How to make Debian more attractive for users
By: schwim

Get rid of the pompous douche bags that inhabit the Debian forums.

Although there’s an incredible number of symptoms of Linux’s lack of popularity, I think it mostly comes down to a single main cause; it’s very hard to take Linux seriously.  Self-appointed spokepersons that wear robes, act like the world’s largest emo and have an incredible God complex, companies that mock more than promote Linux(use this if you don’t want to use Windows???  Really?) and rabid fans that ostracise the whole community in the process of telling the world how great their OS are all things that combine to make one big pot of laughing stock.

To be honest, I don’t have a very good relationship with Linux myself, in part because of the community tasked with promoting it.  I grow tired of the blind allegiance that many harbour and I find it very hard to ignore the actions of people like Richard Stallman.  I just want an operating system that works and while Linux is a pretty great operating system, to act like it doesn’t have any shortcomings is akin to acting like Mr. Stallman is a sane person. Just like any other operating system in the world, it has plenty it can improve upon.

As for Mr. Stallman, if he gets any more emo, then we won’t have to worry about him at all.

I have used it for a couple hours and no matter how much I explored, I can only find one change between the old and new.  This change, however, will alter the landscape of linux computing.  Years from now, after every distribution, in all OS camps have followed in Ubuntu’s steps, the four of you that read this will remember my heralding of a new era.

So what’s the change?  What incredible insight did Mark Shuttleworth have that is sure to forever change the way we compute?

Good Lord in heaven, can you believe what you see?  I couldn’t at first and I still have moments where I feel the need to pinch…  What?  You don’t see it?  Ok, just a second.

Now, don’t you feel stupid?  Now that you can see the sheer genius that is Ubuntu, you’re probably feeling pretty stupid now, aren’t you…  What?  You still can’t see the change that is going to forever change the way you compute?  Christ, do I have to hold your hand?

There you go.  The only noticeable difference I was able to distinguish was the fact that they moved the action buttons for your windows to the left.  Which is fucking genius.  Now, when you want to choose something under the file menu, you have over a 50% chance of accidentally choosing to close your application, and if you’re lucky, losing all of your work in that application.

I can just picture Mark Shuttleworth as he looks in the mirror, comparing himself to Steve Jobs, the master of huge changes that on the surface seem absolutely asinine only to become globally emulated within the next year.

Well, he got half of it down pat.

After getting everything installed, set up and tested, I moved over all the important stuff in my home directory and replaced the old work machine.  Then I got to reflect upon the install.  I can say that I still would never think of handing a linux disk to a Windows user and telling them to try it as their OS.  At the same time, I’m astounded at how far linux has come in regards to the desktop.  Here’s the highs and lows:

Highs:

1) Did I say fast?  Holy crap, I don’t know what happened in the last year, but whatever it was, it seems to have gotten rid of half of the time needed for bootup. From BIOS splash to no disk activity in the desktop, I’m looking at between 15-20 seconds.  A Vista boot on the same machine requires almost a minute to stop disk activity.

2) Friendly install for the ignorant: Finally, I don’t need to know anything about chipsets and partition sizes for my swap space to install.  I had a working install within a half hour of starting the process.

3) Looking pretty snazzy:  Gone of the days are oversized icons, almost-readable fonts and menus that look like they were Windows 3.1 rejects.  The fonts are fantastically crisp, the icons are top notch and the polish is in place in all the right spots.

4) I can rest:  My game computer is such a tiring experience. Malware, antivirus, scans, disabled javascript and more just for some peace of mind.  It’s so refreshing not to give a flying shit if I visit a hijacked web page.

5) Screensavers and power settings are no longer a joke:  Used to be nothing worked.  Then, Gnome sometimes worked.  Then Xscreensaver worked in lieu of Gnome screensaver.  Imagine my surprise when I got a screensaver and power management without messing with startup apps and shutting down native processes.

There’s more, but those are the high points.  Not all of my experience with The latest distro has been rosey though. There were some aspects that made me wonder what I was thinking.

The Lows:

1) Partitioner? More like PartitioNOTer:  I’m serious.  Just stop acting like you can resize partitions for dualbooting.  I’ve never once had a linux distro successfully resize a Windows partition.  I tried for about 30 minutes to resize the Vista partion before breaking down and using the Vista system to resize itself.  The process took under one minute in Vista.

