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Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat
lisah writes "The flame wars between Linus Torvalds and the GNOME community continue to burn. Responding to Torvalds' recent claim that GNOME 'seems to be developed by interface Nazis' and that its developers believe their 'users are idiots,' a member of the Linux Foundation's Desktop Architects mailing list suggested that Torvalds use GNOME for a month before making such pronouncements. Torvalds, never one to back down from a challenge, simply turned around and submitted patches to GNOME and then told the list, '...let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code.' After lobbing that over the fence, Torvalds concluded his comments by saying, 'Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
They all come off as squabbling children. This is FOSS' finest?
Here are the highlights for those who didn't RTFA:
Lopez: "Linus, you don't know how to read Spanish, so are you an idiot too?"
[snip]
Schaller: "Could maybe be a good way to start a constructive dialog instead of this useless mudslinging?"
[snip]
Torvalds: "What I find unconstructive is how the GNOME people always make *excuses*. It took me a few hours to actually do the patches. It wasn't that hard. So why didn't I do it years ago?
I'll tell you why: because GNOME apologists don't say "please send us patches". No. They basically make it clear that they aren't even *interested* in fixing things, because their dear old Mum isn't interested in the feature.
[snip]
But why, oh, why, have GNOME people not just said "please fix it then"?
Instead, I _still_ (now after I sent out the patch) hear more of your kvetching about how you actually do everything right, and it's somehow *my* fault that I find things limiting.
Here's a damn big clue: the reason I find GNOME limiting is BECAUSE IT IS."
> Sorry kneejerkers, but its going to require a much more detailed description of those patches
Well you could just RTFA if you are interested in details. Linus: "(with my patches, double-clicking on the title bar isn't a special event: it's configurable along with right- and middle-clicking, and with the exact same syntax for all)"
Even just bump for the response
o p_architects/2007-February/001129.html
http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskt
Surely if they are power users, then tick off the check box next to "kde-desktop", press apply, wait a little while, logout, and login to KDE.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I know you're trolling, but what the hey...
"But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, but the problem just is that is not what Linus is, he is the boss of volenteers, they can quit if they don't like their boss."
Linus is not the boss for these volunteers, and he does not pretend to be. His role in this debate is that of a user. He may not be an average user and his name might carry a lot of weight, but he definitely has the right to complain about something that he doesn't like. If he has the skills to actually fix the problems, even better!
"I am just worried for Linus, I sure hope he does take care of himself and stay mentally fit,"
Excuse me? Linus is having an argument and you question his mental health? Are you actually suggesting that people lose it because of disagreements they have with other pepole? Whoever modded you "insightful" is on crack.
I'm a huge rabid KDE fan. I use it on FreeBSD. It's fast, snappy responsive and quick. Other than some minor issues with HAL, it's also bug free. But then I needed a Linux distro for use with a project. I unfortunately chose Kubuntu. I swear Kubuntu must be an Ubuntu conspiracy to make people hate KDE. It's slow, bloated, buggy and a mess. And sluggish.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
People should read the thread where all this happened: http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskt
After someone asked about where the patches were, Linus said the following:
I dunno. I think it's fine for him to act all badass once in a while; it gets people's attention.
As for the Gnome issue... I rather agree with him that it's underfeatured. Honestly, XFCE is about as robust for grandma needs, at a much lower HD/RAM footprint.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
For the lazy ones:
.tar.gz with the patches:s /attachments/20070216/d6c4ac6a/attachment-0001.bin
This is a
http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architect
You're going to laugh at what causes KDE to seem slow on Kubuntu.
It's the window titlebar theme they use. That "Crystal" one. It's horribly inefficient. If you switch over to Plastik (which is also better looking, imho), it will be just as snappy as Debian.
Mepis (http://mepis.org/) is the distro Kubuntu should have been. It defaults to KDE & uses the Ubuntu repositories but it's set up correctly out of the box and is pretty snappy even on my 500mhz notebook.
Incidentally, spatial file management is one of the worst things ever to come out of the "if it agrees with common sense it can't possibly be right" school of interface design.
And also incidentally, you don't have to use it. in gconf-editor: apps -> nautilus -> preferences -> always_use_browser.
I hate it too.
It's time for the obligatory Princess Bride quote. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Could it be that you intended the word "schizophrenia"? It is difficult to tell.
Someone who is autistic typically:
* Is unable to start or sustain a social conversation
* Develops language slowly or not at all
* Repeats words or memorized passages, like commercials
* Doesn't refer to self correctly (for example, says "you want water" when the child means "I want water")
* Uses nonsense rhyming
* Communicates with gestures instead of words
Those characteristics clearly do not describe Mr. Torvalds, who is an articulate speaker and writer. What's more, when you go on to elaborate "autistics tend to care about things that most non-autistics don't...like engaging in holy wars about which is the *one true* graphical environment, which is the *one true* text editor, or which is the *one true* license", such behavior again does not come close to describing Mr.Torvalds.
when they are happy to endorse the exact same kind of defamation they claim to oppose
Who modded that up?
Did you even read the links you provided, or do you just like to defame an organization as you whine about about defaming others?
And as to your misleading comments implying they only care when Jews are harassed, here's one of many examples of ADL condemning anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence after 9/11.
make world, not war
Superior in what sense ?
There's functionnality on the one hand, which I'll agree BK may have in drove, and there's availability on the other. For example I'd like to use Matlab for some personal projects, but it costs too much for me, so I don't.
Some people interested in Linux development were limited by BK's license. They couldn't use it outside of strict Linux development, which was bad for learning the tool. It didn't interface with other tools (GUIs, etc). BK's author retracted the license overnight because someone reversed-engineered the protocol to improve interoperability, IIRC. Overnight BK became a very powerful unavailable tool.
