You know _________ is a nice little distro....

[Tsuroerusu]

I just read parts of an article on Zen Buddhism, and I stumbled upon something that I thought I'd share, because I thought it was great advice:

"If you don't have patience, if you can't endure, well, don't bother, because you won't get very far".

[Wally Balljacker]

I agree for the most part, Linux is still far from being something most people can deal with on the whole. As Dann had mentioned on the Tech Show, he attempted to upgrade his System76 laptop (which is DESIGNED for Linux for crying out loud), and afterwards his sound and wireless quit working.

Well, then maybe a distro that has a six month release cycle isn't the right thing for Mr. Ultimate Computer N00b. You can only do so much testing in six months!! I agree Ubuntu has done a slew of good work, but things like upgrades are just .... yeah, you said it yourself.

The problem is, if they wait more than 6 months to put out a new release, people start complaining that Ubuntu is too old, and it would quickly lose it's massive popularity.

[snarkout]

You think so? Even if they developed a better system to keep things reasonably up to date? I mean, it's hardly like ubuntu is bleeding edge as it is.

[hellonorman]

Isn't it sort of interesting that you would have to use 15 year old whores, complete noobs and grandma to make your statements? This isn't just about grandma there are plenty of smart savvy people who don't use linux because it's never ready.

It's also the case that you could read forums from 5-6 years ago that made the same points. Things like give it time and I'm confident linux will gain market share very soon. I can't even listen to the linux action show anymore because those two are constantly talking about how all this stuff is just around the corner. The problem is since I've been following linux for the last 7 years I've been around many many corners.

I find the same sort of pattern repeating. Things get 80% done and nobody wants to do the hard work of the last 10-20% to make it complete. Instead of doing what it takes to finish things people decide they have a better way that will allow them to complete their project. But alas they get to the same point and discover that the last 10-20% is hard. And so the cycle continues almost ready never finished.

[Tsuroerusu]

Isn't it sort of interesting that you would have to use 15 year old whores, complete noobs and grandma to make your statements? This isn't just about grandma there are plenty of smart savvy people who don't use linux because it's never ready.

Well excuuuuuuuuuuse me, for being sourrounded by truckloads of absolutely morons in my daily life!!!
I am not referring to anyone in here, not you, not Snarkout, not Wally Balljacker, but the people that are around me at school. It's fairly hard to make examples of people you don't meet in your everyday life you know.

It's also the case that you could read forums from 5-6 years ago that made the same points. Things like give it time and I'm confident linux will gain market share very soon. I can't even listen to the linux action show anymore because those two are constantly talking about how all this stuff is just around the corner. The problem is since I've been following linux for the last 7 years I've been around many many corners.

I find the same sort of pattern repeating. Things get 80% done and nobody wants to do the hard work of the last 10-20% to make it complete. Instead of doing what it takes to finish things people decide they have a better way that will allow them to complete their project. But alas they get to the same point and discover that the last 10-20% is hard. And so the cycle continues almost ready never finished.

I agree with most of what you said, although the way you paint the picture, makes it sounded like there havn't been made any progress at all in the last 7 years, and that is just not true at all. 7 years ago, I was using Windows 98 SE, and boy did it suck some serious ass!!
In 2003 I saw KDE for the first time, and my first reaction was "Holy moly! That's awesome!!".
Today, GNU/Linux is extremely easy to use, driver support has improved by hundreds, if not thousands, of light years!!

I don't know what you mean by "the last 10-20%", but just looking at the stuff for the KDE 4 cycle (Thing eventually meaning KDE 4.5) is just amazing, YES it is not reality yet, and I shouldn't get my hopes up, but I can say one thing for certain, improvements will be made.
I'm a pessimist extremely often, but there's one area that I am not, and that is the value of what do have. Am I the only one in here who're actually happy that things are as good as they are (It's not some toy operating system we're talking about here!) ? I would hope not, because that would be one of the saddest things in the world.

[snarkout]

ENOUGH!!! Talk all the shit you want about n3wbz and grandmothers, but I'll not hear a word spoken against 15 year old sluts!!!!

[hellonorman]

Isn't it sort of interesting that you would have to use 15 year old whores, complete noobs and grandma to make your statements? This isn't just about grandma there are plenty of smart savvy people who don't use linux because it's never ready.

