The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective

Posted Dec 28, 2008 16:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

you really should not attack people on your side (at least partially).

I was responding to a post that voiced the opinion that the XO is becoming obsolete (and listed many Sugar problems as justification). this is a person who went out of their way to conribute by spending their hard earned money to pay double price for a device.

your response annoys people the same way that a bug report that's responded with a message that says 'patches are welcome' annoys people

attacking people who contribute becouse you don't think that they contribute enough (or in the 'right way') harms the community for more than it ever helps.

I have purchased 6 XOs through the G1G1 program (two for my own use/testing, four for relatives), I do contribute (via testing)

however, that's not necessarily the important point.

the OLPC people decided to deploy a system that is in many ways unusable (for the reasons that were in the message I replied to), and they made it worse by doing so in a way that made it very hard to use any of the standard tools. they then push the result as the most user friendly version ever.

while I test Sugar (on the stripped down Fedora shipped with the OLPC) I think that this combination is a big mistake, and I'm not interested in spending a lot of time trying to convince Fedora to change when there are other distros that give me a much better starting point, so I spend more time working with the other distros that I can run on the XO.

OLPC Sugar problems

Posted Dec 28, 2008 17:29 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Sorry if it sounded that way. I was just trying to point out to other readers here that interested parties can help out with the interface without owning an OPLC themselves.

OLPC Sugar problems

Posted Dec 29, 2008 0:50 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

sorry for taking your comment in ways you didn't intend. I just have had too many times when a discussion of tools has gone

person 1: X has these problems try using Y

person 2: why don't you contribute code to fix X instead

sometimes the right answer isn't to work on product X to 'fix' it (in some cases the 'fix' is in direct conflict with the goals of project X), but to just switch to a different option

The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective

Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:15 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> I spend more time working with the other distros that I can run on the XO.

Now this is interesting. What distro do you find to be the most usable? Is there anything that will sleep when the laptop is closed, doesn't burn through the battery in an hour, lives agreeably in flash, and only takes an hour or so of my time to install and configure?

In reply to vonbrand, I'm personally uninterested in contributing to Sugar. It feels slow, incomplete, and poorly designed. And I disagree with its claim that existing UIs are so broken that the baby must be chucked out with the bathwater. If it had started as a set of extensions to a tried and true desktop environment (unimportant which one), I feel the XO would have been generally usable by now and the whole project would have seen far more momentum. Alas.

The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective

Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:56 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I'm mostly running them from USB sticks at the moment (since I'm experimenting with several options)

that being said, I have had the best results so far with the debxo images (debian)

I expect the ubuntu option to work about as well, but the one image I tried didn't want to work from the USB (looks like a bootloader being hard-coded for the SD card slot, but I haven't tried it yet)

all the debian options and the ubuntu option are small enough to fit in the built-in flash (unlike the fedora 10 image)

none of these do power management well yet, the problem is that the OLPC team went their own way (again) and instead of teaching the kernel about the power management options they created a userspace tool that accesses the hardware directly to do the power management. until this gets fixed (which _is_ on a short-term roadmap) it's just about impossible to do power management properly without running the full olpc distro. I see battery life in the 2-3 hour range with no power savings.

but things are changing rapidly, a month or so ago none of these distros was able to access the game keys on the screen, or control the screen brightness and mode. at this point I believe that the XO can run a kernel compiled from raw kernel.org sources (also not possible a few months ago)

it's hit the point where the various options can be used, so more people are trying them, each doing small tweaks to fix things and the results are getting combined.

Sugar is so slow that KDE and Gnome both seem fast by comparison. I don't have enough experiance with LXDE or Awesome to really use them, but they are considerably smaller (and should be faster)