I have to wonder if anybody else uses bookmarks or address-bar pull-down lists. At the very most, I type in each address once in my life. If I found it through search-engine or linking, I didn't even type it once! My bookmark file is so vital, I even port it when I switch machines and OSs and back it up.
Well, it helps that most of what the rest of the world considers worthy expenditure of free time is exactly the kind of thing hackers "detest and avoid". http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
Watch the Superbowl? There's 6+ hours you could have had at least your own text editor right there. Watch TV at all? That's costing you a whole operating system per year. Carry a cell phone? I did the math once and figured out that I have added the effective 15 years to my life I lost from smoking by not carrying a cell phone. Little things like that add up, you cut corners...
And yeah, you may work 70 hour weeks, but only for short stretches so you can pile away the money, take some time off, and work on your own again...
If Debian happened to die, what choices would we have ?
It's talk like this that makes me nervous. WHAT, besides the install program and the apt-system, is so important about Debian that it and only it will do??? Did Debian suddenly do a hostile takeover of every single line of code in all of GNU, Unix, Solaris, Minix, and Linux combined? Will I still be able to read Emacs source code without Debian suing me? If anybody else uses KDE, will Debian sue them for copying the "look and feel"? Does Debian own proprietary exclusive rights to every Bash script I write in the future? Can we write C code without applying for a Debian license?
Was there ever a time, since the dawn of history, when there was no Debian? Because otherwise, unless Moses himself brought Debian down on clay tablets from the Mountain, it would indicate that mere, flawed, human mortals wrote Debian, which might further indicate that if Debian quit, mere, flawed, human mortals could write it again. What magic ingredient seperates Debian from the system you could build with source files from exactly the same tarballs everybody else uses to make their distros?
Anyway, if Debian folds, I guess you'll just have to go back to Windows. The rest of us will just go on using GNU, Hurd, the Linux kernel, and the source tarballs for all the Linux utilities covered under the same GPL they always were. Or did Debian co-opt that, too? Are the rest of us using man, info, coreutils, gcc, glibc, yacc, sed, awk, perl, python, etc. illegally?
This type of (financial) commitment to linux will do great things to silence (corporate) critics of FLOSS who say that there is no "structure and support" for linux.
You make sense, and yet don't I remember the same thing being said about Red Hat back in '99?
I just went ten rounds with the Missionaries of the church of Debian's Witnesses two days ago, and here we all go again!
I'll just lay some points down once and for all, and I don't care what anybody says, these are the facts as I observe them with my own eyes and the common-sense that logically concludes from those observations:
(a) More Linux = Big Win for everybody! I don't care what it is, how it works, how narrow it's market is, who funds it, who writes it, what they believe, or whether they make money. More Free/Open software enriches us all.
(b) Bill Gates must surely be laughing his fat moneycat ass off watching all the Linux tribes bicker and flame each other. Just try to keep this in mind, when Linux fights Linux, Bill Gates wins.
(c) Every distribution I've tried that was derived from/based on Debian worked for me. I've never heard the complaints about Debian-based distros that I've heard (and experienced) with Debian itself. It is indeed in Debian's best interest to take a backseat and continue maintaining the base packages, but leave assembling them into released operating systems up to other distros.
(d) If the above statement makes your blood pressure pop your eyeballs out of your head and steam shoot out your ears, the person you are mad at is the Debian founder as I read in his own personal blog. And you have no right to be mad about that, it's his distro and he speaks much good sense about it and I am agreeing with him and emphasizing his point. If Debian is that precious to you, then just download it's packages and make your own system, because that's all anybody else has ever done, anyway! Isn't that the selling point, you can customize it?
(e) Linux wouldn't be Linux if everybody doing something with Linux didn't have the right to do it. If you're mad at all the distros, there's nothing to stop you from downloading the tarballs and building it yourself. You can even call your arrangement the One True Linux, and say everybody else is a hypocrite and a poser and a lamer. I can download the exact same tarballs and say the same thing about my arrangement and about everybody else. The point being: The source and kernel are GNU/Linux. United! Completely! Steady as a rock! Everything else is what we make out of it, because Linux is and will always be a ball of clay. You can use that clay to build an idol to worship, or a toilet bowl, but you also can't stop anybody else from doing the same. Don't be surprised if somebody pisses on your idol or worships your toilet bowl.
(f) This has been a Public Service Announcement. Flames will be printed out and shredded into hamster litter, because/dev/null is mailing me bounce messages.
Am I the only person here who can read? Yoo-hoo! The links I posted two posts back up this thread? I suppose I cleverly impersonated all those different people and made up all the stuff that's there, too? Oh, yeah, I must have hacked Ian Murdock's blog and put the words in his mouth - plus all the comments from all those different posters. And I suppose I faked the news article about Debian security problems and then impersonated frequent poster Zonk to be sure the story got maximum coverage. My, I must have been busy!
"And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids..."
None of his experiences with Debian sound remotely similar to mine, and I've been using it for around 5 years
Ah, yes, thank you, at least there's something that makes sense. You know, I've been hearing many such comments...but *only* from old-time Debian users of the Potato/Woody era. In fact, no less a respected figure than Neil Stephenson, in his essay: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
has nothing but praise for Debian...but check the copyright date, circa 1999!
No, I have caught a whiff of an idea that whatever the hell (I do mean hell, demons, brimstone, and all!) happened to Debian, it was once much mightier than it is, now. But, as another/.er put it, "Oh how the mighty have fallen." And I indicated that I'd read something in the pages that my previous post links to, that sounded like (a) Debian is experiencing some deep political turmoil, i.e. head-to-head fights among developers, and (b) Mr. Murdock's post titled "Can't we all just get along?", seems a pretty clear indication that the Debian volunteers evidentally don't consider cooperation to be a chief utility of volunteering in the first place?
So far, this explanation holds water. Because, remember in my original attempt to gloss over the topic (that'll teach me to try to be nice!) I referred to it as "fantastic disorganization, just a shambles". Come to think of it, if a group that was teamed together on a distro had a big war over how to make it and couldn't put their differences aside long enough to at least do a decent enough job to save some face, it would look - not just almost - but EXACTLY like what Sarge 3.1 looked like!
