I agree about man. I mean, now that I understand how to use it and read it, it's a great resource. But as a beginner it was atrocious. I often simply wallowed in ignorance rather than attempt to wade through a man page.
I think there needs to be a new man page written for man, and I've said this before. I mean, as a new user, what's the first thing you're going to try? "man man" of course. And that fucker is unreadable. That's a serious problem.
Let's be honest: Documentation of open source programs is generally TERRIBLE.
Generally, all software manuals are terrible. But the best manuals I've read in my life have universally been free software manuals. The emacs manual. The Krusader Handbook. Python 101. The org-mode manual. The Ubuntu Pocket Guide (free plug!). Hands down, the truly great, readable, enjoyable documentation I have read (I am not just talking about accurate information here, I am talking about good books) has all been free documentation, made with love.
This doesn't excuse the mountains of crap and deserts of paucity out there (and they are out there), but it's a least a solid counterpoint.
Anything unusual you want to do usually requires a week of experimentation.
Anything unusual you want to do with non-free software is generally impossible.
It's pretty simple. They're trying to move past "KDE is a Linux desktop environment" into "KDE is a technology platform." And it's true, the KDE desktop and its underlying pillars, and the KDE application suite, are a lot more than just another Linux desktop.
Here's the point. Windows comes with nothing. Zippo. Nada. And this is expected, because Windows is half-assed.
Ubuntu, otoh, comes with the works. The whole point of Ubuntu is that any casual desktop user can install it in half an hour and be ready to rock like right now. No fucking around, it's already ready already, et cetera.
And that is right and expected, because Ubuntu is not half-assed. It comes with shit. Serious shit, to do real work right now.
And to try and turn this back to the original topic, the above is why I think this decision is a mistake, unless there's something serious to fill that gap with (and no, I'm not talking about F-Spot).
Hell, I don't even like Gimp, and I don't use Ubuntu in my home anymore (though I do still recommend it to others). I run Arch with KDE, use Krita, and you'll pry it out of my cold dead hands. But I'm obviously not Ubuntu's user base. If you're Ubuntu, and you use the Gnome desktop, you must ergo include the Gimp. If you don't, as the GP said, you look less serious, and more half-assed.
Except the distributions. Who somehow got the impression that KDE 3.x was no longer supported [launchpad.net], that they had to upgrade to KDE 4, and that any bitching about KDE4's premature inclusion was just a "pet peeve".
Wow, is that bug report yours? Because if it is, you're a fucking asshole.
Anyway, there were two fairly sizable bugfix releases to 3.5 in the six months directly after 4.0 came out. But if you're expecting the KDE development team to continue support two entirely different and non-compatible desktop environments, each based on different toolkits (Qt 3 and 4), indefinitely, well... Tough shit, I guess.
How come that distributors were so much out of phase with the KDE developpers?
I don't really know what to tell you. Everybody knew what the fuck was going on. Lots of distributions handled it very well indeed. As far as (k)ubuntu goes, I personally think they were on the right track for a minute there with 8.04, having the two versions in two separate trees, but they jumped way too soon, when not only was KDE 4.1 not ready for public consumption, but the Kubuntu team didn't have any sort of graceful upgrade path in place. I mean, for fuck's sake, whose fault is that?
Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors?
I have no idea how it could have been. I mean, I can sympathize with some users who felt a little misled by the version number, but distro packagers should at least be able to be relied upon to read the fucking release notes.
Especially since more than one distribution (at least Fedora and Kubuntu) made the same "mistake"?
Yes, KDE 3 is abandoned. It was made very clear at the time of the final 3.x release (3.5.10?) that that was in fact the final release.
If KDE-project wants old users to trust them, they need to make their new code backward-compatible.
Well, for one thing, speak for yourself, a whole lot of "old users" (this one included) are really happy with the direction and momentum of 4.x. These days I refuse to consider distros that still only package KDE 3, as a matter of fact (or still insist on putting 4.x into Unstable, Gentoo!.
For another, the bottom line is that no one wants to do it. I mean, God knows I wouldn't. Do you want to do it?
