On 03/28/2013 04:49 PM, Lonnie Olson wrote: > On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 4:19 PM, Daniel Fussell<[email protected]> wrote: >> And so they chased after an OS that was once again dumbing down the >> interface to meet the intelligence of it's "users". This might work for >> the general masses. But someone that seeks enlightenment and truth >> wants an interface the pulls them up, not dumbs them down. We seek an >> intelligent interface that improves out lives. Dumbing down the >> interface just dumbs down the user. And those users are too dumb to >> switch to a better OS anyway, so why chase it. Give people with the >> desire to have a free mind find their way out of the matrix a place to >> go. Do shove them back in an call it an improvement. > I strongly disagree with this sentiment. These new desktop interfaces > are not dumbing down the interface. They add tons of features that > previously required tons of third party addons and configuring to > work. Features that increase productivity. I for one couldn't live > without built-in instant search for apps, files, etc. > > They do remove some of the insane level of options in the "control > panels" that more often than not tends to break stuff > (http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill). However they continue to > provide a rich set of customization through hidden settings or > extensions for advanced users. I would argue if you truly only cared > about customization, you would be using KDE, E17 or some other strange > window manager.
That's why I run KDE. I had hoped Gnome3 would be better with memory usage, and I'd have a decent alternative to KDE4. But for one thing, I couldn't get past it repositioning and resizing my modal dialogs to cover the main window I was working on every time I opened a dialog. It feels like my desktop wants to play peek-a-boo with me! And the applications list is so overwhelming, my wife refuses to even look at the computer it's on. Many desktops she has complained about for a week or two; KDE4 a little longer. Gnome3 and every windows version since Vista have been the only interfaces she boycotts. And smartphones in general. She won't talk on mine even if I answer the call for her. > systemd is not just about booting faster, it's about adding tons of > init features that are sorely needed, and those that have been in use > through ugly hacks before. Dependencies, LSB-headered init scripts have done this since at least 2007. Yes, it can be an ugly hack, and I prefer using rc.local for my own custom stuff. But that's what rc.local was for anyway. > socket activated daemons, Internet Supervisor/Superserver. Been around since BSD, and at least two very capable versions of it: bsd-inetd and xinetd. Take your pick. > process watching, inittab, the various heartbeat/pacemaker cluster stacks, hacked-and-cron-ed process watchers. No, none are pretty, or totally reliable, I'll give you that. But I suspect systemd will have all the constant respawn problems of inittab, and the complexity of cluster and/or local process watch dogs. > etc. Also, creating new services/jobs is much > easier than trying to hack together a custom init script. You may have something there, but the simplicity and transparency of init scripts was one of the major selling points over the non-opaque, constantly-broken service managers Windows uses. Now we're following suit. What's next, a registry? > > Yes, there will need to be some initial learning to be done to > understand the new ways of doing things, but it's not much more than > the initial learning you had to do with SysV Init scripts + distro > specific handling of them (chkconfig vs update-rc.d) Agreed, and I am being hard on something I know less about than even Gnome3. But it sure feels like several other good ideas that were all one step forward and two back (akonadi, nepomuk, Gnome3, upstart, grub2, AMD/ATI, Nokia/Qt, the plague, etc) ;-Daniel /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
