I'm not trying to discourage people from writing a comfy HTML editor.:P
Your remarks regarding adding printing to the original code; typically that's not what I see happening. I usually see someone rewrite the editor from scratch and advertise their version as having printing capabilities.
Your analogies about reusing code advantageously are exactly what I would love to see happen with open source, rather than the code duplication that happens instead.
Are you a programmer? We need more of them like you.
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
Good point, and I'm inclined to agree.
A conundrum that's come to me lately (and struck a chord with me in this article) is what indicates the growth and maturation of an operating system?
I came to 'ease of use' because it's in my background; as a program becomes more mature it typically becomes more polished, more sensible to the user.
Linux remains extremely powerful as a command line OS, and it should forever be that. True power lies in being able to fundamentally interact with a computer system.
But what purpose does it serve except to intellectually stimulate hobbyists? That leaves me a bit unfulfilled. Wouldn't it be an ideal to see Linux be able to compete with others instead of remaining in a class of its own?
RedHat invariably does silly things like fail to initialize a network card, and lemme tell you, in a networked environment this is a not so good thing.
RedHat and other mainstream userfriendly distributions have the pieces lined up, but they're not there yet as many MANY people will tell you.
Windows may crash and it may be unrighteous and all that good stuff we like to tell ourselves, but it behaves in a consistent manner on supported hardware, it has a list of supported hardware, a huge list of third party software titles, and it just works by brainlessly clicking things.
You still can't do this even in RedHat 9. You risk breaking KDE, or GNOME, or whichever desktop you chose during the install, because they themselves are also fragile. I can't tell you the number of bugs I've run into with either environment which completely corrupt a new user's preferences.
Then what are they left with? Oh yeah, a STOCK GNOME desktop! D'oh.
Well, it is. But the game has changed. It's not about pragmatism anymore, or at least it shouldn't be. We stepped into the spotlight as a community that claimed it had a better product than the competition.
Are we backing down now and stating that we can't deliver, instead claiming that we're a thinktank, a group of problem-solvers rather than solution providers?
Open Source is perfectly capable of delivering something superior to a commercial product. Fundamental lack of organisation, the wrong attitude, and no motivation to write the necessary glue to make the operating system feel good to the end-user or even the server administrator of the future is going to be its downfall.
Until Linux can be installed in five clicks, can print, scan, facsimile, run a wordprocessor and web browser that are completely interoperable via drag and drop, and do all the other nice *little* things a real operating system and not a collection of parts can do, it's not going to get anywhere.
The success of a product at large depends on every developer having a common goal; the success of the product at large. It's not going to work to say "I need a text editor that does color coding of my HTML" and ignore basic needs like printing, display, sound and document model subsystems that the users truly need.
It's a paradigm shift; this started as a fun little USENET project, and now all the world is looking at it as a competitor to the biggest operating system product on the market.
Fortunately, using AIM to ask people out "for drinks" is your forte.
You'd be an interesting case, you should submit your list to this project. Then we could see what fraction of your buddy list consists of female, school-aged children.
I think being popular on a service like AOL Instant Messenger would in fact be a worse blight.:P
Re:Why I just switched from Gentoo to Debian
on
Debian's Own SourceForge
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
PEBKAC on your part aside with regard to portage (on a 233 it doesn't take anywhere near that amount of time to list or rebuild the cache), and aside from your misinterpretation of the kernel changelog (there are four other kernels, btw, did you check into one of those? Did you have trouble with the default kernel? The process priorities problem was exceedingly rare).
I've also never broken my userland to the extent that I require a reinstall; did you read the part about Gentoo being for power users and being a learning platform? Yeah, if you're coming from RedHat, obviously you're going to screw it up. That's no problem. But be patient until you learn how Linux works, that's what you're there for isn't it?
I always hear people saying "I use Debian because I just want to get work done" but something about it just doesn't ring true. Apt is a fantastic package manager I grant you, but whenever I install Debian I do without debconf. I know what I'm doing, thanks.
So from my perspective the main thing I'm concerned with is packages. Are they up to date? Are userland packages like KDE or X released promptly when there are new versions? The answer is an unfortunate no. The stable branch of Debian refuses to merge new versions in a dynamic way, instead insisting that stable is stable and you must use unstable to get the latest.
So here I am having to either move to an unstable branch of Debian, which I've seen break before, or add all kinds of third party repositories (Can you say UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE) to my sources.list. What happened to just wanting to get work done?
I'd use Debian if they were timely about new versions of software in a stable release, rather than making me wait 24 months for something I can knock on and say I TRUST THIS.
To any Debian developer reading this: Is it possible to institute such an official backporting process without my having to use a Debian variant? I'd very much like to see this aspect of Debian's package management brought up to speed. I like Gentoo, but I don't like having only one choice and no fallbacks on which to rely. Debian would fit the bill perfectly for me.
