Try FreeBSD. I've used pretty much all of what you mentioned as well, except Vista, and I agree with you about those.
The difference with FreeBSD is that, while maybe it is largely textual, it truly is simple, unlike Linux distributions that merely claim to be. What that in turn means is that it virtually never breaks, and when it does, the design is sufficiently straightforward that I can fix it.
The point is, I'm really not intelligent. No human being truly is. Because of that, we need things that are simple. Ubuntu tries to be, but it only is on the user side, to a very superficial level. On the technical side, it is fiendishly complex, and the more complexity you have, the more chances there are for errors to happen, and the more different things a human being has to keep track of. It gets to be too much to cope.
I haven't found anything with FreeBSD yet where there are more than three or four steps to remember at once, and that includes even technical stuff like compiling a kernel or adding drivers to it. When I was using Linux on the other hand, my head often ached all the time because I was trying to keep so much in it at once. Now I don't need to, and I'm a lot happier.
Why do I need permission to do things? If I'm in front of my own bloody computer, then I have permission.
Let me explain. The Internet is used by a lot of ruthless, unscrupulous people, who enjoy nothing more than breaking into another person's computer remotely and completely taking it over.
In other words, you need permission for executing programs for exactly the same reason that you need a lock on your front door.
The door doesn't know whether it is you trying to enter, or someone else. Likewise, the computer doesn't either. Passwords and permissions serve the same purpose as the door lock does; to make sure that you're the only person who enters your house, or who is able to use your computer.
So utterly convincing. Even the moron who wrote the original article has more to say than that.
No, ALSA really is garbage. Unstable, finicky, excessively complex garbage. Worst of all, it's actually totally unnecessary garbage.
Why? In FreeBSD, I load a sound driver module into the kernel, and it works. End of story. There is no other unnecessary software layer which simply exists as nothing other than a potential source of problems.
GTK itself isn't garbage, but GConf most certainly is. GConf is the single worst design decision that has ever been made anywhere for Linux, and GTK has since been made reliant on it for its' settings.
They didn't need to do it, either. They could have written a GUI which printed the GUI-generated settings as hand-editable dotfiles, but no. Those latte-sipping yuppie CS graduates who write GNOME know so much better than the people who came before them, you see. They just had to invent the current pile of shit that GNOME is now stuck with.
Something is seriously fucked up on your machine. OO takes 15-20 seconds to load here from a cold start on my 2Ghz dual core with 3GB of memory. After that it takes about 5-10 seconds to load.
That's still bloated as hell. Mind you, office suites are nearly always garbage, (Microsoft's was no better) but that still doesn't give OO any excuse. The culprit there is the disease called "integration." It was a staple of earlier UNIX philosophy that programs should not have an excessively intimate knowledge of each other's internals, and that was for a reason.
Each distro has ONE package format that completley integrates with the system and allows for easy installation and uninstallation.
That's a good laugh. You've obviously never had apt go berserk and trash your system because you tried to uninstall a single element, which some idiot among the developers decided to declare a critical dependency of the rest of the system (like cups) when there was no sane reason for it to be at all.
Yes, bash is great - for programmers. Non-programmers should never need it. Everything should be configurable by the GUI.
Windows is still there, you know. As crazy as they might be, even the FSF don't go around putting guns to people's heads and forcing them to use Linux.
There is also OSX as well, as far as end user alternatives are concerned. Linux isn't going to be for everyone, and I wish I understood why people think it has to be.
No, Ubuntu (which around 9.5% of said 10% will be using) is anything but ready.
- Hald and dbus as implemented by it are an on-by-default, bloated mess.
- Sound support is bad beyond belief. ALSA crashes depending on the phase of the moon.
- Gdm is tied to any number of different things which it shouldn't be, which again causes massive instability. Cut gdm out of the startup in init, and watch the entire system fall apart. Sound doesn't work outside gdm AT ALL, and terminals in X lose their ability to preload the shell, as well.
- Debian's kernel management framework is the worst I've ever seen; it's an unmitigated, over-automated disaster. Custom kernel compilation virtually never works; there are just too many tiny snags for the process to trip on and fall flat on its' face, and when it does, you're left staring at a screenful of error messages from incomprehensible perl scripts.
The Debian community have absolutely no idea whatsoever about how to design a solid operating system.
Want to start hald and dbus to get your usb hardware working? Assuming it's already installed, (which it will be if you use the X-User prefab distribution in sysinstall) do the following.
1. Open/etc/rc.conf. 2. Enter the two lines, hald_enable="YES", and dbus_enable="YES." 3. Run sudo/usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald start, or if that fails, sudo/usr/local/sbin/hald, or if you want, reboot.
