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Shareholder Fight Threatens Mandriva SA
LinuxScribe writes "A shareholder fight (French [Google translation]) has put one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors at risk of shuttering on January 16. If Mandriva can't raise 4 million euro in capital by then, it will have no choice but to cease operations."
An existing investor wants to make sure that his investment isn't marginalized through accepting additional investment at unfavorable terms, in turn reducing their effective ownership over Mandriva.
can you blame them?
I was a Mandrake/Mandriva guy for years. Before Ubuntu, it was THE "newbie" distro. It's still very user-friendly.
Once all this uncertainty started about a year ago, I switched to Mageia, which is a community fork of Mandrake.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source :-)
If they were profitable, or even revenue neutral, this wouldn't be a problem.
I'm not saying anything bad about Mandriva, rather the summary who seems to blame the inability to get loans, whereas the inability to get loans is the natural way of the world. Eventually it happens to everyone.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd say the real threat to Mandriva is Mandriva itself.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The phrasing in that letter is kind of torturous and very flowery, and Google translate misses in a few spots.. (But does shockingly well over all.)
Here's a slightly cleaner translation (my own):
To the associates and directors of Bryan Garnier:
Mr. Olivier Garnier De Falletans,
In this letter, we wish to bring to your attention the extreme gravity of the situation which we believe ourselves, as employees of Mandriva, to be the victims.
We are determined to no longer sit back and endure this situation passively.
In less than four weeks, our company could be effectively forced to file for bankruptcy and cease all activities because its indispensable recapitilization has been two times prevented by Linlux SARL, and this even though Townarea Trading & Investment Ltd, our other majority shareholder, was inclined to support entirely the cost, an amount of 4,000,000 euro.
Now, Linux SARL, an organization which seems to be under your control and that of Mr. Marc Goldberg, your employee and manager, had itself no financial obligation and therefore could not be but a beneficiary of this salvage operation.
The refusal which was offered by Linlux SARL to all the propositions made during the general assemblies of September 30th and December 5th 2011 is and remains for us absolutely incomprehensible and absolutely unjustifiable.
There are no less and no more than 45 direct jobs between Paris, Brasil, our external personnel, and all the indirect jobs at our subcontractors and suppliers.
In addition, following a reorganization already in progress, the operations in Brasil are almost breaking even, and a new business plan lays out the reorientation of the business with solid prospects for growth for next year.
Very worried for the future of our company, we ask you please to immediately reconsider a decision, which will turn out not only extremely negative for our and your future, but also for that of the world of free software in Europe.
While waiting for your prompt decision, we hope you will accept, Ms, Mr., our sincere regards.
http://linuxpr.com/releases/2749.html is an indication that the people pulling the strings through Linux SARL are actually Suse......
No shit, Sherlock.
Y2K called and would like its press release back, please.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors at risk of shuttering on January 16
That's exactly one year to the day after I first arrived in Texas... Look out! Bad things come in threes! (Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Please forgive me.)
The problem here is that so many distributions are high-quality and free that these days, you need to offer something extra in order to either excite people into using and coding to support your distro and creating hype and popularity or giving them enough in support to encouraged a paid-for environment that works. With Ubuntu, it's been usability...it's such a far-reaching and diverse distro with several major window managers offered that it covers a lot of ground -- and handing out disks for free way back in the day (are they still? -- I'm personally not sure...) certainly helped a lot. My first installation of Ubuntu was from a free disk I got from them. The user base and support system is also MASSIVE. I mean, I've used many, many distros over the years from Fedora to Mint to Ubuntu and many more but usually whenever I'd search for the fix to some problem it would inevitably be posted in some Ubuntu forum or blog. That not only gets the name out there but helps users to easily get accustomed to the different environment if they're switching from another OS.
I never even tried Mandriva. Why? It didn't seem like it had anything special to offer. Now keep in mind that I've tried over 20 or so distros over the years. The fact that wasn't one of them says something. If they want to stick around, they need to take a lead from other Open Source software like Ubuntu, Slackware, or even non-Linux distributions...just desktop software that's become popular like various media players or Firefox itself.
Bottom line? Offer something unique/special/above the competition and you'll succeed...if you're not going to do that...then the question really becomes: why would anyone move to your distro anyway, let alone stick with it?
And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows. to bring Linux up to that level would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar because the only way to herd developers is by paying them, otherwise you get what you have now with everyone scratching their own personal itches and then none of the "busted shitters" as i call them get fixed. When folks are doing work for free they are gonna do what they consider fun, nobody wants to be the guy that goes and fixes the busted shitters. just look at how many bugs on canonical is over two years, over three, i think the oldest ones are going on six years now because nobody wants the shitty jobs so they just don't get done.