Documents that pointed me to docs in other folders that didn't exist! Screens in the install program that contradicted each other! Three copies of a file under three different names here, ghost copies of files which were actually softlinks pointing to softlinks pointing to empty space there! Packages that installed all the supporting features without installing the base program itself! "Placeholder man pages" - oh, my ASS, placeholders, funny how I'm lying about something that turns out to not exist - yet, mysteriously, you actually have a name for it! What could be simpler to write than a man page? What, ten minutes, and run it through nroff? Three years wasn't enough time to do that? Show me ANY other operating system - Linux or not - that releases with blank doc pages ??? They must be damn rare, because I never saw any before or since. And you can shove "100% percent unpaid volunteers" up your wazoo! 90% of Linux is volun-fucking-teers, including the humble little amatuer programs I post myself in my blog, which even if they're PURE SHIT, have documentation in the form of comments in the source code!!! Anybody who has a man page to write that isn't done yet, I hope they weren't in places like Slashdot bitching about how hard they have to work and accusing everybody who says their work isn't done of lying!
Finally, there's that word "server" again. "It makes the world's best 14-CD server!!!" Ey, whatever floats your boat. Surprise, I've actually worked around a server or two in my time, my own self! And to me, a server was something that came on two floppy disks which you installed with about four commands on a plai
On another note, anyone that said Debian was a "joy-gasm" probably also mentioned that it really is a difficult setup to use for home use. It really just wasn't designed with that in mind.
In other words, I'm still a liar, is exactly and precisely what you mean to say.
Instead it sounds more like you are trying to do harm to the distro by suggesting that it's so full of problems that you couldn't use it - without actually clarifying what they are.
Oh, OK, you got me dead to rights! I'm pulling the whole thing out of my ass! That's why:
I especially like how you keep harping on reporting bugs through the proper channels. What, like you think I haven't tried? Then on that last link, Ian Murdock's weblog, I see: "One major difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian users' imput is mostly ignored, whereas Ubuntu users are heard and respected." -quote, typos and all! So, tell me, "stevey", is that you deleting our input so that the PUBLIC NEVER SEES IT?
I'm hoping to God that this lying weasel I've been arguing with is somebody currently high up in the Debian chain of command. Because, to read Ian Murdock's weblog, this man [Ian] sounds like he originally founded a fantastic, kick-ass distro, which he then trusted to a pack of idiots who fouled it up, and he regrets it.
Until today, I thought somebody just must have been scarfing shrooms - how could a Linux Distro *possibly* be *this* *stinking* *bad*?!?!? But thank you, "stevey" for at last providing me with an explanation that approaches sense: Debian is deliberately being sabotaged from within. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that that sabotuer(s?) was paid by a commercial software company which views itself to be in competition. This isn't the only possible explanation, but by God it makes the most sense. And I was ready to let it go, before I met you. But I love a good mystery! So, yeah, I think I WILL dig deeper until I get to the bottom of this...lol...pile, whenever I get the free time.
People who really want to know every detail of what's going on when you stick Debian Sarge disk #1 in your machine and boot it can view all the complaints this guy claims I'm covering up, along with my aborted effort to write some kind of install guide for the home user (heck, I *did* get it installed, after all!), can find my report HERE: http://aimlesslifehobbies.blogspot.com/
So you had "lots of problems", but you can't even name one?
What would be the point of posting all 999,999 snivels on Slashdot?
After all with a recent release of Fedora, etc, chances are the same package versions and kernel were installed.
Nope, not correct at all. Fedora has something closer to modern programs written in this century. More so for Slackware, Mandrake, Knoppix, and Mepis, which is what I have currently running on all five hard drives of the three computers I currently run in the home. Other systems release with man pages for their package managers that say something besides "This man page isn't even written yet!" Other systems don't have 5% of their files as softlinks to other files, so you get a ton of dead-ends and tail-chases every time you try to find something! Happy now? It's better when I meticulously list every single gripe, isn't it?
To the purpose of giving people who want to argue more things to argue about.
As for the other comments, it's funny how much I hear, "Well of COURSE you hated it, it's not for desktop use! It's a server system for admins only!" and "Well, duh, installing is a nightmare using the disks only on a machine that's not on the internet! You're only supposed to do it online, where apt can update live" or however it goes. You know where the right place would be to tell me all this? HERE:
In big capital letters at the top of the page. Quote: "DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME DOWNLOADING AND BURNING 14 CDS TO INSTALL ON YOUR HOME COMPUTER, NO MATTER HOW MUCH OUR FANS CONVINCE YOU DOING SO IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE PASSAGE TO VALHALLA. THIS DISTRO IS JUST FOR GEORGE, SAM, AND ALICE. IT'S DELIBERATELY AIMED TO BE A FANTASTIC WASTE OF EVERYBODY ELSE'S TIME, AND TO MAKE A BAD NAME FOR LINUX ON THE HOME DESKTOP". Better than the song and dance I find on this page, now.
Pardon me for sounding so sarcastic. But, surely, through all the layers of smart-assery, I must make some token amount of sense? That was one of my chief gripes with Debian: It tells me it's going to kiss me, then kicks my ass over my shoulders, then says, "Of course I was going to kick you, you dumb ass, don't you know anything?"
I get that from even the most incidentally-associated anything with Debian, just with Debian, and with nothing and nowhere else. Somehow, I have the feeling that the zillion other distros that include server installs and admin utilities would have *something* to offer, without this behavior?
All of which backs up my initial statement: "I am not surprised that Debian is having problems with security."
This time, BELIEVE ME when I say I could say a hell of a lot worse about Debian than I could already, here. I haven't scratched the surface of the iceburg, yet. I'm not holding back out of hiding something. I'm holding back out of a desire to not do any more harm to the distro than I have to, not to hurt any more feelings than I have to, and most especially because I hate shooting a dead horse.
How could this dream be achieved? Think of the fortune waiting for the person who implements it. Wouldn't you think it would have been done already?
Linux is more difficult to operate than other systems for the same reason that a Stealth Bomber is more difficult to operate than a tricycle. Because a Stealth can go places that a tricycle can't.
Yes, you can strip the complex control panel from the Stealth and replace it with a set of handlebars and a pair of pedals. But how do you then use this interface to tell the Stealth to fly?
I have a program I've written in C, which I want to post on my blog. But first, I have to "translate" the C-code into HTML-code, so that the page will display correctly. I have to add tags and such. I have to replace the angle-brackets around "stdio.h" with the HTML escape sequence "& lt;", and other such places. I also want to replace references in the code to my home-grown functions with standard library functions that the user could download.
