August 27, 2009

Sometimes It Won't Work (II)

Linux user for a couple of years. Only Linux and I love it. Still, some things are wrong, they are wrong, and unfortunately, as I see it, they will always be wrong (yes I'm paid by Microsoft to say this; and yes I get the big bucks from them; and yes that's true, and unfortunately it seems like it's true for a long time now :(

subtitles green red blue and pink
(i'm waiting for when they're making them black on grey background)
change the volume, subtitles don't work
encrypted dvds usually work
non-encrypted dvds don't :)
do not request a bug to be fixed, the software comes with no warranty
each and every bug (from the tens of tens you discovered) will be fixed in the next version
new version -> happy -> sad (no fixes)
linux programmers are professionals = each and every one are biologists, botanists, geographists, working in their spare time (i wonder where the "computer science" guys are working at - either in their spare or working time)
do not, under any circumstances plan to uncompress a big archive and use another application in the same time, not even on high-end pcs
we have a completely modern os, but don't do anything else while deleting or copying a 4 GB single-file
release early - release often = great practice, but why the hell tag applications as 'stable' when they're not even in alpha working state?!
new distro available, here are the brand new amazing features:
- full desktop environments like airo-gnome (parachuters included)
- 3 games which don't crash (only 20 openend-bugs!)
- free office suite - be thankful we provide 30 DEBs to install it
- video editor (to start it and see the crashing output in the console)
- audio editor (it kind of works but... it crashes when it comes to proprietary formats and strangely it doesn't have support for Ogg vorbis or flac)
- hdd editor (you can erase your entire drive if you like, if you don't we'll do it for you for free)
- shell commander: that thingy where you have to type those strange thingies, just make sure not to press Shift for more than 3 seconds
- the 'olive', 'goat's shit' and 'you can't stand me' themes (upcoming 'i shit my pants' on its way)
- we always loved to innovative, but how: mess up a boot manager, and do not ever provide help for fixing and getting to know it (something tells me 1000 posts on a specific forum will be posted in October)

Oh and by the way, how I love this "if you don't like it, do it yourself" thing. So I was submitting a bug for what was (and is) supposed to be a "stable" distro and the answer was "does it happen in the new version of..." . It's great to see such wonderful tools and so much work going to nothing just because we get to "freeze" things up. I think freeze it's a nice word for what is going on. Make every interface possible as amateurish as possible, respect the DFSG as good as possible, even if that means "ship a 'stable' system, even if that means to ship a still crappy system'". Each and every time I open Amarok 1.4 I enjoy to see how Wikipedia doesn't work in a so-called 'stable' distro. Especially since 2.x is a state-of-art piece of software. Vision for the future, but everything is broken. And it's been 2 years already. Great work!

Stay tuned, for parts 3, 4, 5 and 6 will come soon :)

P.S. Do you still think we can fix bug number 1? and P.S.2 that was a lame post, but I doubt it wasn't true. Some things can be ignored, and there is a lot of great, awesome work going on. Take the entire KDE desktop. Wonderful. Open an application. Why do you have to resize everything? Why do you have to open a konsole and kill a plasma widget? For fuck's sake, a simple action like open a new tab, copy a file over a file and uncompressing in the same time an archive doesn't work sometimes. Drag and drop a file and resizing a window doesn't work sometimes. Sometimes you won't even get sound out of your player, even though the so called drivers should work. Sometimes just searching in a listbox will freeze the system. Sometimes previews don't work. Sometimes just opening a save file as box won't even show the files of the same filetype. We have the powerful file utility but there are still problems when trying to compile a .c file source if it doesn't have the .c extension. We have two good ways (and logical) of copying, by selecting and by using a clipboard. Do they work well in some desktop environment? Neah, they don't. We have so many libraries doing all the work. And 10 applications which use those libraries. If there is one, one single bug hard to fix in any of them, it won't get fixed. There still is a bug in KDE3 which didn't get fixed because of "Qt3 issues". (multicolumn view mode, navigating by arrows jumped files by a rule). So, we get open source software which can be modified, but that bug never got fixed, although it could've been. Is this an OS? Beause if that's an OS I'm curious how can anybody be productive working with it.