Done.
Want to load the kernel module for your sound card?
1. pciconf -lv (To find out what it is; similar to lspci, but remember the args) 2. Once you know what it is, go to look up which module to load. In my case, snd_cmi, for a CMedia card. 3. Type sudo kldload snd_cmi at a prompt to load the module into the kernel. 4. Add snd_cmi_load="YES" to/boot/loader.conf to load it automatically next time.
Done. The sound module loaded directly into the kernel Just Works.;) There's no need to screw around with third party userland abominations like ALSA or OSS, and so no risk of either of said abominations dying randomly. (As ALSA did for me over the space of a month with Ubuntu)
I know I'd be frowned on by the FreeBSD devs for saying something nasty about Linux while pimping FreeBSD, but the truth is that FreeBSD's design is light years ahead of Linux. The added, totally unnecessary complexity added in Debian distributions in particular is absolutely appalling by comparison.
Lack of added complexity means lack of additional things which can potentially cause crashes or reliability, and FreeBSD's devs fairly obviously understand that. It's equally obvious to see that Debian's developers (and Canonical) don't.
The only two things holding FreeBSD back on the desktop are sysinstall being ncurses based, and the partitioner possibly being a little more intimidating than GParted. Apart from those two minor things, it has enormous advantages.
1. Infinitely more robust and reliable package management than anything available for Linux, in my experience.
2. A greatly simplified (and well documented) method of custom kernel configuration, in comparison with Linux, and a kernel module mechanism which is enormously simpler, as well.
3. Vastly simplified system startup. No init, no Upstart rubbish. Just YES lines in/etc/rc.conf.
4. Hald and dbus are not run by default, but only when they need to be, for USB/hotpluggable hardware. The rest of the time you can turn them off and take them out, and most people don't use them at all.
In summary, FreeBSD isn't just more user-friendly by virtue of its' much higher level of simplicity; it's an infinitely superior system to Linux overall. The single main reason for this is the fact that FreeBSD's developers aren't trying to twist UNIX into a clone of Microsoft Windows, because they know that they already have something much better.
If you're tired of Ubuntu or various other Linux distributions causing you endless headaches, I strongly invite you to visit the site , and download the cure for your frustrations.
Open source, on the other hand, is happy to license their products to anyone, and everyone, and they don't care if you give them nothing, give them a dollar, or give them a trillion dollars.
Linux people care. The GPL by its' very nature encourages a culture where people are often more concerned about how much others are contributing than about how much they are themselves.
I just installed FreeBSD last night. I got some help from an IRC channel as well; and I know, Linux has that, too. Thing is, I could decide hypothetically never to have anything to do with the devs of the system if I wanted, AND go and sell copies of it to other people entirely free and clear as well. I don't ever hear about BSD people crying about users (or anyone else) "not giving back."
The thing is, however, I find myself *wanting* to contribute, simply because this isn't the first time I've used FreeBSD, and I love it. I've written an advocacy piece on a blog of mine, and will almost certainly be writing more such in the future. I'm also not much of a programmer yet, but maybe I can help with that in time, too.
By contrast, with Linux, I admit that I:-
1. Don't like the GPL anywhere near as much, as a license. 2. Seriously don't like the GPL's author. The guy is a megalomaniac and wannabe cult leader. Being honest, I truly despise Stallman, and one of the main reasons for my loathing of him is because while it is due to my own conscience, I have been condemned by other people who tried to make out that his influence is nothing but positive.
3. Don't tend to want to contribute as much because of the sorts of flaps and drama that the Debian people in particular create, and how a lot of Linux people tend to treat others. 4. Tend to view Linux as being severely technically inferior to *BSD, especially Debian and Ubuntu. 5. Don't want to feel obligated to do something, purely in order to try and get the whiners to shut up.
So some Open Source people do try and force involvement from people; and I'll probably get one of the very shrieking Communists that I'm talking about replying to this. I attribute pretty much all of it to the influence of Richard Stallman, which ultimately, I view as very negative.
I admit it; I've pirated stuff before. However, I also pay for things too.
For me, piracy is about three things. Either:-
a) What I'm pirating is sufficiently rare and/or old now that I can't find it in stores. This is also a hint that if you were selling it, I'd be willing to pay for it, because old stuff isn't always easy to find, even online. The Terminator novels would be a good example of this.
b) Evaluation. Sometimes I'll come across a particular musical artist who I haven't heard before. If I'm sufficiently curious, I'll download an mp3 or two, and see what they're like.
c) I'm grazing/browsing in a transitory sense and I don't really care about the stuff I'm downloading. In that instance, a downloaded mp3 can be considered the equivalent of a radio track; it's transitory. If you're worried about losing money from me doing that, then put current mp3s on a site with ads, and I will quite happily watch a few second ad in order to download a file. I don't like greed, but bills need paying and I understand that.
