[CS-FSLUG] Still a "cult leader"

[Nathan T.]

On 8/6/06, Timothy Butler <tbutler at ofb.biz> wrote:
[snip]
> SUSE never seemed that slow to me,
> other than YaST, which was extremely slow since it insisted on
> running a bunch of completely unrelated configuration scripts
> whenever one changed anything.

I've always found it slower than Windows XP to be honest, and on my
laptop with a 1.5 GHz celeron processor and 256 MB of ram it's just
intolerable, the one time Windows runs circles around Linux. I'm
particularly disappointed that they're investing in so much .net, the
last thing Linux needs now is to make the same mistake as Microsoft:
investing in slow interpreted languages that are more suited to
servers than desktops and workstations. The benchmarks aren't honest,
very fast hardware might generate benchmarks that show it catching up
to C and C++, but as you go down to what is average hardware today the
speed difference becomes very noticeable and painful, and the older
the hardware gets the slower Java and .net get exponentially. Beagle
itself should not exist, it's way too slow.

> 	Ubuntu seems to me to be the best of the bunch at the moment,
> offering a distro that follows GNOME's aesthetically pleasing simple
> and clean ideology combined with the beauty of Debian. It also is the
> closest in design, IMO, to Mac OS X, which is the goal *nix should
> aim for, IMO.

Tim, I apologize now for what I'm going to say, I don't think anyone
who's fond of Gnome is going to like it.

"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality
of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots
will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it
has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I
need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE."
- Linux Torvalds, 2005, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

I've had plenty of opportunities to get acquainted with Gnome while
keeping dad's computer going, and I've only gotten to find it more and
more irritating in the way it "retards" the user interface. I think
people pick Gnome for the same reason they would otherwise pick
Windows over Linux, Gnome isn't better, it's just that they'll take
what's easiest or most familiar over what is better. To be blunt: I
think people are using Gnome because it caters to their unwillingness
to actually learn how to use software, that detracts greatly from the
software and it alienates power users. I think calling Gnome retarded
is accurate, the software is artificially held back to cater to people
who would rather die a horrible death than read a manual or quick
orientation guide.

What bothers me the most about Gnome thought is that bero is making a
convincing case that there is a lot of underhanded warfare going on,
and I could easily believe it considering the current state of
affairs. If you're interested in that you'd best contact him yourself,
I don't want to misquote him. Let me know if you're interested in his
e-mail address, I don't know if he'll talk about it though, committing
to saying anything bad about Gnome tends to get people shunned these
days, and he's got a whole Linux distribution riding on his
reputation.

I'll be upfront right now and say that Gnome is destroying Linux as I
know it, I believe Gnome is gradually destroying all the good design
decisions and the power of Linux in order to make their own OS X
clone, only simpler (ie: less powerful). I wouldn't care what happens
to Linux, except that KDE is also being damaged by all this, and some
of it actually comes from loose nuts in the project who think the best
thing to do is simply go along with Gnome.