Linux is not about choice (2008)

https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html

by 1_player • 5 years ago

8 4 5 years ago

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togaen• 5 years ago

“Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug.”

Amen.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

The issue is that Red Hat's solution to this has almost always been Another Competing Standard.

Situation: There are 140 different desktop environments.
"140! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard desktop that covers everyone's use cases!"
Situation: There are now 141 different desktop environments.

The only difference between this and the XKCD comic is that there's no one saying "Yeah!" to Red Hat's ideas.

junon• 5 years ago

I completely agree with the author here. Linux is vastly unattractive to me as a desktop environment pretty much for this reason; everything is customizable to the nth degree, which cool whatever, but a lot of it simply doesn't work.

The audio server examples are a great example, and probably the worst offenders; sound management on just about any OS is terrible (MacOS does it best, currently) but Linux is the worst. I couldn't even build JACK1 or 2 from source a couple of years ago and the development efforts were mostly dead.

And don't get me started on graphical environments.

I love Linux, I love what it's all about, but I don't think I'll ever install another desktop environment again. I use WSL and while I despise everything about Windows, at least it works.

Consequently, this whole area of frustration is what got me into OSDev to begin with...

hulitu• 5 years ago

If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two.

And they delivered alsa and pulseaudio (which used alsa). And now it's alsa and pipewire. SW is hard. Why not develop alsa ? Why do they had to do pulseaudio which shiped broken and needed years to work properly. There is a big difference between choice and being forced broken SW because "it is inovative". (the only inovation Pulseaudio brought me was using killall -9 pulseaudiod to make sound work again).

The problem with linux is the same as with all SW: every couple of years comes someone who declares that almost everything done until now is crap and must be forget to make room for the latest and greatest AI/ML/UI/UX concept. They are never able to make something that lasts (see Gnome and KDE - every release is incompatible with the previous and future versions).

Linux is not about choice (2008)

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