Unlike apparently a lot of FOSS users, I'm not a Communist, although payment for me represents an acknowledgement of genuine merit. I don't have a lot of money, so if you get some from me, it means two things:-
a) I'm happy with your pricing model. Because, as I said, I don't have much money, this is important. I'm not going to pay for something I can't afford, no matter how good it is. Make it affordable, and you'll get a sale from me and others like me, and make more money in the end on volume.
b) Your product has genuinely impressed and/or otherwise made a positive impact with me. I downloaded a cam of The Dark Knight when it initially came out, but then went and saw the movie twice in a cinema, and now also own a copy of the DVD. The cam has also now been deleted. So did Warner Bros lose money from me downloading that cam? I think not.
It is sufficiently rare now that Hollywood brings out truly good movies, that when they do, I make very sure to go and see them in the cinema, (also partly simply because I still genuinely enjoy that experience more than sitting at home) and if they're really good (although this is very rare for me) I will then buy a DVD as well.
Other examples of products I've bought that I could have pirated include The Sims 2, and every game in the Unreal series up to and including UT2k4, as well as multiple copies of the original UT, due to some of them having been lost. Epic are very intelligent and creative people, who have brought me nearly a decade of pleasure from their games now, and they deserve to get paid for that.
Music I haven't bought, but would, includes anything by Guns'n'Roses, probably anything by Nine Inch Nails after I'd heard it, and anything by Shpongle, 1200 Micrograms, or Infected Mushroom as well.
>I really feel for the BSD guys. Just hope they can keep users. Having choice in OS >selection is great.
"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
To put it another way, I've tended to observe that the degree of quality of something is usually (although admittedly not always) inversely proportional to its' degree of popularity. Ubuntu in my observation very strongly adheres to this principle.
Security, infinitely superior overall design, the ability to run rings around Linux in benchmarks, and still the only truly decent form of package management in existence.
I nearly forgot the single biggest fringe benefits; freedom from the megalomaniacal, cultic aspirations of Richard Stallman or his drone army, and a license that you truly *can* do whatever you want with.
What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
The only reason why I agree with Stallman's "GNU/Linux," claim is because the kernel itself cannot be successfully compiled with any compiler other than GCC.
However, alternatives to the CLI GNU userland do exist. The most obvious one is the BSD, but there is the heirloom project, asmutils, and Caldera's source as well.
I made the decision some time ago now that Windows XP would be my last operating system from Microsoft.
It's taken a long time, and a lot of waffling and bracing myself for the amount of work involved, (since I tend to be someone who, where Linux at least is concerned, tends to psychologically need to make their own system from scratch, rather than installing another pre-existing distro) but I'm finally making the switch.
Although I still have XP installed on this machine, I've already bought my next primary box, and it will not. I'm currently on Ubuntu, and once I've finished writing the installer I'm working on for Linux From Scratch, (A HREF="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/") the new box is going to be getting that system, and Ubuntu is going be coming off here as well; and then it will be pure custom Linux all the way for me.
I think downloading and viewing the T4 previews really brought home the fact that for what I do, I really don't need Windows any more. Those files were all.wmv, and VLC played them just fine. I can play WoW, do anything on the net that I can do in Windows, and usually at higher speed, and with Linux I can tinker around with some shell scripts which I love doing, as well; I'm currently in the process of learning the ropes with Vim at the moment.
If anyone else reading this is currently on the fence, as I was, I would really encourage you to make the switch. Everything I've read about Vista tells me it's horrible, and Windows 7 is only going to be worse. Linux has had to go through a long period before I've been willing to fully migrate; but it's time now, and I'm not sorry.
So long, Microsoft, and no hard feelings. It's truthfully been great; but I've always known that once a UNIX system was sufficiently ready for me, this day would come.
Yes, and here's the catch. It has been my experience that if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with the offerings from Microsoft, in compatibility, functionality, and eye candy, you are looking into something pretty heavyweight: Gnome or KDE
In terms of eye candy, Enlightenment thrashes the pants off either of the "Big Two." Where E doesn't win though is in terms of the really important things...E16 at least doesn't have a bottom anchored Start Menu or a trivial means of changing your wallpaper.;)
I really hate updating my systems these days, because for every bug fixed it seems you get a fresh new one. Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later!
This, very simply, is the entire problem.
Real technical quality isn't a priority to Linux people any more.
The only priority is emulating Windows as closely as possible.
