Linux Hater's Blog

Bwahahah

2015-01-11T21:37:00.000-08:00

Here's one big, fat, TOLD YOU SO.

http://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-deploying-linux-was-a-disaster-going-back-to-windows

An old gem...

2013-05-06T22:52:00.001-07:00

... which apparently I missed completely:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html

> Linux is about choice.

If I could only have one thing this year, it would be to eliminate that
meme from the collective consciousness.  It is a disease.  It strangles
the mind and ensures you can never change anything ever because someone
somewhere has OCD'd their environment exactly how they like it and how
dare you change it on them you're so mean and next time I have friends
over for Buffy night you're not invited mom he's sitting on my side
again.

As a consumer, yes, you have lots of choices in which Linux you use.
This does not mean Linux is in any sense _about_ choice, any more than
because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about
choice.

The complaints up-thread about juju and pulse are entirely valid, but
the solution is not to try to deliver two things at once.  If you try to
deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between
the two.  Now you have three moving parts instead of one, which means
the failure rate has gone up by a factor of _six_ (three parts, and
three interactions).  We have essentially already posited that we have
insufficient developer effort to have 100%-complete features at ship
time, so asking them to take on six times the failure rate when they're
already overburdened is just madness.  Alternatively, we could say that
we're integrating features too rapidly, but you do that at the expense
of goal 1, to be the showcase for the latest and greatest in free
software.

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

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about where and how we draw
the line for feature inclusion, about how we increase and formalize our
testing efforts, and about how we develop and deploy spike solutions for
corner-case problems like the one device class that juju happens to do
worse than the old stack.  But the chain of logic from "Linux is about
choice" to "ship everything and let the user chose how they want their
sound to not work" starts with fallacy and ends with disaster.

- ajax

Carry on

2013-03-26T22:24:00.000-07:00

Several of you asked for a comment thread reset. Here you go. Not sure what kind of BS linux-based system falls over at 5000 comments.

Fragmentation

2012-10-30T10:11:00.001-07:00

More evidence of cluelessness. In a weird late night rage, against my better judgement, I found myself reading this article over at Phoronix, about how Ubuntu is thinking about an SDK.

A proper Ubuntu Software Development Kit would be nice for developers targeting Ubuntu SDK with a standard set of libraries/interfaces that are stable, but this isn't likely to please non-Ubuntu Linux users. This SDK that Canonical will look to push to application developers will likely be centered just around Ubuntu's needs and not the Linux ecosystem as a whole with other Linux distributions not being a focus, which could potentially lead to greater Linux desktop fragmentation.

Anyone who's been around long enough knows that any time some one of people tries to move the ball forward by doing something different, everyone thinks it's their right to crap on them. Worrying about fragmentation is the fucking dumbest thing you could do at this particular moment.

Desktop Linux is already heavily fragmented. The benefit of potentially getting major app developers to sign up far outweighs any incremental fragmentation this might create. In fact, if this actually works, I predict that suddenly every other freetard distriution will offer SDK compatibility, and then spew on about how open source is great because it allows all kinds of variation while keeping compatibility. In other words, you will see someone writing a blog post about how you can run Steam in XMonad. Because that's totally relevant, and it's the one thing that desktop Linux is missing.

It's not about how many incompatible choices there are, it's about how your users are distributed. Nobody gives a shit about how Ubuntu creating a stable SDK makes life harder for some crack-laced minty fresh Ubuntu derivative. Ubuntu already has a lot of users, if not the majority of desktop Linux users. That means this move could make desktop Linux better for the majority of users. If some big ISV signs on, it could mean that there are now 5x more Ubuntu users, making it by far the biggest majority. When Ubuntu grows the market by 5x, and owns 80% of it, the Linux desktop userbase is now less fragmented than where it started.

Fragmentation doesn't mean shit when the market is so small. Freetards argue about how things are fragmented for the 1%. Well, when you only have 1%, the problem isn't that you're too fragmented. The problem is you're not doing the right things to grow beyond 1%. Fragmentation is a problem for Android. Not desktop Linux.

skunkworks

2012-10-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

It appears as if good ol' Mr. Shuttleworth has finally seen the light.

The skunkworks approach has its detractors. We’ve tried it both ways, and in the end, figured out that critics will be critics whether you discuss an idea with them in advance or not.

In other words: freetards will be freetards.

Your free software website, for dummies

2012-07-27T23:16:00.003-07:00

There is a certain art to buidling a website for your open source project.Before you create your own, make sure you know and follow the rules. You’ll thank me later.

It’s simple, really. It’s all about the first impression.