Well when you are building a consumer OS guess what? there are literally THOUSANDS of truly shitty thankless lousy jobs that need doing. there is bug fixing and QA and regression testing and making sure all the UIs match the OS standard and maintaining your own kernel because God knows when Torvalds will get an itch and break all your drivers and writing all the help files and documentation and I'm sure if i sat here a couple of minutes i could easily name a dozen or two more truly lousy, boring, shitty, thankless jobs that HAVE to be done if you want a world class highly polished OS where everything "Just works" and is so simple and intuitive that Suzy the checkout girl can work it. This is why Apple and MSFT pay a metric shitload of money to developers, because they won't do those shitty jobs for free.
And THAT, that right there, is the problem. Consumers won't buy support contracts so the Red Hat method of making money is right out and why should the OEMs pay you shit when they can just "pull a CentOS" and have the thing for free? Gotta look out for the shareholders you know. i'm sure dell threw a few bucks Canonical's way but I seriously doubt it was even 1/10th what they were spending to build Ubuntu. Has Canonical even made a dime in profit yet? and the much vaunted community won't back you up, just look at how ATI bent over backwards to open up their code, even hiring driver developers to work for the free driver group out of their own pocket only to have every forum covered with posts that read "LOL use Nvidia" or the simple fact that more than a THIRD of the webservers on the entire planet are not using RHEL but, survey says....CentOS, an OS created by a bunch of cheapskates that used to sell an appliance that required RHEL who said "Fuck 'em, we'll just cut out the copyrights and then we won't have to pay shit!" and now of course they don't pay shit, not when compared to the RHEL licenses they used to buy.
How many here have cut a check to canonical? How many have sent money to their favorite distro? despite the BS I'm sure this post will get i bet if you looked at the numbers you are talking maybe 1 in 10,000 if you are lucky. So don't complain when Linux on the desktop goes exactly nowhere, just look at how canonical is now gonna be selling some tablet starting at CES and is spending an increasing amount of their limited resources on the server. its simply because with the FOSS model there isn't any money to be made on consumers and if anyone was to sink the hundreds of millions required to make a world class rock solid picture perfect Linux desktop it wouldn't be five minutes before just like Mint you had a knockoff stealing all the users thanks to being 'free as in beer" but without the work and money required to bring it up to OSX and Win 7 its 'free as in worthless" and despite the modbombing i'm sure to get for pointing out the truth THAT is why Linux isn't gaining shit on the desktop. I mean when MSFT puts out a flaming turd like Vista and the OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains like mad and the "free as in beer" OS don't gain shit, how big of a cluebat do you have to be hit by to see the FOSS model don't work in this case? Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use" and I'm sorry but Linux is still a long way from that friends and I don't see it getting any better, if anything all the itch scratching by the DE devs has made it worse.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Come on - how this post can be modded down "troll"? This is a constructive opinion on the Linux business model. :-(
Should be at least "interesting". In other words, where are my mod points
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Pleade MOD parent up. ABUSIVE MODERATION detected.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
very mature.
there are a large number of profitable, and/or revenue neutral businesses that are closed all the time. why?
because profit and revenue are not the only things that matter. sometimes politics matters more. and sometimes someone thinks they can make 'more profit' for themselves by closing down a profitable company than by keeping it open.
the article explains all this very simply.
all of the threads complaining about how it was not a profitable company, etc, are wrong. this guy has hit the nail on the head. capitalism doesnt care if you are profitable, it only cares if you could be sold off for MORE profit than you are making.
the personal profit of a very powerful group is often behind these things. its the whole point of corporate raiding. 'mergers and acquisitions'. private equity firms.
the 'linux companies' are not competing on quality, they are competing on who can survive the monopoly in Redmond without getting sued for patent infringement. its not about building products for customers. its about raw, naked, animal aggression, as microsoft has always been, ever since the days of Dr Dos and before.
look guy, this is not what happened. just take a few minutes and read the article. its not about products, its not about business models. its about one gangster mowing down a bunch of innocent people, robbing them, taking their money, and selling their clothes for a profit.
this child like fairyland view of how high-stakes capitalism works: "build a good product, people will buy it, therefore if you go bankrupt, your product must have been bad", is just absolutely hilarious, and sad.
And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You know what? I've been a rabid Debian fan for (holy crap, I'm old) 10 years now. In fact, I own and administer several hundred Debian servers, and I frequently use a Gnome desktop. I also use a Macbook. After reading the GP's entire post, I have to say he's actually mostly right. Why are you so narrow-minded that you didn't bother to read and address the entire post?
And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.
I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet; and there is very little interest in fixing things that keep that from happening. Linux is very much a hobbyist OS for people who ilk ego tinker - but most computer users don't ant to tinker, or as the OP put it:
Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use"
Ad to that there is no money in making it just work - why should a Dell, for example, turn it into a viable alternative when any competitor can take their work for free? And so Linux languishes on the desktop; and finds its niche in areas where companies can make money.
