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That mork format was really something else. Whoever thought that having the browser history stored in an impenetrable format with no tools to read it should turn in their nerd badge.

Seriously if you scrapped the entire GUI and rendering system whenever a minor tewak is needed you'd never get anywhere.

Amen, brother.

But you can preach all day and the CADT crowd will never listen.

Worse is Better

Do you hate your job? Are you only still there because you're waiting to vest? I feel your pain, brother. The only thing that kept me from leaving Netscape in 1997 and walking away from a dumptruck full of cash in frustration was this script. I ran this every morning for at least a year: it prints out the following motivational message:

Today's NSCP price is $__._; your total unsold shares are worth $____. You are __._% vested, for a total of ____ vested unsold shares ($____). But if you quit today, you will walk away from $____.
Hang in there, little trooper! Only _ years __ months __ days to go!

It's amazing how this script can put it all back into perspective and keep you from going postal and strangling someone. Fill in your numbers, and let it remind you not to do something you'll regret later.

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/

Eh? XRANDR is dependent on neither your dungeon master, window manager, desktop environment, or whatever else "DM" might stand for, nor on your graphics card driver (unless it's one of the archaic closed-source ones that doesn't support it at all). It's an X extension that any client can connect to.

I believe both big overbearing desktop environments already supplied a rather crappy client to do it, but sane users used a third-party client that saves configurations (I used one for awhile, but the name escapes me), a collection of manually-executed scripts calling xrandr(1) (I've got three of these in a panel now, for docked w/ monitor, projector, and laptop only), or (for those who are hackish enough to do it, and yet patient enough to put up with the CADT-model development) a collection of scripts to do it automatically with hotplug, udev, or whatever incompatible hardware detection and configuration system of the day (been there, done that, won't get fooled again).

What this will do is:
* if you exclusively use kde, it "fixes" this problem using method 3, only it will be some poor K schmuck's problem to rewrite all the magic next time someone says "Hey, let's rewrite everything from scratch!". Which, I guess, is his problem, so good.
* if you do not use kde, accomplishes nothing, and reduces motivation for people to actually fix the problem with further enhancements to the desktop-agnostic third-party clients. (but that's ok, because people who don't use kde don't matter!)
* If you switch back and forth between kde and other desktop environments (perhaps multiple users on a family computer), and you have a custom automated script setup; now when you're in KDE, this will interfere with them. (but that's ok, because everyone should be using kde, not switching back and forth -- and when some perpetual-v0.8 programmer breaks your scripts again, are you gonna rewrite them, or switch to KDE fulltime?)

If GNOME is like the republicans, KDE is like the democrats. They want to give you the illusion of a two-way choice, and you could make an argument that one is slightly the lesser of two evils, but the real solution is to ditch big-desktop authoritarianism altogether.

Linux was a very different beast when Raymond wrote that.

Actually, Raymond never wrote that. It was Jamie Zawinski in 1998.

Between that and writing "The Cathedral and the Bizarre" I think the AC is just trolling.

The "lock" screen can now optionally control your music player, the system volume, and display notifications so you don't have to type in a password.

Oh, great. How about also adding in a function to enter commands into a terminal from the lock screen. Adding new functions to lock screens is always risk-free, after all. I'm sure jwz would approve.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Such a beautiful and concise description of one of the greatest problems in the Linux desktop.

Gnome had no direction because it had arrived where it aimed: functional desktop that more or less corresponded to people's expectations and that let you run applications without getting in the way. Perhaps it was not sexy, but the Linux ceased being cool and sexy at some point in the last 10 years. OS X raised the desktop standards by delivering a fully working sane desktop pre-loaded with loads of mature and well executed applications. Linux has "pre-loaded" applications (through apt/yum) but not at the same quality level.

Adapt it for tablets and phones? Who on Earth would prefer a half baked mobile interface without any decent applications (and no expectation of API stability) over Android with its sane stable API and thousands apps? Ans: even less people than those running a Linux Desktop right now.