No matter what you think about BK, it is now unusable for Linux kernel development. That doesn't make it a superior tool by any definition.
As the mother of an autistic (PDD) child--thank you for saying all that.
I'm so fucking sick and tired of these geeks who think autism is some sort of neato cool thing to have which makes your life a magical fairyland of math and science genius while explaining away their aversion to dating and soap. That attitude alone tells me they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.
Autism is not a benefit and it's not fun and games. It's a fucking nightmare! I can't even begin to imagine what my son goes through when he "short circuits" on sensory overload. And he's old enough now to realize something is going wrong, but he can't do anything to stop it. How come none of the "autism wannabes" out there ever talk about that aspect? Maybe because they're not actually autistic? Trust me, if I could I'd take my son's autism away from him and give it to one of those "autism is so kewl!" geeks so their dream of being autistic can come true.
Do you even know what you're talking about? The GTK file dialog is almost exactly the same as the OS X file dialog. Compare these screenshots:
GTK save file dialog: http://clemens-and.nihongonauts.com/uploads/gtk2.
OS X save file dialog: http://www.uwec.edu/help/MacOSX/Images/dialog/fil
GTK open file dialog: http://www.flamerobin.org/images/screenshots/0.6.
OS X open file dialog: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interfac
Which part of the GTK file dialog is "much worse" than the OS X one? There's almost no difference.
How naive you are. Things don't work like that for 90% of the users, sorry.
It seems to me that that's the beauty of a "default": power users can still change it. If you can't figure out how to install KDE, and you can't figure out to download Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, then maybe you are better off using Gnome. But it's not like it's hard to find a KDE distro or even install KDE on a Gnome-default distro.
It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there
where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got
ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper
had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The really special thing about Sawfish was that it
was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it.
All of these three went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested in taking over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look elsewhere
for a maintained window manager, it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance
of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and
users and subsequently chosen as the standard. Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to a policy that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem.
This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME, in the sense that there is a consensus to not allow 'random' patches
add config options to the GUI without a very good reason. For instance one shouldn't add config options as a way to work around bugs or
missing features in lower parts of the stack, instead one should try to fix them. In the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore
fashion that for most other modules, but due to Havoc's high profile I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceived
the project as a whole.
Two years ago IIRC the whole GOME usability discussion popped up in OSNews, involving its editor, Eugenia Loli-Queru.
It became very clear that GNOME did not even accept patches. Not only that, they didn't even look at substantial percentage of patches.
In another, more recent, example, the FreeBSD GNOME guy said that it was hard working with the GNOME hackers, because they practically only care about Linux (as opposed to KDE people, who were cooperative) and were not really focused on portability.
A few years back, glibc maintainers refused to accept some OpenBSD suggestions reagarding C string functions (safer by design, from the OpenBSD team, with an extensive proven record in safe coding)- they only did so after two years, IIRC.
So, yeah, it seems there's some problems with GNOME people.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Stallman laid some dirt paths and now he demands that the whole interstate system named after him.
There were other free compilers before gcc (though their licenses were murky at best). Many of them faster, because gcc is about being easily retargetable, not fast.
glibc didn't even really work with Linux, and RMS wasn't maintaining it even then. Binutils didn't support ELF on x86. Thank the Linux hackers for that.
The existence of the GNU userland had a pretty obvious alternative in the very OS it was cloned from.
Let's use the GNOME application Evince as an example. Evince is a PDF (and other) file reader. The GNOME usability gurus, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that hiding preferences in an option or preferences dialog is bad UI design. They'd rather have all your viewing options up front in the menus.
Not bad, except for one thing -- there's no way that I can find to set a default for the settings you want to use to view a PDF. Everytime I open a PDF in Evince, I have to spend a few seconds turning off "continuous" display of pages (which mucks with paging through a document), setting the zoom level to "best fit," closing the thumbnails view, and resizing the window. Evince will remember these changes for about 30 or so files (I think) for the next time you open them. If you open a lot of different files, or you're viewing a new file, this memory is utterly useless and you have to change your settings over again. It gets to be a real drag.
There's no menu option for "use current settings as default," and the only reference I can find to preferences is a message on their bug tracker where a developer basically shoots down a request for globally persistent preferences stating that it's not what they want to do.
The attitude of the the Evince developers is that their "smart" sizing choices should always be the default, and they ask users to attempt to justify why they should be allowed to set personal preferences with the attitude that they must explain why they're rejecting the defaults that the developers prefer. That sort of looking down your nose at users is just intolerable in my opinion.
The only reason I haven't dumped Evince entirely is because it reads CBZ & CBR files.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
> Studies have consistently shown that higher intelligence leads to healthier (physically and mentally) and happier people. This "semi-autistic genius geek" thing is a BS myth. Don't say most, say "me." Because that is what you mean, and it ends there.
i sm#Intelligence_and_autism :
The issue is nowhere near as clear-cut as you make it, and while you describe an old consensus, more recent research suggests otherwise.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_in_aut
"Characteristics observed by some studies as being associated with gifted children at least appear to be analogous to those of autistic children:
Some studies suggest that gifted children are more than twice as introverted as their peers.[1]
Gifted children have been characterized as having obsessive interests, preferring to play alone, and enjoying solitude. They are also said to have prodigious memories and show intense reactions to noise, pain and frustration.[2]
According to some reports, gifted children have a higher-than-average propensity to allergies[3]."
Sounds like the introverted geek stereotype, doesn't it?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.