Rants and Laughs 6

• GregKH, kernel hacker extra-ordinaire, couldn't figure out to convert an avi of a video from his own conference to OGG format. Go open source!
• Remember all those Linux netbooks? Well apparently they're so great, that they get returned 4 times as often as the same hardware running Windows.
• John writes about his Ubuntu upgrade experience. 

  Im sure everyone reading this is aware of that feeling when you go and use a friends brand new $2000 Windows Vista computer. The way it runs so slowly with 2GHz of processing power at its disposal, crashes all the time and takes 6 minutes to turn on. It is brand new FFS. When I am in that situation it makes me feel like the entire engineering profession has failed me.

  I got that feeling with Ubuntu this week.

•  Timothy Prickett Morgan at the Register writes about how Linux is what Windows wanted to be. Yes, an OS that supports a bazillion hardware platforms but has barely any useful applications. That's exactly what Windows wanted to be.
• An article about how open source hippies have a hard time working at large corporations. 

  If possible, larger corporations that have open source components should do what they can to leave them alone and impose the very minimum amount of bureaucratic overhead on those teams. Results matter far more than process.

• Mr. Toponce, once again, from Planet Ubuntu, talking about how Wikimedia has moved to Ubuntu. In the process, he points all the shortcomings of Fedora, for example "Fedora, although it strives for stability, never really gets that opportunity. Instead, each release is broken somehow, someway" or "Fedora places itself to be a test bed for new technologies and changes". Umm yea. Because every Ubuntu release is perfect, and Ubuntu doesn't ship bleeding edge stuff like Pulse Audio in a LTS release.. oh wait..
• Don't you love it when open source folks fight among each other? I thought this whole thing was about cooperation.
• A rant sent in by a reader about Linux and Marketing.
• Another rant that shoots down common Linux claims.
• A blog post suggesting that making your software free is a good approach amidst this global credit crisis. Right, because if you "Sell customers what they need, in their eyes its _just_ the right amount of support. Often this will exceed or equal the amount that you’d gain via licensing." And yea, when exactly are they going to buy this support? Like as a contract? Up front? So you're charging them more? And that's supposed to be attractive to them?
• And finally, I thought Linux was about freedom and choice, and that extends to Satan warshippers. Apparently, distrowatch doesn't think so.