Corporate creep in Linux? (mini-rantette)
in [Slackware]
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From: Sidney Lambe on 5 Oct 2009 16:44 On alt.os.linux.slackware, Mike Jones <Not(a)Arizona.Bay> wrote: > Been reading a bit on people complaining about KDE's "features" > and other similar "What the hell is it doing NOW?" stuff, and > I'm thinking that there is a significant drift toward corporate > convenience in Linux distro development, including Slackware > (audience gasps!). > > While "improved market share" is obviously helped by providing > installations that have all the clicky-interface controls > traditional Win- D'ohz users have come to expect (due to being > trained by M$ software to expect things to work that way) I > have a concern that the "traditional" ways of doing things are > being slowly eroded by this feature-creep. > > For example, I spent way longer writing a usbmsd loading script > than I needed to because the HAL system kept getting in the > way, and, because I now don't have a range of devs to manually > assign, I'm still expecting resources to go missing as some > automated process steals them before my scripts can use them. > > In "the good old days" we got to write things as we wanted them > and they stayed that way. These days that is becoming a luxury > as learning how to use the software that controls your hardware > is replaced by auto-this and auto-that, which don't always do > that brilliant a job, and can take longer to fix when they barf > that simply hacking a plain text config file would have done > doing things "the old way". > > I've recently switched back from using Xfce4 (the luxury > sports-estate car of GUIs) to IceWM (the open top kit-car > car of GUIs), and having recently played about with KDE (the > Prof-Pat-Pending-mobile of GUIs) I've noticed a distinct > difference in the concepts behind these GUIs, and the thing They aren't GUIs. They are GDEs (Graphical Desktop Environments). They run _in_ the GUI. I am running Linux from a GUI right now, but I am _not_ using a GDE. A GUI is just X and a simple window manager and an x-term. A GDE is a massive suite of graphical applications, libraries, scripts and utilities that run in a GUI like any other graphical executable. They are two different beasts entirely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI/History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Linux#history > that gives me cause for concern is that we appear to be sliding > toward the click-it-for-me world of Win-D'ohz with all this > semi- automation, especially as a lot of it seems to be created > and maintained by coporate development teams that encourage > increasing levels of dependancy on ever more complex software, > to do only the same jobs we were doing a decade ago with much > lighter software. > > In the 21st Century, one might expect flicker-fast boot ups, > and light- switch responses from software, but no, things > appear to be slower on average, and way more disk-space is used > up for tools that should surely by now have become sleeker and > more optimised for what they are supposed to do. > > Am I suffering from classic nostalgia here? Or is there > a distinct presence of corporate "just leave it to us" > development replacing the ingenuity of home-hackers we used to > admire so much? > > Does everything need to look feel and work like Win-D'ohz to > appeal? > > Are we being slowly trained to expect "click-me" interfaces by > default? > > Maybe its time to start up some kind of "Campaign for Real UNIX > \Linux" (CRU\L) or something? Some kind of grass-roots thing > that at least could establish that there IS still a desire on > the part of many to NOT have 5GiB of auto-stuff getting in the > way of things that used to only need about 500MiB to do pretty > much the same thing? > Exactly. And how do we shake off the corporations and get rid of their greed-motivated bloat? By saying no to the GDEs (Graphical Desktop Environments) like Gnome and KDE and Xfce and so forth. KDE, for example, is twice the size of a fully-graphical (GUI) Linux OS, and such a project is completely beyond the means of amateur Linux. If a menu-driven interface for Linux is needed or wanted, then it will have to be simple shell-script menus, comprehensible and accessible to everyone. Sid
From: jellybean stonerfish on 5 Oct 2009 19:24 On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:44:34 +0200, Sidney Lambe wrote: > They aren't GUIs. They are GDEs (Graphical Desktop Environments). They > run _in_ the GUI. A Graphical Desktop Environment is a Graphical User Interface. Your statement above is stupid.
From: Aaron W. Hsu on 5 Oct 2009 19:53 On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:24:43 -0400, jellybean stonerfish <stonerfish(a)geocities.com> wrote: > On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:44:34 +0200, Sidney Lambe wrote: > >> They aren't GUIs. They are GDEs (Graphical Desktop Environments). They >> run _in_ the GUI. > > A Graphical Desktop Environment is a Graphical User Interface. Your > statement above is stupid. Don't even try. Aaron W. Hsu -- Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis
From: Aaron W. Hsu on 5 Oct 2009 21:11 On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:59:23 -0400, Sidney Lambe <sidneylambe(a)nospam.invalid> wrote: > What an incredibly pathetic loser he is. Who, me? :-) Aaron W. Hsu -- Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis
From: Keith Keller on 5 Oct 2009 23:51
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.setup.] On 2009-10-06, Aaron W. Hsu <arcfide(a)sacrideo.us> wrote: > On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:59:23 -0400, Sidney Lambe ><sidneylambe(a)nospam.invalid> wrote: > >> What an incredibly pathetic loser he is. > > Who, me? :-) I don't think you're a loser! Then again, we're the same person, so I suppose that's being immodest. --keith -- kkeller-usenet(a)wombat.san-francisco.ca.us (try just my userid to email me) AOLSFAQ=http://www.therockgarden.ca/aolsfaq.txt see X- headers for PGP signature information |