Everything else is considered secondary to that, and the entire system continues to suffer as a result. Making "the desktop," the sole priority is going to end up destroying Linux.
Speaking of switching, why haven't you switched to OS X yet?
Are you stupid or just slow?
For some of us, it's because we're cheap bastards who can't afford a Mac.
For me, it's because while I'd be a lot happier simply using FreeBSD, (it has a license I like a lot more, and it's better technically in just about every respect other than hardware support) that would be boring. I'm addicted to pain and suffering, so I need to single handedly try and write solutions for what I perceive to be Linux's problems, which probably nobody will ever use, rather than simply using a system where all of said problems are already solved instead.
For the rest, however, it's because they're card carrying members of the cult of the GNU. In some ways, Linux has less in common with an operating system, and more with the Church of Scientology.
You must not know much, if anything, about Debian.
God, I love this. Anyone (and I mean anyone) who is in any way remotely critical of Debian, gets this response immediately fired at them from the cheerleading squad.
Kudos on the compelling argument there, Slick. Totally airtight, and utterly unassailable rhetoric.;)
I'll dispute that the OS will ever become irrelevant.
OSes won't become irrelevant, and UNIX in broader terms won't, but Linux itself might.
The kernel is 60 Mb compressed, these days. That's bloated as hell. Linus and friends are way too focused on the big iron that is being used by their corporate sponsors; the whole flap with Con Kolivas showed that.
The other real issue is that most of the people working on Linux are Windows immigrants who truthfully wouldn't be able to genuinely code their way out of a wet paper bag. As an overall design, Debian is absolutely terrible, although I know I'll get the usual fanboys in response to this, telling me I have no clue...and that's fine.
Ten years ago, we had a scenario where Linux was better from a code point of view, but the impediment in its' path was superficiality and intellectual laziness in the consumer.
That is no longer true, and we're threatening to head towards a scenario where code superiority to Windows isn't something that can be claimed as much as it used to be, as well.
- I keep hearing negative reports from all directions about KDE 4.
- As noted, the kernel keeps getting more and more bloated, with the kernel team's management turning a deaf ear to anyone who isn't directly putting bread in their jar. Three cheers for Free Software, eh?;)
- Ubuntu's hardware support is generally good for about the first 5-10 minutes it takes for someone to run the installation routine, and after that, all bets are off. I've had sound randomly die for no apparent reason, with ALSA needing a complete reinstall, and my video card drivers developing weird problems as well. Then there were the number of other people I saw on the Freenode help channel with similar issues.
- The package management problem, contrary to mainstream perception, is most definitely NOT solved. Library issues with subpackaging still exist, and the reliance on precompiled binaries has proven bad for system robustness more or less in general, especially when you get novice users installing binary packages from different distros and expecting them to work together. Abandoning source compilation simply in order to satisfy idiots who demand instant gratification is not an appropriate response. If they don't want to do the necessary work for a quality system, let them go back to Windows where they belong.
Complacency is setting in, and the frantic, desperate, insanely irrational need to be a carbon copy of Microsoft Windows has also never been more chronic, or more damaging.
Due to that, if someone in that position happens to be an antisocial moron who can't help being a dick... That person will end up making the project look bad and suffer the consequences that his own moronic actions cause.
Autism is very often about specialisation. Have a look at the proverbial mathematical savants. They're unbelievable with mathematics, but their entire neurology is so strongly specialised towards just that one ability that they very often can't communicate at all, and sometimes can barely feed themselves or do other things either.
That is possibly the case with Ulrich. (and maybe Theo as well, I don't know)
In other words, if he genuinely is a Godlike programmer, it is possible that his brain is so specialised towards tasks in that one particular area, that he simply doesn't have the neurological resources left to be able to communicate effectively as well. Meaning that while he might be great to have in a coding position, Red Hat might also have to hire someone else next to him as well, in order to handle the actual PR side.
The other thing is that there are lots of programs that rely on glibc internals to link. They would need a recompile. Then there are those programs that actually use glibc internals, and there are more of those than you think. For a while there that was the only way to really get internationalization to work right with glibc.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time before you post something like this actually know how to install and configure Linux and then come back and post facts and not myth
You're a fanatic.
Next.
Sadly I have no mod points at the moment, but if I did, you'd get modded up for this.
Now you no longer need a playpen!
Also good for wives, girlfriends, grandparents, and inviting your employer on a trip to the beach. Has endless possible uses!
Try FreeBSD. I've used pretty much all of what you mentioned as well, except Vista, and I agree with you about those.
The difference with FreeBSD is that, while maybe it is largely textual, it truly is simple, unlike Linux distributions that merely claim to be. What that in turn means is that it virtually never breaks, and when it does, the design is sufficiently straightforward that I can fix it.