And the reason no one wants to do it is because KDE 3 is eight years old and the code's a fucking mess. Take a look at Windows if you want to see where that "backwards compatibility uber alles" mindset leads. It's not pretty, and I do not want. Actually, that kind of leads me backward in your post to this...
Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how...
See that? That oh-so-delicate system of kludges and workarounds you've so cleverly and painstakingly erected? (No offense meant by that at all, I'm sure it is clever.) That's the problem. There's no such thing as an "upgrade path" from that sort of nightmare.
How the KDE team managed it? I'll tell you how. By telling everyone very loudly "Hey everyone, this is not ready for prime time, we are putting it out for testing and feedback, it will eat your babies and make your daughter worship the devil!"
Seriously. Everyone was warned. No one was ignorant.
Also, wrt Kubuntu, that should in no way be taken as indicative of the quality of KDE. In fairness, I haven't tried 9.10 yet, but since KDE 4.0 shipped, I have found every successive Kubuntu release to be unbearably bad. I have since switched to Arch, which has a thriving KDE community, and have not looked back.
I can see why you posted anonymously. This is fucking retarded.
The problem with relying on people that are motivated by their inspiration is that you tend not to get "normal." You have to pay people to work on "normal". Refining and polishing is not fun. Inventing your own bespoke miracle from whole cloth and taking it no more than 10% of the way to functional before you lose interest and wander off is infinitely more fun.
Gnome 2.x has been in use and under active development for seven years. KDE 3 was in use and under active development for six years. My God, however shall we handle such rapid and radical change? Let's all go back to OS/2!
KDE 4 is and ongoing failure. I haven't bothered to get my hands on 4.3 yet because 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 killed all hope. They haven't had the 5 years it's going to take to fix what's wrong with 4.x.
Even one example might make you sound a little less stupid.
I'm sticking with 3.5.x until that interval has passed.
You're retarded.
The vast collection of background services sucking down hundreds of MB of RAM doing who the hell knows what is also on-going and ever worsening problem.
OMFG, not hundreds of MB of RAM! Maybe it's because the rest of us want to do shit! If you don't have hundreds of MB of RAM just sitting there waiting for something to do (it is 2009, asshole) then go back to XFCE and STFU.
Both systems pollute home directories with vast file hierarchies hidden in dot-file directories making a shared NFS home a practical impossibility.
Every piece of KDE config lives in ~/.kde or ~/.kde4 depending on how your distribution set it up. All of it. One folder. Shut up shut up shut up your stupid stupid mouth.
Just boot XP and clone Windows Explorer, mkay...? A badly done clone of Explorer would trump anything Gnome/KDE has produced to date wrt file management.
My God, the bullshit's getting deep in here. Microsoft has yet to replicate the functionality that Nautilus and Konqueror had five years ago. If you really want a power tool, use Krusader like the real men do. And shut the fuck up.
All right, I wrote half a reply to your other comment and then decided not to submit it, but now you've pissed me off.
I am a young, able-bodied, moderately well-educated (if largely self-educated) white male with a decent job. When I was a child, I lived in the rural midwest version of a ghetto. There weren't really any non-white people where I grew up (I remember there being exactly one black girl in my elementary school, and some Latino families that mostly worked at the egg packing plant). SHOCKINGLY there are poor people there. I know, holy shit, poor white people! It must just blow your mind.
But it's true, and I know it's true because I was one. I didn't realize it at the time because I was a kid and you think whatever you're doing is normal when you're six. But I'm here to tell you that you don't know a fucking thing about poverty.
I'm not talking about lower middle class suburban "poor." I'm not talking about "working poor." I'm talking about pissing in a bucket because we didn't have running water. I'm talking about learning at age four to tear apart scavenged old refrigerators and console TVs so we could take the copper wire the fifty miles into town every month or so to get a hundred bucks at the recycling plant and that being food and gas and bills for a family of six. I'm talking about poor.
I'm not telling you this to build cred or get your widdle heart bleeding or make you feel bad and apologize, I don't really give a rat's ass. I am telling you this because you need to wake the fuck up and understand that poverty and hierarchy and class division are everywhere. They've been the bane of man since the dawn of man. Is it often linked to race, especially in very heterogeneous and urbanized areas? Yeah it is.
