an interesting rant

[wizard10000]

I swiped the link off the Ubuntu forums and thought it'd make for interesting discussion. I personally think the guy's a bit of a bonehead

http://batsov.com/Linux/Windows/Rant...e-desktop.html

[Detonate]

Re: an interesting rant

Without commenting on the validity of his arguments, I find it difficult to treat with any degree of seriousness, anyone who feels it is necessary to use slang terms for excrement to present his thoughts.

[dibl]

Re: an interesting rant

I'm not impressed with his claim of Linux advocacy. Anyone who has used it for a year, with newish hardware, understands the risk of buying the hottest new hardware and then expecting full functionality in Linux. It's a bogus complaint for a person who knows Linux. It's only a valid complaint for a person who expects Linux drivers to be as instantly available as Windows drivers, i.e. a noob. In 6 months his new Thinkpad T520 will run just fine with Linux drivers. But his rant will endure long past the problem he's ranting about.

[GreyGeek]

Re: an interesting rant

A person who is a programmer ("Software engineer and entrepreneur with substantial experience in C, C++, Java, C#, Perl and Ruby development. Proficient in Unix like operating systems. Committed to open source, fond of cutting edge development technologies.") and holds a Master's (a year ago) in computer science, with 8 years of Linux experience. who has worked on EMACs and other FOSS projects, but doesn't know enough to check out the hardware he plans on buying to make sure that his "beloved" Fedora runs well on it?

Five years ago, he bragged about his uptime but mentioned that "my home troubles are somewhat related to my hardware configuration", so the problems of making sure your hardware runs Linux is not new to him. Why did he forget that lesson with his new laptop?

His new attitude could be related to his new employer: Empower United:

Empower United Foundation is a Bulgarian not-for-profit organization with the mission to help empower Bulgarian citizens and Bulgarian companies to realize their full potential.

We are working in close partnership with all stakeholders to provide attractive opportunities and implement international best practices in order to improve education, leadership skills and professional qualifications of young Bulgarians and in the process help Bulgaria establish the world’s best educational system and to become one of the world’s most dynamic and entrepreneurial countries.

The Foundation is dedicated to creating a unique, strong and sustainable public private partnership model between the private sector, government and education, which could serve as the future global model for funding and developing early stage innovating business ideas and technologies.

Empower United is creating opportunities for people to gain knowledge, skill-sets and attitudes needed for breeding innovation, making informed choices and inspiring growth and development.

We are stimulating achievement through creating opportunities for ideas and talents to flourish and through creating platforms for knowledge sharing and professional support.

Almost reads like an MS PR memo. My guess is that his new employer had some requirements which don't include Linux. That's understandable. Not every company uses Linux, andi in today's job market you take any job you can find.

[woodsmoke]

Re: an interesting rant

Hi
a) In my writing classes I generally had two maybe three "tell me about something" essays that they would do in class, and there was usually at least one "rant". And, generally, the rant was not about the topic but something going on elsewhere in the person's life. Curiously, the "rant" papers were "mostly" also very ....wrinkled up, and "messy"...

Yes, it was a rant, but the number of the personal pronoun "I" says a lot and, so does the person's blog and twitter activity. Telling everyone that he slummed by watching Red Riding Hood might be indicative of something also.....he is a LOT smarter than the rest of us... 8)

So GG's comment seems to be spot on..there is the DISTINCT possibility that the whole thing is a subconscious appeal to get ANYBODY....to give him a nice fat paycheck in Linux.

b) I quite go along with dlbls comment about the hardware problems given his supposed experience,....

For someone to be so EXPERIENCED.....I find it rather amazing that I have absolutely no problems with ANY of the things he mentioned....i mean the sound system? Uhhhh you pick one of the provided systems and get on with your life... how hard is that?

Now....given, again, his really DISMISSIVE comments in his twits about films and his appreciation of "music" possibly the slider bars just weren't nuanced enough for him to hear the third oboe on the second row in a manner that was completely to his satisfaction.... don't know..I probably have a tin ear for the third oboe on the second row....

But now the FIRST oboe.....the sound system had BETTER get THAT right or I....am....OUTTA HERE!!!

c) And, he seems to very proud of his choice of a "cutting edge" distro, but then when one uses a cutting edge something one should expect a lot of....um.....cuts along the way...

maybe he should use Ubu or Kubu.

or.....maybe just go to windblows and collect a big check.

[de_koraco]

Re: an interesting rant

Poor power management - my older laptop’s battery lasted several weeks while sleeping when I was using Windows on it. When I replaced it with Linux the battery was being drained in 2 days while the laptop was sleeping

Among other crappily written things, I just don't see a use case scenario in which you would put a laptop to sleep for weeks on end.

[Linkmaster]

Re: an interesting rant

Poor power management - my older laptop’s battery lasted several weeks while sleeping when I was using Windows on it. When I replaced it with Linux the battery was being drained in 2 days while the laptop was sleeping

Among other crappily written things, I just don't see a use case scenario in which you would put a laptop to sleep for weeks on end.

I don't put mine to sleep ever, so this issue never really bothered me, though on my computer I can suck 5.5 hours of life from the battery on Linux, and maybe 4 from Windows. Its an older computer too, and I'm surprised it even has 6 hours of batter :P [note, this is without any form of power managment other then lowest brightness possible. When I introduced screen darkening, it boosted up to easily 6 or more hours]

[de_koraco]

Re: an interesting rant

Suspend is still a sore spot on some laptops running Linux, sure, although things are not as bad as people make it out to be, but it's kinda hard to give the guy credit for stating a deficiency if he follows up on it with a ludicrous claim that it's a big problem if you can't suspend your laptop for two weeks without a charge.

[jpenguin]

Re: an interesting rant

Why does everyone always say the ATI drivers are crap? Granted, I had a rocky start when installing the propriety driver for my Radeon HD 4890, but other than the clack of Nvidea's PhysX- I've never had a complaint...

[GreyGeek]

Re: an interesting rant

ATI drivers exhibit a problem: they are tied to specific versions of kernels. If you have a PC with an ATI video chip that is more than 3 years old there is a strong possibility that when you try to install a current Linux distro you will get a "catch-22" situation. The newer versions of Catalyst won't recognize your old chip. Your ATI chip may require the 8.x version of Catalyst, which is only in ATI's archive. When you run the 8.x version of Catalyst it dies with the message that it works only with an older kernel, which you can't run because most of the libraries require the latest kernel. You are over a barrel and are stuck using the Open Source radeon driver, which may or may not get the best out of your older ATI chip.

[de_koraco]

Re: an interesting rant

Plus, a lot of the time you gotta wait for a recent release of Catalyst, and download it from the AMD site, because the jockey version blows, and it's kinda best to not use any Catalyst drivers with the latest version of X. One has to admit that the last two versions of the driver are quite ok with the tear free desktop option and the like, though, and AMD has put out a call to two more developers to work on the open source stack, along with giving the specs. I think that in two years time the OSS drivers are gonna rock, plus the Mesa/Galium stack gives great performance for desktop use, excluding a lack of temperature control.