The point is, I'm really not intelligent. No human being truly is. Because of that, we need things that are simple. Ubuntu tries to be, but it only is on the user side, to a very superficial level. On the technical side, it is fiendishly complex, and the more complexity you have, the more chances there are for errors to happen, and the more different things a human being has to keep track of. It gets to be too much to cope.
I haven't found anything with FreeBSD yet where there are more than three or four steps to remember at once, and that includes even technical stuff like compiling a kernel or adding drivers to it. When I was using Linux on the other hand, my head often ached all the time because I was trying to keep so much in it at once. Now I don't need to, and I'm a lot happier.
Why do I need permission to do things? If I'm in front of my own bloody computer, then I have permission.
Let me explain. The Internet is used by a lot of ruthless, unscrupulous people, who enjoy nothing more than breaking into another person's computer remotely and completely taking it over.
In other words, you need permission for executing programs for exactly the same reason that you need a lock on your front door.
The door doesn't know whether it is you trying to enter, or someone else. Likewise, the computer doesn't either. Passwords and permissions serve the same purpose as the door lock does; to make sure that you're the only person who enters your house, or who is able to use your computer.
So utterly convincing. Even the moron who wrote the original article has more to say than that.
No, ALSA really is garbage. Unstable, finicky, excessively complex garbage. Worst of all, it's actually totally unnecessary garbage.
Why? In FreeBSD, I load a sound driver module into the kernel, and it works. End of story. There is no other unnecessary software layer which simply exists as nothing other than a potential source of problems.
GTK itself isn't garbage, but GConf most certainly is. GConf is the single worst design decision that has ever been made anywhere for Linux, and GTK has since been made reliant on it for its' settings.
They didn't need to do it, either. They could have written a GUI which printed the GUI-generated settings as hand-editable dotfiles, but no. Those latte-sipping yuppie CS graduates who write GNOME know so much better than the people who came before them, you see. They just had to invent the current pile of shit that GNOME is now stuck with.
Something is seriously fucked up on your machine. OO takes 15-20 seconds to load here from a cold start on my 2Ghz dual core with 3GB of memory. After that it takes about 5-10 seconds to load.
That's still bloated as hell. Mind you, office suites are nearly always garbage, (Microsoft's was no better) but that still doesn't give OO any excuse. The culprit there is the disease called "integration." It was a staple of earlier UNIX philosophy that programs should not have an excessively intimate knowledge of each other's internals, and that was for a reason.
Each distro has ONE package format that completley integrates with the system and allows for easy installation and uninstallation.
That's a good laugh. You've obviously never had apt go berserk and trash your system because you tried to uninstall a single element, which some idiot among the developers decided to declare a critical dependency of the rest of the system (like cups) when there was no sane reason for it to be at all.
Yes, bash is great - for programmers. Non-programmers should never need it. Everything should be configurable by the GUI.
Windows is still there, you know. As crazy as they might be, even the FSF don't go around putting guns to people's heads and forcing them to use Linux.
There is also OSX as well, as far as end user alternatives are concerned. Linux isn't going to be for everyone, and I wish I understood why people think it has to be.
No, Ubuntu (which around 9.5% of said 10% will be using) is anything but ready.
- Hald and dbus as implemented by it are an on-by-default, bloated mess.
- Sound support is bad beyond belief. ALSA crashes depending on the phase of the moon.
- Gdm is tied to any number of different things which it shouldn't be, which again causes massive instability. Cut gdm out of the startup in init, and watch the entire system fall apart. Sound doesn't work outside gdm AT ALL, and terminals in X lose their ability to preload the shell, as well.
- Debian's kernel management framework is the worst I've ever seen; it's an unmitigated, over-automated disaster. Custom kernel compilation virtually never works; there are just too many tiny snags for the process to trip on and fall flat on its' face, and when it does, you're left staring at a screenful of error messages from incomprehensible perl scripts.
The Debian community have absolutely no idea whatsoever about how to design a solid operating system.
Want to start hald and dbus to get your usb hardware working? Assuming it's already installed, (which it will be if you use the X-User prefab distribution in sysinstall) do the following.
1. Open /etc/rc.conf. /usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald start, or if that fails, sudo /usr/local/sbin/hald, or if you want, reboot.
2. Enter the two lines, hald_enable="YES", and dbus_enable="YES."
3. Run sudo
Done.
Want to load the kernel module for your sound card?
1. pciconf -lv (To find out what it is; similar to lspci, but remember the args) /boot/loader.conf to load it automatically next time.
