Searching for the Linux of Mass Appeal

Posted on January 7, 2009 by ehurst

As a computer service volunteer and Linux advocate, how can I get the average computer user to adopt Linux?

This has nothing to do with what I happen to like, but what I find actually doing the job. Having to work around minor issues is no sweat for me, but the average refugee from Redmond isn’t gonna like it. Just getting past the inertia of moving away from what comes bundled on the PC from the store means we have to be significantly better. Gamers and hobbyists already know what to do, but most home users have too many other concerns in their lives. We want them; we need that mass appeal to overcome hindrances we have faced since the days Linus first posted his ideas on Usenet. We have to offer a compelling reason to switch.

Simple security is not enough. Everybody knows Linux is better at security, if they even know what Linux is. I remain firmly convinced neither the Russian Mafia nor NSA will find a typical Linux home PC an easy target for cracking over the wire. This is because of fundamental differences in structure, not just market share. There is a huge difference between a system which starts with all the gates closed (Linux) and one which has no fence (Windows). But the people who bring home a Vista box from Wal-Mart will simply run what comes on the system, even struggling with ill-considered security measures, will not install something different unless it’s worth more to them than the presumed value of that bundled OS.

What they want is easily determined from anyone who serves these same people when the security measures fail, or when something simply doesn’t work. I can convince them to be more careful in selecting their optional hardware add-ons, because they are used to being ripped off via false advertising. I can’t convince them their entire OS is broken because they can see it running on their computer. What will move them is something which works with the hardware which came in the box. We are doing a lot better in that department, and I’m really impressed with the proliferation of projects grinding out working drivers for just about everything. We’ve also done a great job with Linux gaming software. We will probably never capture the insane gamers who live inside their PCs until we capture more market share and convince game developers to add a Linux port, but that’s the whole point. We have reached out to every marketing area except one: the mass of users who simply want their system to work better with less interruption. They consider a computer essential, but not at all central, to their daily lives.

These people will all too quickly revert to Windows, demanding it loudly, if the daily activities for which they have been using their system is in any way hindered. They’ll forgive a drab and boring desktop if it they can find everything and use it pretty much as they did in Windows 98. Over the past three years I’ve been testing systems based on what I see my clients and friends doing on their PCs at home. Please note, we’ve already covered Linux distros with rolling release or frequent releases, and which refuse to support any previous release longer than one year. Those are out of the question. I find a 3-year support cycle is the absolute minimum. As I compare what they see with what I experience in the Land of Linux, here are some observations:

1. GNOME is slightly ahead of the game over KDE and others. More stuff works, more consistently, right out of the box. They include things like the default CD player, screensavers, applets, and frequently font rendering. People don’t give a rat’s patootie about clutter or simplicity as a matter of aesthetics, but once they have it set up, it better work first time, every time. GNOME has a better track record. It also has a bigger share of the common use applications interfaces. While plenty of KDE stuff works better technically, and is more familiar in terms of general appearance, Windows refugees are more likely to find GNOME usable. As a side note, I find KDE 3.x still broken, but it seems abandoned now. At the same time, I doubt 4.x will be usable for at least a couple of years, particularly from the standpoint of common users.

There is one issue so large I can’t overstate it: Adaptive Technology. Right now, KDE is very poorly covered by this. I’ve seen a range of add-on software for Windows, from the cheapest to the most expensive. I’ve seen how it works, and how the vision-impaired want it to work. I haven’t tested the Linux version, but that will begin next week. Fully blind users are another issue, but in my reading I’ve seen nothing to compare with the Orca Project in Linux, and it is based on GNOME. The built-in stuff with KDE won’t do it, though it covers motion-impaired users well enough. A significant part of my service is to vision-impaired people, and I can’t afford to invest time in something which isn’t even close to readiness.