In a command-line, I solve this problem with the "sed" program. I type something like:
sed [replace-command #1] && [replace-command #2] &&... myfile.c >> myfile.html
and I have solved all of the problems in one shot. Sed is a programmable stream editor...it is concievable that you could write an entire document editing program that would consist of nothing but a shell script with calls to sed! Now, how do I use sed in a GUI editor?
I'd be stuck fooling with all those menus and popup dialog boxes. Even considering I'd use the "find and replace" application (extra code bogging down my memory when I don't want it, unlike a seperate interactive editor and stream editor) I'm still stuck doing it one command at a time. And my computer has to waste time drawing me pretty pictures of a menu and window while it's doing it.
"Oh, sure, we can just include both the I-can't-believe-it's-not-Windows Word-clone for the users who only need to write letters to gramma, and include sed for these pain-in-the-a** geeks who just have to make everything so damn complicated." Sure, go ahead and include both programs. You now have a larger, more complex operating system. Do this again for every single possible application, and you have...a mess. Because we have tried to make an operating system that struggles to be all things to all people, we now have one that comes on 25 disks, requires 800 Gigabytes and 3 days to install, fails on half the hardware platforms because of the unseen incompatibilities of using program A which needs library foo version 1.1 which requires.dll #345, with program B which requires library foo version 2.0 and.dll #666. And when you get lucky and 1% of your end-user-base actually gets a usable system installed, all it takes is for one of them to say "It doesn't come with the Machine That Goes 'Bing'!" and just like that, you failed in your initial goal, anyway!
Face it, the ultimate success would be the Machine That Can Do Anything, and it would be so simple that it would Read Your Mind In Your Sleep and Predict The Future To Forsee Your Every Need so that it would automatically do everything before you even knew it needed to be done.
GOD HIMSELF does not have such a device!!!!!!!
And even if he did, and he gave every living thing one for free, with a mail-in million-dollar-rebate, the disgruntled whines from the trenches of dis-satisfied users would abate not a tad, especially not after one of us used our Machine That Can Do Anything to write The Ultimate Virus that killed everybody else's Machine That Can Do Anything.
Thus is the bitter grain of the Information Age Renaissance reaped. For a while there, it looked like we'd done found us a new Tower of Babyl we could build out of circuit boards and acsend to a plane higher than the Gods. Except we just ended up re-learning the same lesson that we keep forgetting: We make lousy Gods! At best, we make barely-housetrained animals!
I know I'll get flamed all over Christmas by Debian die-hards about it, but oh well.
I tried Debian for the first time as soon as Sarge 3.1 went to stable. I've tried about ten Linux distros (ranging from popular installs like Red Hat and Slackware, to live distros like Knoppix, and even floppy-based like Tom's root-boot and Hal91), and sorry to have to say it, but every other Linux I've ever worked with combined didn't give me as much trouble as Debian. The whole thing left me with an impression of fantastic disorganisation. It was just a shambles! And I might not be so quick to lay blame, but other distros manage with a handful of maintainers releasing every six months, and they get their act together better than Debian, which brags about their "hundreds of developers worldwide" and had a leisurely THREE YEARS to release the new version. I bet they're plagued with all *sorts* of problems, but at least some good Debian-based distros come from the huge package archive.
No kidding, I've fooled around with building my own system from scratch a little, (nowhere near getting a whole major title together!) but enough to gain a basic understanding for how it's done. All it really takes to make your own Linux distro is fdisk and create some partitions, set up a few folders, get a few basic components installed from source compiled on a host system, and then just download tarballs and compile from source. Any Linux distro, logically, should be even LESS trouble to get going than it would be to do-it-yourself. I vowwed on my first Debian-day to conquor the difficulties and perhaps even contribute some small fixes when I get going. By the third Debian day, I looked at the whole mess and just shook my head and zeroed the drive. My effort is much better spent writing programs to enhance *other* distros, which aren't so bad off to start with. Of course, it would also be an easier job for me!
No, I don't hate Debian. I wanted like *damn* to experience the super-cool, ultimate-Linux, uber-geek joygasm that Debian fans have been selling me. I do, however, feel sorry for Debian, and hope it perhaps gets redone right from scratch? I can conceive of no other solution for it.
We hated the other choices out there. They ranged from the utterly brain-damaged to the only-moderately-stupid. So we created our own system. We used it. We loved it. It was up to our level. Then we started bragging about it, and now everybody wants one. Except for one small problem...everybody else has been using Fischer-Price My-First_PC toys for so long, they complain that our system is...*gasp*!!!...too difficult. So the solution is to dumb it down 1000 times over, until it's as easy to use as every other platform...and just as stupid as every other platform.
The saving grace of Linux is that, due to it's openness, it can be modified to give everyone what they want. It can still be my vodka screwdriver while we water down another version to the Shirley-Temple-on-the-rocks-with-extra-sugar that will be demanded by the GUI-only crowd.
But rockier coastlines are in sight. The effect, I predict, will be called "distro drift", with certain distributions falling off the Linux bandwagon altogether...when you've reduced it to a toy, it can't be called a "real system" any more! So we'll have the "two Linuxes", the weak-n-easy camp, and the Real-computers camp. This is happening already...who today can look at Mandrake and Debian and identify them as the same system? Maybe so, for a while longer, but it's getting to where some Linux distros have as much in common with each other as they have in common with...any other operating system!
Must we go this way? Or is it just time for us Linux fanatics to tell everybody to just go away? Why torture Linux and try to mold it like a bonsai tree until it becomes something else? Why not just BUILD SOMETHING ELSE, and let Linux be Linux? What is the point of switching from Windows to Linux, if you demand that Linux become the exact, duplicate, genetic clone of Windows?
Yes, I'm a Linux fanatic...and even I, since day one, have told people "Linux is not for everyone". If all the computer is to you is an entertainment device, used just to play games and chat online, you need something that caters just to those needs. Get an Xbox and a Web TV. Get one of those new cell phones with a screen on them. Get an Ipod.
You will only meet with failure if you keep beating on the computer trying to hammer it into something that's a completely different shape from a computer!!!
The only other possible outcome: we slash Linux down to a shadow of it's former self, abandon it to the Suits, and go off and build our own cool operating system again. Then the cycle will begin again...have I explained this clearly enough, at last? Can everybody clearly see what the path leads to?