2. Once you know what it is, go to look up which module to load. In my case, snd_cmi, for a CMedia card.
3. Type sudo kldload snd_cmi at a prompt to load the module into the kernel.
4. Add snd_cmi_load="YES" to
Done. The sound module loaded directly into the kernel Just Works. ;) There's no need to screw around with third party userland abominations like ALSA or OSS, and so no risk of either of said abominations dying randomly. (As ALSA did for me over the space of a month with Ubuntu)
I know I'd be frowned on by the FreeBSD devs for saying something nasty about Linux while pimping FreeBSD, but the truth is that FreeBSD's design is light years ahead of Linux. The added, totally unnecessary complexity added in Debian distributions in particular is absolutely appalling by comparison.
Lack of added complexity means lack of additional things which can potentially cause crashes or reliability, and FreeBSD's devs fairly obviously understand that. It's equally obvious to see that Debian's developers (and Canonical) don't.
The only two things holding FreeBSD back on the desktop are sysinstall being ncurses based, and the partitioner possibly being a little more intimidating than GParted. Apart from those two minor things, it has enormous advantages.
1. Infinitely more robust and reliable package management than anything available for Linux, in my experience.
2. A greatly simplified (and well documented) method of custom kernel configuration, in comparison with Linux, and a kernel module mechanism which is enormously simpler, as well.
3. Vastly simplified system startup. No init, no Upstart rubbish. Just YES lines in /etc/rc.conf.
4. Hald and dbus are not run by default, but only when they need to be, for USB/hotpluggable hardware. The rest of the time you can turn them off and take them out, and most people don't use them at all.
In summary, FreeBSD isn't just more user-friendly by virtue of its' much higher level of simplicity; it's an infinitely superior system to Linux overall. The single main reason for this is the fact that FreeBSD's developers aren't trying to twist UNIX into a clone of Microsoft Windows, because they know that they already have something much better.
If you're tired of Ubuntu or various other Linux distributions causing you endless headaches, I strongly invite you to visit the site , and download the cure for your frustrations.
Open source, on the other hand, is happy to license their products to anyone, and everyone, and they don't care if you give them nothing, give them a dollar, or give them a trillion dollars.
Linux people care. The GPL by its' very nature encourages a culture where people are often more concerned about how much others are contributing than about how much they are themselves.
I just installed FreeBSD last night. I got some help from an IRC channel as well; and I know, Linux has that, too. Thing is, I could decide hypothetically never to have anything to do with the devs of the system if I wanted, AND go and sell copies of it to other people entirely free and clear as well. I don't ever hear about BSD people crying about users (or anyone else) "not giving back."
The thing is, however, I find myself *wanting* to contribute, simply because this isn't the first time I've used FreeBSD, and I love it. I've written an advocacy piece on a blog of mine, and will almost certainly be writing more such in the future. I'm also not much of a programmer yet, but maybe I can help with that in time, too.
By contrast, with Linux, I admit that I:-
1. Don't like the GPL anywhere near as much, as a license.
2. Seriously don't like the GPL's author. The guy is a megalomaniac and wannabe cult leader. Being honest, I truly despise Stallman, and one of the main reasons for my loathing of him is because while it is due to my own conscience, I have been condemned by other people who tried to make out that his influence is nothing but positive.
3. Don't tend to want to contribute as much because of the sorts of flaps and drama that the Debian people in particular create, and how a lot of Linux people tend to treat others.
4. Tend to view Linux as being severely technically inferior to *BSD, especially Debian and Ubuntu.
5. Don't want to feel obligated to do something, purely in order to try and get the whiners to shut up.
So some Open Source people do try and force involvement from people; and I'll probably get one of the very shrieking Communists that I'm talking about replying to this. I attribute pretty much all of it to the influence of Richard Stallman, which ultimately, I view as very negative.
I admit it; I've pirated stuff before. However, I also pay for things too.
For me, piracy is about three things. Either:-
a) What I'm pirating is sufficiently rare and/or old now that I can't find it in stores. This is also a hint that if you were selling it, I'd be willing to pay for it, because old stuff isn't always easy to find, even online. The Terminator novels would be a good example of this.
b) Evaluation. Sometimes I'll come across a particular musical artist who I haven't heard before. If I'm sufficiently curious, I'll download an mp3 or two, and see what they're like.
c) I'm grazing/browsing in a transitory sense and I don't really care about the stuff I'm downloading. In that instance, a downloaded mp3 can be considered the equivalent of a radio track; it's transitory. If you're worried about losing money from me doing that, then put current mp3s on a site with ads, and I will quite happily watch a few second ad in order to download a file. I don't like greed, but bills need paying and I understand that.