2. Hardware detection is everything. It’s not just a question of, “Will it work in Linux?” It’s a question whether the installation process of your chosen distro will minimize the pain. Frankly, Ubuntu/Knoppix and friends are loosing ground on this front where I’ve tried it. I won’t pretend to know what’s behind it, but the last few releases have given me fits with display setup. The GUI config utility is entirely too simplified, and there is no means for simply choosing the monitor from a list, nor even setting the hardware specs if known. There are at least a half-dozen systems where the boot process froze, and one or two where all the expert boot incantations in the world can’t get past the hardware detection freeze. On the same boxes, RedHat clones or SUSE do just fine. I’ve had to quit offering the former CDs, because they just don’t work.

3. There is such as a thing as “too secure.” Here is where CentOS and other RH clones break down. Security should work in the background. The number one complaint against Windows I hear is the way security software dominates the system resources and too often fails in one way or another. The primary consumer complaint against Vista is the obtrusive security measures which serve only to make it hard to use. In a hundred little ways, those server distros do the same thing. Yes, we want security on our servers, and server distros are the primary source of stability over the long haul. However, persuading CentOS to loosen up for a different mission is quite a large task. We can add all sorts of third-party goodies without breaking a sweat, but I have found, in consultation with developers and sysadmins, all that tweaking of the underlying assumptions is probably not worth it. Somebody needs to step forward with a different model, or we’ll never gain that wider acceptance.

4. For now, openSUSE is probably the best bet. Complain all you like about compromise with Leviathan, and apparent bloat, SUSE on the desktop is the current leader for the mass market. This, even though their latest release is badly broken in some places. I’m going to be offering to my clients and friends the DVDs from 11.0, particularly those with 64-bit hardware. People who could care less about the technical differences between 32-bit and 64-bit are often the first to notice the difference in multimedia played on them. It’s no longer just databases and heavy graphics rendering questions; 64-bit sound and video playing is noticeably better than 32-bit. I’m surprised how little this is noted in the Open Source articles I’ve been reading lately. SUSE was quite early in the game of releasing 64-bit desktop stuff, and naturally holds a lead in some aspects.

It won’t matter I’m not happy with the way SUSE tends to run a little more slowly than other distros. It won’t matter I prefer KDE (3.x) to GNOME, the latter is better for my clients. I’m finding the difference between 3 years’ support and 5+ is just small enough I can probably sell it, at least from the way my clients and friends react. Should there ever come a day when Novell wises up and releases the update SRPMs for SLED in a more timely manner, they’ll steal a huge share of the non-paying adoption market. Yes, that won’t make them any profit directly, but it will make a huge difference when they grab a much bigger market share because of the direct feedback on improvements which keeps RedHat cooperating with the likes of CentOS and Scientific Linux. For now, Novell’s policy is to restrict access to update SRPMs, and allow non-paying customers only an annual “service pack” ISO. A year is a really long time in the field of computer technology. While patching and recompiling from source is easy for folks like me, a build-ready SRPM is far simpler and quicker to deploy on a large scale — that’s the whole point behind having RPMs.

So far, no distro is a shining star. SUSE is just barely enough better than Windows I have some hope of selling it. I’ll be running it as my primary work station only so I can keep track of little things which make a difference to clients. I still prefer CentOS for my own use, but I don’t have enough computers, nor enough space for more of them, to make like some commercial operation.

Update: Notice the follow-up to this post — No Paradise

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Tinkering: Mail Servers on the Desktop

Posted on January 6, 2009 by ehurst

In my early experience with Linux, I learned The Way for email was to run an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) in the background, a fetching service, and did email from the commandline. My preferred setup was Postfix, Fetchmail and Pine. For those who loved, and still prefer Sendmail, feel free to chain yourself to hours of esoteric scripting on a system designed by developers who genuinely hate humans. I ran this trio off and on for years, and recently resurrected it on my CentOS box.

Postfix is still one of the simplest to configure, with lots of examples in the documentation (even for dialup connections), and even more scattered across the Net. It’s easy and secure, and I still like it best. The number one piece of information you need for using Postfix through your favorite mail service is how to establish your relayhost.