2) But I like Jackelopes better than Koalas:  I started out with 9.04.  Unfortunately the linux kernel used in Ubuntu 9.04 didn’t recognize my soundcard(Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme).  There was a three page tutorial for building a workaround module into the kernel but there were a couple caveats.  One, you lost all but duplex capabilities on the card.  Secondly, you had to follow the three page tutorial every time you upgraded your kernel.   Thirdly, users had a huge amount of problems with the process.  To say they had mixed results would be kind.  Fortunately the latest kernel supports the card, so I decided to upgrade to 9.10(Karmic Koala).  It’s only a couple of weeks prior to the official release and to be honest there was no way I was going to go to all that trouble for mediocre results.  Upgrading to 9.10 led me to my next hiccup, however.

3) We get it, you like absolute control: Another reason I wasn’t hot about running 9.04 was because of the age of the apps available.  If you’re running a major version behind on a browser, you’re doing something wrong.  Sure, we can build apps into the distro, but there might be something behind letting the user deal with the third party apps like OpenOffice, Firefox, Songbird and more.  For instance, my upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 kept failing.  after trying a few times, I began rooting through the logs to find out why.  I eventually did find the problem.  OpenOffice was causing the complete failure of the upgrade.  A word processing app stopped my OS upgrade.  As another example, this thread guides you along the process of installing the latest Firefox 3.5 and getting your menus to accept and use it.  The fact that this thread exists is proof that linux hasn’t figured out how to relinquish control of apps that have nothing to do with their distro.

4) Networked drives… they’ve been around a while you know:  It’s still a process of adding options to your fstab entries until you get a working Win share.  And don’t forget to install smbfs!  Oh, and linux still thinks there’s nothing wrong with shutting down the network prior to disconnecting network drives.  Hello, minute and a half shutdowns!

5) Make the brown stop.

I could nitpick but to be completely honest, I’m happy with the way everything has gone and barring any oddities that impact my productivity, I’m going to end up one of the Ubuntu flock for a while.

If I can get over their brown fetish.

Wait a steenking meenoot.  I know what you’re thinking.  I was supposed to be buying a work computer.  Here’s how you too can manage to get a new gaming computer any time you need a work computer.

I purchase the snazziest gaming computer I can afford without making us homeless, then relegate the old gaming machine to work detail.  In this case, I’m getting a quad core 2.4 ghz/4mb ram with a 9xxx Nvidia card as a work machine.  The new machine is almost identical, but with dual graphics cards.

<insert evil laugh here>

I’ve already burnt the latest iso’s for the distro’s I’m going to try on it.  I don’t know what I’ll settle on but I can say that I’m going for ease of use.  I don’t think I’ll stick with Dreamlinux this time around.  I’m probably either going to go with Mint, Ubu or Fedora.  Fedora is comfortably familiar, Ubu is popular enough to have tons of apps and mods available and Mint takes a kitchen sink approach to dirty stuff, which I like.

It will be the first time I’ve ever run linux on a machine from this decade, so I’m understandably excited to see the results.

I’m wondering if any of them will install drivers for the stupid miniviewer that’s built into the case.

While I wait for the people that develop my OS to put on their big-boy pants and join the adult world, I have time to wonder how we got the reputation that we did.  I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves.  In spite of the fact that inarguably *nix is a better foundation upon which to build an OS, a very small percentage of the technical community takes the movement seriously.  I have my own suspicions but to be honest, I’m cynical, jaded and very often wrong.  I try to at least challenge my preconceptions and prejudices, so I won’t waste anyone’s time putting them to paper.  Instead of my canned rhetoric, I’m hoping for some enlightenment.

I’ve talked to a few software developers in the industry and to the last, they all dismiss linux, giving reasons ranging from being based on fact to some wild kool-aid laden FUD regurgitation.  I’ve been told that linux, being developed by people without any monetary interest puts anything they base it on at risk.  In their mind, when Billy, while sitting in his basement decides to stop development on Redhat, they will be left with no linux operating system to base their software off of.  To be honest, when I hear something like this, I never try to correct them.  I mean, when someone is this far from the fact of the matter, it’s kind of a daunting thought to try to set them straight.

I’ve also been told that linux seems too disorganized and unfocused.  This, I can’t really argue with.  The article I linked to is an example I think of when I think of this kind of argument.  How many other commercial endeavors spend their time discussing their entity’s sexism via a public forum?  The problem, as I see it is this:  The community is so large that everyone that considers themselves an ally of the FOSS movement has equal chance to damage the overall reputation, myself included.  If you are on the Redmond campus, you are able to impact the perception of Microsoft.  If you have a computer, you can impact the view of linux.