This just looks to me like he's rediscovered the old "Right Thing" vs. "Worse is Better" philosophies, as spelled out by Richard Grable in The Rise of Worse-is-Better 25 years ago. In a lot of ways, I think Dr. Grable's idea is probably even a better way of looking at it.

Overall though, I think its a very good contribution to the discussion of software engineering.

However, I do have some minor quibbles. Realise as I say this that I'm a big Ada fan, which makes me by his reckoning a "hardcore conservative". I can't really argue with that. However, as someone from that community, I take strong umbrage with him ascribing being a fan of premature optimization to us. Nothing can be further from the truth. Doing anything to pervert code from a good-maintainable design without proven need (derived from tests showing a measurable bottleneck in the affected place), is indeed considered evil.

The point of this is that I just gave a impassioned argument against something he called a "conservative" attitude using what is clearly a conservative argument. I didn't make it up myself though. This is the argument I usually hear against pre-optimization. So I have to conclude that pre-optimization is in fact not a feature of a "conservative" outlook. We would probably argue it belongs with the "liberals", but more likely it is just something only argued for by incompetents. :-)

The Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers development model has been the GNOME way for at least a decade.

Working on new stuff (a) is fun (b) enhances the resume. Maintenance on something that basically works does neither.

Dear remaining GNOME devs,

You guys said “If you don’t like GNOME 3, don’t use it.”

So we took you at your word.

The CADT development model remains predominant in GNOME: throwing everything away and writing something new is always much more fun (and better for the resume) than just fixing the remaining bugs in something that basically works.

I'm a Unix sysadmin for a living. I just reinstalled my work box with Xubuntu 12.04. It's amazingly responsive and the interface doesn't make me want to set it on fucking fire. I can GET SHIT DONE AT WORK.

I didn’t leave GNOME, it left me.

I don't know if you're using "core" to mean "kernel" or "basic OS layout", but either way you'd be wrong. iOS is derived from OSX and shares the Darwin/XNU kernel, BSD subsystem and even the BSD userspace stuff with OSX. Most of the frameworks (Cocoa, etc) are also essentially the same or very similar.

Well he could be mostly right, actually.

Yes, the kernel and BSD userland are very, very similar, but once you move up the stack towards Cocoa there are actually quite a lot of differences. It's not as simple as s/NS/UI/ on the class names, case in point: JWZ's efforts to port Dali Clock.

Yeah, massive dev buy-in problem. The apps that were there were OK, but there weren't very many overall. That was really the both the first and last nails in the coffin. When they launched, it was $100 to publish an app, so if you wanted to give your app away for free, it cost you. jwz has a couple of good posts about the app posting nightmare. Besides, why maintain apps for three different mobile platforms when IOS is already widely adopted, and Android is winning the footrace for second place?

Yeah, massive dev buy-in problem. The apps that were there were OK, but there weren't very many overall. That was really the both the first and last nails in the coffin. When they launched, it was $100 to publish an app, so if you wanted to give your app away for free, it cost you. jwz has a couple of good posts about the app posting nightmare. Besides, why maintain apps for three different mobile platforms when IOS is already widely adopted, and Android is winning the footrace for second place?

This is all good solid advice.

Also, I would pass up on raid (except maybe mirroring the entire drive) in favor of one hard disk, one partition.

see:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

There is a really old saying, "Linux is free if your time is worth noting."

There is no such "old saying". It's what Jamie Zawinski (then of Netscape) wrote, comparing Linux with, of all things, IRIX, many years ago. It was wrong then, it is most definitely wrong now. Though Jamie Zawinski usually has a clue when he writes software, his style of complaining about everything software-related did not change at all -- here is a recent example: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/

Okay so I understand the whole desire to toss out X and it's extreme amount of legacy code

Why? What part of "legacy code" automatically means "toss [it] out"? The Linux kernel is over 20 years old, and the core BSD code is older than that. Do you also want to just throw them out and start over from scratch because they're old? Now, I agree with you that something that is less functional than its predecessor should not be adopted as its replacement, but I hate the assumption that "old == replace from scratch" that seems to be common in software development (especially in the open source/free software community).