Whose blog? My blog? I use Mozilla myself to look at it, and edit it, and it looks about like I'd expect. If it looks like shit to you, it's because I'm a shitty page author, I guess.
Uh, not sure what you call a "high quality and easy to learn" development platform, but Linux has Python, Perl, Tc/Tkl, Expect, Lisp, and some Java kits, all of the above which fit the bill nicely. For C++ graphics stuff like kewl gamerz, SDL is showing a lot of promise of late. You, uh, sure you've ever programmed?
*giggle*, well, a *nux user (and I am one) makes me think of the classic hacker style. Hard core geek, S/F fan, software developer, website administrator. I never met an engineer who would use anything else.
Mac users, you're right, even Linux users associate Macs with arts and multimedia, albeit not very portable tools. Even the most die-hard Linux Zealot has to admit, closed as the Macintosh structure is, that you at least get some kind of quality for your money (as in, integrated hardware/software).
Which brings us to Windows users: Ba-a-a-ah. Too broke to buy a good machine, not knowledgable enough to install decent software on the machine that they have...or too naive to know better.
Java and Open Source can be extremely good for each other
You are 100.00000% correct, but here's the view from the Open Source end of the table: (a) Sun keeps doing this tap-dance 'We're open standard today, we're proprietary tomorrow, we're the new GNU next week, we're open, we're not, la, la, la.'. We FOSS rebels are used to thinking in terms of black hats and white hats. Shades of grey confuse our AI algorithms. (b) Ever read a Sun liscence to figure out if you can integrate your own free/open code with one of their tools, or use their library to support your application, or write a FOSS application to support Java? Kind of like downing 500 micrograins of acid and then trying to pass the Bar Exam. (c) We have Lisp, Perl, Python, and Ruby just for starters for hybrid languages. Java, cleaner than C++, has some mod attraction, but quite frankly the average Linux distro comes with somewhere around 15 compilers/interpreters for different languages, about three parser generators, the Bash scripting environment, PHP for the web, yada. It's not like we're crying ourselves to sleep at night for want of a programming language. I think there's more motivation for Sun to come to us than for us to come to them. (d) Hey! We all have gcj, our own native Java compiler! I've seen it on my systems from day one, never even popped it open. Neither does anybody else. We're all waiting to either be able to see grey smoke better, for the acid to wear off, or to learn how to pass Bar Exams.
"We're from the Government, and we're here to help you!"
"No, no, no, really, Government, we're OK! Yessir, just a little glitch, we'll get it worked out ourselves! Go back to Iraq and finish rendering it into the unspoiled Eden that you promised..."
(1) Right out, no less an authority on hackerdom than Eric S Raymond charges hackers to write English correctly in his essay: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
"How to be a Hacker"
(2) Hackers may be native English speakers, but they speak many languages...or rather, write them. When I've finished a hairy C coding session, put a Bash shell script wrapper around the C program, added a supporting feature in Python, all the while talking to my system and compiler in terse "gcc -o -Wall" and "ls -lh" syntax, and finally post the code to share online, which requires translating it into an HTML-friendly format, my English is shot to hell by then. Whose wouldn't be? Ever done this: "Why the hell won't it take a semi-colon at the end of this line? Oh, wait, I'm writing in Lisp!!!" ? After that, you're not prone to remember the twelve words that are an exception to "I before E".
(3) The internet environment.
The internet kills spelling. Chats, emails, and other type-written communication lend themselves easily to abbreviation and jargon. Command-line environments especially strip the non-essential letters and syllables away, leaving you typing "man" for manual for instance. *nix users especially forget how to type in the "real world" because they're used to a system where you can just type in the first few letters of a word and hit "tab" and the computer completes it for you.
(4) Then there's the special circumstances of hacking itself. Hackers may be relieved when they type English, because when they type any other language (programming languages) they get errors and bugs every time they get a comma in the wrong place or leave out a closing brace. If the keyboard itself had an "English compiler" that said:
"Error 4085: Line 22: Dangling Participle"
Things might be different. Yes, I know, interactive spell-checkers in fancy Word-Office applications...but hackers compose in ed!
If/. had a spell-check button on this page I'm posting from, I'd use it...
Because you *already* *own* Linux! Yes, you, personally, own Linux itself: It's waiting for you to download it and install it for free. You own it in the sense that you have the right to rewrite every semicolon of the entire source code if you want to. You can release your version as the better choice, if you believe it is so. You can *sell* it! You are not helpless waiting for patches that never come. You are not gang-banged by all the corporate suits passing you around to their buddies like you were a joint. You can remold Linux like a lump of clay, or pick from the hundreds of different distributions of it, being picky right down to the tiniest detail what it is that is *exactly* what you want.
Yes, there are user-friendly distros, and yes, there are distros that will, over time, prove weaker. But no matter what, because *everybody* *owns* Linux, we can all re-create it into whatever shape we need it to be. What distros are out there, particularly the most popular, reflect what the public needs and wants right at that moment in time, because the *public* *wrote* it! The technology exists to secure computers...but why should a multinational corporation give a thin damn about you?
That's how GNU/Linux happened. The suits didn't care about us, so we started taking care of ourselves.
People use Windows because it is easy, more-or-less, and because Linux is such a pain in the ass to work with due to the inability of its designers to transcend their 'computer priesthood' mentality. I realize that comment will get the message marked as a troll, but, beautiful slashdaughters, it's so true.
I don't think you're trolling at all. I mostly agree. However, you might want to update your view of Linux - particularly versions like Red Hat and Mandrake have gone so far in the user-friendly direction, they have attracted criticism for trying to be "I can't believe it's not Windows!"
Some other distros are so hard core, even die-hard geeks get frustrated with them sometimes... The advantage to open software, however, is that you can have it any way you want it, and if you can't find it that way, pick the closest one and work it over in your ideal!
The Big Lie that we Linux folk want people to get out of their heads is that computers are simple things like toasters and radios. Computers are inherently complex, and it should only be the user's choice how much of that complexity they want to have hidden behind layers of abstraction. And there's always been a trade-off between simplicity and functionality. It's a sad social comment that the marketing hacks have done their job so well, that people now feel justified in demanding to have *no* knowledge of computers, while reaping all of their benefits. You have to learn how to drive a car to use it. Cars are complex. You have to learn how to cook, so you don't burn yourself when you cook. Computers are expected to operate themselves, and of course, as we see when viruses and crashes happen, they are poor at doing that.