But there is poverty everywhere. There's poverty in LA, there's poverty in Africa, there's poverty in rural Minnesota. Real poverty that your simplistic "white privilege" rhetoric can in no way even begin to penetrate. I'm sure it's very comforting to you to have this great monolithic theory of why there's injustice in the world, but I can personally assure you that you just do not get it.
OR, my major point, just try to work out minor perpetual upgrading instead of all at once? Install once, that's it, no need to reinstall the whole thing ever, ever, ever again.
Losing the mod points I already used in this discussion, but this is important, so listen. Cancel whatever you had planned for this weekend, because you need to switch to Arch.
Are you high? They take what others are doing well, fuck it up, slap a Microsoft logo on it, and drop bombs like Windows Mobile and the bloody Zune. Can you name one Microsoft product in this decade that was anything remotely resembling an "instant hit?"
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for the better part of thirty years.
This is true.
Hardware and software ships as a factory-tested and generally well-balanced system for its intended - advertised - use.
This is not true. Look at "Vista Capable."
The buyer has a warranty - the toll-free number for support. He doesn't need to google for a solution. He doesn't need his son-in-law.
This is also not true. It's true that this is the popular perception, but it's not true.
The DIY Linux OS install is never going to happen in numbers which matter.
This is true.
The FOSS app for Windows is already there. There is almost nothing of interest in the home and SOHO markets that is uniquely or distinctly Linux.
This is not true in any meaningful sense. Try it yourself. Search for "Free CD burner Windows XP." You get pages of garbage. Yes, the application exists, but users are never going to find it. OTOH, no one needs to search for "Free CD burner Ubuntu," because it's already installed.
By the time the Linux product hits the retail shelves - with licensed media play and other essentials - the "free" OS is a trivial discount at best.
This is not remotely true. Are you aware of the retail cost of Windows 7?
The retailer needs more to justify maintaining a dual inventory and support structure.
I can see how this may be true.
Most users want the OS to recede into the background. To be undemanding of their attention as possible.
This is true, but is in no way a plus in the Microsoft column. Windows continues to be the neediest and most demanding system on the market.
That is by no means always true. Take marijuana. Low end weed (brick weed) comes from Mexico. It is indeed made by an oligarchy of competing organized criminal interests, as you state.
High end weed (nug, dank, whatever you want to call it) is typically grown by, as you call them, "co-op upstarts," smaller craft operations, and the majority of it is sold comparatively locally, without the aid (or baggage) of the drug cartel machine, and at much higher margin.
A lot of the money in brick weed goes into middle men and transportation costs, it's a highly inefficient and low-margin operation. Two guys growing four good plants in Oregon are worth more money than a U-Haul full of Mexican brick. It has been this way for a long time, and despite the drug warriors' rhetoric, the "terrorists" have yet to find a way to break into that market.
Why is this? I don't know. It does seem to go against economic logic, but there it is.
I dispute your premise. I think the subset of humans for whom "consistency and familiarity" are the primary concerns when using a computer interface is vanishingly small.
Even in the "first world," where computer use is comparatively common, the percentage of people who have either zero or as-close-to-zero-as-makes-no-odds experience with and/or understanding of any computer interface at all would doubtlessly shock us all.
But even more than that, consider this question on a global scale. The vast majority of people on Earth have never used a computer. The technology revolution is just barely beginning.
I ramble some, but my point is this. It's not a question of "Which OS resonates best with American corporate office workers?" The question, now and in the next twenty years, is going to be "What is the best and most compelling choice for the millions of people who are getting their first exposure to a computer right now, today?" Win that battle, you win the war.
I'm not weighing in as pro- or anti-anything here. I have my opinions which are well documented in my comment history, but this is not about that. This is about asking the right question.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you feel you have to know how every component in your car works.
No, but if I don't, I have to pay somebody else to fix it when it breaks. That's how it works.
I disagree. I think of shell commands as verbs, so "list" makes more sense to me than "directorize."
Okay, I've got to admit that was funny.
Not yet, but patches welcome.
(Unless you count "M-x shell")
I agree about man. I mean, now that I understand how to use it and read it, it's a great resource. But as a beginner it was atrocious. I often simply wallowed in ignorance rather than attempt to wade through a man page.