In particular, your site’s first page must communicate the following points:

It must mention the fact that your software is open source or free, or whatever bastardly combination of the two, even before explaining what your software does. Extra points if you mention exactly which license you use, and if you help educate the masses about how speech and beer are in fact, different worldly entities. Studies show that if your users do not understand exactly whether binary linking is allowed with your software, they will not use it.
If the name of your software is an acronym, you must explain what the acronym stands for, with even more confusing terms.
You must note which programming language your software is coded in, because that’s the first thing that any potential user will care about.
You must note how your program is modularized, and anyone can add modules and customize it to actually do what it was supposed to just do in the first place.
You must mention that your software is localized. Because, crappy software is somehow better when it speaks your language.
You must immediately jump into a “recent announcements” section, which has items that only the 3 developers on your project would possibly understand or derive any value from. Extra points if you have an embedded commit log.
You must mention that your software runs on at least 5 irrelevant platforms.
A personal favor, please note whether your application is multithreaded. I only download multithreaded software.
Refer to your application as a framework. Since all good great applications are framework. Firefox is a browsing framework. Gimp is a image processing framework. iTunes is a music listening framework. See?
Don’t ever call it an installer. Call it a binary distribution. Better yet, make sure the only way to install is through github. Make sure your github page offers no clues on what to do once you’re there.

There. Now you’re equipped to go create a site can compete with the best of ‘em. You’re welcome.

Pester mingo

2012-03-17T15:03:00.001-07:00

https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfRzNe

Sigh. About 7 years too late, buddy.

Ahahahaha

2012-03-13T14:20:00.001-07:00

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/idealism-vs-pragmatism-mozilla-debates-supporting-h264-video-playback.ars

Dear Mozilla. Your users don't care. Please make a useful browser. kbyethx.

DBus! It's Evil!

2012-02-15T13:12:00.000-08:00

So, please support choice and freedom by implementing programs the right way instead of the Linux/Gnome/DBus way.

Oh boy.

http://blog.ngas.ch/archives/2011/12/13/the_destructive_desktop__mdash_linux_in_trouble/index.html

here we go again

2011-11-22T23:02:00.000-08:00

Just found out about u1db.

The Ubuntu One team have started work on u1db, a project codename for an easy-to-use database API layer which can work on any platform (Ubuntu, web servers, Windows, smartphone platforms) with the existing native databases (SQLite, MySQL, API layers, everything)

Is it just me, or does this sound like the database equivalent of pulse audio? I can't wait until we have the ultimate abstracted UI. The one that lets you watch porn in the same way across all platforms. It will have to be open source, of course.

Seriously though. If I've learned anything, it's that OSS projects can't make a choice. And when you can't make a choice, what do you do? You support all options! Yay! How do we support all options? An abstraction layer! Yay! Abstraction layers are fun to write! Yay!

gold

2011-09-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2011/06/focusing-on-the-next-linux-client.html Opens with:

"Way back in 1999 I predicted a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. (I was targeting better than Mac OS type numbers, in the 10-15% range.) It was clear back then that Linux had found a substantial adoption as a server OS, and it seemed only time before the desktop adoption rivaled at least “the other desktop”.

progress

2011-08-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

In true open source fashion, the community debates the most important issue of the day

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678775

I for one, think we should remove the kernel version number from dmesg output. I mean, it's changing all the time anyways.

twat

2011-04-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

I've revived my twitter account.

http://www.twitter.com/hatinglinux

I still think it's kinda lame, but posting there is just easier. Light-weight micro ranting ftw.

Sounds like fun

2011-03-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/

tl;dr of the tl;dr: C.L.U.S.T.E.R.F.U.C.K.

it buuuuuuurns

2011-02-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

Bwahahahahaahah Nokia.

What a shit show in the making. It keeps getting better. And then of course there's this article. Intel, if you have to say you're not blinking, then you're blinking.

Quoth Intel:

Our strategy has always been to provide choice when it comes to operating systems, a strategy that includes Windows, Android, and MeeGo. This is not changing.

Uh huh. Your strategy has been to develop a shitty choice that goes along less shitty choices. If you're not building the "best" and just building a "choice", that has fail written all over it.

And I love all these blogs claiming they should have gone for Android. HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY USED WP7? Seriously. Just try it. It's at least as good as Android. And it doesn't have the, "lets be like linux distros and invent a new home screen UI for every damn phone" syndrome. OMG BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE COPY AND PASTE! WTF people, Apple proved that you could ship a good phone w/o it. I'd much rather use WP7 w/o c&p than Android with it.

