That was the lead in a rant by Andrew Wyatt, a.k.a. "Fewt", on his blog.
Wyatt wrote a pair of system tray utilities for the EeeUbuntu distro, designed to run on Eeepcs, but which mimicked Windows. How ever, that doesn't stop most of the reports from suggesting the EeeUbuntu itself is in trouble. They never bothered to check that Wyatt joined EeeBuntu only 7 months ago, mainly to support his two applications. Here is what I tried to post on his blog, but it was too big.
Fewt,
Is it a case of too much too soon? Or, are there other reasons?
I noticed that you joined the EeeUbuntu forum on March 12, 2009, and since then have made a total of 856 posts, mostly dealing with the two utilities you wrote to work on EeePCs running Eeeubuntu.
On July 30, 2009 you post a message at the EeeUbuntu forum asking for additional testers, hoping to get 150-200. That is ONLY two and 1/2 months ago!
In the current comments GruMaster suggested that you should post your bugs to the Launchpad bugzilla. You counter with a msg in which you "prove" that posting bugs at Lauchpad is not worth the effort. Yet, even though you registered with Launchpad on April 7, 2009, you made casual comments on ONLY TWO bugs and did NOT actually report any of the numerous bugs you claimed have hindered your progress. I find this very confusing because I run Kubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, and I have played with Ubuntu. When ever anything crashes on my Karmic beta installation it AUTOMATICALLY generates and sends a report to Lauchpad. While most of the reports my Karmic sends off are redundant, but some have been "first" reports. Surely you should have several first reports in such an esoteric area as a system tray utility if you are having such a bad time with Ubuntu/Eeubuntu. Or, you could have added comments to other posts in which you could have included significant technical information which would help the developers to isolate and identify the bug. You didn't. Why not? Surely when you registered on Launchpad you believed that reporting bugs there was useful, yet you report none and claim many in your rant.
Regardless, as an "IT Pro focusing on Architecture, Engineering, and Automation. Builder of enterprise solutions. OSS Guy, Ubuntu & Perl geek, RedHat Certified Engineer" I find it amazing that you would expect bug fixing to work any faster than it does. You KNOW that Linux developers get very little support, if at all, from hardware vendors and most of their work is by reverse engineering and analysis. Whines don't make it into Launchpad and, as you should know, developers don't have time to scour the thousands of blogs trying to pick useful information from whines and rants. Even Intel's GM45 support was only the first release, on June 16, 2008, of the tarball, which didn't work well on a large number of laptops and notebooks which use that chip, and which Linux developers at xorg had to pour over and experiment on with no additional help from Intel. Not even data sheets on the chip, which would have been VERY helpful. Ever wonder why vendors won't give Linux developers data sheets? Don't you think having data sheets could shorten debugging time significantly?
Maybe you were confused by your past experience writing software for Windows, where proprietary vendors supply binaries and libraries tuned to Windows and you merely tap into the API documentation for their binaries and libraries, which makes writing EEEPC utilities easier. Two and 1/2 months is hardly enough time to write, test and debug software for which Linux developers cannot access API documents for proprietary binaries and libraries.
The website, Icronic, in reporting on your "I Quit" story, states that you are a "major" EeeUbuntu developer. Using your whine, Icronic attempts to build a case that "While not claiming Linux itself is doomed, he [YOU] paints a grim picture for the development of Ubuntu. It was, after all, supposed to be “the one” that brought Linux to the mainstream consumer desktop." And, to top that off, you write "Maybe I should buy a copy of Windows 7, I hear that it actually works. How can we expect non-technical users to use this pile of garbage that is ‘Linux’?”" They quote you on that, too. The 10 comments to the article didn't chime in. Most comments suggest that you were either a "noob", tried too much too quickly, or thought that mimicking a Windows utility was lame.
However, not satisfied with slandering Ubuntu, you slime Linux in its entirety with your accusations. The fact is that Ubuntu is a MAJOR competitor to Win7, which is being released in a couple weeks. It is also a fact that you arrived onto the scene less than a year ago, established some early credibility, but began only on the first of August to enroll a sufficient number of testers, and then after a mere 2 1/2 months of testing and debugging post your "I Quit" rant.
Your timing, your complaints and your motive are VERY suspicious.