For some reason, Fetchmail doesn’t draw the same “let me help you” crowd. Recent changes in Fetchmail itself seem aimed it making it difficult enough for home users to be discouraged. For some time now, most users have learned you really need to put nodns in your configuration, because otherwise Fetchmail will download, then promptly reject mail from servers hosting multiple domains. A newer complaint from Fetchmail is regarding all those messages you get from mailing lists which don’t specifically put the precise “envelope” in the headers preferred by the Fetchmail developers. You now get warnings about “envelopes” and “multidrop” which will make no sense to the average users invoking Fetchmail from the commandline. If you read the documentation, you will find it’s carefully written to confuse you. If you ask for help on forums where Fetchmail experts hang out, you’ll get rude responses about “RTFM!” from people who know beyond all doubt you won’t understand it. All it really requires is you add no envelope to shut up the warnings. Here’s my own .fetchmailrc (obviously some details have been changed to protect my privacy):

poll mail.example.org protocol POP3 nodns no envelope
        user me@example.org is user me here
        password "0x0x0x0!"

The only other significant change was in Pine: It’s now Alpine, and it’s open source. Instead of settling for the version 1.0 offered by my third party repos, I chose to hunt down a RedHat-based source RPM for building 2.0. One of the newest features of no real significance is a wider array of colors for enhancing the display of Alpine on the Xterm. You can now elect to build with 256 color capability. I’m too old fashioned to care much, so I still use the original 16 colors. Still, that’s just a silly example of some changes in user configuration options and the way it works under the hood.

Aside from some minor security advantages there is no particular reason for doing things this way. It’s just that I enjoy it. I’ve configured Alpine to use Joe as the editor for composing and replying. I’m comfortable with this setup, having used it for years.

As a side note, things are not all peace and joy in CentOS Land. You really do want solid security in the server room, but on the desktop, it can be a nuisance. Some security settings simply aren’t justified for common users. The standard permission settings for users on CentOS are just a little too tight. Even without enabling SELinux, I still run into too many places where I have to login as root. For example, I cannot review any part of the system logs. It’s probably a simple matter of adding my user name to some obscure group in the system, but I haven’t worked it out yet. I may be shifting back to SUSE 11.0 (because 11.1 is too badly broken in too many places). While I don’t think 3 years is really long enough for supporting a distro release, it may be the best I can get right now.

For all you Ubuntu fanboys, forget it: No version of Ubuntu or its clones will read the detection signature of my monitor, and I have to fight like Hades to get bigger than 800×600 on a monitor designed for twice that. This is a pretty standard Dell hand-me-down CRT. Even after I install the nVidia drivers, the Ubuntu hardware recognition module ignores my monitor. The entire Debian chain of products offers no simple path to adding enough details to xorg.conf to get a reasonable display out of the box. I have to add, not only the monitor freqs, but the modelines by hand. That I know how to fix it has no bearing on the question; none of my clients should have to experience that. I am working toward supporting one or two best distros for the quickest and simplest deployment for home users.

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Green Deities

Posted on January 6, 2009 by ehurst

During the summer of 1979, I got my hands on a copy of the Greenpeace Manifesto, as it existed at the time. The mass-produced photocopy got lost during a subsequent move, and I have not found a copy since then. To my knowledge, they don’t even have a copy on their own websites. I’ve also seen a few other manifestos and philosophy statements from individuals and organizations on the same track.

The thing which stands out for a theologian like me is the underlying pagan earth worship. There’s no better term for it. The assumption is Earth is somehow sacred, and humans are mostly a disease on the Her. Only those sufficiently enlightened to receive this truth are permitted some hope to stay while they work to destroy all other humans. I’m not joking, nor do I believe this is hyperbole. The Greens essentially hate all humans, but will tolerate the idea of keeping a few of their own kind around.

When you understand this, you realize Greens are not interested in human welfare. They want you dead, but in the meantime, they’ll accept taking control of government power to make sure you are reduced to the most primitive standard of living: eating only what falls off plants, wearing only what falls over dead on its own, building nothing, changing nothing, leaving all disease and other medical complaints untreated, etc.

