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Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?"
John Siracusa writes a brief article at Ars Technica pointing out an exchange between Andrew Morton, a lead developer of the Linux kernel, and a ZFS developer. Morton accused ZFS of being a "rampant layering violation." Siracusa states that this attitude of refusing to think holistically ("across layers") is responsible for all of the current failings of Linux — desktop adoption, user-friendliness, consumer software, and gaming. ZFS is effective because it crosses the lines set by conventional wisdom. Siracusa ultimately believes that the ability to achieve such a break is more likely to emerge within an authoritative, top-down organization than from a grass-roots, fractious community such as Linux.
You're right. The problem is there aren't nearly enough homosexuals in the linux community. Plenty use Windows, so it's very easy to find some to design visual elements. In linux it's much harder.
It's been a long time.
You have exposed quite a bit about how little you know about operating systems.
The problems with Vista have nothing to do with the product, which is quite stable and secure (definitely moreso of the latter than OSX or Lunix, which are trivially easy for hackers to penetrate). Vista's problem is with drivers, and that has nothing to do with Microsoft (since they don't create the hardware).
The hardware manufacturers had over a year to get Vista-compatible, since Vista had actually been in released to corporate customers since last year. But instead, a majority of companies simply assumed their XP drivers would work... and so we see, as usual, what ASSuming things does.
I would expect this shoddy driver support out of ATI, since they have always been pretty disappointing. But nVidia is a true disappointment, since their driver support had always been top-notch until now.
As for your other statement, it's pretty silly to expect Novell (2 L's) to succeed where Suse failed. After all, in their hands, NetWare has continued to be a failure, Word Perfect has continuted to be a failure, and essentially everything they touch gets transmogrified by Novell's fecal Midas touch.
Expecting Novell to turn around a Lunix distro is so absurd as to be outright laughable. Suse has not gotten anywhere in years, and Lunix is STILL chasing Windows 95's tail lights. As I said, you can continue to polish that turd, but it's unhealthy to expect it to shine. And downright dishonest trying to convince anyone else that it will.
Linux folk don't want to think outside the box or change things up. They're using a clone of an OS developed in the '70s. They use C, a language from the same period, not C++. They use an interface that literally emulates an ancient teletype.
Reiserfs suffered from a lot more trouble than that. Reiserfs is effectively dead with its core developer facing murder charges: his cavalier attitude about losing files seems similar to his casual attitude about the location of his ex-wife's corpse. Nasty, but he does seem to be as guilty as OJ Simpson.