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Google Eliminates Gizmo5 Client For Linux
cuttheredwire writes "Evidence on the Gizmo5 forum (login required) confirms that since Google's takeover of Gizmo5, only the Windows, Mac, and iPhone clients are available for download from the official Web page. The Linux download link no longer works. This is a potential problem for happy Linux users with paid-up credit in their Gizmo5 accounts if they need to reinstall the software. A back-door download is still available, although it is speculated on the forums that it will go away soon. Does this mean that (as with other Google projects such as Google Talk) Linux will be the poor relation for Google Voice also?"
Probably one of the reasons they dont support Linux and why no one else does is the headache of supporting its 10,000 distributions which can't agree on anything about how the system should be set up. Let's face it, making a software installer for Linux is a nightmare. This, and the lack of a stable driver interface, is why Linux remains a niche OS for a few elites who seem impressed that they are able to cope with using such a confounding and difficult operating system. Such is the mentality of Linux people, their userunfriendly behaviour, that instead of accomodating users needs, i have often heard Linux developers say that users should have to learn how to compile software, debug makefiles and C code and the million ways that software may not compile, resolve library dependancies, find out why a driver wont compile against one of 2000 different conventions on the location of Linux kernel headers, to name a few Linux useability nightmares. On Windows, you put the disk in, click install, and your hardware and software just works. No messy days trying to figure out why a kernel module wont compile or some arcane problem admist millions of lines of code. I have always said that being welcoming and making it easier for companies to make program and binary drivers that run on every Linux operating system version is key to its success, especially since it is months or years until open source drivers can appear for hardware, and also that open source drivers are often filled with bugs while the manufacturers driver is subjected to extensive quality control testing with the actual hardware. The really absurd thing is that while kernel developers continue to make it hard for companies to make a driver for Linux, allowing binary drivers would actually lead to faster creation of open source software, it would allow the vendors driver to be used in back engineering by monitoring communications with hardware devices.
In another screwup, Linux developers in order to address the risk of null pointer dereference in the kernel, blocked all applications from using address 0. In the process they blew up hundreds of applications that run on Wine, when they could have just cleared address 0 when the system goes into kernel mode and preserved compatability. Incompetence, and lack of imagination to not have come up with such a simple solution.
Linux is worth it is your time is worth nothing, but if you are doing real work you need something that does not take 10 times as long to get anything done. Most Linux developers, in my dealings with this, seem to have an elite complex and want to keep Linux hard to use, so that they can feel special in using an operating system which is only useable to 3% of computer users, it makes them feel special and superior that they can figure out such a nightmare of an OS.
As I have always said, the key to software useability is in backwards compatability, layout, and flexibility and feature richness of software. In another messup Linux developers have been making software that is so rigid and inflexible it is unuseable. One example is gnome which is a nightmare to customise. There are hundreds of cases where Linux software has been unuseable to me because some important feature was removed. Making software feature bare and inflexible does not make it useable. The key to useability is many features and lots of customisability but in layout, placing lesser used features deeper into the UI and laying out the user interface so the features can be found easily. Secondly, a system can be user and expert friendly at the same time. Software can be built in layers, with a friendly GUI interface for most users, and experts would be able to access the configuration files, source code, command line and so on at the lower layers. Everything should be able to be done by both CLI and GUI. One of the things I like about Linux is its commmand line interface and that it is possible for one to understand how the entire system works and is put together, and a modular approach is also important. There
So, then I guess this is a dead link: http://picasa.google.com/linux/
Good points and in regards to the LSB, you are trully correct in the fact that it's a damn joke. I've tried Linux since 96 when I got a copy of Caldera 1.3 and was able to actually get my modem (USR hardware model) to work but in diving into the various versions of RH/Mandrake/Debian/Slack/Gentoo/LFS I discovered that the LSB was a joke for myself as there are to many Distro specific exceptions to the damn thing. RH is allowed to do things their way while Debian is allowed to do the same. Because of this, there really isn't any standard being enforced that's usable.
This is one of the biggest issues that faces Linux and is one reason that MS was able to take the market by storm. Sure MS couldn't care less about security in the early days but the did one thing that made it possible to take over like they did and that was develop a stable set of AP/ABI's that didn't change. This meant developers and companies could code in a stable manner and not have to worry about things breaking with every damn update unlike Linux and yes I do know what in hell I'm talking about. Although Windows had DLL hell that could give people real headaches, it was fairly easy for the coders to simply change the directory where the app located specific DLL version to it's installation folder though few did. In Linux though, unless you have a good package system and stick with strickly vanilla packages as offered by the Distro, you are screwed, blued and tattoo'd as soon as you step outside official repositories because of version specific library needs. Talk about DLL hell all you want, Linux suffers it's own version and becuase of the fragmentation, it isn't making the needed headway to take over the desktop. From where I sit right now, it'll be a cold day in Hell when Linux finally agrees on a standard and everyone follows it.
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(waits to be modded up "insightful")
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.