Comments about Linux/Ubuntu from a former MS-programmer

[Derek Broughton]

Eric Dunbar wrote:

> On 10/04/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>> > that Nautilus doesn't play nicely with  the network,
>>
>> I didn't think Nautilus was supposed to play nicely with the network.
>> That's what Konqueror is for. :-)
> 
> What if you hate Konq even more than Nautilus?

If you _must_ trot out completely hypothetical scenarios (it's not as if
that could really happen :-) )

> Seriously though, Konq 
> and Nautilus are both supposed to be the GUI file browsers for their
> respective environments. Nautilus has a hell of a hard time dealing
> with my SMB file server. 

Is it mounted with smbfs or cifs?  That's my point - if it's mounted
in /etc/fstab or equivalent, it should be transparent.  If it _isn't_, I
didn't think Nautilus was intended to handle it.  Whereas Konqueror does
explicitly handle them.

> Mac OS X Finder OTOH plays perfectly with it every time.

> But, as with a lot of things in OSS, "give it time". Eventually
> someone might stumble upon this as a good idea and go after it.

Works in KDE...

> I think the next revolution in GUI might come from the OSS world, but,
> as long as people continue to copy Windows (and, sometimes Mac) we're
> not going to see that happen.

I'm more optimistic.  I see KDE continuing to copy Windows but sooner or
later someone will come up with a completely unrelated GUI revolution -
because that's the way OSS works.

>> > My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn't have
>> > anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first.
>>
>> _If_ that's the problem, it's never going to go away.  Linux (and OSS in
>> general) is evolutionary.  Good traits are kept, bad traits go away.
>> Nobody is ever going to direct more than a small portion of development
>> in
>> any organized way.  That's both what makes Linux great ... and doesn't.
> 
> The social Darwinism inherent in that statement doesn't quite work.
> Bad traits don't go away in the world of programming -- 15 years later
> we still have Windows, 22 years later we still have a Mac-only file
> system.

Doesn't apply.  Windows & Mac are _not_ evolutionary systems.  There's no
natural selection at work.  In the OSS world, things may not actually go
away, but they definitely become complete evolutionary dead ends (say,
Hurd?)
> 
>> > it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work
>> > on it, not because an important user scenario is broken.
>>
>> Not "sometimes".  Always.  Arguing against the methodology is pointless.
>> There's no other way that OSS development _can_ work.
> 
> I don't think that's true. With advocates or voting systems you can
> show what's important and what's not.

You can't - say I develop package XYZ.  You think there's a bug in it.  I
consider it to be working as desired in that area - but I have a list
of "real" bugs to work on.  Now, if I get 500 votes for your spurious bugs,
and none for any of my real bugs, which do you think I'm going to fix?  You
can lobby the developer, but when it comes right down to it, he's still
only going to fix the things he feels are important, unless there's a quid
pro quo - you either pay him, or contribute in kind (completing his
documentation will almost certainly get your bugs to the head of the to-do
list!).
-- 
derek