Unlike apparently a lot of FOSS users, I'm not a Communist, although payment for me represents an acknowledgement of genuine merit. I don't have a lot of money, so if you get some from me, it means two things:-
a) I'm happy with your pricing model. Because, as I said, I don't have much money, this is important. I'm not going to pay for something I can't afford, no matter how good it is. Make it affordable, and you'll get a sale from me and others like me, and make more money in the end on volume.
b) Your product has genuinely impressed and/or otherwise made a positive impact with me. I downloaded a cam of The Dark Knight when it initially came out, but then went and saw the movie twice in a cinema, and now also own a copy of the DVD. The cam has also now been deleted. So did Warner Bros lose money from me downloading that cam? I think not.
It is sufficiently rare now that Hollywood brings out truly good movies, that when they do, I make very sure to go and see them in the cinema, (also partly simply because I still genuinely enjoy that experience more than sitting at home) and if they're really good (although this is very rare for me) I will then buy a DVD as well.
Other examples of products I've bought that I could have pirated include The Sims 2, and every game in the Unreal series up to and including UT2k4, as well as multiple copies of the original UT, due to some of them having been lost. Epic are very intelligent and creative people, who have brought me nearly a decade of pleasure from their games now, and they deserve to get paid for that.
Music I haven't bought, but would, includes anything by Guns'n'Roses, probably anything by Nine Inch Nails after I'd heard it, and anything by Shpongle, 1200 Micrograms, or Infected Mushroom as well.
Make good stuff, and you will be paid.
>I really feel for the BSD guys. Just hope they can keep users. Having choice in OS >selection is great.
"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
-- Matthew 7:13-14
You might have heard of a concept called the Tragedy of the Commons.
To put it another way, I've tended to observe that the degree of quality of something is usually (although admittedly not always) inversely proportional to its' degree of popularity. Ubuntu in my observation very strongly adheres to this principle.
Security, infinitely superior overall design, the ability to run rings around Linux in benchmarks, and still the only truly decent form of package management in existence.
I nearly forgot the single biggest fringe benefits; freedom from the megalomaniacal, cultic aspirations of Richard Stallman or his drone army, and a license that you truly *can* do whatever you want with.
What's not to love? ;)
>Flash is for sissies anyway, no?
"The Tumbler? Oh, I don't think you'd be interested in that."
What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
The only reason why I agree with Stallman's "GNU/Linux," claim is because the kernel itself cannot be successfully compiled with any compiler other than GCC.
However, alternatives to the CLI GNU userland do exist. The most obvious one is the BSD, but there is the heirloom project, asmutils, and Caldera's source as well.
I made the decision some time ago now that Windows XP would be my last operating system from Microsoft.
It's taken a long time, and a lot of waffling and bracing myself for the amount of work involved, (since I tend to be someone who, where Linux at least is concerned, tends to psychologically need to make their own system from scratch, rather than installing another pre-existing distro) but I'm finally making the switch.
Although I still have XP installed on this machine, I've already bought my next primary box, and it will not. I'm currently on Ubuntu, and once I've finished writing the installer I'm working on for Linux From Scratch, (A HREF="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/") the new box is going to be getting that system, and Ubuntu is going be coming off here as well; and then it will be pure custom Linux all the way for me.
I think downloading and viewing the T4 previews really brought home the fact that for what I do, I really don't need Windows any more. Those files were all .wmv, and VLC played them just fine. I can play WoW, do anything on the net that I can do in Windows, and usually at higher speed, and with Linux I can tinker around with some shell scripts which I love doing, as well; I'm currently in the process of learning the ropes with Vim at the moment.
If anyone else reading this is currently on the fence, as I was, I would really encourage you to make the switch. Everything I've read about Vista tells me it's horrible, and Windows 7 is only going to be worse. Linux has had to go through a long period before I've been willing to fully migrate; but it's time now, and I'm not sorry.
So long, Microsoft, and no hard feelings. It's truthfully been great; but I've always known that once a UNIX system was sufficiently ready for me, this day would come.
Yes, and here's the catch. It has been my experience that if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with the offerings from Microsoft, in compatibility, functionality, and eye candy, you are looking into something pretty heavyweight: Gnome or KDE
In terms of eye candy, Enlightenment thrashes the pants off either of the "Big Two." Where E doesn't win though is in terms of the really important things...E16 at least doesn't have a bottom anchored Start Menu or a trivial means of changing your wallpaper. ;)
I really hate updating my systems these days, because for every bug fixed it seems you get a fresh new one. Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later!
This, very simply, is the entire problem.
Real technical quality isn't a priority to Linux people any more.
The only priority is emulating Windows as closely as possible.