"Computers in the home" is a concept less than 40 years old. Many twists and turns lie ahead before we get all the kinks worked out. In the meantime, it *will* help things along if my fellow geeks can put their impatience aside, realize that ignorance has been forced on the public, not chosen for themselves; and if the public, in turn, can accept some reasonable threshold of taking responsibility for the complex machines they want to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to wonder if anybody else uses bookmarks or address-bar pull-down lists. At the very most, I type in each address once in my life. If I found it through search-engine or linking, I didn't even type it once! My bookmark file is so vital, I even port it when I switch machines and OSs and back it up.
Well, it helps that most of what the rest of the world considers worthy expenditure of free time is exactly the kind of thing hackers "detest and avoid". http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
Watch the Superbowl? There's 6+ hours you could have had at least your own text editor right there. Watch TV at all? That's costing you a whole operating system per year. Carry a cell phone? I did the math once and figured out that I have added the effective 15 years to my life I lost from smoking by not carrying a cell phone. Little things like that add up, you cut corners...
And yeah, you may work 70 hour weeks, but only for short stretches so you can pile away the money, take some time off, and work on your own again...
It's talk like this that makes me nervous. WHAT, besides the install program and the apt-system, is so important about Debian that it and only it will do??? Did Debian suddenly do a hostile takeover of every single line of code in all of GNU, Unix, Solaris, Minix, and Linux combined? Will I still be able to read Emacs source code without Debian suing me? If anybody else uses KDE, will Debian sue them for copying the "look and feel"? Does Debian own proprietary exclusive rights to every Bash script I write in the future? Can we write C code without applying for a Debian license?
Was there ever a time, since the dawn of history, when there was no Debian? Because otherwise, unless Moses himself brought Debian down on clay tablets from the Mountain, it would indicate that mere, flawed, human mortals wrote Debian, which might further indicate that if Debian quit, mere, flawed, human mortals could write it again. What magic ingredient seperates Debian from the system you could build with source files from exactly the same tarballs everybody else uses to make their distros?
Anyway, if Debian folds, I guess you'll just have to go back to Windows. The rest of us will just go on using GNU, Hurd, the Linux kernel, and the source tarballs for all the Linux utilities covered under the same GPL they always were. Or did Debian co-opt that, too? Are the rest of us using man, info, coreutils, gcc, glibc, yacc, sed, awk, perl, python, etc. illegally?
*Going back to working with my project, using emacs, grep, awk, sed, and bash....*
You make sense, and yet don't I remember the same thing being said about Red Hat back in '99?
I'll just lay some points down once and for all, and I don't care what anybody says, these are the facts as I observe them with my own eyes and the common-sense that logically concludes from those observations:
(a) More Linux = Big Win for everybody! I don't care what it is, how it works, how narrow it's market is, who funds it, who writes it, what they believe, or whether they make money. More Free/Open software enriches us all.
(b) Bill Gates must surely be laughing his fat moneycat ass off watching all the Linux tribes bicker and flame each other. Just try to keep this in mind, when Linux fights Linux, Bill Gates wins.
(c) Every distribution I've tried that was derived from/based on Debian worked for me. I've never heard the complaints about Debian-based distros that I've heard (and experienced) with Debian itself. It is indeed in Debian's best interest to take a backseat and continue maintaining the base packages, but leave assembling them into released operating systems up to other distros.
(d) If the above statement makes your blood pressure pop your eyeballs out of your head and steam shoot out your ears, the person you are mad at is the Debian founder as I read in his own personal blog. And you have no right to be mad about that, it's his distro and he speaks much good sense about it and I am agreeing with him and emphasizing his point. If Debian is that precious to you, then just download it's packages and make your own system, because that's all anybody else has ever done, anyway! Isn't that the selling point, you can customize it?
(e) Linux wouldn't be Linux if everybody doing something with Linux didn't have the right to do it. If you're mad at all the distros, there's nothing to stop you from downloading the tarballs and building it yourself. You can even call your arrangement the One True Linux, and say everybody else is a hypocrite and a poser and a lamer. I can download the exact same tarballs and say the same thing about my arrangement and about everybody else. The point being: The source and kernel are GNU/Linux. United! Completely! Steady as a rock! Everything else is what we make out of it, because Linux is and will always be a ball of clay. You can use that clay to build an idol to worship, or a toilet bowl, but you also can't stop anybody else from doing the same. Don't be surprised if somebody pisses on your idol or worships your toilet bowl.
(f) This has been a Public Service Announcement. Flames will be printed out and shredded into hamster litter, because /dev/null is mailing me bounce messages.
A whole hour has crept by, and no more it's-not-a-dead-parrot, it's-just-pining-for-the-fjords buttwad excuses about Debian???
Jesus, I'm getting bored!
Am I the only person here who can read? Yoo-hoo! The links I posted two posts back up this thread? I suppose I cleverly impersonated all those different people and made up all the stuff that's there, too? Oh, yeah, I must have hacked Ian Murdock's blog and put the words in his mouth - plus all the comments from all those different posters. And I suppose I faked the news article about Debian security problems and then impersonated frequent poster Zonk to be sure the story got maximum coverage. My, I must have been busy!
"And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids..."
None of his experiences with Debian sound remotely similar to mine, and I've been using it for around 5 years
Ah, yes, thank you, at least there's something that makes sense. You know, I've been hearing many such comments...but *only* from old-time Debian users of the Potato/Woody era. In fact, no less a respected figure than Neil Stephenson, in his essay:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
has nothing but praise for Debian...but check the copyright date, circa 1999!
No, I have caught a whiff of an idea that whatever the hell (I do mean hell, demons, brimstone, and all!) happened to Debian, it was once much mightier than it is, now. But, as another /.er put it, "Oh how the mighty have fallen." And I indicated that I'd read something in the pages that my previous post links to, that sounded like (a) Debian is experiencing some deep political turmoil, i.e. head-to-head fights among developers, and (b) Mr. Murdock's post titled "Can't we all just get along?", seems a pretty clear indication that the Debian volunteers evidentally don't consider cooperation to be a chief utility of volunteering in the first place?
So far, this explanation holds water. Because, remember in my original attempt to gloss over the topic (that'll teach me to try to be nice!) I referred to it as "fantastic disorganization, just a shambles". Come to think of it, if a group that was teamed together on a distro had a big war over how to make it and couldn't put their differences aside long enough to at least do a decent enough job to save some face, it would look - not just almost - but EXACTLY like what Sarge 3.1 looked like!
