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Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

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Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#21

Post by hasmoo »

toyg wrote: post #16
hasmoo wrote: post #5

Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle between Draxinger and Poettering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and support…

> I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did.

Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#22

Post by glaurent »

microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

I did the exact same thing (except in early 2008 - been using Linux since 1995), for the exact same reasons. A Kubuntu upgrade breaking my mouse config was the last straw.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#23

Post by andrewcooke »

stephen_g wrote: post #15
darklajid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupidity, in a word (attacking a single person in this way). If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).

The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...

i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#24

Post by roel_v »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

> the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007 I remember it was complicated in 2002. In 2007 it was already at the "mostly works" stage.

"Mostly" is not enough when it's not a hobby. It needs to "just work". Of course other OS'es aren't at 100% in that regard either, but at least they don't break stuff that used to work so often. I've used Linux since late 1990's into 2005-2007 or so, after that only revisiting it every now and then to see if things have improved. They have, but not enough. And the curve is only getting flatter, especially with much/most of the crowd that used Linux because it wasn't Microsoft moving to Macs over the last 5 years.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#25

Post by microtonal »

toyg wrote: post #19
microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

The failure of Linux as a commercial desktop is also (not entirely, of course) his responsibility, considering the crap he pulled with all the desktop components he messed with (PulseAudio, HAL, DBUS etc etc), so clearly it's not a causal factor for his behaviour.

I think the 'failure' of the commercial Linux desktop can mostly be attributed to economics. Most importantly, consumers do not want to pay for a desktop operating system (even if it were proprietary). Microsoft effectively shut down the alternative market by making Windows-hardware coupling mandatory for large hardware vendors. This gives the perception (through scale and coupling) that Windows is nearly free. So, why would one spend money on an alternative operating system?

Then, there are social factors. A vocal minority of the Linux community is outright hostile towards proprietary software or even towards any form of capitalism. It is not a very attractive market to operate in - one misstep, and elaborate PR campaigns are set up.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#26

Post by Angostura »

silon3 wrote: post #18
microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years. To each his own. For me it's much better than Windows and GNOME attempting to copy OSX features has made it much worse. I'm not certainly not switching to OSX ever.

I think"attempting to copy" is the operative phrase there.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#27

Post by microtonal »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

> the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007 I remember it was complicated in 2002. In 2007 it was already at the "mostly works" stage.

It was even more complicated in 1994. But, throughout high school and university I had plenty of time, and fixing things was an interesting challenge.

Then real-life started (internships, thesis writing, a day job), and the few hours per day that are left, you'd rather spend with loved ones, sports, and interesting projects. And then you suddenly realize that you'd rather have "works" than "mostly works".

YMMV

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#28

Post by rbanffy »

roel_v wrote: post #24
rbanffy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007 I remember it was complicated in 2002. In 2007 it was already at the "mostly works" stage.

"Mostly" is not enough when it's not a hobby. It needs to "just work". Of course other OS'es aren't at 100% in that regard either, but at least they don't break stuff that used to work so often. I've used Linux since late 1990's into 2005-2007 or so, after that only revisiting it every now and then to see if things have improved. They have, but not enough. And the curve is only getting flatter, especially with much/m…

I started using Linux in 2001 and can agree with you that things were a bit messy up until 2005 or so. In my experience, I had very little problems since then, the only major frustration was Compiz not working on a cheap notebook that had 3D acceleration but no Linux support for it. Since then, everything just works, provided I don't sabotage myself buying hardware I know won't work properly.

I've also been a Mac user since the late 90's and I have a very solid experience with OSX since 10.2. It's not as flexible as Linux or FreeBSD, but, for a consumer-grade experience, it's excellent. I find the hardware choices somewhat limiting, but that's me. For work, I prefer Linux for its flexibility and, like I said before, I can't remember the last time my machine stopped working.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#29

Post by toyg »

hasmoo wrote: post #21
toyg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and support…

> I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did. Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.

No, it's because they're coherent experiences, developing single components over 10 or even 20 years. They don't chuck out entire subsystems on a whim, breaking compatibility with everything and then blaming anybody but themselves for the resulting mess.

Edit: it's quite astonishing how such a wide ecosystem of developers continues to misunderstand how you build successful developer ecosystems.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#30

Post by lvillani »

Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart. From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think he's getting a lot of flak for choices made by others.

_________

1: Fedora is known to ship with lots of experimental software/wide-scale changes. Its users expect breakage/major innovations from time to time.

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