These bloggers smell of the "oh the last time I used anything Microsoft was windows 98 and I'm not touching anything from them again!". Is there a TM for that?

Nokia, with it's strategy of symbian, than maemo, then symbian, then meego, then qt, then symbian, then linux, then symbian, then open source symbian, then gtk, then qt, has clearly shown the open source is the way! Maybe that CEO dude meant to say open source is the burning platform. As in, it burns you every time you try to build on it.

Moar flames

2011-01-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

Jeez, linux can only handle 5000 comments? What's up with that? MySQL FTW! Carry on.

Vuvubuntu

2010-07-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

I just realized. Lusers are the vuvuzelas of the software world.

OMG OMG OMG. In addition to totally fucked window controls, we now have a font!

I'm so excited about this thing because it's going to fix so many problems. It's going to make my 30 inch monitor work, and give me awesome 3d graphics, and all the game companies will port to linux to take advantage of this font, and my wireless problems will go away. And it will make Intel open source their gpu, and Microsoft will roll over and die.

I mean seriously. That's what happened when they release Bitstream Vera, and Liberation. Right? All the free desktop was missing was a fucking font.

Oh btw, will this make other websties that specify the standard web fonts look good? No?

Wut

2010-05-10T10:30:00.001-07:00

I was just taking a look at S-man's announcement for Ubuntu Unity and Light versions. Most of it is blah, except for this tidbit:

... The dual-boot, web-focused use case is sufficiently different from general-purpose desktop usage to warrant a fresh look at the way the desktop is configured. We spent quite a bit of time analyzing screenshots of a couple of hundred different desktop configurations from the current Ubuntu and Kubuntu user base, to see what people used most. We also identified the things that are NOT needed in lightweight dual-boot instant-on offerings...

Wut. Ok. Let me learn you something. I've seen lots of Linux screenshots in my time. If you were actually optimizing for the freetard, basically what you'd have is a desktop with two semi-transparent terminals. One tailing a syslog, and another showing an irc session. Oh and like some pager with a bazillion virtual desktops that are totally useless. Oh, and don't forget the scantily-clad, objectified female as the wallpaper image.

As for the rest of the article? OMG, You put a fucking dock on the side. In OSX and Win7, doing the same thing takes like 3 seconds. Do you really need to write a whole giant announcement about it?

Oh and I like the two sections at the end, about "Relationship to Gnome Shell" and "Relationship to KDE". Even the S-man has figured out that you can't just go "innovate" in the OSS community without shouting out to everyone. Because we don't want to piss off the ten people who care about Gnome Shell or KDE. Fuck. Could you imagine an Apple announcement saying something like "Relationship to Windows"?

A year later

2010-04-27T19:52:00.001-07:00

Woah, Lundude is at it again.

Don't worry, it's mostly the same stuff. Linux Desktop sucks. It still sucks. Even a year later. When it's sucked for the last N years, why do you think N+1 will make it so much better? But I'm sooooo sure that there's just a business plan hiding under there somewhere, and I'm the only person to think this hard about it..

The rest of us know that if there were a business model that made sense and could be presented in a 45 minute slide-deck in some classroom, then someone would have done it already.

But I had some other funny thoughts:

The big players in the linux desktop are the distributions. They distribute stuff. They're somewhat ok at distributing their own stuff. But they're supremely awesome at making it hard for third parties to distribute their stuff. It's the distributions (and more precisely, the fact that there are so many of them) that make the actual distributing hard. Go figure.

Another thing. Why are y'all _still_ focused on random niche desktop thick client apps. Linux's problem is not a lack of thick client apps. Hardly anyone uses them, other than Office. And besides, that problem is solved. Distributing thick client apps to generic PC hardware is MS's turf. You wouldn't try to take on Google's search advertising business with a rag tag group of volunteers would you? So why the fuck would you go after MS's bread and butter? You win by solving the problem in a new better way, not making the problem worse in a shittier way.

Besides, the desktop is dying. Web apps are taking over. And it so happens that Linux is in a pretty good place to be an awesome web terminal. Even Google thinks so. But it still takes a google to herd enough people together to produce something like ChromeOS. Y'all could have probably put something like that together in as much time, if you could only focus and stop chasing after Microsoft's sinking boat.

Y'all bitch an complain that nobody writes apps for Linux. Boo hoo. Hardly anyone writes apps for windows either these days. They all write for the web. You got your fucking level playing field that you've been bitching about for years. But I'm sure it's still going to take some eeeevil corporation with a giant clue stick to show y'all how it's done.