Yep, it's what jwz called Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers development model. And it's not the whole F/OSS community -- this disease is specific to the Johnny-come-lately Linux community. It's the flip side of CatB, and it's not pretty -- I go back and forth on whether it's worth it all or not.

As I understand it, X11 is horribly out of date.
It should be clear to anyone that there are some stone-age omissions in X:
- Basic transparency is either an ugly hack that glitches all the time (xcompmgr) or else a fairly extravagant system like compiz.
- Smooth fonts is an extra.
- Multiple displays is an extra.
- There are serious security flaws in areas such as screen locking. See this great series of points by the author of xscreensaver.
Then, there's all this support for legacy technologies that don't affect 90% of Linux/BSD systems, let alone the potential general market.
All in all, X11 has fundamental weaknesses, doesn't reflect modern usage and is really too big to fix. Legacy support and compatibility are so important that problems can't be fixed.

I haven't been following Wayland too closely, but my understanding is that it will address these issues as fundamentals of the system. I hope it does address each of these issues, because they are important. Performance could certainly improve on X. Let's hope it does with Wayland.
I'm not that familiar with how display servers work either, so correct me if I'm wrong about anything. No need to rage, I'm not trollling anyone.

My prediction is that it will become fashionable to whine about Wayland, lots of people will resist it for a while, but in the end it will be the most suitable alternative and only the truly stubborn and those who need X for some reason will avoid it. See the history of PulseAudio for reference.

Sorry about the identical AC post below. I forgot to sign in.

As I understand it, X11 is horribly out of date.
It should be clear to anyone that there are some stone-age omissions in X:
- Basic transparency is either an ugly hack that glitches all the time (xcompmgr) or else a fairly extravagant system like compiz.
- Smooth fonts is an extra.
- Multiple displays is an extra.
- There are serious security flaws in areas such as screen locking. See this great series of points by the author of xscreensaver.
Then, there's all this support for legacy technologies that don't affect 90% of Linux/BSD systems, let alone the potential general market.
All in all, X11 has fundamental weaknesses, doesn't reflect modern usage and is really too big to fix. Legacy support and compatibility are so important that problems can't be fixed.

I haven't been following Wayland too closely, but my understanding is that it will address these issues as fundamentals of the system. I hope it does address each of these issues, because they are important. Performance could certainly improve on X. Let's hope it does with Wayland.
I'm not that familiar with how display servers work either, so correct me if I'm wrong about anything. No need to rage, I'm not trollling anyone.

My prediction is that it will become fashionable to whine about Wayland, lots of people will resist it for a while, but in the end it will be the most suitable alternative and only the truly stubborn and those who need X for some reason will avoid it. See the history of PulseAudio for reference.

1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not their legal name.
2. There is no step 2.

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2007/09/psa-backups/

This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note

This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob â" that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? Itâ(TM)s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.

Me? Iâ(TM)ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it.

Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.

Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.

Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.

[..] breaking just about every rule of thoughtfulness and elegance known to God and man. And look where that got them: pretty damn far.

Worse is Better

Yes.

By the way all the praises here and elsewhere about C and UNIX are ironically a bit overdone too. UNIX is better than Windows. But it isn't that wonderful. C might be preferable to Pascal, but it isn't that great either.

1) C and UNIX are the "Worse is Better" approach: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

2) There was already a "unix" before UNIX. It was called Multics, and it was better in many areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics and after UNIX there was Plan9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs .

So a world without C and UNIX might not necessarily be worse. Maybe stuff would only start happening 10 years later but we might have a lot fewer stupid "buffer overflows" and "exploits".