Well excuuuuuuuuuuse me, for being sourrounded by truckloads of absolutely morons in my daily life!!!
I am not referring to anyone in here, not you, not Snarkout, not Wally Balljacker, but the people that are around me at school. It's fairly hard to make examples of people you don't meet in your everyday life you know.

Huh? The point is that you can't dismiss the problem as though only grandma, ultimate noobs and 15 year old whores can't or won't run linux.

It's also the case that you could read forums from 5-6 years ago that made the same points. Things like give it time and I'm confident linux will gain market share very soon. I can't even listen to the linux action show anymore because those two are constantly talking about how all this stuff is just around the corner. The problem is since I've been following linux for the last 7 years I've been around many many corners.

I find the same sort of pattern repeating. Things get 80% done and nobody wants to do the hard work of the last 10-20% to make it complete. Instead of doing what it takes to finish things people decide they have a better way that will allow them to complete their project. But alas they get to the same point and discover that the last 10-20% is hard. And so the cycle continues almost ready never finished.

I agree with most of what you said, although the way you paint the picture, makes it sounded like there havn't been made any progress at all in the last 7 years, and that is just not true at all. 7 years ago, I was using Windows 98 SE, and boy did it suck some serious ass!!
In 2003 I saw KDE for the first time, and my first reaction was "Holy moly! That's awesome!!".
Today, GNU/Linux is extremely easy to use, driver support has improved by hundreds, if not thousands, of light years!!

I don't know what you mean by "the last 10-20%", but just looking at the stuff for the KDE 4 cycle (Thing eventually meaning KDE 4.5) is just amazing, YES it is not reality yet, and I shouldn't get my hopes up, but I can say one thing for certain, improvements will be made.
I'm a pessimist extremely often, but there's one area that I am not, and that is the value of what do have. Am I the only one in here who're actually happy that things are as good as they are (It's not some toy operating system we're talking about here!) ? I would hope not, because that would be one of the saddest things in the world.

When I speak of done I'm not talking about released. I'm talking about stable, mature and complete. Think about all the times you've said or heard "they have made great progress". This great progress is usually from 0 up to 80 percent complete. It's that last 10-20 percent that is the hardest but most essential. That is the place where most open source stalls. Almost ready but never finished. The fact that people that spend hours and hours a day fiddling with can get it to work doesn't make it ready or complete.

[Wally Balljacker]

Considering that Linux and FOSS are a moving target, something that is constantly in a state of evolution, I don't think you'll ever see 100 percent completion. There's always going to be room for improvement and perfection as long as FOSS exists.

[Tsuroerusu]

Isn't it sort of interesting that you would have to use 15 year old whores, complete noobs and grandma to make your statements? This isn't just about grandma there are plenty of smart savvy people who don't use linux because it's never ready.

Well excuuuuuuuuuuse me, for being sourrounded by truckloads of absolutely morons in my daily life!!!
I am not referring to anyone in here, not you, not Snarkout, not Wally Balljacker, but the people that are around me at school. It's fairly hard to make examples of people you don't meet in your everyday life you know.

Huh? The point is that you can't dismiss the problem as though only grandma, ultimate noobs and 15 year old whores can't or won't run linux.

Huh? (Back at ya)

I didn't mean to dismiss anything, if my post sounded like I was, then I obviously wrote it in the wrong way. In fact, I think I mentioned problems with X, that needs to be fixed, because there's still garbage, from the mid 90', in X, as far as I have heard X developers say.
I have heard Linspire morons argue that having a distro that didn't "force" the user to run as a non-root user was giving the user more choice, and blah blah blah. I personally see this as stupid, because that's removing one of the best security advantages of a UNIX-like system.
If say such a change was necessary to make GNU/Linux cater to the types of people I mentioned by tomorrow, then I personally think such a change would not be worth making.
And I personally do think that for your basic computer user (Web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheet) GNU/Linux is "ready", and I do so because I have seen it work. There's always gonna be people for whom it doesn't fit the bill, and that's just reality. Proprietary operating systems will never fit my bill, because I want my operating system to be free software.
I think you're making the problem larger than it actually is, but of course since you havn't provided a specific example of the problem you seem to see, then I can't say how large of a problem it is.