I'd add to his argument that there is no "killer app" for Linux that makes switching from WIN/OSX necessary. Much of the effort goes to building free "me too" apps to replicate apps on those platforms., and in many cases those same me too apps are available for them, so why bother switching?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have been with Mandriva since version 9, it was the distro I picked which got me into Linux, so have been with the distro for a lot of years now. However since the beta of Mageia 1 came out, I jumped ship - I didn't want to deal with Mandriva's new menu system for a start.
The problem I see with a shareholder revolt is, the company should have found a way to not fire their main developers in the first place. Now they are working on the community Mageia Linux version, and who is left at Mandriva?
IMO if they wanted a better distro, you should get more people to bother to report bugs so they can be investigated, not think someone else has found it. This should be made easy for non technical users so that others with more experience may try re-creating the bug. The various distro webpages to report a bug are way over the top for a new person to understand and report a bug.
I myself among now lots of others reported various Nouveau free nVidia driver issues where there are problems if you want to switch to the real nVidia driver to get 3D. Stuff like Compiz, Google Earth, or BZFlag won't work with the Nouveau driver.... but 2D stuff works fine with Nouveau.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The only way any Linux distro would be successful is if a computer manufacturer took it, built a set of hardware just for it, and then sold that entire solution as a system, w/ whatever software the customer wanted. Price everything appropriately - don't charge $500 or $800 or $250 per software, but don't charge $0 either. Offering package suites, where one can get the OS for, say, $50, or Libre Office for $40, and so on. That way, every bit of software is paid for, but is known to work, since it comes pre-installed on the computer w/ all known features enabled.
That way, a customer of something can be guaranteed that something works - something that none of the licenses would ever assure one. Truly speaking, one of the major reasons that all the Linuxes & BSDs are a bust is that they are all competing w/ Windows on the same platform. It would be different if someone like Sun was selling it on their SparcStations. Really, their window of opporunity existed in the 90s, when MS was struggling to get Windows 95 out,, and had the Linuxes or BSDs been as usable as today, they'd have captured a large portion of the market. But by the time they (and Apple) got their act together, Microsoft had captured a huge portion of the market. But anyone who builds PCs based on things like ARM, or Loongson can still make a credible case for the unixes, provided they do what's been suggested above and in the parent post.
And Linux itself does not provide *any* UI. Polished and intuitive or not. So you, Sir, are obviously talking about something that does not even exist. Catch 22, indeed.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Correlation, causation, etc. When exactly did the Ubuntu project contribute to X.org?
The reason you don't have to spend 20 hours fucking with X configuration files is because the X project improved, not because of Ubuntu.
Dilbert RSS feed
I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet
Funnily enough, I think he didn't miss the point. The "Linux is not there yet" poster compares later in the thread the whole Windows software package with just the Linux kernel (because Gnome 2/3 aren't OSes by themselves). Never mind that thousands of public administration and education computers in Spain run just a modified Debian (Linex -which is possibly going to disappear-, Guadalinex, Molinux) with no real problems.
And the OEM argument is flawed too: Dell offers laptops with Linux (not all over the world, mind you) and so do many other OEMs. Is that enough "it just works" for you?
Another perfectly good human endeavor ruined by... business, just like the arts and science.
Why were you modded down?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Please stop confusing the GUI for the OS. Thank you.
-- $G
This has been the history of Mandriva, originally Mandrake. And, it isn't because of being a desktop distro, but because management decisions at critical points of its life (or would that be mis-management decisions). Anyway, it does appear that this time, the large beast is in its final death throws.
canonical did employ some X developers around the XFree -> xorg and monolithic X -> modular X time.
Mageia has the "tainted" repository that replaces PLF.
I assume he seriously mis-typed "like to tinker" and maybe let an ignorant automatic spelling correction turn his typos into random words.
Isn't Mandriva another MS partner? Like SuSE, Xandros, and Linspire?
I think all the MS supporting Linuxes are going to die out. And it can't happen fast enough for me. Plenty of non-scam Linux distros out there.
Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.
Then you have the horrible bugs and driver breaking. Just look at the Canonical bugtracker where many bugs are measured in YEARS without being fixed. Some have thousands of complaints yet they sit, why? no payments to devs mean they don't want to do shit works for free, its simple human nature. if i'm gonna give up my own free time I'm gonna be doing something FUN and coding is fun, bug fixing? Not fun, not even a little fun, in fact it sucks ass. I mean when Dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, has to run their own repos because if they don't the whole thing shits itself and dies? You got serious problems friend. Why does it do that? Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find. Just for the hell of it i tried counting on the Ubuntu forum after the last release and I quit at over 700 and there were literally page after page I didn't bother counting. Now realize for every ONE complaint you probably have a couple of hundred that just got frustrated and either went somewhere else or gave up completely and went to Windows or OSX. One of the long time posters on LinuxInsider has been a Linux server admin for over a decade and she recently gave up and is looking at either BSD or Mac, why? because the latest apt-dist-upgrade wiped out her email and left her with a broken machine. Data loss in this stage of the game is unacceptable people!
