Ubuntu is under attack

[Mike Bird]

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 11:18, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> If "Just Works" means it just works for you, then you better be
> willing to cough up the dough for a distro that will "just work" for
> you. Otherwise, you (and I) have to accept that the focus will be on
> meeting the needs of most users, or meeting the needs of the
> developers. Not on meeting your or my needs!

Certainly.  You or I can install what we need.  My concern is for
the unfortunate newbies - and they will certainly number at least
into the thousands - who will lose months of work because the
warning messages that cronjobs or other software send them were
deliberately discarded by religious zealots who don't believe that
newbies should see such system emails.

That's hundreds of man-years - lifetimes of work - lost because
some mid-level PHB at Canonical didn't understand system emails.

> It's questionable whether it's WISE to have a user's files spread out
> all over the file system. There's a reason admins lock down a computer
> and keep users in ~/. There's little reason for most users to really
> exit ~/.

It's questionable whether it's LOGICAL to assume that not having a
user's key files in ~/ means that they are "spread out all over the
file system".  We see shared-workspace paradigms where files are
organized by group rather than by user.  We see paradigms where files
are organized by project under /srv.  We see paradigms where files
are organized by importance, with e.g. source files in /stuff2backup
and MP3's in /dontwastebackupspace.

Don't restrict millions of potential Ubuntu users to the limitations
of your imagination, no matter how wonderful your imagination may be.

Linux contains the accumulated wisdom (and mistakes) of thousands of
people over decades of development.  These little Canonical cabals
of three or four people who say "well I don't know why anyone would
want to do that, let's chuck it out" are seriously hurting what
could have been a valuable improvement over Debian.

--Mike Bird