All this hot air about global warming is a part of the propaganda platform. You can push, twist, and pummel evidence until it confesses to all manner of pure nonsense, so it has nothing to do with science. It’s pure religion, dressed up with whatever facts conveniently fit the lie of the day. The few in the very core of the movement are only to glad to find a few Al Gores and a couple million public education fools (including students) to lend credence to the idea you should be regulated and impoverished until you die.

Make no mistake: Greens hate you.

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CentOS: KDE Upgrade the Hard Way

Posted on January 5, 2009 by ehurst

There is one feature of CentOS I dislike very much: the tendency to drag in a lot of 32-bit packages as unnecessary dependencies on a 64-bit system. I found the bundled version of KDE 3.5.4 one of the more badly broken ones. I really wanted to try 3.5.10, if I could. When I attempted to add the KDE-RedHat repo to Yum the default instructions didn’t work. I spent more time trying to understand why, unsuccessfully, than I eventually spent just doing it all manually. In the bargain, I managed to avoid dragging in a bunch of 32-bit junk. So the first move was to completely eliminate the entire group of KDE packages: yum groupremove kde-desktop.

Since the KDE repo was built off the Fedora EPEL project, I first installed that repo via RPM, and it worked okay. I still had to hunt down the actual file archives on one of the mirrors because Yum just would not yield it’s secrets to my lame brain. Then, I opened a simple console session for root and went to work. Mostly it was a matter grabbing the obvious first decencies, such as aRTs and some lib packages from EPEL. One by one I eliminated the missing decencies until I got the RPMs from KDE-RedHat to install.

First, as stated, was to wget the newer aRTs RPM and install it. Then came some goodies like OpenEXR, Taglib, Gnokii, Wavpack, Akode, Libmodplug and Xine-libs, mostly from EPEL. I always tried Yum first; if that failed, I used wget and a direct RPM installation. Back to KDE for KDEbase, and all the other packages which seemed to match what would have been installed from CentOS. Some dependencies required me to Google a bit, but eventually I got it all installed.

Upon logging out of GNOME and back into the new KDE desktop, I was rewarded with a much better working system. Apparently the packagers at KDE-RedHat have been very careful with their defaults, because I really didn’t have to do much to make things suit me. While I don’t recommend this method, sometimes you have to get creative to get what you want.

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I’m Not Alone on Rolling Release

Posted on January 4, 2009 by ehurst

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t understand all the technical details, but I find the Autopackage project is trying to overcome the problems I’ve tried to point out:

What’s a desktop Linux platform? Why do we need one?

Essentially, software is easy to install on Windows and MacOS not because of some fancy technology they have that we don’t – arguably Linux is the most advanced OS ever seen with respect to package management technology – but rather because by depending on “Windows 2000 or above” developers get a huge chunk of functionality guaranteed to be present, and it’s guaranteed to be stable.

In contrast, on Linux you cannot depend on anything apart from the kernel and glibc. Beyond that you must explicitly specify everything, which restricts what you can use in your app quite significantly. This is especially true because open source developers often depend on new versions of libraries that have been out for perhaps only a few months, putting Linux users on a constant upgrade treadmill.

Worse, sometimes the only way of easily upgrading a particular component like GTK+ is to upgrade your entire distribution which may be hard, especially for dialup users (the norm in third world countries). The problem is especially big because many distros don’t install obsolete library versions by default, relegating them to compatibility packages the user must know about and request explicitly.

I especially like that part: “open source developers often depend on new versions of libraries that have been out for perhaps only a few months, putting Linux users on a constant upgrade treadmill.” Just today I heard back from the Cheese project folks, and essentially they say what everyone else in the entire chain says: “It’s someone else’s fault.” I’ve already tried the GNOME people, and they won’t even answer the questions.

At least not everyone in Open Source is that inconsiderate.

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Suck It Up

Posted on January 3, 2009 by ehurst

There are in this life a great many things affecting you which you can’t change. You might try, but if your attempts affect too much other people, it will simply create more and bigger problems. Do I need to raise the issue of externalizing the costs of our own personal comfort? If you feel it’s okay to impose on others, taking away what little comfort they have for the sake of increasing your own, you deserve to die right now. That’s not my judgment, but God’s; argue with Him.