I think there needs to be a new man page written for man, and I've said this before. I mean, as a new user, what's the first thing you're going to try? "man man" of course. And that fucker is unreadable. That's a serious problem.
Let's be honest: Documentation of open source programs is generally TERRIBLE.
Generally, all software manuals are terrible. But the best manuals I've read in my life have universally been free software manuals. The emacs manual. The Krusader Handbook. Python 101. The org-mode manual. The Ubuntu Pocket Guide (free plug!). Hands down, the truly great, readable, enjoyable documentation I have read (I am not just talking about accurate information here, I am talking about good books) has all been free documentation, made with love.
This doesn't excuse the mountains of crap and deserts of paucity out there (and they are out there), but it's a least a solid counterpoint.
Anything unusual you want to do usually requires a week of experimentation.
Anything unusual you want to do with non-free software is generally impossible.
It's pretty simple. They're trying to move past "KDE is a Linux desktop environment" into "KDE is a technology platform." And it's true, the KDE desktop and its underlying pillars, and the KDE application suite, are a lot more than just another Linux desktop.
I'm really sorry I already posted to this discussion and can't mod you up today. God bless you.
Not to the people they're hoping to reach with this move (they don't even know what KDE is).
Not the point at all.
Here's the point. Windows comes with nothing. Zippo. Nada. And this is expected, because Windows is half-assed.
Ubuntu, otoh, comes with the works. The whole point of Ubuntu is that any casual desktop user can install it in half an hour and be ready to rock like right now. No fucking around, it's already ready already, et cetera.
And that is right and expected, because Ubuntu is not half-assed. It comes with shit. Serious shit, to do real work right now.
And to try and turn this back to the original topic, the above is why I think this decision is a mistake, unless there's something serious to fill that gap with (and no, I'm not talking about F-Spot).
Hell, I don't even like Gimp, and I don't use Ubuntu in my home anymore (though I do still recommend it to others). I run Arch with KDE, use Krita, and you'll pry it out of my cold dead hands. But I'm obviously not Ubuntu's user base. If you're Ubuntu, and you use the Gnome desktop, you must ergo include the Gimp. If you don't, as the GP said, you look less serious, and more half-assed.
I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed
Eeeew.
Except the distributions. Who somehow got the impression that KDE 3.x was no longer supported [launchpad.net], that they had to upgrade to KDE 4, and that any bitching about KDE4's premature inclusion was just a "pet peeve".
Wow, is that bug report yours? Because if it is, you're a fucking asshole.
Anyway, there were two fairly sizable bugfix releases to 3.5 in the six months directly after 4.0 came out. But if you're expecting the KDE development team to continue support two entirely different and non-compatible desktop environments, each based on different toolkits (Qt 3 and 4), indefinitely, well... Tough shit, I guess.
How come that distributors were so much out of phase with the KDE developpers?
I don't really know what to tell you. Everybody knew what the fuck was going on. Lots of distributions handled it very well indeed. As far as (k)ubuntu goes, I personally think they were on the right track for a minute there with 8.04, having the two versions in two separate trees, but they jumped way too soon, when not only was KDE 4.1 not ready for public consumption, but the Kubuntu team didn't have any sort of graceful upgrade path in place. I mean, for fuck's sake, whose fault is that?
Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors?
I have no idea how it could have been. I mean, I can sympathize with some users who felt a little misled by the version number, but distro packagers should at least be able to be relied upon to read the fucking release notes.
Especially since more than one distribution (at least Fedora and Kubuntu) made the same "mistake"?
Way more didn't.
Yes, KDE 3 is abandoned. It was made very clear at the time of the final 3.x release (3.5.10?) that that was in fact the final release.
If KDE-project wants old users to trust them, they need to make their new code backward-compatible.
Well, for one thing, speak for yourself, a whole lot of "old users" (this one included) are really happy with the direction and momentum of 4.x. These days I refuse to consider distros that still only package KDE 3, as a matter of fact (or still insist on putting 4.x into Unstable, Gentoo!.
For another, the bottom line is that no one wants to do it. I mean, God knows I wouldn't. Do you want to do it?
