Well I got some response to my rant. I’m surprised nobody said, “So do something about it.” That seems to be the usual open source thing to do (and not that bad a response either). It was looking like I’d have to pull out my RH6.2 cd’s and go back to 1999. However I have, at last, downloaded Knoppix. Wow, it actually works! This is seriously cool! The future suddenly doesn’t look so bad. Of course it did spoils things a little by not supporting my sounds card when I managed to get it working under RH and Debian with surprisingly little effort. Why is this distro so good when the others seem to have regressed so much?
February 12th, 2004
I started replying to this and this came out. I didn’t need to rant on jwz’s blog, I’ll leave that to him. Here I go.
Thing is in a previous life I did learn Linux (I was a sys admin). I even liked it quite a bit, hell it was the only O/S on my work PC. Then I went away to make kites (really I did) and a couple of years later bought my own PC, cause I’m a geek at heart and hated using others machines. I thought to myself, “Why pay for an O/S. Linux is great it’ll do everything I need and 95 sucked back in 2000 anyway.” But then a strange thing happened and for some reason I thought, “What the hell it’s only a few bucks for XP I’ll give it a go.” Of course it’s 18 months later. After installing XP I got RedHat 8. Wow what a disappointment. I spent the best part of two days learning turn off the firewall (one of the main things we used Linux for in my old job) so I could talk to my other boxen all because the fuckers put a shitty UI on everything and hid all the useful stuff across 50 thousand sub menus. I was so pissed after that I re-read some jwz.org (try here and most of here)stuff to remind myself how right he’d been all along and left the partition alone for a year. Then I decided Debian might be better for an 3l1t3 hacker like myself. Oh boy wrong again. How anyone manages to get a working X out of that thing is beyond my ken. I remember getting FreeBSD to do it like 7 years ago on then ancient eisa cards (no I’m don’t like free BSD any better, please don’t tell me what I did wrong). So basically XP’s been my O/S for almost two years, and you know what I like it. Yes I’m coming out of the geek closet. Stuff, just, well….works. You know you buy a camera, scanner, whatever plug it in stick in the CD and off you go. The only thing I had trouble with was an old cheap TV card, the irony being that I got some open source drivers to make it work. I not enitrly happy about this, it shouldn’t be like this by now dam it, Linux seemed like the answer a few years ago I’m sure I remember it working well and it’s actually managed to regress! It’s a hopeless 1 000 000 distros, KDE,Gnome,Mozilla,Firebird hell where nothing quite works with anything else. A million people (well actually no one reads this blog) will no doubt email me and say, “But you should have used blah,blah,blah, and downloaded foobar”, but the point is I don’t have to and neither should you).
February 2nd, 2004