Indeed, most of the world does argue with God, particularly about what constitutes reality. The world is fallen, people sin, even when they don’t really want to, and life at times just stinks. Suck it up. Upon being vested with some authority, if you suddenly begin to take yourself and your position so seriously you forget about the principle of externalizing costs of your comfort and convenience, you deserve to die even more than those without authority.

So it is bureaucrats and other government figures sin on a huge scale. Everybody wants to be left alone, and I can fully appreciate the Zero Aggression Principle. The world needs a really big dose of that. However, it also needs a dose of recognition some intrusions are not the result of aggression, and some aggressions aren’t worthy of response. When bureaucrats think of being left alone, they think in terms of not having to deal with anything which disturbs their comfort. So while their sole employment is wrapped up in handling the mass of variegated humans, they become grouchy because humans have this confounded habit of varying. Such bureaucrats want the citizenry to show up, walk through their bureaucratic process, then go away — all uniform, all simple, no surprises. It’s “leave me alone” blown completely out of proportion.

I first became conscious of this when I was working as a substitute teacher in public schools. I overheard a discussion about teenage sexual proclivities and how the school system really needed to get a handle on it. I groaned inwardly, knowing I was going to be forced to say something which would guarantee I’d never get to work in that school again. At some point, I said, “Yes, these things affect what we face in the classroom, and what administrators face, as well. However, not everything which affects us is our business. We just have to suck it up.” I’m sure you can imagine how that goes over in the socialist public education environment.

Nor would it have done any good to explain how the fundamental philosophy of most of what we were doing as teachers, the very structure of everything going on inside that building, was a major part of what caused whatever problems might arise from teenage sexual escapades. Whole books address this better than I could here. But there is a fully artificial culture kids create in that pressure cooker because socialist education philosophy rejects the notion of passing on our culture, which includes our morals. In the act of saying all morals are relative, you cannot avoid taking a moral position. That moral position demands an intervention which advances the idea those who work in public schools ought to be able to dictate how the world should think and act.

When it first happened, I wondered why the college professors who taught the classes I took while working on my teaching certificate kept trying to persuade me to do something besides teaching. Their arguments began with variations of noting my grades were too high for me to go into teaching in public school. Silly me for thinking the teaching profession needed teachers who knew their subject matter well. The bulk of full time teachers were first and foremost political activists of one kind or another, except for those who were simply trying to find a hiding place from real work.

That’s what I ran into with every job I had where the government paid my wages. The only people who prospered in the system were those who could hardly succeed elsewhere. These are the folks who cannot comprehend carrying their share of the load with the rest of the world. They had some authority, and darned if they weren’t going to make the most of it for their personal benefit.

And bureaucrats wonder why citizens hate them.

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Vignettes 1

Posted on January 2, 2009 by ehurst

A collection of small thoughts. They are connected, but can be considered individually.

1. The Democratic Party was hijacked about four decades ago. It had been a fairly conservative, rural oriented bunch of old men, but became home to American socialism in just a few months. The Republican Party was a lie from the start. It had always been the party of industrial oligarchy, and always pretended to care about people by supporting things which were superficially morally, or superficially supporting moral things, just to make a buck.

Oddly, both eventually agreed on a brand of corporate socialism, with only superficial differences to keep the masses fooled. The system for plundering the nation’s productivity has nearly run its course. Pretty soon it will be naked oppression, and we the people will realize once more, too late, there has been a separate ruling class all along, and we are not a part of it. Some may serve it directly, but the ruling class is wholly different from you and I, and will not shed a tear when it comes time to murder huge masses of us.

2. As this naked oppression rises on the back of a falling economy, I’m wondering how much longer we will have access to the Net, and to blogging like this. I confess the Net has been a very powerful tool in shaping my philosophy and theology, in that it provided the means for me to explore areas otherwise not available to me. It made the long path of study much shorter. I am certain access will change radically, though I can hardly predict just how.

