E-Dribble

I love computer games.  Some games, I love more than I should(My productivity dropped alarmingly during my WoW period). Since I love games so much, I have a very zoomy computer off to my left with smile inducing specs.  Nothing but games gets installed on it.

I wouldn’t contemplate running anything but Windows on it. Although I sometimes find games that I want to play that will run on linux, I have never found a game that I wanted to play that wouldn’t run on Windows. Windows does gaming better.

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I just read an incredibly interesting article on Gadgetell, titled “Microsoft Office comes to Linux – MS begrudgingly bends”.

The implications are huge!

Well, if it weren’t really about Office becoming web based, allowing anything with a popular browser to use it, it would be big news.  When you know what’s actually happening here, it seems they might have stretched the artistic license a little too thin.

Ryan over at Linuxphilia wanted to help the members of the Windows community that are contemplating moving to linux by posting the 7 most common complaints Windows users have with linux and then explaining to them why it’s their own damned fault and thus of no concern to the people promoting linux.

You guys know me.  I could give two shits less what you use as an operating system, however I never cease to get a kick out of the linux zealot that can’t figure out why linux isn’t the global OS of choice.

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You all know how I love flavors and the abundance of them.  Finally, someone has created one that we needed instead of just one that we wanted.

It’s awe inspiring to see the power of freedom at work.

As Demetri Martin has stated before, “sort of” is an innocuous filler with a few very important exceptions:

“You’re going to live…. sort of”
“It’s a boy…. sort of”

Microsoft is adding the following:

“We won’t sue open source developers that use C#…. sort of”

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Before I begin, I would  like to admit two things:

#1 Some of my issues concerning linux reflect more poorly on me than it does on linux

#2 I tend to hold grudges

The last successful linux install I had(meaning one in which I could do everything I needed and wanted to do) happened in 2007.  I had used linux in the years prior as a desktop, but that was the last install I was able to use as my desktop.  The ocean of subsequent install attempts(of which there were many) were all failures of some degree.

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I saw it all go down.

Well, I tried linux Mint over the last few days.  Argueably the most easy to use and feature-rich distro currently available.  How could I go wrong?

Well, let me just say this.  I’m getting much quicker at reaching critical failure, which in and of itself is very useful.  I used to waste weeks in the hope that someone could help me end up with an install that I could use at work before I gave up and became productive again on my Windows box.  I’ve now been able to reach the same conclusion in the span of days.  Add to this the fact that I now know not to install it on the box that I make a living on, and you’ve got yourself what may be the first stress-free linux install ever.  I simply threw my old work box on the test bench, installed, found it to be lacking,  waited 3 days for useful assistance and retired the attempt.

I got so excited when I saw the clean fonts and snappy response of linux.  It made me realize how much I missed it.  Then I began working on dualhead and network printing, which made me remember how much I loathed it.

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Well, it’s almost that time again.  Actually it would have already been that time, but Fedora devs would no sooner push a bus full of nuns over a cliff than they would stick to a release schedule.

That’s right folks, some day in the very near future, Fedora 11 will officially be released and I can begin flagellating myself by trying another version of Fedora. I’ve saved my old work PC in the corner for just this reason.  I can’t explain it to you any better than this: I miss it like a battered woman misses her abuser.

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Most of the regulars know my stance on what I consider is the crippling addiction of open source software to fork.  The nerds just can’t seem to help themselves.

Well, as I stated in the previous post, it’s definitely not just the OS developers that find this to be a powerful attribute of FOSS.  Count the DB devs in, too! After Oracle’s purchase of Sun, shit hit the fan in regards to MySQL and offshoots appeared overnight.  If you think it’s because of Oracle, you would be wrong.  Listening to the lead developers that are jumping ship to develop their own version, they were unhappy even when Sun was in the captain’s chair.  This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

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I got a notice this morning that Linux.com had been completely revamped(and it has).  Now under the control of the linux foundation, they’ve removed the focus of being a half-assed news site and concentrated on being a half-assed news site with a half-assed community feel.

I logged in and looked around.  They’re method of trying to keep people active is by awarding karma in the form of guru or geek points.  The biggest gurus at the end of the year get laptops with linux on them.  (I guess the elephant in the room is that they’re all going to wipe linux off of them once in their possession so they can install something with working wireless).

So, that’s the business model.  You’ll stay at linux.com as opposed to the 4 billion other sites because of a site ranking system that makes you feel special and you might get a laptop out of the deal.

I checked the forums and of the 27 categories, there was not a single one that could either be considered to have a community feel or pertaining to site suggestions, problems or comments.  There was a category specifically for kernel development(because it’s such a hot topic, it would overflow a parent category) but there wasn’t one to say hi, introduce yourself or post your latest exploits with vi.  As is the case with 95% of the linux communities out there, they’re not a community.  They’re  a support forum.

Because, you know… we didn’t have enough linux support forums.