Hi,

A few days ago I was quite upset with Gimp, so I wanted to vent off and typed “gimp sucks” in google, and I came upon piestar. I generally like Linux/OSS, but that doesn’t make me blind to the problems they have. I actually prefer and use Windows (as it’s completely free for students via MSDAA, along with Visual Studio and pretty much all Microsoft software except for Office). I keep an eye on Linux and FOSS out of technical curiosity, and I generally don’t like hate in either direction, but I kind of had a lot of fun while reading through your blog. And it’s not just hate like LHB (which I discovered via references from piestar).

I do “distro hopping” to try out different releases. Linux has some sort of charm, but it’s never quite made it as my main OS. I’ve always wanted to be able to use it exclusively (simply to prove to myself that I can), but I’ve always found obstacles. When I was younger I didn’t really mind doing all the /etc config kung-fu, but as I grew up, I simply wanted to get stuff done. At some point it seemed that Linux had matured – I could actually watch movies, listen to music and watch youtube “out of the box”; I wasn’t required to compile mplayer from code or meddle with xorg.conf to get my mouse and keyboard working (yep, even keyboard layout for us non-English speaking people required xorg meddling), let alone graphics and sound. You could actually hop across distros and get some value out of your computer (mainly light entertainment) – there was no platform lock-in, and you actually had some choice. Then something went terribly wrong. It all started innocently with KDE4, which made everybody use GNOME; after that there were rumors about how GNOME 3 would bring some great new stuff, but without the disappointment that was KDE4. It turned out to be kind of cute with some nice ideas, but unproductive and unusable for most of the time. All that time I used desktop machines, and being amateur (at the time) programmer I was at least somewhat competent user.

Then I had to use laptop, since I had to travel a lot. I was introduced to the horror of AMD CPU + ATI GPU. With dual ATI cards (power-saver option and “performance” card), to boot. I mean, it’s ugly now, but it was even worse before the acquisition. This introduced me to a whole new level of ugliness.

Jumping to the present, I was curious to try out how stuff was on the linux side. With a new laptop that had NVIDIA chip. I thought now that I don’t have to rely on crappy drivers, I might actually see what is all this stuff about composition on Linux (the whole herd, KDE4, GNOME3 and Unity). I saw what I wanted to see, played a little bit with this and that, and everything seemed to be OK. Linux is this cool stuff that I look at for fun, but all the work gets done while booted on Windows, because stuff there always used to work and is well thought out. Then I made the mistake to actually install Ubuntu on the HDD for real and not with Wubi (which I was forced to, because it is the only commercially supported distro; e.g. Bumblebee+Skype+Flash+Chrome all have packages for it). And while it was almost usable, it was able to somehow fuck up my Windows installation! So sleep and hibernate don’t work on Ubuntu – let’s stop it from working on Window as well, just because we can! (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1341694) .

Like I said in the beginning, I don’t generally like hate in either direction, but you seem to just vent off frustration and not simply hate like LHB (who still raises valid points). I wanted to vent off my frustration with this very disappointing episode. Choice? No way, you are locked to either Fedora or Ubuntu if you want to have even basic things as not using the “power” GPU all the time. And hybrid graphics is quite common now with Intel integrating their integrated GPUs in the processors. And when I see where Windows 8 is heading I’m kind of losing hope. Maybe I’ll just switch to Mac when I graduate and start working again. or I’ll simply stick with Windows 7 for a while and hope Microsoft introduces some non-tablet features in the final release. But then everybody seems to be in love with introducing smartphone/tablet concepts to the desktop, including Apple. It might be fine for light entertainment, but sucks terribly at actually getting what I need done (that is, writing reports and programming).

Ahh, just the rant of another hopelessly lost soul in the “Post-PC” era (pouring tons of hate here!).

Yours,
Dido

Really, Janne? Fucking idiots.

Don’t you think you forgot something? Fucking idiots.

You means imbeciles who actually knows the right tools for embedded systems as opposed to “I use GCC to try and solve every problem”?

P.S. all the major FOSS efforts are corporate funded. The basement coder army is a myth.

That is all.

But yeah, to the point, a huge bunch of OSS software is crap, as well as a huge bunch of Linux users.

Keep writing great, amusing, informative posts, please!