Documents that pointed me to docs in other folders that didn't exist! Screens in the install program that contradicted each other! Three copies of a file under three different names here, ghost copies of files which were actually softlinks pointing to softlinks pointing to empty space there! Packages that installed all the supporting features without installing the base program itself! "Placeholder man pages" - oh, my ASS, placeholders, funny how I'm lying about something that turns out to not exist - yet, mysteriously, you actually have a name for it! What could be simpler to write than a man page? What, ten minutes, and run it through nroff? Three years wasn't enough time to do that? Show me ANY other operating system - Linux or not - that releases with blank doc pages ??? They must be damn rare, because I never saw any before or since. And you can shove "100% percent unpaid volunteers" up your wazoo! 90% of Linux is volun-fucking-teers, including the humble little amatuer programs I post myself in my blog, which even if they're PURE SHIT, have documentation in the form of comments in the source code!!! Anybody who has a man page to write that isn't done yet, I hope they weren't in places like Slashdot bitching about how hard they have to work and accusing everybody who says their work isn't done of lying!
Finally, there's that word "server" again. "It makes the world's best 14-CD server!!!" Ey, whatever floats your boat. Surprise, I've actually worked around a server or two in my time, my own self! And to me, a server was something that came on two floppy disks which you installed with about four commands on a plai
In other words, I'm still a liar, is exactly and precisely what you mean to say.
Oh, OK, you got me dead to rights! I'm pulling the whole thing out of my ass! That's why:
http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=831 this unbiased review points out many of the same issues I had, and why:
http://eol.init1.nl/content/view/47/2/
this guy seemed to have an issue with it, and why: http://corelands.com/blog/?postid=4
this guy sees a problem, and why:
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/wxinmfpl/debian. html
This guy hits it on the head with why the whole apt system is screwed, and why:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/platforms/branden
this page of politics points to strife and
http://ianmurdock.com/?p=153
YOUR OWN FOUNDER EVEN SAYS THERE'S PROBLEMS COMPARED TO UBUNTU.
I especially like how you keep harping on reporting bugs through the proper channels. What, like you think I haven't tried? Then on that last link, Ian Murdock's weblog, I see: "One major difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian users' imput is mostly ignored, whereas Ubuntu users are heard and respected." -quote, typos and all! So, tell me, "stevey", is that you deleting our input so that the PUBLIC NEVER SEES IT?
I'm hoping to God that this lying weasel I've been arguing with is somebody currently high up in the Debian chain of command. Because, to read Ian Murdock's weblog, this man [Ian] sounds like he originally founded a fantastic, kick-ass distro, which he then trusted to a pack of idiots who fouled it up, and he regrets it.
Until today, I thought somebody just must have been scarfing shrooms - how could a Linux Distro *possibly* be *this* *stinking* *bad*?!?!? But thank you, "stevey" for at last providing me with an explanation that approaches sense: Debian is deliberately being sabotaged from within. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that that sabotuer(s?) was paid by a commercial software company which views itself to be in competition. This isn't the only possible explanation, but by God it makes the most sense. And I was ready to let it go, before I met you. But I love a good mystery! So, yeah, I think I WILL dig deeper until I get to the bottom of this...lol...pile, whenever I get the free time.
People who really want to know every detail of what's going on when you stick Debian Sarge disk #1 in your machine and boot it can view all the complaints this guy claims I'm covering up, along with my aborted effort to write some kind of install guide for the home user (heck, I *did* get it installed, after all!), can find my report HERE:
http://aimlesslifehobbies.blogspot.com/
What would be the point of posting all 999,999 snivels on Slashdot?
After all with a recent release of Fedora, etc, chances are the same package versions and kernel were installed.
Nope, not correct at all. Fedora has something closer to modern programs written in this century. More so for Slackware, Mandrake, Knoppix, and Mepis, which is what I have currently running on all five hard drives of the three computers I currently run in the home. Other systems release with man pages for their package managers that say something besides "This man page isn't even written yet!" Other systems don't have 5% of their files as softlinks to other files, so you get a ton of dead-ends and tail-chases every time you try to find something! Happy now? It's better when I meticulously list every single gripe, isn't it? To the purpose of giving people who want to argue more things to argue about.
As for the other comments, it's funny how much I hear, "Well of COURSE you hated it, it's not for desktop use! It's a server system for admins only!" and "Well, duh, installing is a nightmare using the disks only on a machine that's not on the internet! You're only supposed to do it online, where apt can update live" or however it goes. You know where the right place would be to tell me all this? HERE:
http://www.debian.org/intro/about
In big capital letters at the top of the page. Quote: "DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME DOWNLOADING AND BURNING 14 CDS TO INSTALL ON YOUR HOME COMPUTER, NO MATTER HOW MUCH OUR FANS CONVINCE YOU DOING SO IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE PASSAGE TO VALHALLA. THIS DISTRO IS JUST FOR GEORGE, SAM, AND ALICE. IT'S DELIBERATELY AIMED TO BE A FANTASTIC WASTE OF EVERYBODY ELSE'S TIME, AND TO MAKE A BAD NAME FOR LINUX ON THE HOME DESKTOP". Better than the song and dance I find on this page, now.
Pardon me for sounding so sarcastic. But, surely, through all the layers of smart-assery, I must make some token amount of sense? That was one of my chief gripes with Debian: It tells me it's going to kiss me, then kicks my ass over my shoulders, then says, "Of course I was going to kick you, you dumb ass, don't you know anything?" I get that from even the most incidentally-associated anything with Debian, just with Debian, and with nothing and nowhere else. Somehow, I have the feeling that the zillion other distros that include server installs and admin utilities would have *something* to offer, without this behavior?
All of which backs up my initial statement: "I am not surprised that Debian is having problems with security."
This time, BELIEVE ME when I say I could say a hell of a lot worse about Debian than I could already, here. I haven't scratched the surface of the iceburg, yet. I'm not holding back out of hiding something. I'm holding back out of a desire to not do any more harm to the distro than I have to, not to hurt any more feelings than I have to, and most especially because I hate shooting a dead horse.
How could this dream be achieved? Think of the fortune waiting for the person who implements it. Wouldn't you think it would have been done already?
