Sorbet on Fedora's future

[Marcel Rieux]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Am Sonntag, den 21.03.2010, 02:04 -0400 schrieb Marcel Rieux:
>> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Christoph Wickert
>> <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > Am Samstag, den 20.03.2010, 01:30 -0400 schrieb Marcel Rieux:
>>
>> >> (1) The only option available in my Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P's BIOS
>> >> offering only options for entering passwords, for exemple.
>> >
>> > Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to tell us. What does
your
>> > BIOS have to do with the OS?
>>
>> See my answer to charles zeitler. I suppose he'd be more apt then me
>> to answer this question.
>
> No he's not. As you were the one who claimed there is a connection
> between BIOS and OS you should be able to answer that. It was not
> Charles who stated this.

He stated that there is an OpenBIOS project. This project, as you might
know, has been set up because  BIOSes are proprietary hardware and they must
be studied by Linux developers in order to work properly with Linux. So, it
seems there is a relation between Linux and BIOSes.

For one, I know that when I reset my BIOS, all options are available. I tehn
boot Linux, reboot,:no more options. After I boot now, I see "Verifying
DMI pool data AMD data change Update new data to DMI" It might or might not
be related to my problem. I have no idea.

At the time I bought the mobo, there wasn't too much information on it on
the net. It was just out on the American market. I bought it because it was
fairly cheap and used DDR3 memory. I must have been and probably still is a
rather popular mobo.

Now, if you want to brawl about this, in my book, you'll join the
Tim/White/Gresko club.

>> >> (2) For instance, "New File" entering the clipboard every time a new
>> >> file is created.
>>
>> > I cannot reproduce this bug here
>>
>> Try the GNOME desktop.
>
> I did try nautilus which is "the GNOME desktop".
>
>> , could you explain a little more in
>> > detail? I created a new file in nautilus, thunar and pcmanfm and never
>> > had "New File" in my paste buffer. Do you have a cliboard manager
>> > running, preferably parcellite
>>
>> I installed parcellite.
>
> There you go, I already guessed that and explained why the behavior is
> normal then.
>
>> When you have more than a screenful of
>> entries, you have to scroll up the list to the first entry. This
>> disqualifies parcelite for me.
>
> So where is your bug report or feature request.

Oh, I see I'm the first one in the Whole Wide World to discover this bug!
Isn't it fantastic? Of course, since you only have 256 MB of RAM, you never
tried it yourself :) You never thought "The hell with it, this is just
another Linux quick hack, I'll just use a screenful of entries."

And, of course, the developer himself never tried 100 -- or is it 85? --
entries to see if his software worked? Or maybe you think that it just
worked fine on his very special hardware?  Glipper, which had a similar
problem, worked fine on its developer's hardware, also. Sure!

Well, it seems somebody finally decided to remove this crapware from the
"market":

yum search klipper
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
======== Matched: klipper ==========
kdebase-workspace.x86_64 : K Desktop Environment - Workspace

yum search glipper
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Warning: No matches found for: glipper
No Matches found

I believe it was also causing crashes.

With clipman there were also problems. I've tried one after another. So much
fun!

That's the problem with Linux on the desktop. There are tens of window
managers, clipboard utilities, file managers, email clients and so on, but
nothing works perfectly. Now, as I explained, -- but you skipped over this,
I suppose -- industry is getting involved in open source. Nokia bought
Trolltech, Intel joined forces with Nokia, Google is offering the Chrome
browser, soon ChromeOS, and so on, Shuttleworth has hired developers for
Ubuntu.

IOW, developers are now paid not only to develop /industrial/ Linux -- the
kernel, databases and so on --, they are now paid to develop desktop Linux.
They getting paid by companies, and they'll soon get paid writing
applications for their /ecosystem/: ChromeOS, Android, Meego, iUbuntu, etc.
 And this is only the beginning of a list that will grow from year to year.

Developers will begin writing freelance for the ecosystem and, if they're
doing good, they'll be hired by the company... though they might prefer to
freelance. If you've never seen a meritocracy in action, check this one.
Companies won't give a shit whether the developer is in America, India or
China, they'll send a check.

The most likely end result will be lowering salaries in America, rising them
/a little/ in developing countries. The good fortune of a few developers
will make the headlines and sustain the dream of easy money but, generally,
it's going to be hard work to get a good pay. (My 2¢ on this. Not something
I wish to discuss.)

Who's going to remain to work for free for the Linux distributions and the
Linux software development projects? Already, it seems a "new shift" has
begun working at some projects whose skill's seem more limited.

KDE 4 was supposed to be so much more user friendly than KDE 3. At iteration
4, it's, IMO. still very far in terms of user-friendliness. I already noted
some problems in this thread, but they're all over the place.

For instance, trying to have a readable URL window in Firefox, I set all the
fonts to 14. The URL was still at ~11. In GNOME, it's right under
"Application font", first in the list. I didn't study KDE4 much, but I
already could go on forever on this. You know, how ridiculous can you get,
when you use slide bars on the main menus. Why not just a down arrow at the
bottom of the menu, if you don't see what you want? (I must admit my icons
must be set quite big, but it's ludicrous just the same.)

I must say I fear too for next version of GNOME.

The BIG problem with open source is that developers are always right. Users
must fill zany bug reports, RTFM, Google their way through thousands of
pages of, sometimes dead wrong, technical mumbo jumbo. (Cf. my comments
installing/removing Nvidia drivers.)

In OS X, the user is central: if he doesn't get it at first, there's a
problem. Hence, results are not the same. OK, I'm not a developer, I'm
bashing and act as if I was Steve Jobs. Well, to tell you the truth, I'd
really like somebody to do Steve Jobs' job here. Otherwise, Linux certainly
won't go where OS X and ChromeOS are headed. I can smell trash can odors.

> As I cannot comment on the rest of your mail because I don't use KDE,
> please let me ask you again: Where are your feature requests, bug
> reports or where is your feedback on updates. You seem to complaining a
> lot, but this is not how Linux or Fedora work. A community based project
> depends on what the community does

I've always been a really weird guy, you see, and it's no different here.
I believe I work a lot in answering you. I'm doing what is called a case
study... from the outside, unfortunately. In the industry, people who do
case studies are getting a much better pay than developers.

While I'm spending hours on end answering a bunch of brawlers, I know some
Red Hat employees who say Red Hat doesn't know where it's headed. And it
seems that, whatever happens, they won't try expressing their ideas. Is it
that they seem to fear getting involved  or that they have a hard time
outputting something coherent, I have no idea. (You know how geeks are: they
pretend they must run everything, but can't come up with a plan. That's why
Jobs does so good running Apple!)

Nonetheless, I'm sure some Red Hat employees have an opinion or two that
they can put together. Is the climate so rotten at Red Hat's that nobody
dares speak openly? Ok, this is not a developers' forum, but the matter at
hand is not technical, it's administrative. How come nobody from Red Hat
joins the discussion with users and give a little bit more information than
we got from Jonathan Corbet's article? Will all information on Red Hat have
to come from outsiders?

If I can write something about Red Hat's development in a new technological
context, with the insight employees, administrators, whoever, have, it
should be possible to go further. They don't have to disclose insiders
secrets or suggest to fire some boss  on the spot. We're talking about
starting a discussion. You know, evolving. Maybe they don't like my
"aggressive" approach? Nothing stops them from starting another thread.

The deafening silence I was talking about in another thread is not only
deafening, it's frightening. I don't see how a company can be headed
anywhere if it doesn't develop a vision together with its employees.

Supper time. Reread fast.
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