[CS-FSLUG] fyi, migration the other way, linux=>windows

[Eduardo Sánchez]

This is pure trolling. I understand the man might be frustrated, but 
most of his objections can be easily overruled. Of course, some of them 
are valid. Let me go through them:

> The irrational “megafreeze” distro model, which binds each and every
> application to a fixed version for the whole supported period of a
> given distro release.

And so? In Windows you are tied to a specific version too. You are free 
to upgrade some apps... manually. In GNU/Linux is the same case. Want a 
newer OO.o? Upgrade it by hand, just as in Windows.

Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.

> The irrational “we must release every 6 months” mantra of the
> majority of non-enterprise distros. This way, most bugs never get
> fixed, while new bugs are constantly introduced.

But some distros just release a new version "when it's ready". Prime 
example is Debian. If you want something really bug-free, use Debian 
stable. Slackware is very stable, too, and I use Slack 11 in production 
servers and in one desktop with no major problems.

This is a problem that will bite you only if you use Fedora / Ubuntu / 
Mandriva. To extrapolate it to the whole Linux universe is just useless 
flamebait.

By the way, are all Windows bugs fixed??? Ehm... better not even touch 
that one.

Verdict: Trollish, but might have some truth.

> The moronic “we must mimic Vista, but make it worse” goal of the KDE4
> project. KDE4 is the worst desktop environment of all that have
> existed under the sun (and yes, this includes Vista).

If you don't like it, don't use it. You are free to use something else, 
unlike Windows, where if you don't like the desktop choices, you are 
stuck. Period.

By the way, you can make KDE4 look like anything else, too. The problem 
is that right now the theming options are very limited. I use KDE 4.1 
daily and the only thing I really miss is Quanta Plus. But everything 
else is in its place, and I find KDE4 to be fast, light, and stable. In 
the end, it's a matter of taste.

I also used Vista and believe me, it's very different (and worse) than 
KDE 4.

Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.

> The constant attempt of each and every component of a Linux distro to
> screw whatever worked. When a technology gets mature and reasonably
> bug-free, the bunch of emo kids cry that it's obsolete, so it should
> be replaced with something new, rewritten from scratch, and that
> comes with more bugs than features in the first year. Think of the
> sound, an eternal problem in Linux: it mostly worked though, and ALSA
> was a rather mature technology (and ESD was not that bad in GNOME),
> but they had to invent PulseAudio.

Eh? My state-of-the art GNU/Linux setup uses ALSA. PulseAudio is nowhere 
to be seen, and the best part about my sound setup: it works. Don't know 
what you're talking about.

Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.

> Recently, X.Org adopted the Windows-like philosophy of an “automatic
> detection”, leaving xorg.conf absolutely uninformative, and also it
> seems to have started to ignore some of the settings specified there.
> This is not Unix-like anymore, this is doomsday.

Again, a sensible distribution would wait and see until things have 
stabilized. Let me quote the Nov 19 Slackware current changelog:

"For the last several days we have been building and testing the very 
newest X updates, and it seems that the more intrusive updates are 
probably best left to develop until sometime after the coming -stable 
Slackware 12.2 release. Those will require a lot of testing and some 
things don't seem to be quite there yet. "X -configure" is hanging the 
console, DRI is not yet working on all the hardware tested, and the new 
xorg-server will render most existing xorg.conffiles non-functional 
until several changes are made."

Therefore my state-of-the art Linux setup is free of this problem. I 
cannot say this of other distros, however, because I just simply don't 
know about them.

Verdict: Might have some truth.

> Trying to get rid of some Unix traditions, pure crap like UDEV and
> HAL was invented. 'Nuff said.

But what do you whiners want? We had traditional mounts and you said "We 
want automatic mount like Windows" and now you come with this. By the 
way, the ruleset Slackware uses is sensible, and I never ever had any 
hardware conflict. It really stays out of your way.