No one is going to switch away from Windows 9x just because it's no longer supported. It does what everyone requires of it at little additional cost.
Purchasing a site license for 200 copies of Windows XP Professional edition is simply not cost effective and won't be planned as an upgrade path for a LONG time. That gives Linux time to be an upgrade path as domain server for these clients.
People start realizing that 'the feature/bug will be fixed when I get to it' is unacceptable for the corporate environment (in which Windows thrives), ease of use is made a priority, and the practical needs of small to midsized businesses are met by Linux.
This weekend I was involved in the installation of a Windows 2000 AD configuration for a medium sized business at two locations in this city; their needs and their budget could have been met for thousands of dollars less had Linux been able to support an NT domain with simple graphical utilities.
For all RedHat's work creating their new product line, not one of their efforts has even FOCUSED on the massive number of Windows 9x client workstations that simply need a Microsoft Windows domain and drive shares.
So quit buzzwording, clustering, XMLifying everything, and create something someone NEEDS.
I'm also not seeing anything quantitative other than a claim that he's spoken with market researchers. I'd like to see some names of the people surveyed or at least information about what the surveyed developers were/are doing in general.
I'd consider Debian a practical choice as soon as they pared down their efforts a little.
The fact that they're unable to come up with binary packages that aren't more recent than 24 months in their stable branch is indicative of some massive release engineering issues.
This doesn't even begin to go into the fact that Debian's stable branch is not dynamic. Large projects like KDE 3.1 will never officially be placed in stable, even if the developer base manages to 'fix every problem' on each and every CPU architecture they support, like the purists that they are.
And no, Debian unstable is not an option. Some of us like to run workstations without fearing breakage.
The sad thing is, on slashdot, I'm outnumbered by a legion of Debian users who, as they read this, will shake their heads and say "man, what is he talking about?"
Just sharing some of the opinions from the real world.
Let's not forget that Debian's other policies seem to limit its adoption of software at an acceptable rate.:P
A utility which may be of interest to Linux distributions is 'info2man', which will turn all the GNU info pages into the traditional man format. EXTREMELY COOL.
You seem to be quite vocal about your inability to interact with the FreeBSD team.
I didn't have a problem conferring with them over several issues, some of which included errors in-kernel or in the release engineering process. I found them quite responsive to answer questions and even accept feedback if properly presented.
Perhaps you had a personality clash with the individual(s) you were speaking to, I don't know. But I think your categorizing of the entire team as a gaggle of elitists is out of nowhere.
My Dell Inspiron 8100 has gone through three batteries and is on its fourth currently. This battery has already lost 15% of its nominal discharge time just through normal use. I'm now beyond the warranty replacement period and do not intend to purchase more batteries for this machine. It's going to become a desktop.
This type of 'smart battery' is flawed at best and I wish more people would have pointed it out sooner. I'm glad this article was posted at least, but be aware, this is universal to all laptops using a smart battery, not just IBM ThinkPads.
A great deal of Apple's work in bringing FreeBSD components into the MacOS X platform have been quite specific, I'd be surprised if there were changes/improvements made to the software that were generic enough to include in FreeBSD itself.
Keeping in mind also, Apple doesn't use FreeBSD's kernel, the single point where corporate development would be most valuable; they use mach and a BSD mach_server, and a proprietary (IOKit) system for drivers and such.
So I'm reading about RC2 and a thread about Debian breaks out.
Why is this topical? Does apt do something FreeBSD ports doesn't, or is this just another example of people being militant and off topic? Preference is great until it fills my browser window with my pet peeve.
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
That sounds practical enough.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.
I don't think that carries over quite as well; I use Unix based operating systems because they're of better workmanship overall and possess a greater amount of functionality which I like.
It is perhaps ironic that the GPL is more favorable to commercialization of a product than QT's licensing strategy is, isn't it?:P
I'm having a hard time believing people here either straight facedly make such commentary or do so of their own beliefs rather than parroting the party line.
Starting the GNOME project because QT didn't appeal to people's communist licensing views was socially and ideologically distorted to begin with, and the failure of the two projects to share ideas and work has been a detriment, not a service, to open source.
Please think before you adopt extremist attitudes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not trying to discourage people from writing a comfy HTML editor. :P
Your remarks regarding adding printing to the original code; typically that's not what I see happening. I usually see someone rewrite the editor from scratch and advertise their version as having printing capabilities.
Your analogies about reusing code advantageously are exactly what I would love to see happen with open source, rather than the code duplication that happens instead.
Are you a programmer? We need more of them like you.
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
Good point, and I'm inclined to agree.
A conundrum that's come to me lately (and struck a chord with me in this article) is what indicates the growth and maturation of an operating system?
