Hi there, guys, I don't think that this discussion will lead anywhere. A few days ago, when ion3 was removed from the FreeBSDs ports system I was quite angry and looking for an alternative. There are several tiling WMs available, but none of them is a good replacement for ion3. So I'll stay with ion3 and continue reading this mailing list.
On the freebsd-ports mailing list I stated that I can understand some of Tuomos opinions, and I'm ready to give more details: I started using Linux back in the days as the 486 systems slowly where replaced with the first generation of pentiums. Back in these days installations where done with CDs and Diskettes were still widely in use. Packaging was done by extracting tarballs in the root directory. In these days people dreamed about replacing Windows. They were happy that their Linux installation was smaller than any Windows setup. Several years later things changed dramatically: Most Linux installations are bigger than everything Microsoft installs. Instead of designing something good and new people started to copy Windows just make it more easy for non Linux-users to migrate. You can select between Gnome, KDE and Xcfe, and all try to do the same. Users want applications that help them solving a problem. But now you have KDE-App that is better than everything found in Gnome and vice versa. So you'll end up having all Libs and dependancies installed anyway. Great... When someone is using an Unix for the first time he/she complains that things are different than on Linux. I'm beyond the point to discuss such stupidity, I just want to slap them in the face. Most people don't even want to know why things are handled differently and just states that "Linux is better" - without even knowing the technical background of a solution. So Linux created some kind of standard because people started to develop _for Linux_ and not Open Source in general. This led to strange effects where Unices are said to behave wrongly or are even buggy due to their own implenentation of a library/function call/whatever. Libiconv is a nice example for this. So when you open a problem record for a tool because you've problems on Solaris for example you find your problem being closed without solution because the problem is the target OS. Nice. On the other hand if there is something wrong with a program users are being told to fix it themselves because they have the code. What a chizophrenia! Most users aren't developers, and most developers aren't even good at what they are doing. I wouldn't want any user with limited coding abilities to fidle around with some source code. But exactly those users is being told that it is save to switch over to Linux instead of Mac OS X. Yeah, I see... So yes, "Modern technology mostly sucks." puts it in good terms. This is correct for most Hardware related things, too. Look at USB, the protocol just sucks because of it's overhead. But you find it everywhere. I dropped Linux two years ago after many annoyances with the kernel and related software. If you're not on the mainstream road but like something else (PowerPC, for example), you're doomed. Patches are blocked upstream or even removed after it's clear they break something x86-related. Which is just possible because something is broken in x86 anway. But instead of fixing the x86 parts the PowerPC patches were removed. Great... BTW: Linus Torvalds said a few month ago that Linux drivers are working "good enough". What the hell does this mean? It means in the end that these drivers don't work in 100% of all possible configurations. And this means that some users have to play with something else. This had side effects on all distributions, of course. If you want to make it easy for all users to work with Linux, you have to take everything into account. So it doesn't matter if a workstation needs 20 seconds to boot up, or 120. Package maintainers have to deal with every single of these issues. They have to take care of dependencies, versions and stuff. This is why I have some sympathy with them and wouldn't label them as "dickheads". I'm happy when I've a package at hand that I can use. The FreeBSD ports system was exactly what I was looking for. I dropped Debian because of issues with their ports system, and Gentoos emerge was just too slow, and fiddling around with masked packages is awfull. I guess that every package systems has its pros and cons, because it has to be compromise between the package and the distribution. You can't just include every newest version of a piece of software as long as you don't know the consequences. On the other hand some packages have too many changes/patches applied (found this on Debian where several packages have nothing in common with the default). Yes, there is a "FOSS herd", and most of the time it makes me want to cry. For me switching over to Windows is not an option, most windows users are even less educated than OSS users. BTW: Some people state that AntiAliasing is bad for the eyes since the font appears to be blurred it's stressfull to look at since the eyes try to get it properly focused. At least it adds up to the fact why eyes are getting tired infront of the screen... Christian
