The same should be done with soccer, where kids "header" the ball. And of course, boxing, which isn't a sport in any sense of the word, when the goal is to pound the outher person into unconsciousness.
There's a difference between sports where you don't have a continuous risk of impact to the head (volleyball, basketball, baseball - unless the pitcher is wild or trying to do a brushback), and soccer, football, or boxing.
Not to say that any sport is completely safe, but brain damage is not at all in the same league a twisted ankle or broken rib.
My daughter is a college athlete. Since she easily has a 30 point IQ advantage over you, what does that say about you?
Considering the diversity of the audience, you may be saying that your daughter has an IQ well below average. Have you been playing too much football without a helmet?
Besides, who cares what someone's Idiot Quotient is?
They returned it without telling the owners that it was returned. What if it had sat there for a month, reporting on every packet passing through it?
It's not that they returned it so quickly, but that they hoped the owners wouldn't realize it was up and running again.
The right thing to do would have been to say "Okay, we're done, where do you want us to drop it off?" Not covertly stick it back in the rack and hook it up.
I sincerely hope the server owner and users consider tne equipment hopelessly compromised, and quickly and completely dispose of it.
It never kept any log files or other personal identifying data, so they could probably make some serious coin auctioning it off to whoever wants to pay the most to get a first-hand look at the lastest guvernment spyware.
As you pointed out, this is a VERY fast turn-around... almost like they hope that people will use it in a "business as usual" fashion... like a honeypot?
Not even telling them that it was back so that the owners could decide if they even wanted to risk leaving it in place? VERY suspicious.
A huge part of the problem is regressions - bugs that are fixed, only to reappear. This is an indicator of a deeper problem.
It could be as simple as someone not knowing how to do a merge properly (I've seen bugs that I've tracked down and fixed magically re-appear, right in front of my - and the boss's - eyes. Turns out that almost everyone else, including the boss, thought that doing a commit auto-magically resolved conflicts).
It could be people and projects being over-extended, so they don't have enough "institutional memory" - the person who maintained "A" now works on "B" instead, and the new maintainer of "A" thinks "Hey, this code can be made better by doing XYZ", not knowing that the original author didn't do it the obvious way, because the obvious way broke things.
Whatever the reason, regressions are a serious problem. One day, everything is working fine, you're happy as a clam; the next, an update breaks something. When this happens too often, people get discouraged, and eventually, either go to another distro, or to another OS, and who can blame them?
The WORKS_FOR_ME response is dumb - of course it "works for your" - you introduced the bug, you nitwit! If it didn't "work for you", you hopefully would have done something different. We really need to stop referring to programmer errors as "bugs" - unlike the original moth that got fried, these are not creepy-crawlies that somehow wormed their way into your code - they are programmer errors, often caused by poor communications (lack of comments, readme, implementation notes, or even just a simple "/*** there be dragons here - yes it's fugly, but it's this way for a reason - do not 'fix' it ***/").
One of the reasons Microsoft wants to prohibit dual booting on ARM-based tablets is to prevent people from using "that other OS" - that other one being Linux.
Frankly, I don't think it will be a problem - anyone who tries the Windows 8 Consumer Preview will never buy a Win8 tablet... except maybe to see if it blends.
Yes, staring for several minutes can cause some damage, even sometimes permanent damage. But a few seconds at a time? Doesn't happen. And it's much less likely to happen if you're nearsighted to begin with and don't correct your vision (don't wear glasses or contacts) - the light simply will not focus.
FreeBSD installed fine first time around. However, I felt bad about condemning linux without giving a few more distros a try (I *do* try to keep an open mind, and I'm not afraid to take a second look and see if maybe I was wrong in some way), and I was initially impressed with the improvements in Fedora. For a while, it looked like a real keeper - until the instability caused by several upgrades...
It's why I'm fooling around with Knoppix - the idea of an overlay on a separate device (or multiple devices, so your data and user settings can go anywhere, just copy the.img file) is interesting. The next version should be available for download soon (it's already been distributed at Cebit), and I want to see where it goes.
