The I.T. Life

Well, I havn`t posted here in ages… and Jeff has kinda been hinting that I should… so what to talk about…

Well… how bout the latest Torvalds VS. Gnome incident that took place on a distant mailing list.

Torvalds, as you all better know, is the creator of what is essentially linux. The other day, he stepped into the great desktop debate by responding to a comment about the functionality offered by gnomes print dialog. The comment was as follows:

“I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE,” Torvalds wrote. “This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome (sic) is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE.”

GNOME release manager, Jeff Waugh responded by saying that ‘users are idiots’ was not a point of view which the project held. He further commented that:

“…we’re focused on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don’t talk about ‘dumb users’), but just don’t care about computing technology. We’re just like every other Free Software project – fixing stuff requires the work and attention of people who care about the problem at hand. If you want to chat about what’s missing in GNOME sometime, I’m always available and keen to hear feedback, but I can understand if it’s not of interest to you.”

Torvalds retorted to this blatant use of kindness by responding with:
“I’ve talked to people, and often your ‘fixes’ are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were ‘too confusing to the user’. That’s – not – like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing (sic) something is not ‘it’s too complicated to do’, but ‘it would confuse users’.

Now personally I don`t really care for Gnome or KDE. In my opinion they are both overcomplicated, bloated, resource eating monstrosities. Of the two however, id have to side with Torvalds on this. Gnome seems to make a point of hiding as much from the user as possible by simply not including it, whereas KDE still hides things, but replaces them with easier alternatives.

Having followed a link to an article on distroworld.com (which unfortunately turned out to be fairly boring) I found myself browsing the current list of what they (and many people including myself do see them as an accurate statition of *NIX usage) report as the most popular Linux distributions and *NIX based derivatives. I can`t say I was overly surprised to see one of the half way Linux distro’s at the top (although I was surprised it was Ubuntu, being a newcomer to the ultra-easy to use Linux distros category.) What I did find surprising was the next four, namely Mandrivia, SuSE, Fedora, and Mephis. For people who have watched the numbers on Linux popularity, including myself, this represents quite a reversal. It seems that just yesterday, the likes of Redhat/Fedora and company didn’t even graze the top 5. Now the distro’s that once took their place (namely Slackware, Gentoo, BSD, and so on) rest amongst the lower numbers.

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Ok, now im the type of user that wants a computer to work, and I dont want to dick around with settings and files and stuff to get it to work. This is why I love and hate linux. Depending on the distro you will have to do everything yourself (ie slackware) or have it all done for you (ie madriva). Im a middle of the road kind of guy, and I think thats where all new users to linux should be. You should have everything set up, but it should be quick and easy to learn how to set it up yourself.
This why I use Its a debian based distro, so its rock solid. Its already set up and everything you need for basic applications is installed. And when you want to start setting stuff up yourself, than check out the Ubuntu Guide
I really like this and its pretty easy to set up.
Have fun.

Well well well, it seams that linux has viruses. Yes you herd me right. Linux has viruses. And according to the Virus Library, theres a whopping 5 viruses. Thats it, im never using Linux again, im going back to good old windows. Just kidding, Im actually comfortable with all operating systems. I use linux, and Windows, and even MacOS.

Here are 10 of the best unix complaints I have ever seen. And if you think about it, there probably your compalints to, I know there mine. 10 Complaints