What I'm trying to get at folks is the FOSS model works in SOME cases but not ALL cases and trying to fit the FOSS model into all cases is a giant FAIL and consumers are one of those fail cases. like I said consumers won't buy support contracts, so how do you make the hundreds of millions required to pay the devs to get the busted shitters fixed? you don't which is why we have the mess we have. mark my words in less than 5 years Canonical will be OUT of the desktops biz because they can't keep losing money and Shuttleworth made it clear there won't be any more checks. that's why at CES there is gonna be an UbuntuTablet and you see more and more spent on Ubuntu Server and by extension less on Ubuntu desktop. Everyone is gonna have to face the fact that the tin cup model simply doesn't provide the millions in steady income required to build a world class desktop and if you want to compete with Apple and MSFT
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Funny you should mention dell because they are actually a poster child for how broken Linux is a consumer platform is because Dell have to run their own repos just to keep there teeny tiny subset of hardware from being shat on when the devs scratch their itches. I will bet my very last dollar if Dell will publish their numbers (which they won't BTW, I even asked them out of curiosity and they won't give you the numbers) that Dell is LOSING money on Ubuntu because the costs of keeping a dev team to do nothing but maintain their own repo is costing more than they are making on the machines. Do you propose that ALL the OEMs lose money hand over fist to support you? Did you know that ASUS, the ones that started the whole Linux on tiny machines aka netbook craze has given up on Linux and no longer sells any Linux machines? or that a decade old Windows stomped Linux on netbooks or that even canonical admitted that returns were FOUR TIMES higher than Windows? do you think ALL of these people are lying? That they "just don't git it"?
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy and the FOSS model simply won't allow you to make that amount in the consumer market. Look at canonical, they haven't made a single cent, not one penny, on the desktop. if you figure in how much shuttleworth sunk in they have lost millions without a single dime of ROI, you think that is sustainable? in fact I'd bet my last buck that canonical will be out of desktops in less than 5 years, probably less than 3, simply because they won't be able to generate the operating capital. RMS may think you can have a utopia where everyone works for free towards the common good but that is a fallacy because we human like doing fun jobs and HATE doing shitty jobs and in the FOSS model the busted shitters don't get fixed. The FOSS model works in business because business is used to buying support contracts and they make money off their machines so spending money to make money is fine by them. the consumer market simply doesn't work like that and without the steady income you can't herd the devs and if you don't herd the devs you get what you have now, with bugs measured in years, updates that fix one thing and break three, hell I have Windows units out in the field that have been running since 2002 on a single install. can you imagine trying to update a Linux desktop from 2002 to current and still have it functional on the other end? it won't happen friend, hell take a distro disc from just 3 years ago and apt-dist-upgrade to current and watch things fall apart.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have both a Linux computer and a Windows XP computer at home and, for me, they both seem quite polished and easy to use. I have been using both for many years, so by now I am equally comfortable using either Linux or Windows. I see advantages and disadvantages to using either operating system.
Some past versions of Linux did have a few noticeable bugs or other problems. But, Kubuntu 10.04 seems to be working quite well on this computer.
Kubuntu uses KDE instead of Gnome, IceWM, Enlightenment, or one of the other free desktop environments available for Linux.
Like most Linux users, I have never needed to use a virus scanner. I do not know how a new computer user would think Linux and Windows compare. But, I do know of several older people seem to have trouble keeping their Windows computers working properly.
In some ways, installing, upgrading, and installing security updates is now easier with Linux than Windows. After downloading and installing the Synaptic package manager, I had a simple point-and-click tool to install, uninstall, and upgrade all of the software. That is unlike my Windows XP computer, where Windows updates itself automatically, but it is a constant struggle to keep everything else updated. I also like how it is safe and easy to download whatever free software I want from the official Kubuntu repositories.
Synaptic is a GUI front end for the APT, which is a command line tool. The Synaptic Package manager and official repositories are used on some versions of Linux such as Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and PCLinuxOS. Other versions of Linux do it differently.
I assume he seriously mis-typed "like to tinker" and maybe let an ignorant automatic spelling correction turn his typos into random words.
Hell yeah. I get paid for random words so why not?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy
It's even simpler. Kids from 6 years old up, hospital workers, administration workers are using Linux in Spain by the thousands and they have no problems. Your Suzy checkout girl doesn't _want_ to change from what she knows. I can understand that, even if I find it annoying.
And if you need over a hundred million (I'll assume dollars) to get that "polish" I hope you don't work as a programmer. It's being done once and again for much less.