In the meantime I've gotten it to support both screens using a one-liner shell script: "xrandr --output DVI-0 --right-of VGA-0", no need to specify screen sizes, etc., and fixed most of the memory corruption problems using no3d during boot, so who knows:-)
WRT your first point, I disagree. The OS is more than just a kernel.
For a desktop user, the OS is kernel+userland.
Same as for a developer, the OS is kernel+servers+userland tools.
And I was definitely using local files - the venerable, never-goes-wrong, easy-to-access with any utility maildir format. Opensuse went full retard replacing an old standard with their custom database-based akonadai. If they wanted to maintain better indexing of emails, they should have just used the db for storing the indexes, leaving the mail in whatever format works. This way, a db failure would be easy enough to recover from, since all you'd lose were the indexes.
Noooo, they had to go away from the unix philosophy of chaining simple tools together, and make a bloated, buggy, and ultimately fail-prone product. I was one of those who argued that KDE 4.0 shouldn't have had rocks thrown at it because it was clearly labeled as a "first cut - not ready for use." The way they've been going I'm eating my words. They're going down the road towards greater and greater complexity for less and less incremental benefit. that never ends well. Ultimately, you end up with crap like Window 8, which is going to take the crown as worst OS ever, by anyone.
I thought it was pretty clear it was the bug reporter. When the bug reporter is full of bugs, "dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee-dee you have entered the twilight zone". As for just wiping./kde, I'm sorry, but that wouldn't do what you think it would. This was a failed in-place upgrade. Wiping./kde would not give a clean slate - there is the question of whether there were conflicting library versions and parts of the upgrade that didn't get properly installed elsewhere in the filesystem. After unmounting/home (a separate drive) and using a new/home, again with multiple problems, only a clean install would eliminate that possibility.
It turned out that 12.1 is definitely not for everyone - both with akonadai (a really, really, REALLY bad idea, badly implemented) and with the OS as a whole. It was time to look elsewhere. Opensuse has gotten lazy. Must be from that latest $100 million of patent deal Microsoft money (atop the previous $300 million).
1. When a developer writes "WORKS_FOR_ME" && "WONT_FIX", what else do you expect them to do?
Would you accept such an answer to fix a busted toilet? Or when you report a dangerous side effect of a drug? "Gee, I don't get the side effect, so no, we won't bother fixing it."
What if your boss says "hey, the internet's down!" Would you say, "works for me, so go away?"
WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX is a cop-out. Log it as "UNRESOLVED", duh! If you want people to keep filing bug reports, don't insult them.
As for #5, the permissive Apache/MIT/BSD licences are gaining because they work. Enough code gets contributed back upstream that everyone benefits. Look at FreeBSD - Apple paid the devs to improve it, and a lot of that code got back into FreeBSD. Saying "I don't want anyone to profit from it" is cutting your nose off to spite your face. Fine - nobody will profit from it - but look at the market share of Apple (based on FreeBSD) and Linux. Now look at the mindshare.
That *could* have been linux. It would have been, except for the GPL. What a lost opportunity. But keep thinking pariochally instead of looking at the bigger picture, and what might have been.
The only BS (to use your term) that I see here is you making an uninformed comment based on denial.
In OpenSuse 12.1, KDE changed their PIMs email format from maildir - an open, very accessible standard (you can even browse your mail directories using mc or less, or even cat) to a custom database backend.
Their auto-conversion script failed, both on the in-place upgrade, and on a fresh install. Converting the email archives to the alternate format that the PIM supported until then produced the same results. Anyone who was unfortunate enough not to have backed up their email directories (something not possible with the "upgraded" format) would have lost everything.
This is just another example of the stupidity that is turning what used to be the unix philosophy - simplicity - into a bloating mess of crap.
As for slamming linux servers, in-place upgrading is still not nearly as stable as bsd. You choose to ignore that argument because YOU can't refute it. Do you even have *any* experience mantaining real unix servers? One place I worked at, I was told that the bsd servers hadn't been updated in half a decade because of a bios bug - if the update failed, it meant a 1,000 mile road trip (500 miles each way) to go to the colo, and another raod trip to bring back the restored servers, and nobody wanted to risk it. After ascertaining that I could do the upgrade "my way" on an identical local machine, I ssh'd in and did the upgrades, not with some clicky, but manually, one set of critical packages at a time, never taking the machines down until the only thing left was the kernel. Total downtime was about 30 seconds. So I *do* know what I'm doing.