It's also the case that you could read forums from 5-6 years ago that made the same points. Things like give it time and I'm confident linux will gain market share very soon. I can't even listen to the linux action show anymore because those two are constantly talking about how all this stuff is just around the corner. The problem is since I've been following linux for the last 7 years I've been around many many corners.

I find the same sort of pattern repeating. Things get 80% done and nobody wants to do the hard work of the last 10-20% to make it complete. Instead of doing what it takes to finish things people decide they have a better way that will allow them to complete their project. But alas they get to the same point and discover that the last 10-20% is hard. And so the cycle continues almost ready never finished.

I agree with most of what you said, although the way you paint the picture, makes it sounded like there havn't been made any progress at all in the last 7 years, and that is just not true at all. 7 years ago, I was using Windows 98 SE, and boy did it suck some serious ass!!
In 2003 I saw KDE for the first time, and my first reaction was "Holy moly! That's awesome!!".
Today, GNU/Linux is extremely easy to use, driver support has improved by hundreds, if not thousands, of light years!!

I don't know what you mean by "the last 10-20%", but just looking at the stuff for the KDE 4 cycle (Thing eventually meaning KDE 4.5) is just amazing, YES it is not reality yet, and I shouldn't get my hopes up, but I can say one thing for certain, improvements will be made.
I'm a pessimist extremely often, but there's one area that I am not, and that is the value of what do have. Am I the only one in here who're actually happy that things are as good as they are (It's not some toy operating system we're talking about here!) ? I would hope not, because that would be one of the saddest things in the world.

When I speak of done I'm not talking about released. I'm talking about stable, mature and complete. Think about all the times you've said or heard "they have made great progress". This great progress is usually from 0 up to 80 percent complete. It's that last 10-20 percent that is the hardest but most essential. That is the place where most open source stalls. Almost ready but never finished. The fact that people that spend hours and hours a day fiddling with can get it to work doesn't make it ready or complete.

I would like to ask of some examples, I know roughly what you mean, but I would still like to know what exactly you have in mind.

[hellonorman]

Considering that Linux and FOSS are a moving target, something that is constantly in a state of evolution, I don't think you'll ever see 100 percent completion. There's always going to be room for improvement and perfection as long as FOSS exists.

Yeah but what's the reason you can't evolve and improve from stable to software to better stable software? Instead we evolve from almost ready to still almost ready to never finished. Finished not being some state where you never need write more code but stable, mature.

[allix]

Yeah but what's the reason you can't evolve and improve from stable to software to better stable software? Instead we evolve from almost ready to still almost ready to never finished. Finished not being some state where you never need write more code but stable, mature.

Software never finishes , close or not , windows 98 is just more development of window 95.
Mac osx 10.5 is improvements from 10.4 , photosphop cs3 is improvements from cs2 and so on.

Games are the only exception to this rule, quake 4 is nothing like quake 3, that seems to be the reason that free software zealous accept and are willing to buy games.
Hence Troels has many games consoles and games for it.

[hellonorman]

Yeah but what's the reason you can't evolve and improve from stable to software to better stable software? Instead we evolve from almost ready to still almost ready to never finished. Finished not being some state where you never need write more code but stable, mature.

Software never finishes , close or not , windows 98 is just more development of window 95.
Mac osx 10.5 is improvements from 10.4 , photosphop cs3 is improvements from cs2 and so on.

I defined what I was talking about when I say finished. Each version of photoshop is it's own stable release where subsequent versions improve on the last. Same with osx. That's the whole point. Instead of improving on stable everything is always gonna work soon. gonna be ready soon, gonna be stable soon.

Instead of picking between different stable ready distros we pick between which one pisses us off the least. This is what I hate about distro hopping as I said earlier.

[davijordan]

Antix is a nice little distro. I just installed it on an old p3-450 with 192 meg of ram. Seems fairly responsive. Still have a lot to learn about mepis and antix.

[hellonorman]

Antix is a nice little distro. I just installed it on an old p3-450 with 192 meg of ram. Seems fairly responsive. Still have a lot to learn about mepis and antix.

Cool. When you switch let us know how great they were even though you won't continue to use them.

[davijordan]

Che cosa dice?

I still use the same distros. I wanted to try a new one on the spare machine. One good thing I like about it: I did not have to add anything to watch video. Everything seemed to work out of the box.

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Some people watch too much tv.
----- something Davi Giordano (a real Italian) might have said about Giorgio Costanza .