3. I am honestly certain the ubiquity of the Windows operating system will play a major roll in this. That’s because the nature of the Net itself prevents much control. There is a serious vulnerability in our high reliance on DNS as a public infrastructure, but for a great many serious techies, there are ways around that. Serious techies tend not to rely on Windows, simply because they can never control it. That is, hidden within the system are controls which have only been hinted at by the marvelous ingenuity of virus and malware writers. Some are extremely hard to remove, and this is from people who have to discover slowly by determined study how to activate controls buried within the system. How do you think it would be if MS and government agreed to deploy a means of control, with MS’s inside knowledge of what they have created? The final “Doomsday Virus” on Windows will come at the behest of oppressive government, not some clever criminal cracker.

4. On the one hand, as long as this vector of control lasts, government will probably not seek other forms of control on the Internet. I’m guessing here, by the way, the US oligarchy can convince the EU oligarchy and others play along for their own oppressive ends. Thus, at least in the West, things will change only for MS slaves, and it may be Macs will be roped into it. This leaves only the independent Open Source movement, which as a whole would never play along. I am torn by the realization as long as we are few, we are safe. But I want people free. So deeply do I want them free, I am working on a project to offer a Linux which might just tip the balance and convince more people to try it. If some critical mass of people switch away from operating systems vulnerable to external control, the whole thing may get shut down, in a manner of speaking.

5. At the same time, a random collection of geeks are working on protocols which do not rely on wires and fiber as the current system does. On the one hand, we know far too much government business relies on the Internet in all its manifestations. If they cut the wires, they cut off their own primary means of communication. If they restrict access to the wires, they will forever fight the battle to keep all access closed. Fat chance. The brightest minds in the world never work for government, because bureaucracy always attracts losers, so the outsiders always have an edge. These bright minds will always have the advantage in unraveling what the bureaucrats have tried to wrap up tightly. But this will leave out the average Joe Sixpack who is utterly lacking in the kind of hobby obsession which takes advantage of these alternative routes. Even if I do create a Linux distro which draws the masses, the masses will likely fail to fully exploit the advantages. It would require the geeks who write the code and develop the protocols to put it all in easy reach of Joe Sixpack. There is some hope, since most people who defy the system to “pirate” music and movies do get away with it.

6. But a lot of this may make no difference at all for some here in the West. Even the oligarchs probably can’t say what they’ll do beyond general plans, because there are too many variables. That there will be a blood in the streets is inevitable. We are too far down the slope, and there’s no turning back. The entire Western economic system of fiat currency has collapsed, and only the scale of things has kept it from having even more immediate effects. It will not recover, though it may appear to at certain points. The current bureaucratic system of government across the West is incapable of rising to the challenges, pretty much because of the aforementioned lack of talent. Instead, government will seek to maintain it’s current level of consumption in a drastically reduced pool of available resources, and people will rightly conclude this is evil. Conflict is unavoidable, and it will mean agents of enforcement will be caught in the middle, the oligarchy’s buffer zone. Most policemen, sadly, have been so thoroughly conditioned to avoid moral considerations, they will close ranks against the civilian population.

Part of what makes me pessimistic about 2009 is how very much of this has already begun during 2008, and so few people know it. The senseless abuse of police power rose dramatically this past year, but we haven’t seen anything yet.

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Sometimes It Scares Me

Posted on January 1, 2009 by ehurst

It scares me when someone in a fairly mainstream publication says something which makes sense. I’m afraid Greenwald does that now and then.

In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn’t that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?…

Bernstein’s mentality is echoed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who defends Israel’s actions by approvingly quoting Barack Obama’s statement that “If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” But that mindset justifies any and all actions by any group with a legitimate grievance, as in: “if my family and I were forced to live under a 4-decade foreign occupation and had our land blockaded and were not allowed to exit and my children couldn’t access basic nutrition or medical treatment, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing.” That happens also to be the same mentality that was used to justify the 9/11 attacks (“if my family and I were forced to live in a region in which a foreign superpower dominated our politics and propped up brutal dictators for its own ends, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Muslims to do the same thing”).