BTW - I asked the boss where he picked up these servers - he says he got a whole ****load of them at a price too cheap to refuse in a deal. Poking around in one of the remote machines, it turned out to have quite the history - it used to be the #1 pr0n malware server on the net.
For that sort of work, the original owners obviously needed something with the rock-solid stability and uptime of bsd.
Well, Debian stable is ancient. Testing, along with some stuff from unstable, is what most distros base off of.
There were other problems with OpenSuse, but the email one was a show-stopper. It indicated that they had gone too far with their stupid ideas for akonadai, and that as a distro, it is going to be even more bloated in the future than it already is.
Ubuntu has always had problems. I used to had out Ubuntu disks - I stopped when I had to uninstall ubuntu from a co-workers' machine because it was absolutely useless (ended up installing opensuse 10.0, which at the time worked much better). Ubuntu continues it's sad tradition of ignorig the users, lying about future product plans (the promised Android Execution Environment is now ~3 years MIA, the promised Ubuntu Tablet is +2 years MIA, "UbuntuTV" is really just samygo.tv rebadged and going nowhere fast).
As for XP, it "just works." My linux printer actually prints, unlike under linux most of the time, and it runs a lot faster than linux. Linux has become a real piece of bloatware in comparison - I just never noticed because it happened in stages.
I thought of Mint... but which one? I wasn't going to waste even more time, so to heck with it - knoppix works, I can save a persistent image of my data to the hard drive, and for everything not net-connected, I just log out, remove the dvd while it's rebooting, and xp starts up. No grub. And if I want. I can save my knoppix image to my usb key, boot off the dvd off any computer and specify "knoppix fromhd=/dev/path_to_usb_key" and I'm good. Get back to my main computer, copy the knoppix.img file back to the hd, and all my recent changes are preserved.
It's a shame that it's come to that, but it is what it is.
Just because XP won't be officially supported on April 8th, 2014 doesn't mean it will suddenly stop working. It'll continue to work until the computer dies - especially since I've disabled both network adapters when it's running. Contrast this to ANY of the linux distros I've used in the last 15 years, all of which eventually wore out their welcome. Slackware. RedHat. Turbo Linux. Corel Linux. Mandrake. Redhat again. OpenSuse. Fedora. Debian. A bunch of others... I'm just tired of it. I'll use a knoppix boot dvd to boot into my knoppix disk image when I'm on the net, and put up with the need to restart x every once in a while because $random_javascript causes memory corruption so bad that I have to ctl-alt-bksp to restart x (repeatable by going to the same page).
Now I agree with you - Metro sucks. It is the worst mistake Microsoft has ever made, and that's saying a lot. I expect Mac sales to go through the roof when Win7 is no longer available.
As for the "outrageous cost" of Apple products, in many cases they work out a lot cheaper over the long haul. My sister is off the "need to get a new computer every couple of years because this one has become a total piece of crap" treadmill. Her iMac just chugs along. Sure, she paid more up front, but she would be on her 3rd Windows computer by this point.
After my HP laptop self-destructed (defective nvidia gpu - was running linux for a couple of years on the 2nd hd), I kind of regret not having bought a macbook instead - it would still be running.
My daughters love their iPhones, and don't have to upgrade every year any more, so again, there's a cost savings there. Throw in that one of them was able to drop her home internet access completely because, for her, her iphone does everything she wants, and the phone has paid for itself a couple times over.
There's something to be said about having good build quality backed by an OS that won't leave you hanging for updates (like Android), cursing updates (like Windows) or dreading updates (like Linux).
In the meantime, I'll run this box right into the ground, but once it's done, it's done... and I expect there will probably be either bsd or mac in my future.
You're right - I should have been clearer. As you point out, almost nobody using either OSX or Apple is dual-booting because, as you say, they already have everything they need.
