the "correct" choice. Also, qt and gtk aren't really the only popular toolkits; many people prefer wxwidgets or fltk, or for that matter plain old tk, as such you'll see programs with even more toolkits. Even weirder is perhaps evas (honestly I'm not sure if that's the name of the toolkit. It is of part of it as a whole, I believe, but I'm on shaky ground here. It's something starting with an e, anyway
Your point about abstracting DE details is, imo, right on spot though, but I'm not really sure a new API is the answer. Some kind of daemon figuring out what best theme/color/font to use for all tk's, or for that matter a unified config tool, seems easier, and if it worked, would work wonders with the whole "desktop experience". I'm running a fairly mixed setup myself (fluxbox, thunar, firefox, qgo, amarok, amule, etc), and the time spent getting amarok to have just the correct hue of gray is rather annoying. Not to mention the fact that I have to install the kde configuration program, which I don't want and which I don't have a need for, apart from to make amarok look like my gtk apps.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:3, Informative)
You can also double-click a package in some distros, or pick from the list of available packages in a graphical repository browser like Adept. Installing Linux software ia not hard. It actually takes less knowledge than the drag & drop operation which is typical on OS X, when the devs forget to include a directory link to drop the app on.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:3, Informative)
Except, of course, this is not how Debian packages work, and therefore you are posting bullshit.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure there is. Download a windows program and run it. It just works.
Right, it just works. That is, if it's a standalone .exe and has no serious dependencies like .Net or Java or VB(3-6). Or if it isn't a standalone .exe (requires installation) and it can install into a user directory. Or it installs to a global directory and you're an admin.
Just as in Linux with particular libraries, Windows users also sometimes have to scour the 'net for those special dll's that stopped shipping with various releases of Windows.
Re:OS X (Score:3, Informative)
No.
1. Distributions are binary-incompatible across DISTRIBUTION-PROVIDED software. Third-party software usually runs on everything, ex: binaries of Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash, etc.
2. All distributions have their build procedure published. Supporting a distribution is a matter of following simple build directions.
Of course, being completely unaware of anything even remotely related to development for Linux, you didn't know that, and therefore were repeating the words of your friendly Microsoft marketing person.
Re:Installing software is easier on which OS? (Score:3, Informative)
Honestly, installing software was one of my biggest beefs with OS X. You have to mount a file as a drive?
These days Safari opens the image file and everything pops up like magic for the user. If the people who designed the program are worth a damn, they have a link to the apps folder in the image and the user basically doesn't have to think about it. Its about as complicated as you describe for synaptic but the search interface is google and not a cryptically hidden program somewhere in the system submenu of the start bar. I think the last time you used OS X was 10.1.
Re:OS X (Score:3, Informative)
1. Distributions are binary-incompatible across DISTRIBUTION-PROVIDED software. Third-party software usually runs on everything, ex: binaries of Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash, etc.
In my experience (using Linux since 2003), the opposite is true. Distro-supported software I get through emerge or apt works great! Third-party binary blobs work when the phase of the moon is right and I shout "CTHULHU FHTAGN!". Because, again, Linux does not offer a standard ABI across distributions. It can't possibly do so, really, because "Linux" isn't even monolithic. If some third-party binary blob needs libXYZ-1.2.3 and the libXYZ developers made the stupid decision to break binary compability in libXYZ-1.2.4 instead of calling it libXYZ-2.0.0 and allowing users to install the old and new ABIs in parallel and two different major distros made different decisions on when to upgrade their supplied libXYZ package, the binary blob's developers have to go back and patch their code for no good reason at all, and simply might not be able to support all distributions with a single package at all. On Windows and Mac they don't have this problem because applications don't have to share the entire damned file-system with one another and can simply install with their own preferred library versions. The fact that Windoze programs suffered from DLL Hell last time I checked comes from Windoze developers sucking and deciding to use C:\Windows\ as a system-wide library directory rather than for mere storage of the bloody operating system.
2. All distributions have their build procedure published. Supporting a distribution is a matter of following simple build directions.
Why should anyone ever have to follow 5 different build procedures to produce packages for what purports to be one operating system?
A lot of these "Linux" problems could be solved by simply addressing Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo as separate operating systems, but of course that would send an even worse signal to ISVs than we currently send.
Of course, being completely unaware of anything even remotely related to development for Linux, you didn't know that, and therefore were repeating the words of your friendly Microsoft marketing person.
As noted above, I haven't actually used a M$ system since Windows ME. I've done a few packages worth of Linux development in C and Python, and I've used Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch over the years.
But thanks for making an assumption that anyone disagreeing with you must not know what they speak of, thereby dishonoring the 1000 Slashdot ID. I always believed you guys were gurus, not gasbags.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:4, Informative)
Windows application and/or driver installation requires the application/package and a double-click. You then choose a typical install which does literally everything for you or a customizable one. Done.
Here's a better simplification of the process:
1. Open web browser
2. Search (modern browsers, the search bar, older browsers, navigate to google.com) for "calendar program"
3. Find program web site.
4. Find download link and download.
5. Double click EXE
6. Click Next, Next, Next, I Agree, Next
7. Choose "Simple" or "Advanced" install. Assume Simple install for the rest:
8. Click Next, Next, Next, Next, Reboot prompt.
9. Wait for reboot.
10. Configure program.
No Linux distro I have tried has EVER followed as simple an installation process. Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, DSL- Each had its own quirks, almost all of which required shell commands. (In fact, I believe all required it.)
Obviously you've never used any of the distributions you listed. Here's an Ubuntu example:
1. Click System, Administration, Synaptic Package Manager
2. Type password
3. Search for "calendar"
4. Install sunbird (or other desired program)
5. Open program in the Applications menu and use.
If Linux developers could all agree on an install process that was 100% GUI compliant
You mean like this [arstechnica.com]? Most average people would probably see AT MOST two different UI styles, if they happen to install both KDE/Qt and GNOME/Gtk programs, and they're not even dramatically different paradigms by default. If you even look more closely, the linked screenshot consists only of Microsoft applications; way to go, demonstrating there's no such thing as consistency in Windows (ironically, the most "standard" Win32 UI in that screenshot happens to be Notepad).
Re:Why I still have to boot into Windows. (Score:3, Informative)
i don't know of any packages on officially supported architectures that won't run at all. if you're having that sort of problem, a bug-report would seem to be the way to go.
if i want to call people over the computer, i ask them to download and install openwengo. if the other person isn't even willing to do that, i don't see why i should want to call them.
Re:What kernel bugs? (Score:2, Informative)
Ridiculous?
Linux: Click add/remove programs. Tick the app you want. Click apply. Enter password. Done.
vs
Windows: Load web browser. Google for program. Hunt around website for download link. Download program. Open file browser. Navigate to download directory. Double click install file. Click next. Click next. Click next. Click next. Click next. Done.
That's best case for both. If the Linux app isn't in the repositories then you end up with a similar process to the Windows one. If the Windows one isn't free, you get to add going to the shop and paying for it to the above steps.
Of course, if you're happy to use the command line, the Linux one gets even simpler...
Open terminal. apt-get install . Done.