GreyGeek
Wyatt wrote a pair of system tray utilities for the EeeUbuntu distro, designed to run on Eeepcs, but which mimicked Windows. How ever, that doesn't stop most of the reports from suggesting the EeeUbuntu itself is in trouble. They never bothered to check that Wyatt joined EeeBuntu only 7 months ago, mainly to support his two applications. Here is what I tried to post on his blog, but it was too big.
Fewt,
Is it a case of too much too soon? Or, are there other reasons?
I noticed that you joined the EeeUbuntu forum on March 12, 2009, and since then have made a total of 856 posts, mostly dealing with the two utilities you wrote to work on EeePCs running Eeeubuntu.
On July 30, 2009 you post a message at the EeeUbuntu forum asking for additional testers, hoping to get 150-200. That is ONLY two and 1/2 months ago!
In the current comments GruMaster suggested that you should post your bugs to the Launchpad bugzilla. You counter with a msg in which you "prove" that posting bugs at Lauchpad is not worth the effort. Yet, even though you registered with Launchpad on April 7, 2009, you made casual comments on ONLY TWO bugs and did NOT actually report any of the numerous bugs you claimed have hindered your progress. I find this very confusing because I run Kubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, and I have played with Ubuntu. When ever anything crashes on my Karmic beta installation it AUTOMATICALLY generates and sends a report to Lauchpad. While most of the reports my Karmic sends off are redundant, but some have been "first" reports. Surely you should have several first reports in such an esoteric area as a system tray utility if you are having such a bad time with Ubuntu/Eeubuntu. Or, you could have added comments to other posts in which you could have included significant technical information which would help the developers to isolate and identify the bug. You didn't. Why not? Surely when you registered on Launchpad you believed that reporting bugs there was useful, yet you report none and claim many in your rant.
Regardless, as an "IT Pro focusing on Architecture, Engineering, and Automation. Builder of enterprise solutions. OSS Guy, Ubuntu & Perl geek, RedHat Certified Engineer" I find it amazing that you would expect bug fixing to work any faster than it does. You KNOW that Linux developers get very little support, if at all, from hardware vendors and most of their work is by reverse engineering and analysis. Whines don't make it into Launchpad and, as you should know, developers don't have time to scour the thousands of blogs trying to pick useful information from whines and rants. Even Intel's GM45 support was only the first release, on June 16, 2008, of the tarball, which didn't work well on a large number of laptops and notebooks which use that chip, and which Linux developers at xorg had to pour over and experiment on with no additional help from Intel. Not even data sheets on the chip, which would have been VERY helpful. Ever wonder why vendors won't give Linux developers data sheets? Don't you think having data sheets could shorten debugging time significantly?
Maybe you were confused by your past experience writing software for Windows, where proprietary vendors supply binaries and libraries tuned to Windows and you merely tap into the API documentation for their binaries and libraries, which makes writing EEEPC utilities easier. Two and 1/2 months is hardly enough time to write, test and debug software for which Linux developers cannot access API documents for proprietary binaries and libraries.
The website, Icronic, in reporting on your "I Quit" story, states that you are a "major" EeeUbuntu developer. Using your whine, Icronic attempts to build a case that "While not claiming Linux itself is doomed, he [YOU] paints a grim picture for the development of Ubuntu. It was, after all, supposed to be “the one” that brought Linux to the mainstream consumer desktop." And, to top that off, you write "Maybe I should buy a copy of Windows 7, I hear that it actually works. How can we expect non-technical users to use this pile of garbage that is ‘Linux’?”" They quote you on that, too. The 10 comments to the article didn't chime in. Most comments suggest that you were either a "noob", tried too much too quickly, or thought that mimicking a Windows utility was lame.
However, not satisfied with slandering Ubuntu, you slime Linux in its entirety with your accusations. The fact is that Ubuntu is a MAJOR competitor to Win7, which is being released in a couple weeks. It is also a fact that you arrived onto the scene less than a year ago, established some early credibility, but began only on the first of August to enroll a sufficient number of testers, and then after a mere 2 1/2 months of testing and debugging post your "I Quit" rant.
Your timing, your complaints and your motive are VERY suspicious.
GreyGeek
Comment