But — just like those who insist that American Torture is different because American leaders use it for noble ends — this is nothing more elevated than an adolescent refusal to view the world through any prism other than complete self-centeredness, where one’s own side merits infinite empathy and the “other side” merits none. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars — there is endless blame to go around to countless parties.  Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it’s not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.

Then he quotes at length George Washington’s warnings about getting too deeply involved in the quarrels of other countries. Favoring anyone too much ties us down, and cannot possibly ever be in our nation’s best interests. For those of us who recognize the theology of Covenants, knowing this falls under the Covenant of Noah, we have every right to point out their sin, for this is nothing less than defiance of what God said. For those of you who embrace Dispensationalism, please show me how this Modern Israel participates in any way in the Mosaic Covenant? First, they openly reject that covenant, so they can’t inherit any of the promises. Second, if you don’t yet realize virtually none of Israel’s citizens are of Hebrew lineage, I wonder just how you are going to explain to Jesus Christ you refused to learn any facts about this mess?

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Posting from Elinks

Posted on January 1, 2009 by ehurst

Just testing how well I can do this all from Elinks, the plain text browser. Lately I have been somewhat disappointed at sites which have so completely changed, you can no longer view them from a plain text browser. This does not bode well for users with sight problems. Most well-established (and affordable) screen reader software is based on rendering text, but there is a growing tendency to make websites with text displayed graphically in a container which does not display as text.

For now, kudos to WordPress for keeping it accessible.

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Talking Past Each Other

Posted on December 31, 2008 by ehurst

Why did I know it would happen? I got some of my views on rolling release published on a webzine. Immediately, comments began to appear, as I had hoped. That means people are reading it and thinking about it.

Except, they aren’t really thinking about what I said. There is this mental block in the mass of hobby users who just assume everyone in the world will want improvements, and improvement can only mean more features. They are utterly cut off from the world of everyday folks who use computers, even use them a great deal, but don’t want changes in the underlying operating system. They want to use it, not play with it all the time. For the hobby folks, there can be no using it without playing with it.

So ingrained are these differences, I am not surprised to see the comments from the hobbyists who just cannot understand the point I was making. Let’s assume for a moment there was no Microsoft, and just to be fair, no Mac. All computers are limited to the Open Source operating systems like Linux and BSD. Let me assure you there would be far fewer computers in the world, and they would be a darn sight more expensive. However, let’s start from where we are, and MS and Apple just evaporate, along with every copy of their products. The world is forced to turn to Linux, BSD, etc.

Very quickly, after a the first couple of months, you would have angry users seeking to choke some developers to death. They would be yelling, screaming and rioting. They would tell anyone they could catch: “Stop changing it! Leave it alone, and just make it work!” After just two to three months of automatic updates, and the gentle nagging this or that is insecure or broken, but the only fix offered is a newer version which, in the eyes of the user, is significantly different and requires running through the setup process again — you would have people throwing their computers away.

For the average user, constant change is not fun. For the hobby user, lack of change is no fun. If the Open Source community only reaches out to the hobby users, they will have nothing to offer the average user. It’s not a matter of which user type is right or wrong, but whether we can accommodate both.

Addenda: I don’t take myself too seriously, but I know what I like. The last time I really enjoyed using KDE was 3.1.5. It was stable, everything worked, and it needed no improvement. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.x with Enlightenment. The one best release of RedHat in terms of how well it actually worked underneath was 7.3. For FreeBSD it was around 4.8, and SuSE around 8.2. The best word processor was WordPerfect 8. The best X server release in terms of snappy response on current hardware and stable operations was around XFree86 4.2.

In general, I haven’t been too happy with Open Source as a whole since those experiences. What I have now is pretty good, but it could be better. It could be simpler. As a philosophical statement, I would say we have gone past the point of diminishing returns in computers, both hardware and software. It won’t die for a very long time, but it will never be that good again.

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