Monday, February 16, 2009

Bleeding Edge should be an option, not a competition

Re: [ PPLUG ] Tropical Ice Cube Newsletter #7: A Flurry of News!
From: "Jean-Philippe 'Tropical Ice Cube' Monteiro"
To:
pplug ::at/ googlegroups.com
Date: 09/02/16 - 19:08

On Monday 16 February 2009, j. Tim Denny wrote:
> Jean-Phillipe
>
> seems you are really down on Ubuntu in this news letter? what is wrong?
> chat?
>
> cheers
> tim

Hi Tim, Ye Chanpion of Looong Threads here on our PPlug planet!

Old story between me and U - I'll put it down to the famous motto: "Linux is all about Choices" - When one distro is on such a World Domination Rampage, the future just looks gloom again. And in this case, a rather brownish shade of gloom, which doesn't help at all.

:)

http://getshotwithlinux.zenerves.net/2008/08/top-10-reasons-not-to-use-ubuntu.html

The long-ish answer is that progress has never meant "Better"; it just means "Different" in all aspects of human life.

it's the same old story:
A hundred years ago, there where on traffic jams, it was so better
A hundred years ago there where no ambulances, and that sucks.

[The first one to say that a hundred years ago you could be at the hospital faster because of the uselessness of ambulances in traffic jams is to me a very healthy individual, thank you!)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

And so it goes with software; once Linux was blazingly fast on your 256megs of ram old laptop, and 2 years later OpenOffice takes a full minute to start, crashes and do not recover stuff because the RAM is overcrowded, you aging old 5400rpm IDE swap disk stuffed... Not mentioning that your trackpad module was dropped in the meantime, deemed obsolete, and your only solution is to stick with an unsupported, outdated distribution that you can't really maintain...

The Benchmark Story in Newsletter #7 is true, and I don't care much about Mac OS X results since they run an X server too, and they do push upstream lines of code to the BSD project - which is more than what Ubuntu does, since U recipe for victory is to attract, and keep attracted in the halo of it's brownish, t(h)ree-hugging warm light a maximum of individuals who would contribute to U rather than push stuff upstream. And U doesn't fix the kernel, U patches it for it's own use, that's all.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=3443116#post3443116

The above is only my post, but if you read upwards, someone like me suffered a regression in hardware support. Slackware's boss, P. Volkerding, said it: WHY FIX IT IF IT AIN'T BROKEN?

[Yes, I run Slackware!]

Watchdogs of the OpenSource Movement considers the kernel a viable project because... it is growing
10.000 lines a year - !YIKES, soon my 2.66DualCore2 monster won't be able to handle it!

And I say: It's all because of U.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1166026&postcount=47

Because of this pressure put on a six-months release cycle - something that only works for them, because it contributed to attract a crowd of novelty-avid followers and tinkerers that are happy re-installing their system every six months. Sh*t, I like to fool around, but I use sandboxes and virtualmachines for that, not my desktop!

C'mon, when you watch the websphere today, it's like every distro release out there has to be on U's pace. That' s crazy. Since when do you hurry respectable old ladies in the stairwell? Debian and Slackware both looks like they are running out of breadth, while knowing they can't compete. Luckily, they achieve stable releases we can work on. KDE 3.5.10 anyone? You can't beat Konqueror wealth of features and file handling compliances in 3.5.10.


I _just_ mistakenly, as root, deleted my full /usr folder. Has anything stopped running? no, Slack is light on RAM. How long did it take me to recover a system that just lost _all_ it's executables?

25 minutes, including the extra tarballs and special Window Manager I compiled from source. (e16)

Did I had to reboot? No. I am still writing to you. :)


Rock Solid Old Dog - that's the way it should be.

Bleeding Edge should be an option, not a competition. But it seems it has become part of linux success, and as such it is now an egg/chicken problem.

So, to people out there that would have made it down here: NEVER assume a newer version number to be better; If your version is working, KEEP IT! And if you do have issues, don't assume: you can only click on "upgrade" with hope, nothing more.

Jean-Philippe - Slackware 12.2.
--
Celebrate Hannibal Day this year. Take an elephant to lunch.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sup Dude,

You're the priest, and I'm confessing, so skip this part if you don't want to hear my problems. I'm a dumb Ubuntu user. I went from 8.04 to 8.10, and where one problem was fixed (driver for my atheros 5xxx is now supported without madwifi or ndiswrapper), gnome-settings-daemon now appears to screw up the keyboard when I attempt to turn up the volume.

Here's an idea. Is it possible that the reason why their are so many distributions, and why 10,000 lines of code are being added to the Kernel (what was it, every year?) is because there are so many different pieces of hardware by different manufacturers? I think it was Bill Gates who said that an OS is just a collection of drivers. How difficult is it to debug an OS when the hardware platforms vary to such large degrees. It seems to me there should be a Distro for each hardware configuration, but I guess this is essentially what the customizability of Linux is supposed to provide. I don't know about you, but the only useful programming language I know with any degree of capability is SQL...

I can imagine a configuration of Linux that is tailored specifically to this laptop's hardware configuration, at which point I will have the market model equivalent of a macbook (I have a Toshiba U305-S7448). I used to have a Macbook, and it was pretty nice. But I sold it to buy this Toshiba, pocketed several hundred dollars because of what I believe Linux can be...

So this is me, a dumb user. What would you have me do? Are you a developer? A semi-God? What are you? The matrix? has you.

GetShotWithLinux said...

Thanks for the blrub Kev; I just feel like you. Then, I just may make more NOISE out of it.

Peace and love and openness to all you Nixettes and Nixers out there who are fighting their system because they believe in it, not because they weren't given a choice.