It's only the people running linux who need to dual-boot because linux... well, it's linux, and is only marignally more compatible with the vast majority of existing software than it was at the turn of the century.
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
This doesn't even compute... how can he send an email to a demon and get back an email w/o an internet connection?
Personally, I think it has to do with his history of mysogenistic comments, attitudes and behaviour. Maybe he got nailed with a permanent injuntion not to "browse the web", and this is his "work-around." Or maybe he just harrassed the wrong person one time too many. Who knows - you can go nuts trying to understand crazy people.
I want to run the program on someone else's box - I can't because that's distributing. I want to run the program as a paid service leased/licensed to others on their boxes - I can't because that too is distributing. Both scenarios restrict MY ablity to run the program for "any purpose."
So the work-around is to distribute unmodified binaries, and patch them in ram. I am only distributing unmodified code. Another alternative is to run a shim between any code I want to use and my own loadable code modules - and distribute the source to the shim+original code, while keeping my own code closed. Again, fully complaint with the distribution requirements. At no point does my loadable module become a "merged work" - it lives in it's own address space, and is accessed solely through the shim, which is also free to expose the functionality of the GPL code.
Of course, neither of these work-arounds is necessary with the more permissive licenses, but they show that the GPL ultimately is not proof against alternatives to the TIVOization approach.
Someone with greater knowledge or time could have fixed it manually.
No, it wasn't a configuration problem - it's a bug in their code, caused by changing the way they store emails. Someone would have to re-write the broken code. And while we're at it break the keyboard of whoever thought akonadai was a good idea, rather than a pretentious, over-ambitious bug-festered full-in-the-ventilator turddle.
To extend that, I would have to exclude KDE updates because an update to KDE ate my email. And also exclude updating Firefox because every second update makes it more bloated and/or kills an add-on trying to imitate Chrome. And Konqueror because lately it's sucked. And dolphin, because dolphin is just $RANDOM. There's a multi-column view that if I accidentally activated it, I was stuck with it until the next update - someone forgot to include a way to get out of it (and I guess I was the only one who actually used it that way).
And then I'd have to forget updating apache because updates would break my config. Same with sound - $random-update would kill it.
After 15 years of making excuses, I won't do it any more. The reality is that linux is not any better than the competition, and in several ways, much worse. Sure, linux has improved in that time, but the competition was far from standing still.
The only real hope for linux with the masses is when businesses hide it from the end user, as Android does, and as Steam will be doing with their upcoming Steam+Linux product (hey, who wouldn't want a Steam-powered TV?)
I did in-place upgrades to OpenSuse from 10.0 to 10.1 to every release up to 12.1. 12.1 broke - badly. Downgrading to 11.4, it turns out that I was protected from the breakage therein because I had done an in-place upgrade, and my existing settings were preserved. Downgrading to (IIRC) 11.0 to try to find out where the breakage started was no longer possible because the repos for 11.0 were gone.
Why would anyone remove the previous versions' base repo and only leave the point releases? Someone planned that wrong. You have people who take a very conservative approach to updates and upgrades - removing too many repos is telling them that you're not for someone interested in stability.
I had installed multiple desktops - I always do. KDE was totally broken after the upgrade, and there was no way to fix it, so exploring what went wrong required a complete install from scratch, which also refused, 4 times, to properly import the existing mail folders - even when I ran a script to change their format to the new supported one, and did yet another fresh install.
That's broken, in the sense of "should never have been released". That it once again didn't support my linux printer was just more icing on the cake - it hadn't supported it in over a year. And sound required more twiddling than usual to get working.
So, rather than just complain, I stupidly created an account to report bugs, loaded all the debug code - and it has a bug in it that puts it in an endless loop, so the machine would not load the desktop, just peg the cpu.
In the end, it was time to move on.
Unfortunately, every distro today has issues... issues that other OSes have long left behind. There's a problem with "process" under the linux development model, due in part to the fact that in many case nobody is taking ownership of the dirty work of fixing crappy code. Nobody wants to do it, so someone has to be paid to do it - and nobody's ponying up the $$$ to do so, because implementing fancy feature XYZ will get more users than fixing the plumbing.
