Driving me insane

You know what I see a lot lately? Some luser posting some comment somewhere saying something like:

Look how far Linux has come.. it used to be that we had no drivers and you had to really choose your hardware. Nowadays, most of the drivers are there out of the box. This is better than windows!

Another fantastic example of lusers in la-la land.

In case y’all haven’t noticed, the value that a real desktop OS provides is not just in the drivers. Actually, I’d go so far as to saying it’s mostly not in the drivers. Just take a look at the Mac. People are willing to pay oodles of money for that stuff and it has the fewest drivers of any major platform.

Drivers are only just the beginning. And actually, sometimes they’re the easiest part. There’s plenty of room for standard Linux fuck-up at higher layers. Audio, for example. Mostly working alsa drivers you have (and besides, mostly everything is hda-intel these days), but a userlevel piece to manage sound? PulseAudio? Yay!

But for some reason y’all like to focus on the drivers. You know why lusers do that? Because it just happens to be the problem that people notice first. Your install Linux on your machine, your hardware doesn’t fucking show up. That’s immediate fail. Maybe some day you’ll get to a place where your hardware does show up. But does that then instantly make Linux as good as Windows or OSX? Please.

I’m actually excited to see this train-wreck happen. Once y’all have drivers, the fight will move to the next layer up. And like I said, it’s a lot harder at that layer. At least hardware doesn’t change, and most of the time, drivers just expose hardware functions. But providing sane, stable API’s, utilities, configuration GUI’s, and access to those functions to 3rd party apps with high levels of integration? Well, if X and PulseAudio are any indication, lusers will be at this for a loooong time to come.

Just let it die, please

Don’t panic everyone! Apparently openSUSE is not dead yet.

Seriously though. I wish all SUSE’s would just die. SUSE was born a crack baby, and has grown up to be a crack smoking crack dealer. Even their stupid lizard looks like it’s cracked out. I bet the lizard is really just a vessel used for crack smuggling. Running their distro is more painful than trying to make a call on an OpenMoko. If I was convicted of murder, and the punishment was solitary confinement plus the use of a computer running SuSE, I’d just hang myself. And even worse, If I had to make the choice, I’d run Gentoo before I ran SuSE.

But don’t take it from just from me. Their own developers have a nice list of why you should not use SUSE. That’s some really great marketing work guys.

I don’t think Novell never really gave a shit about openSUSE. They just saw what Redhat did with Fedora, and openSUSE is just a poor “me too” attempt. You know, Linux is about community or something. So let’s just toss our POS distro over the wall, and see if some freetards pick it up. Because, like, that would be totally awesome. The community has infinite free resources, why don’t we harness some? It’s really easy. You just make a wiki page with really tiny fonts, stick an “open” in your name, and call it a day.

Now that money is tight, their true colors show. I don’t give a shit about what any open letter says. It’s the results that matter. And the results say that you guys are getting your breakfast, lunch, and dinner eaten by RHEL, Feodra, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian. Why don’t you guys just go spend your time porting your boring management software to distros that actually matter? or work on something that people want, like C#.

But whatever, if you want to port your crack-addled configuration system to yet another UI toolkit, be my guest. Now that Qt is LGPL, you can even port things back! Yay! For those of you that haven’t seen it, here’s the wonderful UI for picking package updates.

And to help you understand that, I’ve added in green, the path that your eye is supposed to take to make sense of things.

So far the only thing I’ve heard that openSUSE is good for is to do development for SLES, and only if you happen to be a poor Novell employee. Because folks tell me that you can’t actually do SLES development using SLES. Yay!

Oh, and we can also thank Novell and SuSE for giving money to jackasses like GregKH. Why is it that the FOSS world attracts so many jackasses? Something about, how I wrote this free software for free and for freedom, so if you do anything with it, I at least get to be a totally pain in your ass. Thanks Novell, for supporting people like GregKH. Why don’t you fund him for another month so he can write a whole new deck about why Ubuntu sucks. Because that makes openSUSE just seem that much better. And it’s like, totally awesome for Linux.

Platform of the Web

Sorry. Been busy. Not too much time to write right now, but thought I’d mention this if you haven’t seen it. Firefox on Wine outperforms native Firefox on Linux. That’s just awesome guys. What was that about having a lightweight platform that runs better on less resources?

I see a lot of drive-by commentards saying something like I’m spreading FUD on behalf of MS. The more I think about it, freetards do something similar. It’s not FUD, it’s the opposite. I’m going to call it COCK. Certainty, Optimism, Conviction, and KDE. Certainty, as in you guys are sooo sure that your OS is the shit, without knowing anything about how real people use real OSes. Optimism, as in y’all are blindly optimistic when it comes to the future of your evolving shitpile. Conviction, as in it’s a fucking religion and y’all go around trying to convert people. And KDE, well just cuz KDE sucks, and y’all try to spread it around to people who don’t care, don’t want it, and dont’ give a fuck.

So please, for the love of Linus, stop spreading COCK.

Dear Abbie

If you hang out in the freetard swamp like I sometimes do, you might have heard the name Abbie Schubert. She’s an unfortunate student who drew the wrath of thousands of freetards when she blamed Ubuntu for causing her to drop out of school.

Let’s take a step back and examine this situation.

First off, Dell, YOU HAVE A FREETARD IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT. You just might want to do something about that. I suggest implementing an improved resume review process to make sure you weed them out.

Secondly, a general rule of selling computers: DON’T PUSH LINUX UNLESS YOUR CUSTOMER EXPLICITLY ASKS FOR IT.

And for good measure, ask: “Are you sure?”

Actually, try insulting their intelligence: “Are you fucking sure?”. If they still say yes, then, and only then, maybe you can sell it to them. I’d suggest a full background check. It’s in the interest of your company. You don’t want another incidient like this on your hands.

Thirdly, this episode once again shows how freetards are just out of touch with the demands of the general public.

Most people simply don’t know what Linux is. They don’t even know what an operating system is. If they’re slightly aware, they know there are two kinds of computers: PCs and Macs. They don’t know that they are essentially the same hardware with different software on top. They don’t fucking care. They use a CD provided by their ISP to get online. They use “Word” becuase that’s what everyone else uses. Word is Word. They don’t fucking care if there’s a sometimes-compatible-but-most-of-the-time-looks-like-ass equivalent in OpenOffice. They don’t give a shit about ODF or OOXML or how MS dicks people over a lot. They don’t want to care. They want to take their class and learn what they want to.

I feel sorry for you guys, really. All those little bits of frustration and anger that get built up everytime someone sends you a word document, or god forbid, a powerpoint with animations and video. It all gets piled up and unleashed on a poor unsuspecting soul, who, if anything, quite accurately represents the kinds of users that you can only dream about having.

Why don’t you guys just go back to your Slashdot circle-jerk and leave normal people alone. Your presence is not appreciated here in the real world.