1. 1. Dump (from an economics perspective) WebOS devices on the market with the side effect of generating interest and developers on WebOS. Then, introduce new WebOS devices for the sudden influx of applications that appear.
2. 2. Completely bail-out.

Unfortunately, I think if people convert these things to Android, #2 is more or less inevitable. I do think that WebOS is a real fine piece of work, but Palm screwed up early on with their developer relations (a good example here). I do hope something along the lines of #1 does happen, though...

Then why didn't he just stay with GNOME 2?
 

Is GNOME 2 still supported?

There are valid reasons to do it for non-evil companies as well. Let us all take the lesson of mcom.bad-attitude to heart. Well, for 30 days. And then perform cardiac expungings.

Seriously dude. Tone down the anger some, and study history some more.

You might want to start off with the essay The Rise of "Worse is Better". It lays out a pretty consistent reasoning for why quick to release, flexible software wins the day. It doesn't have to have all the features that are possible, it doesn't have to be 100% stable. Software that is in users hands NOW and enables them to be productive is worth infinitely more than bug free (or even just "far less buggy") software that may be available some date in the future.

All large software projects have huge lists of bugs. Heck you can even take estimated metrics of Bugs/Line of Code. Even with really damn good coders, once you have millions of lines of code Bugs/LOC is going to bite you in the ass.

Managers and companies set schedules - not programmers.

This is true for everybody in a company. Their job and delivery schedule is based upon the needs of the company.

Marketing idiots says we need feature x because he has a hard-on and absolutely no basis to demand feature x.

Typically some large customer who is willing to pay large sums of money is requesting the feature. Those same large sums of money go to pay your salary. In some cases, especially for one off features, it may be the case that a large company will have a work stoppage if the feature isn't implemented. Or perhaps the software package is not nearly of as much use to them without that feature.

Your job is to make USABLE software. Software that isn't usable isn't worth anything to anyone.

Programmers do their best to create feature in y duration. Its buggy. This is known. The company releases it anyways.

If a company continues with that practice, eventually they will get a reputation for writing low quality software and they will find themselves in a poor financial situation.

In regards to how much Microsoft is to blame for this, have you taken a look at any other enterprise software vendors? Be it Java2 EE, SAS, or IBMs latest and greatest product, enterprise software development is an ugly picture no matter who is producing the tool chain.

(Actually J2EE can be done properly if you have the right people in charge, I am pretty sure SAS and LOTUS are always horrid horrid things to get close to however. :) )

Perhaps (in the same way that Apple chose to reject the complex Mozilla codebase and went with KHTML to design WebKit), a project like Nouveau (is there a similar ATI from-scratch driver effort?) could produce stable, auditable graphics drivers that will run 3D graphics on modern hardware at speed.

Maye some company can subcontract the OpenBSD dev teams to do it. :)

I agree that RMS deserves a lot of recognition for his early vision and good social conscience, but if you look at how key pieces of the GNU system was developed, it seems rather "cathedral-like", to borrow the over-used ESR analogy; even today it seems more so than the Linux kernel. FSF carries a powerful social message, but the early days could also be understood in terms of the clubby hacker cliques that I imagine RMS participating in at MIT. I don't see it as very open to outside contributions. Consider for example the Emacs schism of the 90s, for example. If it were simply about the code, RMS would not have maintained such ridiculous positions on the "official" Emacs 19 code base. Similar can be said for GNU HURD -- if they had been more open about its early development instead of taking a "we know better than you, you'll wait 'til it's ready" approach, maybe it would have had a higher chance of taking off.

Yea, looks like this poster is mixing up WebP and WebM. jwz also compared WebP to WebM and Wave. While WebP is based on WebM, the purpose for creating WebP and WebM are different.

The Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers development model.

that the Linux Desktop suddenly decided to drive off a cliff over the last few years. I was a very happy Linux user for a very long time, and for so many years, the progress was continuous and substantive.

