Corporate creep in Linux? (mini-rantette)
in [Slackware]
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From: Mike Jones on 9 Sep 2009 18:47 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 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? Or am I just getting old(er)? Scuse... The meds nurse is here. Later. ;) -- *===( http://www.400monkeys.com/God/ *===( http://principiadiscordia.com/ *===( http://www.slackware.com/
From: dae3 on 9 Sep 2009 20:45 Mike Jones <Not(a)Arizona.Bay> wrote: > 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? I'd be among the supporters of such a campaign. Also, should Slackware become too bloated, I bet another distro - possibly LFS� based - would spring up to fill the niche for those who like their OS to be lean and speedy. � <http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/> -- ~> cat /etc/*-{version,release}|head -n1 && uname -moprs|fold -sw72 Slackware 12.2.0 Linux 2.6.27.7-crrm i686 AMD Turion(tm) 64 Mobile Technology MK-36 GNU/Linux
From: ~kurt on 9 Sep 2009 21:26 dae3 <7252d9cf(a)example.invalid> wrote: > > become too bloated, I bet another distro - possibly LFS� based - would > spring up to fill the niche for those who like their OS to be lean and > speedy. I believe pretty much every distro is "From Scratch". The problem is getting the right team that can make it lean and speedy, yet work on a large variety of hardware, and supply commonly used applications. Also, it is nice for the distro to not get too hung up on only supplying "free" software. For example, many distros will not distribute the Sun JRE, and opt for the FSF one, which does nothing but give Java a bad name.... - Kurt
From: Keith Keller on 9 Sep 2009 22:11 On 2009-09-10, ~kurt <actinouranium(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > For example, many distros will not distribute the Sun > JRE, and opt for the FSF one, which does nothing but give Java a bad > name.... Perhaps that's the goal of the FSF? ;-) --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
From: Old Man on 9 Sep 2009 22:17
Mike Jones wrote: <snip> > 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". In the good old days, I set a jumper or a dip switch and it stayed set. I also find auto-this and auto-that frustrating sometimes, but that's because I already knew how it worked and how to fix it before, and now I have to learn how this new stuff works and how to fix it. And I'm lazy, so the problem lies with me, not the change in methods. Besides, this is computing. Automation is the point of it all, isn't it? > > 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 that gives me cause for concern is that we appear to be sliding > toward the click-it-for-me world of Win-D'ohz Why? are you afraid KDE is going to kill off IceWM? Hasn't happened in ten years. Heck, fvwm is still being maintained. > 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. Again, automation is what computers and software are supposed to do. And what does it matter that employees of corporations participate in development? Do you really thing they are working "to encourage ... dependency on ... complex software?" Maybe, more likely, they are working to solve perceived problems. > 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. My phone boots really, really fast; and so does my TV set (which runs Linux, btw), and either is more powerful than the first Cray supercomputer. As for my desktop machine, it's pretty old, and it feels sleeker and more responsive with each new release of Slackware. > Am I suffering from classic nostalgia here? I would say so. > 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? Maybe we should be happy that so many of those home hackers we admire so much are making a decent living developing Linux products. > Does everything need to look feel and work like Win-D'ohz to appeal? That's not necessary to appeal to me, or to you. > > Are we being slowly trained to expect "click-me" interfaces by default? Not me, not you. > > 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? Good luck with that. You might want to browse distrowatch first. You might find several lean, basic distributions already available. They'll be based on Slackware. > > Or am I just getting old(er)? We're all getting older. It sucks, but what are you gonna do? -- Old Man |