I think Y2K's own overhype was its own downfall.
Putting everyone on high alert neutralized a lot of the potential for damage because date-stamps were being watched like clocks and everyone KNEW things might go wrong.
To be more blunt, the tech gremlins came with slavering jaws ready to eat us alive, but chickened out when they saw an army of geeks on the lookout for them, turned tail, and slinked back home.
Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them.
You are wasting your breath- just take a look at his other posts.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find.
If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Believing outdated nonsense like that nearly drove me away from Linux when I was having horrible stability/speed problems with Ubuntu for the second half of 2009 as a semi-newbie. Luckily I gave the others a try instead of going back to Windows, because it turned out that they're just as user-friendly, if not moreso -- in fact, the last time I did have to touch X.org was back in Ubuntu.
You really should test your own hypothesis by trying the distros you're maligning, so other users that share our interest in Linux don't feel forced into using Windows if they're not thrilled with Ubuntu or Canonical. There's plenty of legit strengths & weaknesses to point out in every distro out there, after all -- and since you're somewhat representing your fellow Ubuntu fans, not sounding like you're an unhinged clueless fanboy would be a good idea.
Apathy Sucks, Nobody for President!
Ma-Gay-a sounds worse.
Last I saw, there was a note posted on the Mageia website that says there's no set pronunciation since accents vary so wildly by region/language... I've always 'read' it as rhyming with mage, magic, magenta, or similar.
Apathy Sucks, Nobody for President!
Excellent rant! You sir have articulated exactly why I think that Linux on the desktop will never succeed. This deserves to be posted on Reddit, Hacker News, etc...
I mentioned Linus not because i think the man is doing a bad job, although I do disagree on the subject of an ABI because the rest of the OSes have had them for nearly a decade and their drivers don't break nearly as often, no why I mention Torvalds is if I had put in that many years and had MY name attached to something they keep royally fucking up? Man I would be PISSED with a capital P!
Lets face it if Linus was to have a royal shitfit, put his foot down and say "Look, I'm REALLY tired of you taking my hard work and pissing on it, okay? So here is how its gonna be" and made it damned clear that there were gonna be standards that everyone could agree on and get behind and all those that don't follow the standards don't get diddly shit from the community? People WOULD rally behind the man. RMS comes off as too much of a religious zealot, what with his refusing interviews unless you speak "GNUSpeak" and all, but Torvalds is well respected, he's damned smart, he's got clout.
I truly believe that many of the Linux community are tired of the endless bullshit just as I am. I figured when i first started trying Linux in 04 we'd have penguins on boxes and little Tux stickers on desktops and laptops in the Wally World by now, but instead if anything things have gone backward thanks to shit like PulseAudio and lousy testing and a myriad of dick waving by devs and everyone just acting like 4 year olds. I bet if Torvalds would just put his foot down, get together with some of those superbrains that work with him, and announce some solid steps to take things forward and fix a lot of the shit? the community would be more than happy to support the man, that's all I'm saying.
In the end the buck has to stop somewhere and whether he likes it or not Torvalds is the one that started the whole ecosystem. If he would stand up like Jobs did at Apple and not be afraid to kick some butts i bet things would get a LOT better a LOT quicker, the community just needs someone they can rally behind with some good solid ideas and I bet Linus could be that man, what do you think?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thanks. Notice how many insults and attacks on me personally i got? One pretty much accuses me of being some paid astroturfer which if so i'm getting screwed because I haven't seen a single check yet, others actually have the nerve to say Windows isn't polished and neither is OSX (which if that ain't some SERIOUS koolaid chugging i don't know what is) and then others try to use what i call the "move the goalposts and I win!" argument by bringing up things that don't have shit to do with the subject, like Red Hat which i had already covered and which is a SERVER not DESKTOP company, or how Spain is MANDATING Linux which if you tell someone "Use this or enjoy your pink slip" I don't really consider that a fair assessment, do you?
But anyone who has read my past postings know I speak for ONE person and ONE person alone, and that is the CONSUMER. It is the consumer who I work for 6 days a week, its the consumer that I constantly strive to make things easier and better for, its the consumer in the end that puts bread in my children's mouths and a roof over our heads and its the consumer whom the Linux community as a whole gives a Goatse to just as the posts above (or even worse, last critical of Linux posting I did i was modbombed for two weeks and had a psycho follow me around all over the net just so he could post "Die you fat fucker die" over and over) but in the end truth is truth.