Then, suddenly, KDE4 happens, still a disastrous mess despite the claims of its worst-stereotypes-about-geeks users, and I leave KDEland for GNOME 2, which I finally start to feel is a great example of a desktop by 2010 or so at which point GNOME3 happens, a new disastrous mess that once again recalls JWZ's complaint about so much of OSS development, in parallel with Unity.

There is suddenly no currently under development heavyweight IDE for Linux to offer a choice to those of us that want the convenience and coherence of a Windows-like or Mac OS-like desktop that is also stable and retains the X11 infrastructure that so much software going back so many years relies on.

There is simply no choice in OSSland, apart from "stop upgrading your software/distro (and thus, your hardware, due to lack of driver support in old versions), stick to GNOME2 or KDE3, and give up on any further development in this area."

Not acceptable, and really puts a dent in the perception of OSS as a set of platforms with long-term investments in stable user interfaces.

Ted, and the thread, I refer you once again to the Rise of Worse is Better by Richard Gabriel. Repeat, all together now:

"It is slightly better to be simple than correct."

and

"Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality."

These two of the four characteristics most directly confute Nelson, who has always loved theory over practice. That is to say, he is an expert on all of the characteristics and conditions for doing work - without having actually worked himself.

And neither of those facts matters to nonprogrammers. It's much akin to just saying "Oh well if you really care about that, there's some configuration file which you can mess around with where those keys are hidden (and you might just need to guess to find out what those keys happen to be)". If the user already has no clue as to how to program, or isn't able to invest a lot of time to learn an interface which might just be deprecated in a few releases due to a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers, who would much rather remove and replace something with their own new hotness rather than try to find out why something doesn't work, then you're screwed.

It'd be much better to try to both enable the user by providing good low and high level tools, instead of trying to constantly try to remove configuration from the low end tools because you don't like users doing anything more than what you think they should do. That's why I stopped using GNOME; because while I can program, I do get tired of the constant battle against what I like or need for my own workspace, especially since efforts like these decrease my own productivity, not increase them.

Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. I don't use any Microsoft products and neither should you.

The tech's still a bit flaky on the reading side if you have more than just a couple of pieces of information, however. JWZ did some investigating into this late last year and came away disappointed. I'm sure it will slowly improve over time, but it's nowhere near Just Works yet: See his results for more details.

Even AFTER I understood the headline the thought, 'Mozilla is imploding like Netscape did, with stupid browser decisions,' was still running through my head.

Given the jwz quote, paragraph 9:

At this point, I strongly believed that Netscape was no longer capable of shipping products. Netscape's engineering department had lost the single-minded focus we once had, on shipping something useful and doing it fast. That was no longer happening. Netscape was shipping garbage, and shipping it late.

If you think about Firefox since some point after Firefox 2, especially in comparison to Chrome...

Missing option: it doesn't fucking matter. They could do major releases, they could do point releases; hell, they could go the Microsoft route (kind of a Fibonacci/exponential hybrid) and make the next six versions be 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, and 2000. IT DOES NOT MATTER. They either have a culture that says "polish the product and fix bugs" or a culture that says "add features." We discovered less than three weeks ago what they care about. (See also this old piece.) All I see anymore is dick-waving about javascript speed and ACID performance.

A personal appeal to Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (Dear Jimmy: fuck off.)

Also, was I the only one to notice that Jimbo is calling himself the Founder (ie not Co-Founder) in his Personal / Urgent appeals?

Reminds me of jwz's "Groupware Bad" article, wherein he details how normal people want personal software that helps them get laid. Seems quite relevant here. The money shot:

"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software

Side note: fuck slashcode. I want my goddamn copy/paste back in Chrome.

of course somebody's going to need to build the drag-and-drop CMS for HTML5

Will it get me laid?