I came to 'ease of use' because it's in my background; as a program becomes more mature it typically becomes more polished, more sensible to the user.
Linux remains extremely powerful as a command line OS, and it should forever be that. True power lies in being able to fundamentally interact with a computer system.
But what purpose does it serve except to intellectually stimulate hobbyists? That leaves me a bit unfulfilled. Wouldn't it be an ideal to see Linux be able to compete with others instead of remaining in a class of its own?
RedHat invariably does silly things like fail to initialize a network card, and lemme tell you, in a networked environment this is a not so good thing.
RedHat and other mainstream userfriendly distributions have the pieces lined up, but they're not there yet as many MANY people will tell you.
Windows may crash and it may be unrighteous and all that good stuff we like to tell ourselves, but it behaves in a consistent manner on supported hardware, it has a list of supported hardware, a huge list of third party software titles, and it just works by brainlessly clicking things.
You still can't do this even in RedHat 9. You risk breaking KDE, or GNOME, or whichever desktop you chose during the install, because they themselves are also fragile. I can't tell you the number of bugs I've run into with either environment which completely corrupt a new user's preferences.
Then what are they left with? Oh yeah, a STOCK GNOME desktop! D'oh.
It's not a swiss army knife.
Well, it is. But the game has changed. It's not about pragmatism anymore, or at least it shouldn't be. We stepped into the spotlight as a community that claimed it had a better product than the competition.
Are we backing down now and stating that we can't deliver, instead claiming that we're a thinktank, a group of problem-solvers rather than solution providers?
Open Source is perfectly capable of delivering something superior to a commercial product. Fundamental lack of organisation, the wrong attitude, and no motivation to write the necessary glue to make the operating system feel good to the end-user or even the server administrator of the future is going to be its downfall.
Until Linux can be installed in five clicks, can print, scan, facsimile, run a wordprocessor and web browser that are completely interoperable via drag and drop, and do all the other nice *little* things a real operating system and not a collection of parts can do, it's not going to get anywhere.
Not good enough.
The success of a product at large depends on every developer having a common goal; the success of the product at large. It's not going to work to say "I need a text editor that does color coding of my HTML" and ignore basic needs like printing, display, sound and document model subsystems that the users truly need.
It's a paradigm shift; this started as a fun little USENET project, and now all the world is looking at it as a competitor to the biggest operating system product on the market.
And they're beginning to laugh at us.
Absolutely. Using either of these technologies allows one to compile any piece of software using the best possible optimizations for your system.
Gee, you're not a troll at all!
Why do I get the feeling askslashdot is being abused in order to get people to visit an IRC network? :P
Fortunately, using AIM to ask people out "for drinks" is your forte.
You'd be an interesting case, you should submit your list to this project. Then we could see what fraction of your buddy list consists of female, school-aged children.
But I digress.
I think being popular on a service like AOL Instant Messenger would in fact be a worse blight. :P
PEBKAC on your part aside with regard to portage (on a 233 it doesn't take anywhere near that amount of time to list or rebuild the cache), and aside from your misinterpretation of the kernel changelog (there are four other kernels, btw, did you check into one of those? Did you have trouble with the default kernel? The process priorities problem was exceedingly rare).
I've also never broken my userland to the extent that I require a reinstall; did you read the part about Gentoo being for power users and being a learning platform? Yeah, if you're coming from RedHat, obviously you're going to screw it up. That's no problem. But be patient until you learn how Linux works, that's what you're there for isn't it?
I always hear people saying "I use Debian because I just want to get work done" but something about it just doesn't ring true. Apt is a fantastic package manager I grant you, but whenever I install Debian I do without debconf. I know what I'm doing, thanks.
So from my perspective the main thing I'm concerned with is packages. Are they up to date? Are userland packages like KDE or X released promptly when there are new versions? The answer is an unfortunate no. The stable branch of Debian refuses to merge new versions in a dynamic way, instead insisting that stable is stable and you must use unstable to get the latest.
So here I am having to either move to an unstable branch of Debian, which I've seen break before, or add all kinds of third party repositories (Can you say UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE) to my sources.list. What happened to just wanting to get work done?
I'd use Debian if they were timely about new versions of software in a stable release, rather than making me wait 24 months for something I can knock on and say I TRUST THIS.
To any Debian developer reading this: Is it possible to institute such an official backporting process without my having to use a Debian variant? I'd very much like to see this aspect of Debian's package management brought up to speed. I like Gentoo, but I don't like having only one choice and no fallbacks on which to rely. Debian would fit the bill perfectly for me.
Amusing sig; seems to me Debian 'zealots' do the same whenever there's a Gentoo related slashdot article.
No one is going to switch away from Windows 9x just because it's no longer supported. It does what everyone requires of it at little additional cost.