Let me end with this final example of how the community just "doesn't get it" when it comes to consumers. I use a test to see if a distro has finally made a usable version called "is it safe?" and it goes like this: Take whatever distro you want to test, get a version from THREE years ago (this is key, you'll see why in a minute) and then if you need CLI to set it up go ahead since you are the BUILDER not the USER at this point. Now to simulate what my customer would go through let the OS update through whatever GUI mechanism it uses. Try it, see what happened? OS fall down and go BOOM! Real hard. Now before someone says "You can't do that with Windows!" I point out that that is like comparing apples to Apple pie as windows has a MINIMUM of 7 years of support, usually longer. Windows 7 will be supported until July 2020, show me ANY Linux that will continue to get updates for THAT long. you can't so there you go why you have to upgrade. Now the last one i tried this with took a big shit on the wireless, so I did what they tell you to do and went to the forums. What i got was a page and a half mess of CLI bullshit that ME the consumer was supposed to "tweak" because its made for rev A firmware g and I had Rev d firmware F. So I said "Humor me for a minute, you guys are like linux gurus right? pretend i'm Suzy the checkout girl, hold my hand and walk me through the GUI to fix this problem" and you know what happened? They tried one twist after another before someone finally came on and said "Uhhhh..you can't do that with the GUI".
and THAT, that right there, is the problem with Linux in a nutshell. without long term support you HAVE to upgrade, upgrade shits on drivers, and no GUI exists to find driver or rollback drivers when things go wrong. Windows has had those two features for a decade, WTF? I was actually told by one snooty community member "Stop thinking like Windows, Linux can run forever without any updates so just disable them"? Seriously if THAT level of koolaid drinking is considered acceptable, because not a single person said "running old unpatched OSes and software is probably not a good idea" that just proves the level of disconnect there is in the community. One even told me I swear to God i just wished i'd have bookmarked it, that I should "teach my users to embrace the POWER of CLI" like it was the God damned force. I don't know why i still bother, maybe because i am old enough to remember when there was GEM and Amiga and DOS and having competition was good. But here it is 2012 already, the off lease XP boxes are starting to pile up, and here I am having to scramble for extra RAM sticks and hoping
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy and the FOSS model simply won't allow you to make that amount in the consumer market. Look at canonical, they haven't made a single cent, not one penny, on the desktop. if you figure in how much shuttleworth sunk in they have lost millions without a single dime of ROI, you think that is sustainable? in fact I'd bet my last buck that canonical will be out of desktops in less than 5 years, probably less than 3, simply because they won't be able to generate the operating capital. RMS may think you can have a utopia where everyone works for free towards the common good but that is a fallacy because we human like doing fun jobs and HATE doing shitty jobs and in the FOSS model the busted shitters don't get fixed. The FOSS model works in business because business is used to buying support contracts and they make money off their machines so spending money to make money is fine by them. the consumer market simply doesn't work like that and without the steady income you can't herd the devs and if you don't herd the devs you get what you have now, with bugs measured in years, updates that fix one thing and break three, hell I have Windows units out in the field that have been running since 2002 on a single install. can you imagine trying to update a Linux desktop from 2002 to current and still have it functional on the other end? it won't happen friend, hell take a distro disc from just 3 years ago and apt-dist-upgrade to current and watch things fall apart.
I don't doubt you, but if Canonical decides to go into either servers or tablets, it's over. In tablets, how many are going to prefer them even to Microsoft, let alone Google or Apple? And if they are going into servers, who in their right mind is going to prefer them to Debian (which is the same and where CLI is more commonly understood than GUI) if they're on Linux? And that's not even counting those who'd either use RHEL/Centos if they are non-Debian Linux, or either OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
On your other point, one can still type 'cmd' in the search box just above the Start button, which will kick up a CLI. In other words, the search box is like a Run box when it comes to kicking up a CLI session (I'm not sure whether it works that way if I were to type Wordpad in the box - whether it would kick up a Wordpad session). But your point is well taken.
Incidentally, did you get a chance to test PC-BSD or FreeBSD on whether it passes the regression testing that you described above? PC-BSD in particular - since both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are geared towards servers.
With Linux, here are a bunch of problems which is what's being alluded to when one talks of polish:
And that's not even taking into account the minimal settings Gnome & KDE can configure, sending people to the /etc directory. And like the first bullet above pointed out, even this is not consistent b/w different Linux distros. In this aspect, BSD is better.
This is only a part of what needs to be done to ensure that something like Linux (or BSD) has enough polish that anyone can use it. Apple has proven that it can be done w/ BSD.
Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.
Problem is that despite that cathedral model, things ain't consistent even b/w 2 similar OSs like Windows XP and 7. I had bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 (the complete package, not the free Reader that one can simply download from their website). Guess what? I can run it in XP, but not under 7. And we're talking both win32 OSs here - I'm not talking about a 32-bit XP to a 64-bit 7. And unlike in Linux, where an app which one didn't pay for that doesn't work in a subsequent version, I paid for this app and would expect it to work when I'm not doing a major OS overhaul. I could understand it if I were migrating from Windows 98 to XP, or if the Monopoly game that I was running under Window 95 didn't work under XP. But this sort of breakage b/w just 2 (actually 1) generations of an OS change? And no, hypervisor is not available under 7 HP, only in the server 2008 and above models.