Google does have stupid geniuses too

To understand why it failed you must understand what is wave : groupware

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source wave/groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

read more on jwz
http://jwz.livejournal.com/444651.html and more http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

and it was written in an "enterprise language" like cobol err Java and in gwt , they practically
murdered java script with that crap and the format for transfering wave data :xml documents
hint it looks more like exchange system and if you wonder why it failed? think sharepoint
and it was addopted by eterprise type systems like : novel , sap and that was the target i think
people who receive messages into a big inbox and where they should reply to support messages for example

i will install pygowave http://pygowave.net/ at my work place http://reea.net/
and i think it will make a a good platform for collaboration : think one big #irc channel where documents and messages can be shared (but from browser) , if i think well maybe skype is better on that

ps: reinventing the mail system is a bad idea when you already have ....gmail (that sucks too but for that i will write another episode) and it was a bad idea that i was alone in my wave
i was expecting something like facebook with hundreds of friends and invites and lot's of spam from the apps but it was just an empty enterprise exchange type system

funny shnitz this is what google wave https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1 told me today in my inbox
https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1
What do you want to master? I want an Free as in freedom wave
something like http://identi.ca/ alternative for propietary twitter system
in fact you can contact me on the pygowave , it's open it's free and you don't need an invite
you just join the system
mariuz@pygowave.net

In this corner: Spend a weekend recompiling my kernel two dozen times to get some piece of hardware to work the way it's supposed to.

AKA my friends Mac. Damn that was a pain in the a$$ to get that smartphone to backup properly.

In this corner: Plug it in and it does what the hell I need it to do, no kernel recompiles required, thus allowing me to spend the rest of my time doing other things I enjoy.

Sounds like my Ubuntu box. Found drivers for every piece of hardware for me, didn't even need to go to the makers website for drivers.

If you think I'm trolling, no less an authority than JWZ agrees.

Ummmm.... the first site hasn't been updated in 5 years, the other was written in 2003... thats trolling if your cherry picking through very old, non-factual websites for your "facts".

In this corner: Spend a weekend recompiling my kernel two dozen times to get some piece of hardware to work the way it's supposed to.

AKA my friends Mac. Damn that was a pain in the a$$ to get that smartphone to backup properly.

In this corner: Plug it in and it does what the hell I need it to do, no kernel recompiles required, thus allowing me to spend the rest of my time doing other things I enjoy.

Sounds like my Ubuntu box. Found drivers for every piece of hardware for me, didn't even need to go to the makers website for drivers.

If you think I'm trolling, no less an authority than JWZ agrees.

Ummmm.... the first site hasn't been updated in 5 years, the other was written in 2003... thats trolling if your cherry picking through very old, non-factual websites for your "facts".

Call it fanboyism, but I do not think Linux is such a terrible operating system that it would see no use whatsoever, or practically so.

Hmm, let's see here . . .

In this corner: Spend a weekend recompiling my kernel two dozen times to get some piece of hardware to work the way it's supposed to.

In this corner: Plug it in and it does what the hell I need it to do, no kernel recompiles required, thus allowing me to spend the rest of my time doing other things I enjoy.

If you think I'm trolling, no less an authority than JWZ agrees.

I agree, Linux is a great operating system, but even as far as it has come, it's still not ready to be a full-time desktop OS that could replace Windows, much less Mac.

Call it fanboyism, but I do not think Linux is such a terrible operating system that it would see no use whatsoever, or practically so.

Hmm, let's see here . . .

In this corner: Spend a weekend recompiling my kernel two dozen times to get some piece of hardware to work the way it's supposed to.

In this corner: Plug it in and it does what the hell I need it to do, no kernel recompiles required, thus allowing me to spend the rest of my time doing other things I enjoy.

If you think I'm trolling, no less an authority than JWZ agrees.

I agree, Linux is a great operating system, but even as far as it has come, it's still not ready to be a full-time desktop OS that could replace Windows, much less Mac.

<oblig>mail summary files</oblig>

There are several apps in the app store where the user is redistributing the source outside the App store. JWZ has the iPhone and iPad ports included in xdaliclock for example: http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/