And the reason no one wants to do it is because KDE 3 is eight years old and the code's a fucking mess. Take a look at Windows if you want to see where that "backwards compatibility uber alles" mindset leads. It's not pretty, and I do not want. Actually, that kind of leads me backward in your post to this...
Having set up family and friends with (then-latest) KDE-3.x, and all of us using customized desktops, menus, and shortcuts, we don't want to start all that from scratch. No way, no how...
See that? That oh-so-delicate system of kludges and workarounds you've so cleverly and painstakingly erected? (No offense meant by that at all, I'm sure it is clever.) That's the problem. There's no such thing as an "upgrade path" from that sort of nightmare.
How the KDE team managed it? I'll tell you how. By telling everyone very loudly "Hey everyone, this is not ready for prime time, we are putting it out for testing and feedback, it will eat your babies and make your daughter worship the devil!"
Seriously. Everyone was warned. No one was ignorant.
Also, wrt Kubuntu, that should in no way be taken as indicative of the quality of KDE. In fairness, I haven't tried 9.10 yet, but since KDE 4.0 shipped, I have found every successive Kubuntu release to be unbearably bad. I have since switched to Arch, which has a thriving KDE community, and have not looked back.
Perhaps it would have helped your case to actually provide one goddamn example. As it stands, no, you're just trolling.
I'm sorry, did you just say customizable and Gnome in the same paragraph? It's time to move to KDE, my friend.
I can see why you posted anonymously. This is fucking retarded.
The problem with relying on people that are motivated by their inspiration is that you tend not to get "normal." You have to pay people to work on "normal". Refining and polishing is not fun. Inventing your own bespoke miracle from whole cloth and taking it no more than 10% of the way to functional before you lose interest and wander off is infinitely more fun.
Gnome 2.x has been in use and under active development for seven years. KDE 3 was in use and under active development for six years. My God, however shall we handle such rapid and radical change? Let's all go back to OS/2!
KDE 4 is and ongoing failure. I haven't bothered to get my hands on 4.3 yet because 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 killed all hope. They haven't had the 5 years it's going to take to fix what's wrong with 4.x.
Even one example might make you sound a little less stupid.
I'm sticking with 3.5.x until that interval has passed.
You're retarded.
The vast collection of background services sucking down hundreds of MB of RAM doing who the hell knows what is also on-going and ever worsening problem.
OMFG, not hundreds of MB of RAM! Maybe it's because the rest of us want to do shit! If you don't have hundreds of MB of RAM just sitting there waiting for something to do (it is 2009, asshole) then go back to XFCE and STFU.
Both systems pollute home directories with vast file hierarchies hidden in dot-file directories making a shared NFS home a practical impossibility.
Every piece of KDE config lives in ~/.kde or ~/.kde4 depending on how your distribution set it up. All of it. One folder. Shut up shut up shut up your stupid stupid mouth.
Just boot XP and clone Windows Explorer, mkay...? A badly done clone of Explorer would trump anything Gnome/KDE has produced to date wrt file management.
My God, the bullshit's getting deep in here. Microsoft has yet to replicate the functionality that Nautilus and Konqueror had five years ago. If you really want a power tool, use Krusader like the real men do. And shut the fuck up.
You really should have bought a real mp3 player. I hope you learned something.
All right, I wrote half a reply to your other comment and then decided not to submit it, but now you've pissed me off.
I am a young, able-bodied, moderately well-educated (if largely self-educated) white male with a decent job. When I was a child, I lived in the rural midwest version of a ghetto. There weren't really any non-white people where I grew up (I remember there being exactly one black girl in my elementary school, and some Latino families that mostly worked at the egg packing plant). SHOCKINGLY there are poor people there. I know, holy shit, poor white people! It must just blow your mind.
But it's true, and I know it's true because I was one. I didn't realize it at the time because I was a kid and you think whatever you're doing is normal when you're six. But I'm here to tell you that you don't know a fucking thing about poverty.
I'm not talking about lower middle class suburban "poor." I'm not talking about "working poor." I'm talking about pissing in a bucket because we didn't have running water. I'm talking about learning at age four to tear apart scavenged old refrigerators and console TVs so we could take the copper wire the fifty miles into town every month or so to get a hundred bucks at the recycling plant and that being food and gas and bills for a family of six. I'm talking about poor.
