Reaching out to hardware companies

[Doug]

On 10/23/2010 12:37 AM, C de-Avillez wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:09:30 -0400
> Ric Moore<wayward4now at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 23:08 -0400, J wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> Still, it's a goal worth working toward.  Canonical is working on
>>> getting Ubuntu pre-loaded onto systems, but it's up to the buying
>>> public to reinforce that work by actually demanding Ubuntu on their
>>> computers.
>>>        
>> /snip/
>>      
>> One thing to be said about Winders, they own their market and there
>> is only one set of directory/library rules to follow. We've got stuff
>> plastered all over the place, especially between the rpm and deb
>> worlds. It must be obsoletely maddening for a software devel to
>> write packages for each major Linux distro and keep up with their 6
>> month-release packages with each new "scheme d'joir" to contend
>> with. Therein lies the madness.
>>      
> Actually, in general, it would be better for developers to leave
> packaging to the distros. This would guarantee that every distro would
> have a perfect package, instead of having to dump&  redo.
>
> Cheers,
>    
Rant mode on.

Actually, it would be better for developers to start thinking
in terms of usability, and malleability.  Windows has led them
in the wrong direction, I think.  Things are so dumbed down
in W that things that used to be easy are now difficult.  Like
scrolling down a whole list of files and moving them all together
to a different directory, as in W98.  Or downloading an iso that
needs to be burned to a disk, and half the time you can't grab the
file from wherever W put it and send it directly to the burner.
Well, Linux is getting that way.  Things that you might want
to do are hidden away in places you'd never think of looking,
or they have been removed from the repo that comes with
your distro, or you have this nice file-getting program that
will get your file, but you can't figure out how to run it--DOS
and W had .com and .exe, as I mentioned elsewhere, but
Unix/Linux has no such marker.  So there needs to be some
function built into Linux that would figure out which is the
executable file and let you run it from the GUI.  (Case in point:
/synaptiks in Debian.) And once DOS and W would print any
file, regardless if it did not have .doc or
something like it at the end, now W won't try, and the
same seems to be true of the Linux GUIs, altho you _can_
cat anything that has the "r" bit turned on. IF you know cat,
or the various other methods of getting a file to the screen
or the printer.

What I'm trying to get at, is make the GUI malleable in ways
that are fairly obvious to the user.  Frinstance, if you want
to turn off all the junk in Suse's KDE4, or Kubuntu's,
there should be an obvious command to do so.  It
is certainly possible to make K4 look and work a lot like K3,
or for that matter, W, as PCLOs does; why isn't there a simple
command to do that in Suse or Kubuntu?  If the devs insist
on trying to force the user into shoes that don't fit, the
user will find a shoe that does.  (It may even be W.) That's
why I'm no longer using Suse--that and the sound problem
that they never  fixed. And a quick look at Kubuntu told me
not to look again, ever!

Well, I'm not all sour grapes--in many cases Linux _will_ let
you do some things you'd like to do, it's just that you can't
find out how!  To make things worse, my favorite distro
doesn't even have a mailing list!  (It would seem like most
of my fellows hate forums as much as I do, since most
distros _do_ have a mailing list.)  I wonder if PCLos even
has anyone who reads the mailing lists of Deb and Ubuntu
and Suse?

Rant off.  (Maybe this is why PCLos has no list!)

--doug