Re: ::scr open sores

[Simon Batistoni <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14/01/02 12:42 +0000, simon wistow wrote:
> Hark at my witty pun! 
> 
> Open Source is crap. It's like JeffK sez "Lunix si for hippies and
> peopal who liek to spend all day downloading programs that dont work!"
> 
> JeffK be da man.
> 
> Seriously though. I keep being disapointed by Open Source. I maan, It's
> not like I'm in love with Microsoft but at least stuff fucking works
> (until it crashes). And the interfaces don't (as much) suck donkey jism.

Gah, quit moaning you fule. If you really want the moon on a stick
then I'll place an order with NASA, but you could try just calming
down a bit first :) 

Different interfaces suit different people. Personally, I'm quite at
home using Windowmaker on my desktop at work, and on my slightly
more powerful laptop, I'm running gnome, which is extremely
windows-like out the box, but has more flexibility, virtual desktops
and other nice tweaks.

All the machines I run linux on are far stabler than *any* Windows
box, running *any* version of Windows, I've ever had.

Seriously, all of the criticisms you level at various systems seem a
bit, well, moon-on-a-stick ish. Do you really expect *any* software
to be perfect? The human mind is simply not capable, whether working
singly or as a team, of creating a nicely laid-out, coherent complex
system. 

Things need to work quickly, to meet business or other deadlines.
Quality gets sacrificed for speed. This will always happen. It
happens in commercial products (ask anyone who's ever run Oracle
about the quality of its install scripts) and it happens in open
source. Deal.

Even with the most careful planning, once creation starts, things go
screwy. A quick "duct tape" hack to get something working stays in
place for years, because although it's icky, it works.

> * Linux. 
> It's shit. It's not actually as good as BSD (ok, so it's getting there
> but they don't even have a good, stable VM). As a server OS it's good,
> I'll give it that. It seems to be gaining a niche in the embedded
> market. But, as a Desktop? Purleeeease. 

I use it all the time as a desktop. My dual-boot laptop currently enters
Windows only when I need to read a graphics-heavy Word doc that some
fsckwit's sent me, or I need to use the hideous proprietary remote
admin tool that one of my servers requires. I find it clinical and
unwieldy, and I'd rather be in Linux, thank you very much.

Perhaps your problem is that with Linux, you do need to work a
little more to make it what you want it to be. In Windows, you
don't have the choice, but in Linux, you can use hundreds of
different windowmanagers with differing approaches to the desktop,
and you can configure them all in myriad ways. But there are some
good, stable ones, and several of them closely emulate Windows and
MacOS, so if that's what you like, that's what you can have.

Now admittedly, I'm not a typical user, but I think your verdict of
Linux as a desktop is based on a single bad experience with
Mandrake, and I think you're wrong.

> * Apache. 
> It's actually pretty shit. Really. You can write your own HTTP server in
> Perl which is faster. But it does have a huge extensible API. So Apache
> 2 is better but if a commercial company to $long_time to release its
> next version which wans't as shit everybody'd scream blue murder. It
> just happens to be better than everything else out there. 

Your point being? You're complaining that the best webserver
produced by human endeavour (which is what you're saying it is)
isn't good enough. Now either human beings fundamentally can't build
webservers, and we should just give up and switch off the web, or
the right improvements just haven't been made yet.

But here's where open source is great. You can quit moaning, and fix
what you think's wrong. If you hate IIS, then tough shit matey, cos
unless MS deem to listen to your points, it'll be slow and buggy and
illogical and that's just too bad. But if you think you can speed up
Apache, then delve inside, do it, and sumbit the changes back to the
authors. Everyone's a winner! Am I missing something here?

> * GCC
> Have you looked at the ASM it produces? It's a joke. Plus it has huge
> quantities of bugs. It's an amateurish compiler with an (admittedly)
> nifty front end/back end decouplement (how many times have you actually
> used that though) but it would be laughed out of any commercial compiler
> or compiler research lab.

So keep the good bits and rebuild the rest.

> * Mozilla
> /me raises an arched eyebrow

It's fashionable to diss Mozilla in that knowing way, as if "it's so
obviously bad that we don't need to explain why". And I agree that
it does have problems, mainly in the speed of development, and the
front end. But you've used galeon - the rendering engine is
shit-hot, and fast as lightning. And Moz can be clunky, but it
works, on a daily basis, and the only thing it really chokes on is
java. IE6, meanwhile, won't stay running for more than 10 minutes on
any machine I've used it on.

> ...no decent window manager / display engine and not a single good
> mail client.

I'm using mutt. It's the best mail client I've ever used. There's
nothing more that I could want from it. YMMV.

I like WindowMaker. I like the latest Gnome. I think they're streets
ahead of anything out of Redmond, and I prefer them to MacOS,
although hanging around the Mac Mafia has made me more appreciative
of the deep thought that's gone into the Apple Interface Guidelines
(and more incredulous of the fact that OSX is throwing them away).

The display engine has deep problems, because it's lots of hacks
built on top of each other, but for me it works, and it doesn't get
in my way.


Sorry if this is a bit flamey, but I think you're being
unreasonable. And you always moan that we don't argue back at you
enough on this list :)

sb