A tale of ogg

2010-03-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

Oh Ogg. The format that trapped many a user's music files on lowly Linux desktops. I know I've got some oggs somewhere that I can't listen to any more in itunes. Or any device that I care about, for that matter. And I'm too anal to re-encode them into the only format that matters: mp3.

Then today I saw this nice little tear down of Ogg. I'm not going to write much here since this article has a beauty of it's own. But I will quote a bit:

More commonly, the Ogg proponents will respond with hand-waving arguments best summarised as Ogg isn't bad, it's just different. My reply to this assertion is twofold:
Being too different is bad. We live in a world where multimedia files come in many varieties, and a decent media player will need to handle the majority of them. Fortunately, most multimedia file formats share some basic traits, and they can easily be processed in the same general framework, the specifics being taken care of at the input stage. A format deviating too far from the standard model becomes problematic.
Ogg is bad. When every angle of examination reveals serious flaws, bad is the only fitting description.
The third reaction bypasses all technical analysis: Ogg is patent-free, a claim I am not qualified to directly discuss. Assuming it is true, it still does not alter the fact that Ogg is a bad format. Being free from patents does not magically make Ogg a good choice as file format. If all the standard formats are indeed covered by patents, the only proper solution is to design a new, good format which is not, this time hopefully avoiding the old mistakes.

Wow, doesn't this sound fucking familiar? Oh wait, %s/Ogg/Linux Desktop/g ... Ahhh... there we go.

They took our codes!

2010-02-03T12:16:00.001-08:00

Huh. GregKH is complaining. Again. Big suprise.

Short story: Google uses Linux to create Android. Google makes some kernel modifications, in their own tree. Google has no time to deal with kernel community to re-architect their stuff so that it can go mainstream. GregKH whines like a baby.

Dude, get a clue. Seriously.

You can go on and continue to waste keynotes at conferences (yea, I'm sure the the organizers are super happy about that) to complain about people "stealing" your code. Waaa Waaa. Someone took my hippy license and took my code and isn't giving it back. Waaa.

Hello? Did someone not realize that Google is basically all about stealing Linux and "forking" it? Do you think that google server that you're hitting is really running bleeding edge Linux 2.6.35RC62? No, they're probably running some 2 year old kernel with their own patches, because they want to insulate themselves from upstream idiocy. They're not going to give you those patches, and even if they did, they probably couldn't because of upstream churn.

When it comes to Android, Google has done what the license asks. Make all the modifications public. If you and your rag-tag bunch of kernel developers want _their_ HOT new shit, the suck it up and bring the code in. It looks like they've even produced patches and sent you reviews. Don't like what they got? well, they're already doing more than what's required, so stop complaining.

You see, they've got this product to ship. And they've also got this competitor called Apple. You may have heard of them. So, yea, they _could_ sit their rearchitecting their interfaces so that some kernel dev which they don't pay and don't give shit about can feel like he's important... and watch Apple eat their lunch.

Or they could say fuck you guys. We're the one that's actually building something here. We'll get around to it, maybe, after we win.

Seriously, has this guy shipped real software before? And before someone gives the obvious answer, shipping upstream kernel releases does not count as "shipping" or "real". Just go look at the redhat kernel to see why that's the case.

Also, why go after google? There are tons of folks that do the same shit. They're just not as big. By doing so, you just look opportunistic and self-centered. Me me me me me me.

PS. I was thinking, maybe he should change the "staging" tree to the "hostage" tree. I mean, that's basically what it's used for.

BM's

2010-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like there's at least one business model out there that kinda works for companies shipping open source software: be some search engine's bitch.

Mozilla is Google's bitch. And now Ubuntu is Yahoo's bitch. Maybe Novell will be Bing's bitch?

I gotta better idea for you Ubuntu. Why don't you take your awesome hardware auto detection capabilities, and make it such that every time you install, you hit a server, which in turn causes an instant live auction between bing, google, and yahoo, who will bid money to make their search engine the default for that install.

I'm warning all you freetards. Some day, Ubuntu's installer is going to ask you if you want to install the google/yahoo/bing toolbar. And it will be present on every single window. Even your panel, and your xterm. Every shell command that you mistype will result in a google search. Then canonical can make ass loads of money and give you a crappy desktop system for free. It's going to be awesome. And some search engine will get like a hundred new people visiting their site.

BTW, it's amazing how desparate Yahoo looks at this point. A me-too search engine in bed with a me-too operating system. That's some nice thought leadership there Yahoo. Because you know, Google's all going to be like, we need to find some other distro that we can sponsor. Wait, what? They're building their own distro? It's going to ship on supported hardware and be somewhat usable? And it's based on Linux? ha ha ha. That's bullshit. Everybody knows that open source products won't succeed unless they have the support of the FSF. The FSF knows that the people want. Please. Stop your nonsense.