It seems like a big hurdle to overcome.  In spite of huge developments and improvements on the software we use, news of it always seems to be overshadowed by some kind of discussion that makes us all look like rejects.

I’m very aware that part of my problem lies with me.  I tend to focus on the absurd so it’s ever-present. That doesn’t explain the people I talk to, though.  Linux has come so far in the time that I’ve used it.  In spite of it’s remaining shortcomings, it doesn’t deserve the bad rap that it has.  So why does it persist?

It’s got to be an unfortunate combination of circumstances and events, I think.  Ignorance spurred by both previous experiences and the very real paid FUD by competitors would seem to be the main causes.  We have to take some of the blame as well though.  How can developers take a community seriously that can’t seem to stop talking about our desire to touch our community’s collective boob?

To be fair, it is a nice boob, though.

Microsoft partnered with BestBuy to create a tutorial/exam designed to show the techs why Microsoft Windows 7 was a superior choice to linux.

I shit you not when I say that it’s a fantastic read.  The original post lost it’s images, but I’ve linked to a mirror, so hopefully you will get to witness exam in all it’s bullshit.

After his attention grabbing headline, used to ensure that he’s gotten you all riled up, he completely dismisses his proposal and waters it down to “patch your OS before being allowed on the web”.

Regardless, his points concerning the inferiority of Windows made me smile.  People being completely wrong tend to elicit that reaction from me.

You see, there’s nothing wrong with Windows. The problem lies with the user.  It’s why he had to completely backtrack on his post.  Even he knows it.  Patched and being used by a person with a minimum of common sense, Windows is quite safe from attacks.  I’ve run Windows on at least two of my computers for over 15 years and have yet to take part in a botnet.  This is not because my Windows is safer than others’ installs.  It’s because I’m not a retard.

My second issue is his assumption that switching to linux and Mac would be a better move because they are so much safer. I have to patch my  linux servers at least weekly because of vulnerabilities found in the OS.  I patch apache/mysql/etc more often because of course it’s the most common gateway for entrance.  Desktop installations are no better.  Remember the thousands of flavors that make linux so great?  Well, guess what?  Some of those flavors are customized for user convenience and go to trouble to remove some of the safeguards that are supposed to protect the user.  My current Dreamlinux install doesn’t ask for a password once when I run something as administrator via sudo.  I am more vulnerable on it than I am on my Windows install.

Linux is safer because nobody in their right mind would spend the time required to write a bot script for an OS that enjoys less than 1% of the desktop landscape.  The return on investment predicts that the dividends would be a little lacking.  If linux enjoyed 95% of the market share, we would have botnets consisting of linux computers.  We would have that because the OS is not what dictates security, it’s the user.  Users don’t patch.  Users will run flavors with lax security standards.  Users will visit and download content that they shouldn’t.

Users can fuck up any operating system you hand them, linux included.

Sadly, it was hard to follow the article long enough find any merit in his opinions.  I couldn’t get past the written lashing he assigned to the poor bastard he quoted at the start of his post. Since quotation marks were used in his article, I was made aware that he was  quoting someone.  If there was any doubt however, he did name the author of the missive prior to the actual quote.  In spite of this, he used my favorite quoting tool, (sic).  Meaning thus or so, this allows the reader to understand that the written error belongs to the person quoted and not the person quoting.  Additionally, it lets the reader know that the author feels that the quotes alone weren’t enough to ensure that the reader blame someone other than the author.

But wait, there’s more.

Even using my favorite tag, this particular author didn’t feel that he assigned ownership sufficiently, however.

If he truly thinks there are no standards common “between” (I would have said “among”, but that’s just me.) 6 or 7 “versions” (I would say “distributions”.) of GNU/Linux then he did not examine them closely enough.

Please keep in mind that the author’s intention is to debate the merit of the number of linux forks. In spite of the intended direction of the discussion, it seems as if he simply couldn’t help himself and just had make damned sure that you not only understood that the errors were not his, but also that he knew how to correct them.  It was clear by the end of the paragraph that he utilized the quoted author’s grammatical and spelling errors to let you know that since he couldn’t draft his thoughts in proper English, his opinion obviously couldn’t carry the same weight as someone that could correct it.

Between Captain Grammatical and this guy, it’s a wonder that linux hasn’t taken over the world.

From Datamation: Google Chrome OS: Desktop linux’ last chance

A dichotomy, you presume? Well, not really.  What can be gained by combining the two posts is very simple:  Before linux becomes extinct, it will trounce Windows 7.

I guess there’s some comfort to be had in that.