I'm not telling you this to build cred or get your widdle heart bleeding or make you feel bad and apologize, I don't really give a rat's ass. I am telling you this because you need to wake the fuck up and understand that poverty and hierarchy and class division are everywhere. They've been the bane of man since the dawn of man. Is it often linked to race, especially in very heterogeneous and urbanized areas? Yeah it is.
But there is poverty everywhere. There's poverty in LA, there's poverty in Africa, there's poverty in rural Minnesota. Real poverty that your simplistic "white privilege" rhetoric can in no way even begin to penetrate. I'm sure it's very comforting to you to have this great monolithic theory of why there's injustice in the world, but I can personally assure you that you just do not get it.
OR, my major point, just try to work out minor perpetual upgrading instead of all at once? Install once, that's it, no need to reinstall the whole thing ever, ever, ever again.
Losing the mod points I already used in this discussion, but this is important, so listen. Cancel whatever you had planned for this weekend, because you need to switch to Arch.
Are you high? They take what others are doing well, fuck it up, slap a Microsoft logo on it, and drop bombs like Windows Mobile and the bloody Zune. Can you name one Microsoft product in this decade that was anything remotely resembling an "instant hit?"
Seriously, pull the other one.
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. [emphasis mine]
You lost me right here.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for the better part of thirty years.
This is true.
Hardware and software ships as a factory-tested and generally well-balanced system for its intended - advertised - use.
This is not true. Look at "Vista Capable."
The buyer has a warranty - the toll-free number for support. He doesn't need to google for a solution. He doesn't need his son-in-law.
This is also not true. It's true that this is the popular perception, but it's not true.
The DIY Linux OS install is never going to happen in numbers which matter.
This is true.
The FOSS app for Windows is already there. There is almost nothing of interest in the home and SOHO markets that is uniquely or distinctly Linux.
This is not true in any meaningful sense. Try it yourself. Search for "Free CD burner Windows XP." You get pages of garbage. Yes, the application exists, but users are never going to find it. OTOH, no one needs to search for "Free CD burner Ubuntu," because it's already installed.
By the time the Linux product hits the retail shelves - with licensed media play and other essentials - the "free" OS is a trivial discount at best.
This is not remotely true. Are you aware of the retail cost of Windows 7?
The retailer needs more to justify maintaining a dual inventory and support structure.
I can see how this may be true.
Most users want the OS to recede into the background. To be undemanding of their attention as possible.
This is true, but is in no way a plus in the Microsoft column. Windows continues to be the neediest and most demanding system on the market.
That is by no means always true. Take marijuana. Low end weed (brick weed) comes from Mexico. It is indeed made by an oligarchy of competing organized criminal interests, as you state.
High end weed (nug, dank, whatever you want to call it) is typically grown by, as you call them, "co-op upstarts," smaller craft operations, and the majority of it is sold comparatively locally, without the aid (or baggage) of the drug cartel machine, and at much higher margin.
A lot of the money in brick weed goes into middle men and transportation costs, it's a highly inefficient and low-margin operation. Two guys growing four good plants in Oregon are worth more money than a U-Haul full of Mexican brick. It has been this way for a long time, and despite the drug warriors' rhetoric, the "terrorists" have yet to find a way to break into that market.
Why is this? I don't know. It does seem to go against economic logic, but there it is.
The issue is consistency and familiarity.
I dispute your premise. I think the subset of humans for whom "consistency and familiarity" are the primary concerns when using a computer interface is vanishingly small.
Even in the "first world," where computer use is comparatively common, the percentage of people who have either zero or as-close-to-zero-as-makes-no-odds experience with and/or understanding of any computer interface at all would doubtlessly shock us all.
But even more than that, consider this question on a global scale. The vast majority of people on Earth have never used a computer. The technology revolution is just barely beginning.
I ramble some, but my point is this. It's not a question of "Which OS resonates best with American corporate office workers?" The question, now and in the next twenty years, is going to be "What is the best and most compelling choice for the millions of people who are getting their first exposure to a computer right now, today?" Win that battle, you win the war.
I'm not weighing in as pro- or anti-anything here. I have my opinions which are well documented in my comment history, but this is not about that. This is about asking the right question.