Everything else is considered secondary to that, and the entire system continues to suffer as a result. Making "the desktop," the sole priority is going to end up destroying Linux.
Then why does the libc in NetBSD not look like preprocessor soup - yet it still outperforms Linux?
Maybe because the people working on the BSDs actually know how to code?
That's tended to be my hypothesis, anywayz. ;)
Speaking of switching, why haven't you switched to OS X yet?
Are you stupid or just slow?
For some of us, it's because we're cheap bastards who can't afford a Mac.
For me, it's because while I'd be a lot happier simply using FreeBSD, (it has a license I like a lot more, and it's better technically in just about every respect other than hardware support) that would be boring. I'm addicted to pain and suffering, so I need to single handedly try and write solutions for what I perceive to be Linux's problems, which probably nobody will ever use, rather than simply using a system where all of said problems are already solved instead.
For the rest, however, it's because they're card carrying members of the cult of the GNU. In some ways, Linux has less in common with an operating system, and more with the Church of Scientology.
You must not know much, if anything, about Debian.
God, I love this. Anyone (and I mean anyone) who is in any way remotely critical of Debian, gets this response immediately fired at them from the cheerleading squad.
Kudos on the compelling argument there, Slick. Totally airtight, and utterly unassailable rhetoric. ;)
I'll dispute that the OS will ever become irrelevant.
OSes won't become irrelevant, and UNIX in broader terms won't, but Linux itself might.
The kernel is 60 Mb compressed, these days. That's bloated as hell. Linus and friends are way too focused on the big iron that is being used by their corporate sponsors; the whole flap with Con Kolivas showed that.
The other real issue is that most of the people working on Linux are Windows immigrants who truthfully wouldn't be able to genuinely code their way out of a wet paper bag. As an overall design, Debian is absolutely terrible, although I know I'll get the usual fanboys in response to this, telling me I have no clue...and that's fine.
Ten years ago, we had a scenario where Linux was better from a code point of view, but the impediment in its' path was superficiality and intellectual laziness in the consumer.
That is no longer true, and we're threatening to head towards a scenario where code superiority to Windows isn't something that can be claimed as much as it used to be, as well.
- I keep hearing negative reports from all directions about KDE 4.
- As noted, the kernel keeps getting more and more bloated, with the kernel team's management turning a deaf ear to anyone who isn't directly putting bread in their jar. Three cheers for Free Software, eh? ;)
- Ubuntu's hardware support is generally good for about the first 5-10 minutes it takes for someone to run the installation routine, and after that, all bets are off. I've had sound randomly die for no apparent reason, with ALSA needing a complete reinstall, and my video card drivers developing weird problems as well. Then there were the number of other people I saw on the Freenode help channel with similar issues.
- The package management problem, contrary to mainstream perception, is most definitely NOT solved. Library issues with subpackaging still exist, and the reliance on precompiled binaries has proven bad for system robustness more or less in general, especially when you get novice users installing binary packages from different distros and expecting them to work together. Abandoning source compilation simply in order to satisfy idiots who demand instant gratification is not an appropriate response. If they don't want to do the necessary work for a quality system, let them go back to Windows where they belong.
Complacency is setting in, and the frantic, desperate, insanely irrational need to be a carbon copy of Microsoft Windows has also never been more chronic, or more damaging.
Due to that, if someone in that position happens to be an antisocial moron who can't help being a dick... That person will end up making the project look bad and suffer the consequences that his own moronic actions cause.
Autism is very often about specialisation. Have a look at the proverbial mathematical savants. They're unbelievable with mathematics, but their entire neurology is so strongly specialised towards just that one ability that they very often can't communicate at all, and sometimes can barely feed themselves or do other things either.
That is possibly the case with Ulrich. (and maybe Theo as well, I don't know)
In other words, if he genuinely is a Godlike programmer, it is possible that his brain is so specialised towards tasks in that one particular area, that he simply doesn't have the neurological resources left to be able to communicate effectively as well. Meaning that while he might be great to have in a coding position, Red Hat might also have to hire someone else next to him as well, in order to handle the actual PR side.
[ ] You know that a lot of that answers were posted by Trolls that somehow smelled the fish.
(Tip: Move mouse over link after "From", look at href, know "mailinator.com", understand.)
Wow, Ulrich. I would have thought it almost certain that you'd have a Slashdot account.
Hi, by the way. ;)
The other thing is that there are lots of programs that rely on glibc internals to link. They would need a recompile. Then there are those programs that actually use glibc internals, and there are more of those than you think. For a while there that was the only way to really get internationalization to work right with glibc.
Yep. The GNU monoculture at work.