One additional note: If you really want some good ol' Unix traditions, 
use Slackware. You will get everything you could possibly want, 
including the REAL Korn Shell (ksh93, straight from the Bell Labs).

Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense. Additional points for being a 
whiner.
	
> The Linux kernel is terribly monolithic! While in Windows you can add
> no matter how many drivers for a given release (say, XP), with Linux
> you have to release a new kernel to support newer hardware.

Well, most of my hardware was always recognized out of the box. In some 
cases, I had to add support for newer hardware, such as network cards. 
In that case, all I had to do is just add a new module, either by 
compiling it or just adding it by typing "insmod my_module.o".

By the way, what about the "certified drivers" mess of XP ?

Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.

> There is no working regression test for the Linux kernel (nor does
> any distro have such a thing for the whole distro), so one can
> experience constant regressions, usually twice a year, and the
> regressions can be more important than an upgrade from XP to Vista.

I know for a fact that there are regression suites for the kernel. Most 
of them are in-house software of large Linux setups. As for distros, I 
don't know. Slackware, thankfully, is happily alien to regressions.

And... do you know for a fact if MSFT does regression testing for 
Windows? Looks like in Vista they did not. What about regressions in MS 
Office? Better not touch that can of worms...

Verdict: I really don't know what to say. Might have some truth.

> With a very few exceptions, a release is supported with security
> patches for too short a period, much shorter than the supported
> lifetime of Microsoft's products. With a distro like Debian,
> everything is uncertainty — you can't know for how much a release
> will be supported, because you can't know when a future Debian
> release will happen —, and Debian has a history of neglecting some
> updates such as the DST changes (tzdata). RHEL and SLED/SLED are
> commercial distros, which makes them both limited (they only support
> systems that use certified hardware, official packages and certified
> applications), and more expensive than Windows — with Windows, you
> pay once for a lifetime, with RHEL or SLED/SLES you pay per year!
> (Yes, there are free RHEL clones though.)

If you want really long term support, use Slackware. Slackware 8.1 was 
released on June 2002 and its latest update was precisely tzdata, on 
Oct. 13, 2008. That's SIX YEARS of continued support.

The criticism is valid if you consider other distros, such as Ubuntu or 
Fedora, though.

By the way, I have a desktop that came with an OEM version of Windows 
Millennium. Can I get updates? no such luck.

Verdict: Partially true, but trollish. Use Slackware!

> Given that paying for RHEL is a per annum service, and that RHEL has
> a very limited number of Linux packages, one would expect them to be
> more responsive to bug reports, but this is not the case — they often
> refuse to fix trivial bugs.

Red Hat has a history of refusing to fix not only trivial bugs, but 
show-stopping ones as well. That this is a fact doesn't make it true of 
the whole Linux spectrum, though. My Slackware setup is incredibly, 
boringly stable and the Slackware Crew is very responsible to bug 
reports.

Verdict: True, but a straw-man argument. Let's focus in a something 
serious, not in a joke such as Red Hat.

> The “rolling-release” model is not a solution to the broken
> “megafreeze” distro model, not only because it's followed by a
> minority of the distros (think of Arch, the distro with the dumbest
> installer in the whole Universe), but mostly because it forces the
> user to use the latest-and-only-latest build of each and every
> package! This forces the user to live with the latest bugs

Rolling release? What's that? Would you care to explain?

Perhaps you might like Slackware model. Want stable releases? Okay, use 
the stable releases. Want bleeding-edge, not so stable, and the chance 
of fixing bugs? Use -current, and update it daily. I suspect one of 
these models is what you call "rolling release".

Verdict: Don't know what he's talking about, but it might be more crap.

> While Windows (e.g. Vista) can be accused to be more interested in
> the gamers (gaming sells hardware, and new hardware sells OEM Windows
> licenses), the latest developments in the Linux desktop (not only
> Ubuntu) show that Linux is also more interested in the brainless kids
> mindset — Compiz is one of the best examples of useless software.

