Troll-fest

Posted Jun 15, 2008 8:41 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: QUALITY ASSURANCE AND LINUX? by elanthis
Parent article: Changes to Gobuntu

Please come back to us when you have some real, concrete data.

I mean, Linux distros ain't what they used to be. The ones we had 20 years ago: they had
quality and class. But sadly they keep getting worse.

More bugs, but also more functionality

Posted Jun 16, 2008 15:09 UTC (Mon) by amosbatto (guest, #52567) [Link] (2 responses)

> I mean, Linux distros ain't what they used to be. The ones we had 
> 20 years ago: they had quality and class. But sadly they keep 
> getting worse.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but no Linux distros existed 20 years ago. The first was MCC
Interim Linux, created in Feb. 1992 by the Manchester Computing Centre. Yggdrasil was the
first widely-used distro, followed by SuSE.  

It can be argued that GNU/Linux in 1995 was more stable than today, but that ignores the fact
that GNU/Linux is orders of magnitude more complex and does a lot more tasks than it did 13
years ago. The old command line was darn stable, but practically unusable for the vast
majority of users. We could run X-Windows back in 1995, but there wasn't much that you could
do with it. There was no WYSIWYG word processor, no office suite, no music editor, no video
player/editor, no desktop publisher, or all the other things that most people want to do with
their computer. The Windows Managers available back in 1995 were nothing like GNOME and KDE
today. They allowed you to use a menu, open/close/move windows and maybe stick a icon on your
desktop.    

Given the growing complexity and the thousands of pieces of hardware which GNU/Linux now
supports, it is not surprising that there are more bugs. 

Basically you have to make a trade-off. GNU/Linux could be like Apple OSX and only support a
limited number of applications and types of hardware and only release a new version every
couple years after extensive testing.

If you want that, use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or Cent OS if you want a gratis version), but
if you choose to use Fedora/Ubuntu/Debian Testing or any of the other cutting-edge community
distros, then you have to expect the occasional bug. 

Finally, you have to ask yourself what you are personally doing to help eliminate these bugs.
When was the last time that you filed a bug report or actually created a patch to fix a bug?
Free Software may not cost you money, but it does demand your time and energy, which is often
more valuable than the money that you would have spent on proprietary software. Freedom has a
cost.

More bugs, but also more functionality

Posted Jun 16, 2008 15:47 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

> Sorry to burst your bubble, but no Linux distros existed 20 years ago. 

Which only implies that the quality of today's distributions is lower than 0 ;-)

I guess this is what happens when you answer trolls.

More bugs, but also more functionality

Posted Jun 16, 2008 15:53 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

I'm fully aware that the over-all value of Linux on the desktop today vastly exceeds that of
even 5 years ago.  My desktop can do things today that either couldn't be done back then or
which required me to waste hour upon hour learning one-off tricks or overly specialized (and
soon to disappear) tools to get something done.  (And while I don't at all mind learning about
how my computer works or learning new techniques to do things faster/better, being forced to
learn essentially useless tricks for short-lived tools to work around when I should be able to
do in minutes is not fun... I have other things I'd rather do, like talk a walk, read a book,
play guitar, get laid, etc.)

My problem is simply that the number of bugs I encounter in each distro release seems to be
getting larger and larger compared to previous releases while -- at the same time -- certain
distros are expending a massive amount of developer effort on those afore-mentioned one-off
temporary tools and hacks.

Let's take Ubuntu and GNOME as an example.  The time spent breaking Nautilus (the combination
of spatial+navigator interfaces they baked up and most of us hated), the time spent breaking
the logout dialog (with the weird button layout and confused some and just irritated others),
the time spent writing some of the custom GTK config tools that never quite worked right
instead of using GST or Red Hat's open source tools, the time spent completely rewriting the
installer as a GTK app to run on a barely-usable LiveCD, etc... if they used that time solely
to push upstream bug fixes to stable releases, we'd have a better quality OS all around.  We'd
have way less UI churn every six months (a lot of those custom Ubuntu hacks get dropped the
very next release after they realize what a waste and how broken they are) which is good for
users, we wouldn't be forced to wait 5-7 months to get critical driver fixes (like the
cups/foomatic update I needed for my printer), and so on.

A lot of people laud Ubuntu for its 6 month release cycle.  Or Fedora now, same thing.  But
really, why should I have to upgrade my ENTIRE OS - top to bottom - just to get an updated
driver or two or to get a couple fixed bugs?  (As a side note, I usually run development
distros at home, so I know full well the mindset of the Linux/FOSS user types who don't mind
constantly upgrading everything... I swear, some of us must have actual addictions to seeing
new packages being installed.)

Basically, if you want to sum up:

(a) distros need to stop customizing upstream sources without damn good cause
(b) distros should push stable updates to released OSes more often and shove whole-new distro
releases down our throats less often