Even aside from that, there are so many things that have changed that it's not even funny. MS Office 1993 was fine, but in 1997, they introduced new formats, had all those ribbons and totally reset everybody's learning curve. One can't even revert to the old interface if one wants to. And at the OS level, just look @ the Control Panel - what it was under XP, and how it's changed in Vista/7. Some of them are improvements, like the Network Sharing & Neighborhood, but just finding things now is a royal mess. If one tries to change desktop colors, one is forced into the classic version, or one has to go w/ readymade themes. Only major improvement to 7 is 64-bit support, (if I had 4GB or above of RAM, that's what I'd do) and IPv6 support. I know you think the latter is a clusterfuck, but the IETF had determined pretty early on that it wasn't possible to have an IPv4 compatible addressing scheme that didn't require overhauling all routers, which is why, since they had to do something this major anyway, they came up w/ a whole suite of enhancements to the protocol to give us what IPv6 now is.
And in Windows 8, I certainly hope that they leave the Windows 7 default interface as an option, instead of forcing people to the Metro UI and disabling the 'Windows' key on the keyboard. I happen to be an adventurous person who is more than happy to check out a new look OS, but having to change things like a keyboard is unacceptable. Let them use Metro in that Nokia Lumia or any Windows tablet that Nokia or anyone else comes out w/, but leave the laptops alone.
No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Do most users use several distributions at the same time? Because it is the same problem as dealing with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, or MacOS 9 and X, mind you. It is a problem we technical users have to deal with, not your standard user who, by the way, ends up doing the same thing everybody does: ask about their particular version of Windows and get particular answers about that version. Well, I'm fibbing a bit: the standard user often doesn't even know what Windows version is installed. I have lost count of the times I have read at a forum or heard/asked in real life: "what Windows version do you have" only to get a randomish answer like Windows 2003 (because they have Office 2003 installed) or Office 7 (because they have Windows 7 installed).
No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
Does it? And having to install extra microsoft packages that don't come bundled with the software doesn't? (I'm looking at you, MSXML 6 and you too, .NET version X). No, Windows does have similar problems, and developers have to make do the same way. The main difference is you will probably only need to set up a compile chain for the formats you want to support, which is mostly a one time cost (and a cheap one at that).
Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using ./configure && make && make installer. It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it (yes, like in Windows, but probably prompting for user/administrator password).
First of all: don't use them then. I'm not going to use Dyne:bolic for my everyday needs because it is a multimedia production oriented distribution. And most distributions have a way to ask for those packages to be included. No, you probably won't have it available today, but you still have a chance. Good luck with Agfa (no, we don't even have the communication protocol documents for that scanner any more), ATI/AMD (no, we don't have that card in our generic driver because it is a laptop one and the OEM didn't want us to put it in) and many others.
Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to an exponential escalation of number of problems.
So do different versions of Windows. Remember the "compatibility modes"? Windows 7 has even a "Vista compatibility mode". Now how is that for ease of application development? Besides, at Linux you can at least usually have different library versions side by side. Good luck with that in Linux.
Linux is a hell for ISP/ISV support personnel. Within an organization you can force a single distro on anyone, that cannot be accomplished when your clients have freedom to choose.
Ha! Come back when you have spent some time supporting five Windows versions at the same time. See if you can "force" your users to use just one version unless you live in the most tightly controlled organization.
You can't have different versions of the same system and have polish. It is a chimera, an utopic ideal that doesn't hold up to the harsh light of reality. You can have polish on a version (e.g., Windows 7 or Ubuntu 11.10) but you just _can't_ have it all over the place. You don't have it with Windows, you don't have it with Linux, you don't have it with MacOS and I highly doubt you can have it with BSDs eithe
Not had a chance on the BSD yet, I went nuts on the Steam sale and blew through 100Gb+ and for some reason the ISP didn't ding me so i'm trying to be nice and not suck bandwidth like a drunk at a free bar for a little while. as soon as i get this load of off lease out of here my supplier is supposed to bring in a nice selection of lappys and desktops so i'll probably grab one of each to just give it a more fair shake. As for Ubuntu, you don't know? look up "Ubuntu One" and "Ubuntu CES" to see for yourself. Ubuntu One is a rebadged Amazon cloud with Ubuntu server as a frontend and at CES they are gonna show their Ubuntu tablet which i'm sure is just some CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crapola) with again Ubuntu frontend. I also agree that why anybody would actually WANT this is beyond me, Ubuntu is for noobs and noobs don't run cloud servers and on tablets Android has the low locked up and Apple the high and NOBODY likes Unity so that has the stench of fail on it.