Brainless kids? Excuse me, I don't use compiz, never used that, and my 
mindset is that of KISS, "keep it simple, stupid", and "if it ain't 
broken, don't fix it". It coincides very well with that of Slackware and 
some other distros. So this particular tirade is just pure trolling.

Verdict: Pure flamebait.

> One of the major needs for a modern desktop, that is hibernation, is
> not of major interest for the Linux kernel developers, no matter
> Windows had this for a very long time. As a consequence, hibernation
> (suspend-to-disk) and sleep (suspend-to-RAM) is a constant hack under
> Linux, and once you got it working, you'll never know whether the
> next kernel or the next distro release will break it or not (most
> likely, it will break it again).

Well, I should concede this point, at least in part. Sleep works very 
well on my laptop; but I know that hibernation is available only after 
reading some howto. This is not good; it should work out of the box. 
Now, why is that? Lack of interest from kernel devs, or lack of interest 
from hardware manufacturers?

Verdict: He truly has a point here.

> While the “knights of the open source” constantly complain of the
> lack of penetration of Linux on the corporate desktop (let's ignore
> the other trend, where junkies believe that everybody is secretly
> using Ubuntu), the #1 Linux company, Red Hat Inc., officially asserts
> that they don't believe in Linux on the desktop as a viable business
> model. So why would I believe in something that even Red Hat is
> despising?!

Answer: Because Red Hat is wrong.

Conceding that the assertion of RH's lack of interest might be true, it 
refers as the GNU/Linux desktop as a viable BUSINESS model for them. But 
the fact that they don't like the Linux desktop as a BUSINESS model 
doesn't mean that the Linux desktop is impractical, unfeasible, or even 
that it does not have business sense.

1. Many, many people use Linux as a desktop right now, both in home and 
corporate settings. I can cite many, many large corporate installations 
in my country, and in other countries as well. The fact that MSFT uses 
the BSA to blackmail legitimate businesses into paying "license" fees 
explains a lot of that. It's business, down and dirty; bankers, real 
estate agents, non-profit foundations, and even the Paraguayan State 
don't want to do business with someone who is threatening to sue them 
because of "piracy".

2. Right now KDE is being deployed in 50 MILLION desktops in Brazillian 
schools. Riiiiight, the Linux desktop is not feasible.

3. Millions of notebooks and netbooks with Linux desktops also scream 
"inviable as a business model". Riiight.

And I could go on and on and on. but this nonsense is pure flamebait.

Verdict: Pure, unadulterated crap.

> Not to be ignored: except for the focus on using the console for
> issuing some commands, Linux doesn't try anymore to educate people
> into Unix technologies. Arid technologies such as Perl and TeX are
> used by less and less people, while Linux is promoting clones of
> Microsoft technologies, such as Mono, and an office suite that's
> buggier than Microsoft Office: OpenOffice.org (notice the dumb “.org”
> in a product's name).

"Linux doesn't try to educate people into..." or "Linux is promoting 
clones of ..." ? What? Is Linux a person now?

If you want Unix heaven, use Slackware, see above. I use LaTeX daily, 
and many people do. I also know of many Perl wizards. And people use 
both technologies in almost any OS, not only in Linux or Unix.

As for an office suite, well, it's almost the only one I got, and MS 
Office is also buggy, so what? you don't like the name? Go to IBM and 
download its version, it's named Lotus Symphony.

Verdict: This point is utter crap, pure flamebait.

Everybody have a good weekend!

Blessings,

Eduardo


On Friday 12 December 2008 16.37.43 Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> The Big Move: Defecting from Linux to Windows as a rational act
> http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/12/10/23/43/18-the-big-
>move-defecting-from-linu
>
> _______________________________________________
> ChristianSource FSLUG mailing list
> Christiansource at ofb.biz
> http://cs.uninetsolutions.com

-- 
Eduardo Sanchez, B. Th.
Traductor Público Inglés-Español
http://shadow.sombragris.org
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 Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
 That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
   The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
 Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

	-- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
	   

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