1. Change from the GPL to the BSD/MIT/Apache family of licenses. This will attract real investment in real products. Enough code will filter back up the food chain to benefit everyone, same as the *BSDs continue to benefit, and maybe there will be fewer "but I can't switch because I have one program that won't run under linux."
2. Freely commingle open and closed code. Accept that if someone can make something good enough that people are willing to pay for it, it may be a "good thing."
3. Cull the deadwood distros. Ultimately, the forks that can't compete will die off, same as slackware did over the last year. And please don't say it's pining for the fjords - if you follow this link to the updated package browserit has been dead for a year.
4. Take a break from the race to see who can implement more stupid features quicker, and spend the time necessary to fix existing bugs. Products like Firefox, that continue to leak memory like crazy, are a good place to start. If it takes a year, so be it. Consider it a down payment on the huge code debt that this silliness has accumulated.
5. A stable ABI that people can develop against - one that won't be removed or broken every few years/months/every update.
6. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs - "For Linux to win, it doesn't mean that Apple and Microsoft have to lose."
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How many of them got that way because when they were younger their parents would give them a "good hard smack in the head to straighten them out?"
Not even the benefit of a helmet ...
The same should be done with soccer, where kids "header" the ball. And of course, boxing, which isn't a sport in any sense of the word, when the goal is to pound the outher person into unconsciousness.
There's a difference between sports where you don't have a continuous risk of impact to the head (volleyball, basketball, baseball - unless the pitcher is wild or trying to do a brushback), and soccer, football, or boxing.
Not to say that any sport is completely safe, but brain damage is not at all in the same league a twisted ankle or broken rib.
Considering the diversity of the audience, you may be saying that your daughter has an IQ well below average. Have you been playing too much football without a helmet?
Besides, who cares what someone's Idiot Quotient is?
They returned it without telling the owners that it was returned. What if it had sat there for a month, reporting on every packet passing through it?
It's not that they returned it so quickly, but that they hoped the owners wouldn't realize it was up and running again.
The right thing to do would have been to say "Okay, we're done, where do you want us to drop it off?" Not covertly stick it back in the rack and hook it up.
It never kept any log files or other personal identifying data, so they could probably make some serious coin auctioning it off to whoever wants to pay the most to get a first-hand look at the lastest guvernment spyware.
As you pointed out, this is a VERY fast turn-around ... almost like they hope that people will use it in a "business as usual" fashion ... like a honeypot?
Not even telling them that it was back so that the owners could decide if they even wanted to risk leaving it in place? VERY suspicious.
A huge part of the problem is regressions - bugs that are fixed, only to reappear. This is an indicator of a deeper problem.
It could be as simple as someone not knowing how to do a merge properly (I've seen bugs that I've tracked down and fixed magically re-appear, right in front of my - and the boss's - eyes. Turns out that almost everyone else, including the boss, thought that doing a commit auto-magically resolved conflicts).
It could be people and projects being over-extended, so they don't have enough "institutional memory" - the person who maintained "A" now works on "B" instead, and the new maintainer of "A" thinks "Hey, this code can be made better by doing XYZ", not knowing that the original author didn't do it the obvious way, because the obvious way broke things.
Whatever the reason, regressions are a serious problem. One day, everything is working fine, you're happy as a clam; the next, an update breaks something. When this happens too often, people get discouraged, and eventually, either go to another distro, or to another OS, and who can blame them?
The WORKS_FOR_ME response is dumb - of course it "works for your" - you introduced the bug, you nitwit! If it didn't "work for you", you hopefully would have done something different. We really need to stop referring to programmer errors as "bugs" - unlike the original moth that got fried, these are not creepy-crawlies that somehow wormed their way into your code - they are programmer errors, often caused by poor communications (lack of comments, readme, implementation notes, or even just a simple "/*** there be dragons here - yes it's fugly, but it's this way for a reason - do not 'fix' it ***/").
One of the reasons Microsoft wants to prohibit dual booting on ARM-based tablets is to prevent people from using "that other OS" - that other one being Linux.