Some other notes for yahoo:

- These are Linux users. They are too cheap to click on your ads.

- These are freetards. They think it's cool to use adblock and pirate music.

So yea, uh, have fun trying to actually generate revenue from them.

Bad karma

2009-11-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Lets see, it's been almost 18 months since I originally posted Evolution of an Ubuntu user, but looks like they still haven't got their fucking act together.

I know a lot of you freetards out there dream of jobs where you can work on Linux, write code for Linux, and pen flowery blog posts that make it up on hacker news, but let me tell you, unless you're one of the few who are hired by Redhat to contribute nothing to their bottom line and instead work on their playground sand castle known as Fedora, it's going to suck.

So anyways, I had the awesome opportunity to upgrade to Karmic. Cuz I know, like shuttleman says, every Ubuntu release is the best fucking Ubuntu release ever.

Problem #1? Using update-manager to upgrade Ubuntu from behind the firewall is ass-slow. Yep, you guessed it. They try to do something that doesn't respect http_proxy and has to time-out before progressing. What year is this? really guys? Just because Ubuntards work out of their basement, doesn't excuse you from not supporting one of the most common practices in company network environments. I mean, it took us like five years to get you to add that damn option in the installer so that it didn't choke on a fat dick trying to the apt repositories. Now this. Amateur.

And while on the subject of proxies, it looks like your new shiny empathy client doesn't support proxies. Yep, there's a bug for that. Yep that's some empathy right therr. Obviously you totally understand your users get their shit done. Otherwise you wouldn't change my default chat app that fails to download my contact list, even from a server that's behind the proxy.

Problem #2? Wee! Something about my xconfig borked during an upgrade. And now I get a fucking strobe light prompt. I know you want to always give me a challenge to get a reasonable display, but do you actually have to try to damage my eyesight? What the fuck happened to bullet proof X? oh, right maybe that was only for intrepid, because, you know why add a useful feature if you're just going to keep it around for every subsequent release and not rewrite it?

Problem #3? Google reader on firefox is crazy slow. I mean, ff3.5 on jaunty worked just fine. But it's ok, nobody uses google reader. Yep, there's a bug for that, too, with a bunch of awesome Ubuntu contributors saying "me too!" "me too!" OMFG this bug is going to get fixed if we all keep saying me too! How many users does it take to fix a bug? None, you dipshit. You need a dev that gives a fuck.

Problem #4? I'm sure pulseaudio has something to do with this, but the volume on my computer appears to have exactly 3 notches between quiet and SUPER FUCKING TRIPLE SONIC BOOM YOU WIN! Ubuntu -- damaging your senses, one sense at a time. Maybe Linux is totally awesome if you're blind and deaf, and you just connect a serial console to your ass.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's a bug for that. Filed in March 2008!

Ok fine, I'm totally going to schedule three work days to upgrade when Lactating Leper comes out. If only there was some calendaring app that I could use to remind me.. because as far as I can see, Evolution is actually devolving. Come on Novell! just a little more. You've almost killed it! Only a few more smacks!

Target: Lusers

2009-10-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Just came across this wonderful email from the Fedora Advisory Board. In it, they try to describe who they're creating the Fedora distribution for. Here are their four criteria:

is voluntarily switching to Linux
is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer
is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with Fedora
wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser

This seems like a reasonable thing to do. I mean, it's always good to try to understand your user, right? Unfortuantely, the above description fails fantastically in so many ways. Look closely, and you'll see what they're really trying to say:

You're a freetard. If you're voluntarily switching to Linux, so that means you already find intrinsic value in it. Well, the software itself isn't up to par with the other stuff around, so what does Linux have that other's don't? We all know the answer to that one: freedom. But you know, the best way to improve your general purpose operating system is to build it for the tiny number of specific people who have already chosen to use your system. Everybody knows that.
You don't need any support, cuz you ain't gettin' any!
You can tolerate bugs, because our shit is full of bugs. You are also willing to file bug reports, only to see them linger forever. Another way of reading that is: you don't actually have a real life and you don't have anything else that you need to get done.
You only need a subset of features that Windows 98 had.

Brilliant! I think they've just created a nice 4-point summary why Linux is still on the sidelines of the desktop OS battlefield.

Here's an idea

2009-09-21T17:41:00.001-07:00

If you're a freetard, but you need to run Windows at work or something, I've got an idea for a utility that will keep you true to the cause.

Well, a mockup for it anyways. I call it kanye-freetard-notify: