Microsoft were heavily criticized bundling IE with Windows.

Hee hee hee.

…then again, some people like doing that kind of shit….don’t they…but not me. And I’m still in my first install of SP1!

The main thing is that those fucking releases are supposed to be for the people, by some people…and they just fuck up people.

I tried Puppy and it won’t recognize my WiFi.

the GUI has been invented in the 80′s, and the creation of consistent and comprehensive GUIs for administering a system without having to type commands ( something that being a slow typing SW designer, i personally appreciate) has long been proven feasible, so it’s about time for an OS that wants to be “the desktop of the future”

but the problem with linux is that a) even as a console driven OS, linux is buggy and inconsistent (for the sake of “choice” – see ACLs, support for which may or may not be installed on the current kernel, and varies from “more or less” to partial to buggy to nonexistent across the userland); and b) serious sw development ( especially on something as complex as an OS kernel) is about design besides implementation (analyze requirements, then study overall structure and APIs between components, then implement mechanisms behind those APIs) and good practices (if and when APis prove lacking, extend them but retain compatibility for at least an assured time window, don’t remove/replace them with different ones all of a sudden), so the fact that linux developers don’t grasp this concept, or deliberately choose to ignore it in order to churn out subpar code (that even The Finn has judged “bloated”) or pursue their political agenda, makes me think that all this “for developers” thing is a big lie

and don’t tell me that kernel APIs are made volatile since all drivers shall be open source… architecture and development are orthogonal matters, drivers can be decoupled from the kernel proper, AND be GPL’ed at the same time

LinuxStandardBase™

when someone retorts the infamous LSB “standard”, remind him that the LSB mandates its own set of libraries (“environment”) and its own runtime linker devoted to load LSB libraries from their own path (instead of native ones in the normal path) to serve LSB compliant applications – an LSB compliant distribution may have the lsb linker installed as a symlink to the native one, but from the LSB’s perspective it’s different linkers and environments anyway ( more than two, if you want to support different LSB versions – different lsb-ld.so.n linkers are explicitly mentioned), bolted on and coexisting>b> …
now, there’s a name for something like this, but “Common Denominator Standard Specification” is not it …

LOL. That’s the best phrasing I’ve ever heard.

If I was ‘converted’ to Ubuntu when it was released – and the first version I used was Warty – I would be on my eleventh re-install.

…in five years. Yet all of us know of XP installs still humming along fine after five years (especially after the introduction of SP2).

Ultimately there are only six or so ‘required’ distros

Realistically, these could even be consolidated within an umbrella release since it’s not like the software is fundamentally different between them: just install options. All-in-all, the differences between these targets could easily be covered by something like Debian’s ‘tasksel’ dialog. If you exclude third party software this wouldn’t even consume more than a few hundred megabytes.

Think of the cumulative man-hours wasted by unnecessarily supporting thousands of distro’s that do pretty much the same thing in parallel.

It gets even worse. There’s a lot of software out there that gets repackaged over and over but sees little activity upstream. Inactivity doesn’t mean the software is useless–quite the opposite: it’s an indicator of the software’s stability. However, hours and hours are spent recompiling the same release over and over for nothing more than a lateral move, by definition.

Every time Linux has been presented to Joe User, it has been rejected. Out of all of the reasons given, I’ve never seen anyone admit that Joe just didn’t like it.

Now they are pushing the thin client model again (groan), because if there’s one shining hope for Linux it’s as a platform upon which to use some other paradigm to get your work done – just like the lusers with virtualbox XP installs, or who use terminal services into an NT box. On its own it’s pretty pointless because ItsAllAboutTheApps(tm)

Yes, the future of linux – running embedded systems that run someone elses platform because that’s where the apps are.

fifth choice -> UseDistroX™

“The ridiculous thing is if you want to do something even as simple as upgrade Firefox to the latest version you must upgrade your whole OS.”

ICanUpdateAllMySoftwareWithOneClick™

” Linux advocates bleat on all the time about how Microsoft “doesn’t follow standards” yet each main distro has a proprietary software format which doesn’t work on other versions.”

LinuxStandardBase™

“Driver code should be self contained. It should use a stable ABI so that once the driver is written for a major kernel version it should just ‘work’. Software should be as self contained as possible, relying on a stable API to access system functions”

ABI? API?
JustReleaseTheSource™

“Between that and reinventing the wheel (Hello ALSA, Pulse Audio, Gnote etc) It’s no wonder nothing ever seems to get done.”

Choice™

“It gets even more ridiculous when the ‘Linux is just a kernel’ crowd pipe up (as they inevitably do) as if that is the case surely Gnome is just another app, and it can be upgraded and replaced without requiring a whole new OS just to add a new notifications area.”

TalkToUpstream™

“On OSX and Windows these things are simply not necessary. Software comes as an extra, supplied by the very people that make it, with the bonus that OS maker doesn’t have to waste time supporting it and you get updates when they are actually released”

OSXAndWindowsAreNotFreeLibre™

in one ear and out the other, eh Kerb