Frankly, I don't think it will be a problem - anyone who tries the Windows 8 Consumer Preview will never buy a Win8 tablet ... except maybe to see if it blends.
What money?
WW1 aces would look into the sun with no eye protection whatsoever, because the best place to attack from was with the sun at your back.
You cannot go blind looking at the sun.
Yes, staring for several minutes can cause some damage, even sometimes permanent damage. But a few seconds at a time? Doesn't happen. And it's much less likely to happen if you're nearsighted to begin with and don't correct your vision (don't wear glasses or contacts) - the light simply will not focus.
It's why I'm fooling around with Knoppix - the idea of an overlay on a separate device (or multiple devices, so your data and user settings can go anywhere, just copy the .img file) is interesting. The next version should be available for download soon (it's already been distributed at Cebit), and I want to see where it goes.
In the meantime I've gotten it to support both screens using a one-liner shell script: "xrandr --output DVI-0 --right-of VGA-0", no need to specify screen sizes, etc., and fixed most of the memory corruption problems using no3d during boot, so who knows :-)
WRT your first point, I disagree. The OS is more than just a kernel.
For a desktop user, the OS is kernel+userland.
Same as for a developer, the OS is kernel+servers+userland tools.
And I was definitely using local files - the venerable, never-goes-wrong, easy-to-access with any utility maildir format. Opensuse went full retard replacing an old standard with their custom database-based akonadai. If they wanted to maintain better indexing of emails, they should have just used the db for storing the indexes, leaving the mail in whatever format works. This way, a db failure would be easy enough to recover from, since all you'd lose were the indexes.
Noooo, they had to go away from the unix philosophy of chaining simple tools together, and make a bloated, buggy, and ultimately fail-prone product. I was one of those who argued that KDE 4.0 shouldn't have had rocks thrown at it because it was clearly labeled as a "first cut - not ready for use." The way they've been going I'm eating my words. They're going down the road towards greater and greater complexity for less and less incremental benefit. that never ends well. Ultimately, you end up with crap like Window 8, which is going to take the crown as worst OS ever, by anyone.
It turned out that 12.1 is definitely not for everyone - both with akonadai (a really, really, REALLY bad idea, badly implemented) and with the OS as a whole. It was time to look elsewhere. Opensuse has gotten lazy. Must be from that latest $100 million of patent deal Microsoft money (atop the previous $300 million).
Would you accept such an answer to fix a busted toilet? Or when you report a dangerous side effect of a drug? "Gee, I don't get the side effect, so no, we won't bother fixing it."
What if your boss says "hey, the internet's down!" Would you say, "works for me, so go away?"
WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX is a cop-out. Log it as "UNRESOLVED", duh! If you want people to keep filing bug reports, don't insult them.
As for #5, the permissive Apache/MIT/BSD licences are gaining because they work. Enough code gets contributed back upstream that everyone benefits. Look at FreeBSD - Apple paid the devs to improve it, and a lot of that code got back into FreeBSD. Saying "I don't want anyone to profit from it" is cutting your nose off to spite your face. Fine - nobody will profit from it - but look at the market share of Apple (based on FreeBSD) and Linux. Now look at the mindshare.
That *could* have been linux. It would have been, except for the GPL. What a lost opportunity. But keep thinking pariochally instead of looking at the bigger picture, and what might have been.
The only BS (to use your term) that I see here is you making an uninformed comment based on denial.
In OpenSuse 12.1, KDE changed their PIMs email format from maildir - an open, very accessible standard (you can even browse your mail directories using mc or less, or even cat) to a custom database backend.
Their auto-conversion script failed, both on the in-place upgrade, and on a fresh install. Converting the email archives to the alternate format that the PIM supported until then produced the same results. Anyone who was unfortunate enough not to have backed up their email directories (something not possible with the "upgraded" format) would have lost everything.
This is just another example of the stupidity that is turning what used to be the unix philosophy - simplicity - into a bloating mess of crap.