Linux is more difficult to operate than other systems for the same reason that a Stealth Bomber is more difficult to operate than a tricycle. Because a Stealth can go places that a tricycle can't.
Yes, you can strip the complex control panel from the Stealth and replace it with a set of handlebars and a pair of pedals. But how do you then use this interface to tell the Stealth to fly?
I have a program I've written in C, which I want to post on my blog. But first, I have to "translate" the C-code into HTML-code, so that the page will display correctly. I have to add tags and such. I have to replace the angle-brackets around "stdio.h" with the HTML escape sequence "& lt ;", and other such places. I also want to replace references in the code to my home-grown functions with standard library functions that the user could download.
In a command-line, I solve this problem with the "sed" program. I type something like:
sed [replace-command #1] && [replace-command #2] &&... myfile.c >> myfile.html
and I have solved all of the problems in one shot. Sed is a programmable stream editor...it is concievable that you could write an entire document editing program that would consist of nothing but a shell script with calls to sed! Now, how do I use sed in a GUI editor?
I'd be stuck fooling with all those menus and popup dialog boxes. Even considering I'd use the "find and replace" application (extra code bogging down my memory when I don't want it, unlike a seperate interactive editor and stream editor) I'm still stuck doing it one command at a time. And my computer has to waste time drawing me pretty pictures of a menu and window while it's doing it.
"Oh, sure, we can just include both the I-can't-believe-it's-not-Windows Word-clone for the users who only need to write letters to gramma, and include sed for these pain-in-the-a** geeks who just have to make everything so damn complicated." Sure, go ahead and include both programs. You now have a larger, more complex operating system. Do this again for every single possible application, and you have...a mess. Because we have tried to make an operating system that struggles to be all things to all people, we now have one that comes on 25 disks, requires 800 Gigabytes and 3 days to install, fails on half the hardware platforms because of the unseen incompatibilities of using program A which needs library foo version 1.1 which requires .dll #345, with program B which requires library foo version 2.0 and .dll #666. And when you get lucky and 1% of your end-user-base actually gets a usable system installed, all it takes is for one of them to say "It doesn't come with the Machine That Goes 'Bing'!" and just like that, you failed in your initial goal, anyway!
Face it, the ultimate success would be the Machine That Can Do Anything, and it would be so simple that it would Read Your Mind In Your Sleep and Predict The Future To Forsee Your Every Need so that it would automatically do everything before you even knew it needed to be done.
GOD HIMSELF does not have such a device!!!!!!!
And even if he did, and he gave every living thing one for free, with a mail-in million-dollar-rebate, the disgruntled whines from the trenches of dis-satisfied users would abate not a tad, especially not after one of us used our Machine That Can Do Anything to write The Ultimate Virus that killed everybody else's Machine That Can Do Anything.
Thus is the bitter grain of the Information Age Renaissance reaped. For a while there, it looked like we'd done found us a new Tower of Babyl we could build out of circuit boards and acsend to a plane higher than the Gods. Except we just ended up re-learning the same lesson that we keep forgetting: We make lousy Gods! At best, we make barely-housetrained animals!
I tried Debian for the first time as soon as Sarge 3.1 went to stable. I've tried about ten Linux distros (ranging from popular installs like Red Hat and Slackware, to live distros like Knoppix, and even floppy-based like Tom's root-boot and Hal91), and sorry to have to say it, but every other Linux I've ever worked with combined didn't give me as much trouble as Debian. The whole thing left me with an impression of fantastic disorganisation. It was just a shambles! And I might not be so quick to lay blame, but other distros manage with a handful of maintainers releasing every six months, and they get their act together better than Debian, which brags about their "hundreds of developers worldwide" and had a leisurely THREE YEARS to release the new version. I bet they're plagued with all *sorts* of problems, but at least some good Debian-based distros come from the huge package archive.
No kidding, I've fooled around with building my own system from scratch a little, (nowhere near getting a whole major title together!) but enough to gain a basic understanding for how it's done. All it really takes to make your own Linux distro is fdisk and create some partitions, set up a few folders, get a few basic components installed from source compiled on a host system, and then just download tarballs and compile from source. Any Linux distro, logically, should be even LESS trouble to get going than it would be to do-it-yourself. I vowwed on my first Debian-day to conquor the difficulties and perhaps even contribute some small fixes when I get going. By the third Debian day, I looked at the whole mess and just shook my head and zeroed the drive. My effort is much better spent writing programs to enhance *other* distros, which aren't so bad off to start with. Of course, it would also be an easier job for me!
No, I don't hate Debian. I wanted like *damn* to experience the super-cool, ultimate-Linux, uber-geek joygasm that Debian fans have been selling me. I do, however, feel sorry for Debian, and hope it perhaps gets redone right from scratch? I can conceive of no other solution for it.
The saving grace of Linux is that, due to it's openness, it can be modified to give everyone what they want. It can still be my vodka screwdriver while we water down another version to the Shirley-Temple-on-the-rocks-with-extra-sugar that will be demanded by the GUI-only crowd.
But rockier coastlines are in sight. The effect, I predict, will be called "distro drift", with certain distributions falling off the Linux bandwagon altogether...when you've reduced it to a toy, it can't be called a "real system" any more! So we'll have the "two Linuxes", the weak-n-easy camp, and the Real-computers camp. This is happening already...who today can look at Mandrake and Debian and identify them as the same system? Maybe so, for a while longer, but it's getting to where some Linux distros have as much in common with each other as they have in common with...any other operating system!
Must we go this way? Or is it just time for us Linux fanatics to tell everybody to just go away? Why torture Linux and try to mold it like a bonsai tree until it becomes something else? Why not just BUILD SOMETHING ELSE, and let Linux be Linux? What is the point of switching from Windows to Linux, if you demand that Linux become the exact, duplicate, genetic clone of Windows?
Yes, I'm a Linux fanatic...and even I, since day one, have told people "Linux is not for everyone". If all the computer is to you is an entertainment device, used just to play games and chat online, you need something that caters just to those needs. Get an Xbox and a Web TV. Get one of those new cell phones with a screen on them. Get an Ipod.
You will only meet with failure if you keep beating on the computer trying to hammer it into something that's a completely different shape from a computer!!!
The only other possible outcome: we slash Linux down to a shadow of it's former self, abandon it to the Suits, and go off and build our own cool operating system again. Then the cycle will begin again...have I explained this clearly enough, at last? Can everybody clearly see what the path leads to?