Purchasing a site license for 200 copies of Windows XP Professional edition is simply not cost effective and won't be planned as an upgrade path for a LONG time. That gives Linux time to be an upgrade path as domain server for these clients.
Lots of time, in fact.
People start realizing that 'the feature/bug will be fixed when I get to it' is unacceptable for the corporate environment (in which Windows thrives), ease of use is made a priority, and the practical needs of small to midsized businesses are met by Linux.
This weekend I was involved in the installation of a Windows 2000 AD configuration for a medium sized business at two locations in this city; their needs and their budget could have been met for thousands of dollars less had Linux been able to support an NT domain with simple graphical utilities.
For all RedHat's work creating their new product line, not one of their efforts has even FOCUSED on the massive number of Windows 9x client workstations that simply need a Microsoft Windows domain and drive shares.
So quit buzzwording, clustering, XMLifying everything, and create something someone NEEDS.
The main purpose for shared source is to obfuscate the meaning of open-source, to make it less important in the eyes of the customer.
Hey, our source is free for you to browse also, what's the difference?
Big difference. But it won't matter to people. It's buzzword compliant. Make no mistake, this business is NOT about meeting customer demand.
This business is about telling the customer either directly or indirectly what to demand, and lock them into their decisions long term.
You can't accuse a shyster of appealing to your needs because he's interested in them.
Yeah. Who needs up to date packages? That kind of thing is for squares! :P
I'm also not seeing anything quantitative other than a claim that he's spoken with market researchers. I'd like to see some names of the people surveyed or at least information about what the surveyed developers were/are doing in general.
I smell an unsubstantiated claim!
I'd consider Debian a practical choice as soon as they pared down their efforts a little.
The fact that they're unable to come up with binary packages that aren't more recent than 24 months in their stable branch is indicative of some massive release engineering issues.
This doesn't even begin to go into the fact that Debian's stable branch is not dynamic. Large projects like KDE 3.1 will never officially be placed in stable, even if the developer base manages to 'fix every problem' on each and every CPU architecture they support, like the purists that they are.
And no, Debian unstable is not an option. Some of us like to run workstations without fearing breakage.
The sad thing is, on slashdot, I'm outnumbered by a legion of Debian users who, as they read this, will shake their heads and say "man, what is he talking about?"
Just sharing some of the opinions from the real world.
Let's not forget that Debian's other policies seem to limit its adoption of software at an acceptable rate. :P
A utility which may be of interest to Linux distributions is 'info2man', which will turn all the GNU info pages into the traditional man format. EXTREMELY COOL.
Info2Man
You seem to be quite vocal about your inability to interact with the FreeBSD team.
I didn't have a problem conferring with them over several issues, some of which included errors in-kernel or in the release engineering process. I found them quite responsive to answer questions and even accept feedback if properly presented.
Perhaps you had a personality clash with the individual(s) you were speaking to, I don't know. But I think your categorizing of the entire team as a gaggle of elitists is out of nowhere.
My Dell Inspiron 8100 has gone through three batteries and is on its fourth currently. This battery has already lost 15% of its nominal discharge time just through normal use. I'm now beyond the warranty replacement period and do not intend to purchase more batteries for this machine. It's going to become a desktop.
This type of 'smart battery' is flawed at best and I wish more people would have pointed it out sooner. I'm glad this article was posted at least, but be aware, this is universal to all laptops using a smart battery, not just IBM ThinkPads.
A great deal of Apple's work in bringing FreeBSD components into the MacOS X platform have been quite specific, I'd be surprised if there were changes/improvements made to the software that were generic enough to include in FreeBSD itself.
Keeping in mind also, Apple doesn't use FreeBSD's kernel, the single point where corporate development would be most valuable; they use mach and a BSD mach_server, and a proprietary (IOKit) system for drivers and such.
So I'm reading about RC2 and a thread about Debian breaks out.
Why is this topical? Does apt do something FreeBSD ports doesn't, or is this just another example of people being militant and off topic? Preference is great until it fills my browser window with my pet peeve.
"Oh this is great, now if only it were !"
Sigh
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
That sounds practical enough.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.
I don't think that carries over quite as well; I use Unix based operating systems because they're of better workmanship overall and possess a greater amount of functionality which I like.
It is perhaps ironic that the GPL is more favorable to commercialization of a product than QT's licensing strategy is, isn't it? :P
Who said anything about BSD licenses? I think you're focusing on the wrong things here.
Don't try to troll me.
The non-free KDE? Did I miss a meeting?
I'm having a hard time believing people here either straight facedly make such commentary or do so of their own beliefs rather than parroting the party line.
Starting the GNOME project because QT didn't appeal to people's communist licensing views was socially and ideologically distorted to begin with, and the failure of the two projects to share ideas and work has been a detriment, not a service, to open source.
Please think before you adopt extremist attitudes.