As for slamming linux servers, in-place upgrading is still not nearly as stable as bsd. You choose to ignore that argument because YOU can't refute it. Do you even have *any* experience mantaining real unix servers? One place I worked at, I was told that the bsd servers hadn't been updated in half a decade because of a bios bug - if the update failed, it meant a 1,000 mile road trip (500 miles each way) to go to the colo, and another raod trip to bring back the restored servers, and nobody wanted to risk it. After ascertaining that I could do the upgrade "my way" on an identical local machine, I ssh'd in and did the upgrades, not with some clicky, but manually, one set of critical packages at a time, never taking the machines down until the only thing left was the kernel. Total downtime was about 30 seconds. So I *do* know what I'm doing.
BTW - I asked the boss where he picked up these servers - he says he got a whole ****load of them at a price too cheap to refuse in a deal. Poking around in one of the remote machines, it turned out to have quite the history - it used to be the #1 pr0n malware server on the net.
For that sort of work, the original owners obviously needed something with the rock-solid stability and uptime of bsd.
There's "linux" - as in "Linux Is Not UniX". It's good enough for "plain ole linux" :-)
BASIC? Aggh - my eyes!!!!!
Well, Debian stable is ancient. Testing, along with some stuff from unstable, is what most distros base off of.
There were other problems with OpenSuse, but the email one was a show-stopper. It indicated that they had gone too far with their stupid ideas for akonadai, and that as a distro, it is going to be even more bloated in the future than it already is.
Ubuntu has always had problems. I used to had out Ubuntu disks - I stopped when I had to uninstall ubuntu from a co-workers' machine because it was absolutely useless (ended up installing opensuse 10.0, which at the time worked much better). Ubuntu continues it's sad tradition of ignorig the users, lying about future product plans (the promised Android Execution Environment is now ~3 years MIA, the promised Ubuntu Tablet is +2 years MIA, "UbuntuTV" is really just samygo.tv rebadged and going nowhere fast).
As for XP, it "just works." My linux printer actually prints, unlike under linux most of the time, and it runs a lot faster than linux. Linux has become a real piece of bloatware in comparison - I just never noticed because it happened in stages.
I thought of Mint ... but which one? I wasn't going to waste even more time, so to heck with it - knoppix works, I can save a persistent image of my data to the hard drive, and for everything not net-connected, I just log out, remove the dvd while it's rebooting, and xp starts up. No grub. And if I want. I can save my knoppix image to my usb key, boot off the dvd off any computer and specify "knoppix fromhd=/dev/path_to_usb_key" and I'm good. Get back to my main computer, copy the knoppix.img file back to the hd, and all my recent changes are preserved.
It's a shame that it's come to that, but it is what it is.
Now I agree with you - Metro sucks. It is the worst mistake Microsoft has ever made, and that's saying a lot. I expect Mac sales to go through the roof when Win7 is no longer available.
As for the "outrageous cost" of Apple products, in many cases they work out a lot cheaper over the long haul. My sister is off the "need to get a new computer every couple of years because this one has become a total piece of crap" treadmill. Her iMac just chugs along. Sure, she paid more up front, but she would be on her 3rd Windows computer by this point.
After my HP laptop self-destructed (defective nvidia gpu - was running linux for a couple of years on the 2nd hd), I kind of regret not having bought a macbook instead - it would still be running.
My daughters love their iPhones, and don't have to upgrade every year any more, so again, there's a cost savings there. Throw in that one of them was able to drop her home internet access completely because, for her, her iphone does everything she wants, and the phone has paid for itself a couple times over.
There's something to be said about having good build quality backed by an OS that won't leave you hanging for updates (like Android), cursing updates (like Windows) or dreading updates (like Linux).
In the meantime, I'll run this box right into the ground, but once it's done, it's done ... and I expect there will probably be either bsd or mac in my future.
It's only the people running linux who need to dual-boot because linux ... well, it's linux, and is only marignally more compatible with the vast majority of existing software than it was at the turn of the century.
This doesn't even compute ... how can he send an email to a demon and get back an email w/o an internet connection?
Personally, I think it has to do with his history of mysogenistic comments, attitudes and behaviour. Maybe he got nailed with a permanent injuntion not to "browse the web", and this is his "work-around." Or maybe he just harrassed the wrong person one time too many. Who knows - you can go nuts trying to understand crazy people.
