A River of Fail

A lot of you KDEtards seemed to have pissed your pants when Linus recently said that he switched to Gnome.  And then a bunch of other people showed up and tried to say what this says about KDE, or what it means for Gnome, and blah blah blah.

In actuality, this whole situation is just a culmination of one FAIL after another.

First, there was KDE itself. I won’t get into the fact that C++ still makes for a terrible desktop platform from the point of view of anyone who wants to deploy an app. But after a while, even the KDE folks managed to make some people happy, and then they iterated to make a few more happy. There was progress.

Then came KDE 4.0. I’ve already written about how messed up that release was. “Hey everyone! we’re calling it a .0* !”

* it’s not really a .0

Then there was Linus, who for some god forsaken reason uses Fedora. I would already claim FAIL here, but whatever, that’s his choice.

Then there’s KDE 4.0 in Fedora. Apparently, the Fedora folks didn’t get the note about how 4.0 isn’t really 4.0. Oh, but the best part is, there’s a nice little Wiki page that talks about Fedora’s plans to include KDE4 at the time.

What was the supposed “benefit to Fedora”?

KDE 4.0 will be released a few months before Fedora 9, and is already feature-frozen now, therefore we expect this to be a relatively low-risk upgrade (as low-risk as a move to a new major version with significant changes can be). We believe that it is necessary to make this move now to keep in line with Fedora's mission of showcasing leading-edge technology.

Sweet! a low-risk opportunity to showcase leading-edge brokenness. Sign me the fuck up!

Wait, there was a “Test Plan”?

KDE-based Fedora installations will need to be tested very carefully because of the major changes. Anything which doesn't use KDE shouldn't be affected and will thus need no or only minimal retesting.

Uhh, FAIL FAIL FAIL?

So let’s summarize.

• KDE fails for producing a release that nobody wants, and expects everyone to read the fine print after naming it what everyone else in the world would interpret as stable release intended for the masses.
• Fedora fails for underestimating what it means to move to KDE4, and prioritizing shininess over workingness.
• Linus fails for not knowing better. By definition, he’s been around the Linux scene the longest. He should have known.

The best part is, if you read Linus’ actual interview, it’s clear that the man doesn’t give a flying fuck about all this. As usual, it’s all the surrounding clueless freetards with unjustified notions of grandeur that have got their panties in a knot.

BTW, I don’t know whether to write another post about it, but I tried a KDE 4.2 liveCD, and it was another fantastic example of faildom. But hey, at least I could rotate my plasmoids. Using a calculator at 45 degrees is more fun then I ever imagined.

Wobbly Compiz

Ah Compiz, the darling of the freetard community. How many users were led to carnal bliss by your wobbling windows? How many were not heard from for several weeks as they navigated the wild expanse known as the CompizConfig Settings Manager?

Oh what is that you say LWN, diligent summarizer of freetardery? You say compiz is dying? And in true open source fashion?

…the community has been affected by the withdrawal of Compiz project leader David Reveman. Reveman's departure, apparently made without any official announcement, has led to a lack of leadership, since no experienced Compiz developer appears willing to assume the role of community organizer.

All I have to say is:

AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Wasn’t this the project that was finally supposed to bring Linux ahead of the desktop OS pack? Don’t worry about shitty drivers or not being able to smoothly resize windows. This is hot shit man! I fuckin’ replaced by bedroom window with saran wrap so that, it too, could wobble.

C’mon guys. This is your star player, your poster child, the shining example of what OSS can accomplish, better and faster than those commercial companies, and you freetards can’t even keep that going. The rest of the article is depressingly typical, of course.. too few developers, too many branches, no leadership, bad code, blah blah blah blah.

But there’s a great little suggestion at the end:

But it may be that, now that the novelty of 3-D special effects have worn off, few reasons exist to develop them; the few practical effects, such as zooms, are too slight to encourage the majority to move away from standard 2-D desktops.

Wait, are you suggesting that a bunch of freetards got excited by a little bling, and went gung-ho on a new project, hyped it to the max (take that Microsoft and Apple!), without first thinking about whether they’re actually solving a user’s problem? Why, freetards would never do that… would they?

You guys need to wake the fuck up. No amount of wobbling is going to make a user switch to Linux and like it. I think they just might actually want working wireless and cool games, and fonts that don’t make you cry. But that’s just my hunch. Feel free to continue ignoring it.

And even if you’re going to keep working on this, why not try to do it in a way that doesn’t break shit that already worked? Like video? or OpenGL apps? I don’t care if a baboon wrote the drivers for my graphics card. It used to work. Now it doesn’t. FAIL.

Oh, and let me tell you a little secret: You can get wobbly windows on any platform, even Win95! Just browse to your favorite porn site, start a video, let your left hand do its thing (or your right, if you’re left-handed, of course), and at the same time drag a window around. If you don’t see it, just try harder. At the end, you might even get a cool Compiz-like liquid-on-your-screen effect.

For fuck’s sake

Did y’all not learn anything? Was all that ranting and flaming for naught?

Looks like I managed to ruffle a few feathers, but it looks like bringing about real change is going to take a bit more effort.

I had to go because, well, I didn’t have time for this shit. But now I have a little, so I’m back like drobbins. I can’t spend as much time as I used to, but hopefully enough to make Obama happy that I responded to his call to action.

A lot has happened in the last three months. Much of it awful, most of it hilarious. I won’t go into much in this post. Instead, I’ll just link to a few articles that made me smile (a hateful smile, of course). I’m rich bitches!

Actually, I’m not. Well then, at least…

I’m famous bitches!

Oh wait, nobody knows who I am.

Sigh…

• Now Supporting 16 Exabytes (Adobe's Linux Flash Blog)
• Linux-Hater's Blog, considered (ESR's blog)