As for typing CMD in the search box, who does that? The justification MSFT is using for getting rid of the start menu in win 8 (Which i think smells like fail, but i heard there is a simple reg trick that turns it into Win 7 with a square start button so that might save it) is thanks to their default help MSFT make Windows better button being checked since Vista they have a huge DB of what people actually do with their systems and both CMD and start>run didn't even end up in the top 20 use cases. They found that as far as windows explorer and the rest of windows goes you could serve more than 90% of the users with just a handful of basics like copy/paste/move/delete. that's it, that's what they do, they just use those commands along with drag and drop. And while I agree that having it is useful for a geek I would argue that it really isn't for the average user who simply won't know the commands and in Linux it has become a crutch. As i posted in another reply when I asked for the forum guys to pretend i'm just Suzy the new user and hand hold me through the GUI they simply couldn't do it because there wasn't a GUI that would let me fix the problem.
In the end I'd say Linux is around 70%-80% there but the problem is to get it the last 20%-30% is gonna be nothing but shitwork and without pay the shitwork just don't get done. You have bugs measured in years on the canonical bug tracker and that is with Canonical losing millions just to get to where they are. they are using this Ubuntu One and UbuntuTab as a Hail Mary to try to get enough ROI to stay afloat and my guess is it'll fail and they'll go tits up. Ultimately the FOSS model works in some cases but not ALL cases and i'd argue from what we've seen consumer desktop is one of the fails. You simply have to have millions spent on polish but without a way to recoup that investment the money won't get spent and without cash incentives trying to herd devs is like herding cats.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think Steve Jobs beat you to that idea... it's called OS X.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
I guess I'm an oddball - I rarely save either files or programs on the desktop - when prompted during installation, I uncheck both Desktop & QuickLaunch options and just just put it under Start> My reason is that if I have another app running full screen, or covering the required icons on the desktop, I'd have to first shrink it, and then get around. Which is why I normally use the start menu to either invoke a new program or open an existing document. I have My Documents, Favorites and My Recent Documents show in menu mode - in other words, I can drill down from there using either mouse or keyboard, and just open what I need. If it goes away in Windows 8, I guess that's an upgrade I'll just not do, or just stay w/ 7.
Incidentally, in Windows 8, will they have multiple clipboards, like they have in I think Word? I've found Klipper - the clipboard on KDE really useful, since it saves me from opening new tabs or sessions or Windows - I can copy something, then go to another document, then if I copy something else, when I get to paste, I get the option of choosing which clipboard I want to paste. The only 'rough edge' about it in KDE for me was that 'middle click' (or click both buttons of the mouse @ the same time - in old unix implementations like Ultrix and SunOS, where you had 3-mouse buttons, if you highlighted something and @ the target spot middle-clicked, the highlighted text would get pasted to the location i.e. it worked just like a highlight & paste, w/o even 'copy') to paste the clipboard no longer worked, since there are multiple clipboards, but I quickly got around that. Incidentally, I use XP on my desktop and used Linux on my Laptop, until my system got corrupted. While I could re-install Linux (and my data is backed up), I've decided to try out PC-BSD to see whether I could this time also get WiFi to work as well (it doesn't w/ Linux) and also get the chance to tinker w/ IPv6.
In the end the buck has to stop somewhere and whether he likes it or not Torvalds is the one that started the whole ecosystem. If he would stand up like Jobs did at Apple and not be afraid to kick some butts i bet things would get a LOT better a LOT quicker, the community just needs someone they can rally behind with some good solid ideas and I bet Linus could be that man, what do you think?
I agree. I'd really be pleased if you would send him this rant. I've used Linux for years and the things you have noticed have been harped about in forums for years. I've complained about this stuff for years..As have others..But you are right,it's never going to be fixed in my way of thinking. And that infernal itch scratching and reinventing the wheel over and over and over drives me bloody whack o! And some of the "improvements" make things worse..I have one bug that has followed me from Feisty Fawn to Maverick Meerkat.. The change in the lasso in the Gimp is an example of an itch that did not need to be scratched. And DE looking like cell phones..Holy moley,don't get me started....
r because even after all these years the community STILL tries to jam consumers into the geek mold and simply won't accept that grandma isn't gonna learn C programming and Suzy isn't gonna be reading Man Pages in the bathtub. Its fricking nuts!
I agree. On a Linux forum this chap helps me out from time to time...He is determined I'm going to learn the command line,do everything (including playing music and surfing the net) from the command line and not use a mouse. For months I've told him it ain't goanna happen...Yet he keeps trying to wear me down. People need to understand not everyone want to be a geek..And yeah, xyz method may be peachy keen for you,but for the love of Pete,stop trying to ram your way of doing things down everyone's throat.
Again! :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I think you've managed to miss my point pretty completely, which can be summed up as, "AC breathlessly posts 12-years-old press release as if it were hot off the wire".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.