So the work-around is to distribute unmodified binaries, and patch them in ram. I am only distributing unmodified code. Another alternative is to run a shim between any code I want to use and my own loadable code modules - and distribute the source to the shim+original code, while keeping my own code closed. Again, fully complaint with the distribution requirements. At no point does my loadable module become a "merged work" - it lives in it's own address space, and is accessed solely through the shim, which is also free to expose the functionality of the GPL code.
Of course, neither of these work-arounds is necessary with the more permissive licenses, but they show that the GPL ultimately is not proof against alternatives to the TIVOization approach.
No, it wasn't a configuration problem - it's a bug in their code, caused by changing the way they store emails. Someone would have to re-write the broken code. And while we're at it break the keyboard of whoever thought akonadai was a good idea, rather than a pretentious, over-ambitious bug-festered full-in-the-ventilator turddle.
And then I'd have to forget updating apache because updates would break my config. Same with sound - $random-update would kill it.
After 15 years of making excuses, I won't do it any more. The reality is that linux is not any better than the competition, and in several ways, much worse. Sure, linux has improved in that time, but the competition was far from standing still.
The only real hope for linux with the masses is when businesses hide it from the end user, as Android does, and as Steam will be doing with their upcoming Steam+Linux product (hey, who wouldn't want a Steam-powered TV?)
I did in-place upgrades to OpenSuse from 10.0 to 10.1 to every release up to 12.1. 12.1 broke - badly. Downgrading to 11.4, it turns out that I was protected from the breakage therein because I had done an in-place upgrade, and my existing settings were preserved. Downgrading to (IIRC) 11.0 to try to find out where the breakage started was no longer possible because the repos for 11.0 were gone.
Why would anyone remove the previous versions' base repo and only leave the point releases? Someone planned that wrong. You have people who take a very conservative approach to updates and upgrades - removing too many repos is telling them that you're not for someone interested in stability.
I had installed multiple desktops - I always do. KDE was totally broken after the upgrade, and there was no way to fix it, so exploring what went wrong required a complete install from scratch, which also refused, 4 times, to properly import the existing mail folders - even when I ran a script to change their format to the new supported one, and did yet another fresh install.
That's broken, in the sense of "should never have been released". That it once again didn't support my linux printer was just more icing on the cake - it hadn't supported it in over a year. And sound required more twiddling than usual to get working.
So, rather than just complain, I stupidly created an account to report bugs, loaded all the debug code - and it has a bug in it that puts it in an endless loop, so the machine would not load the desktop, just peg the cpu.
In the end, it was time to move on.
Unfortunately, every distro today has issues ... issues that other OSes have long left behind. There's a problem with "process" under the linux development model, due in part to the fact that in many case nobody is taking ownership of the dirty work of fixing crappy code. Nobody wants to do it, so someone has to be paid to do it - and nobody's ponying up the $$$ to do so, because implementing fancy feature XYZ will get more users than fixing the plumbing.
I've pointed out the solution often enough.
1. Change from the GPL to the BSD/MIT/Apache family of licenses. This will attract real investment in real products. Enough code will filter back up the food chain to benefit everyone, same as the *BSDs continue to benefit, and maybe there will be fewer "but I can't switch because I have one program that won't run under linux."
2. Freely commingle open and closed code. Accept that if someone can make something good enough that people are willing to pay for it, it may be a "good thing."
3. Cull the deadwood distros. Ultimately, the forks that can't compete will die off, same as slackware did over the last year. And please don't say it's pining for the fjords - if you follow this link to the updated package browser it has been dead for a year.
4. Take a break from the race to see who can implement more stupid features quicker, and spend the time necessary to fix existing bugs. Products like Firefox, that continue to leak memory like crazy, are a good place to start. If it takes a year, so be it. Consider it a down payment on the huge code debt that this silliness has accumulated.
5. A stable ABI that people can develop against - one that won't be removed or broken every few years/months/every update.
6. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs - "For Linux to win, it doesn't mean that Apple and Microsoft have to lose."