The OS matters to us Zealots! ALOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't even try to tell me that Microsoft and AOL didn't partner to fund this study.
Whose blog? My blog? I use Mozilla myself to look at it, and edit it, and it looks about like I'd expect. If it looks like shit to you, it's because I'm a shitty page author, I guess.
Uh, not sure what you call a "high quality and easy to learn" development platform, but Linux has Python, Perl, Tc/Tkl, Expect, Lisp, and some Java kits, all of the above which fit the bill nicely. For C++ graphics stuff like kewl gamerz, SDL is showing a lot of promise of late. You, uh, sure you've ever programmed?
Mac users, you're right, even Linux users associate Macs with arts and multimedia, albeit not very portable tools. Even the most die-hard Linux Zealot has to admit, closed as the Macintosh structure is, that you at least get some kind of quality for your money (as in, integrated hardware/software).
Which brings us to Windows users: Ba-a-a-ah. Too broke to buy a good machine, not knowledgable enough to install decent software on the machine that they have...or too naive to know better.
something.
You are 100.00000% correct, but here's the view from the Open Source end of the table: (a) Sun keeps doing this tap-dance 'We're open standard today, we're proprietary tomorrow, we're the new GNU next week, we're open, we're not, la, la, la.'. We FOSS rebels are used to thinking in terms of black hats and white hats. Shades of grey confuse our AI algorithms. (b) Ever read a Sun liscence to figure out if you can integrate your own free/open code with one of their tools, or use their library to support your application, or write a FOSS application to support Java? Kind of like downing 500 micrograins of acid and then trying to pass the Bar Exam. (c) We have Lisp, Perl, Python, and Ruby just for starters for hybrid languages. Java, cleaner than C++, has some mod attraction, but quite frankly the average Linux distro comes with somewhere around 15 compilers/interpreters for different languages, about three parser generators, the Bash scripting environment, PHP for the web, yada. It's not like we're crying ourselves to sleep at night for want of a programming language. I think there's more motivation for Sun to come to us than for us to come to them. (d) Hey! We all have gcj, our own native Java compiler! I've seen it on my systems from day one, never even popped it open. Neither does anybody else. We're all waiting to either be able to see grey smoke better, for the acid to wear off, or to learn how to pass Bar Exams.
"No, no, no, really, Government, we're OK! Yessir, just a little glitch, we'll get it worked out ourselves! Go back to Iraq and finish rendering it into the unspoiled Eden that you promised..."
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
"How to be a Hacker"
(2) Hackers may be native English speakers, but they speak many languages...or rather, write them. When I've finished a hairy C coding session, put a Bash shell script wrapper around the C program, added a supporting feature in Python, all the while talking to my system and compiler in terse "gcc -o -Wall" and "ls -lh" syntax, and finally post the code to share online, which requires translating it into an HTML-friendly format, my English is shot to hell by then. Whose wouldn't be? Ever done this: "Why the hell won't it take a semi-colon at the end of this line? Oh, wait, I'm writing in Lisp!!!" ? After that, you're not prone to remember the twelve words that are an exception to "I before E".
(3) The internet environment. The internet kills spelling. Chats, emails, and other type-written communication lend themselves easily to abbreviation and jargon. Command-line environments especially strip the non-essential letters and syllables away, leaving you typing "man" for manual for instance. *nix users especially forget how to type in the "real world" because they're used to a system where you can just type in the first few letters of a word and hit "tab" and the computer completes it for you.
(4) Then there's the special circumstances of hacking itself. Hackers may be relieved when they type English, because when they type any other language (programming languages) they get errors and bugs every time they get a comma in the wrong place or leave out a closing brace. If the keyboard itself had an "English compiler" that said:
"Error 4085: Line 22: Dangling Participle"
Things might be different. Yes, I know, interactive spell-checkers in fancy Word-Office applications...but hackers compose in ed!
If /. had a spell-check button on this page I'm posting from, I'd use it...
Because you *already* *own* Linux! Yes, you, personally, own Linux itself: It's waiting for you to download it and install it for free. You own it in the sense that you have the right to rewrite every semicolon of the entire source code if you want to. You can release your version as the better choice, if you believe it is so. You can *sell* it! You are not helpless waiting for patches that never come. You are not gang-banged by all the corporate suits passing you around to their buddies like you were a joint. You can remold Linux like a lump of clay, or pick from the hundreds of different distributions of it, being picky right down to the tiniest detail what it is that is *exactly* what you want.
Yes, there are user-friendly distros, and yes, there are distros that will, over time, prove weaker. But no matter what, because *everybody* *owns* Linux, we can all re-create it into whatever shape we need it to be. What distros are out there, particularly the most popular, reflect what the public needs and wants right at that moment in time, because the *public* *wrote* it! The technology exists to secure computers...but why should a multinational corporation give a thin damn about you?
That's how GNU/Linux happened. The suits didn't care about us, so we started taking care of ourselves.
I don't think you're trolling at all. I mostly agree. However, you might want to update your view of Linux - particularly versions like Red Hat and Mandrake have gone so far in the user-friendly direction, they have attracted criticism for trying to be "I can't believe it's not Windows!" Some other distros are so hard core, even die-hard geeks get frustrated with them sometimes... The advantage to open software, however, is that you can have it any way you want it, and if you can't find it that way, pick the closest one and work it over in your ideal!
The Big Lie that we Linux folk want people to get out of their heads is that computers are simple things like toasters and radios. Computers are inherently complex, and it should only be the user's choice how much of that complexity they want to have hidden behind layers of abstraction. And there's always been a trade-off between simplicity and functionality. It's a sad social comment that the marketing hacks have done their job so well, that people now feel justified in demanding to have *no* knowledge of computers, while reaping all of their benefits. You have to learn how to drive a car to use it. Cars are complex. You have to learn how to cook, so you don't burn yourself when you cook. Computers are expected to operate themselves, and of course, as we see when viruses and crashes happen, they are poor at doing that.
"Computers in the home" is a concept less than 40 years old. Many twists and turns lie ahead before we get all the kinks worked out. In the meantime, it *will* help things along if my fellow geeks can put their impatience aside, realize that ignorance has been forced on the public, not chosen for themselves; and if the public, in turn, can accept some reasonable threshold of taking responsibility for the complex machines they want to use.