> Sick of the lack of quality is perfectly acceptable, but you know what > fixes that? People who care about it actually *working* on it. > Complaining about it doesn't help anyone!
You're right in theory, and probably also in practice. However, as a skeptical and pessimistic by nature (and by experience: I believe not in progress, but in human regress, and this has nothing to do with technological progress), I fear that the OS field might eventually reach the status we're now seeing in the smartphones field: 1. everyone curses his or her smartphone, no matter the make and model, for various design flaws, hardware or software (always software too); 2. what happens is that newer smartphones models are issued (updating the firmware for existing/old models is discouraged in this consumerist society), with different design or implementation flaws (including software issues); 3. now curses his or her smartphone, just a different model. Sticking to maturity and stability is generally a sign of stagnation, not a sign of progress. However, nowadays everything is incredibly complex as compared to, say, 50 years ago. At the same time, no matter what we believe, our capabilities of dealing with complex situations, and the procedures of managing such processes are not satisfactory enough. Through complexity, we've reached a level of fragility unforeseen before. And that includes software. When I'm looking at the hundreds of thousands of bug reports at an upstream project (KDE, GNOME) or distros like *buntu, Fedora, EL, I cannot but jump to the conclusion that the whole process is out of control, and the bug-fixing (or even bug triaging) is nothing else but a lottery. R-C
