The Linux Crusade

Posted 10-15-2015 at 10:00 PM by Randicus Draco Albus

It is encouraging that the Linux religion is thriving. The contingent of missionaries embarking on the crusade to convert the computer heathens to the one true operating system continues to grow at a healthy rate.
(In case there is any doubt, yes, that is sarcasm.)

From what I see on various fora, it seems that the mentality of the Cult of Ubuntu is spreading vigorously throughout the rest of Linuxdom. Missionary zeal used to be restricted to the fantasy of a world dominated by the wondrous kingdom of the Linux desktop, where Windows users will jump to Linux en masse. The situation has been exacerbated by many Linux users considering Android to be Linux. The resulting increase in zeal to proselytise the faith infests every Linux forum. The thing that gives me a chuckle is the large number of acolytes who decry the evils of companies and their proprietary software also praise the greatness of their Linux systems for being able to use software like Skype and Flash Player.

On the bright side, it makes fora more entertaining.

Hold the beacon of truth and liberty high aloft as ye continue the crusade holy warriors!

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LOL. Living long enough to understand life better than when I was in my 20's.

I learned long ago that if what I did became main stream.

I usually did not like the personalities that came with my preferred actions that only a few did and then became mainstream. Where the flotsam and jetsam came drifting in. Taking up what used to be free space for me.

So I had a decision to make. Either quit in a huff and take all my toys home bitching and moaning about the posers taking over what I thought was my own private thing.

Or, Just keep doing my own thing. While ignoring the posers when possible like
getting bit by a flea and moving on.

I chose the latter.

Harley Davidson and Biker runs used to be small affairs. Like using Linux.
Where good people supported each other and times were good and prices were cheap.

Then Mainstream kicked in in the 80's and boom. Everybody on the planet started showing up at your little motorcycle run expressing their clue less biker views on how a biker should act and be. Posers basically with a credit card buying their way into coolness.

So nothing new here for me. I just grin and bear it. Trying not to trip up on the "Looky at That!" posts and posts that are like taking that stick and striking the hornets nest once. Then stepping away. "Is Kali blah blah blah"
"Insert whatever here, Sucks!"

Grinning here on the Mexican border this morning.

Posted 10-16-2015 at 08:19 AM by rokytnji rokytnji is offline

Personally I remember before Ubuntu came along and I remember the overly enthusiastic kids running Mandrake and Gentoo and compiling stuff for the fun of it...

Ubuntu was floating on Mark Shuttleworth's fortune, they bought the forum and started pushing "the product" - they used their unfair advantage over "competitors" to gain popularity, by pushing the "distribution" at people who were woefully ill prepared to run it. The whole thing was marketed as "humanity to others" and as a movement against the evil MS (bug #1). I suppose it appealed to certain "fair trade" hipster types. Sadly Ubuntu was a broken mess not long after it started to deviate more and more from Debian unstable and after 6.06 every release, released to deadline, with numerous problems - which their target market would not accept. Ubuntu might have gained that 1% of the desktop market, but reinforced in the minds of many that Linux was not "desktop ready".

In later years Ubuntu/Canonical showed their true colours (Byzantine purple rather than the african elephant shit brown) and of course turned out to be a commercial venture from a commercial entity... behaving entirely corporately and putting out products with restrictive licence agreements attached to them and even developing proprietary software. all mention of "GNU", "Linux" and anything remotely related to it's base OS was hidden from view and replaced with the usual off the shelf marketing speak and promotion of social networks and skype...

I chortled a little at furor over the "shopping lens" - evidence that, by taking on the forums and making it official, Canonical had this whole unwieldy community of people who could just warp into typical disgruntled consumers at the slightest provocation...

Posted 10-27-2015 at 12:24 PM by cynwulf cynwulf is offline

Trying to market a buggy system to the masses was a serious miscalculation. They must have believed the sales pitch "With a new release every six months, your system will always be up-to-date" would be more important to people than a stable system. But it did make Ubuntu fairly popular. Just not popular enough to achieve Shuttleworth's goal.

Quote:

The whole thing was marketed as "humanity to others" and as a movement against the evil MS (bug #1).

And now they are partners with MS and Amazon.

Posted 10-27-2015 at 05:39 PM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline

But that's precisely what they did. They 'dressed up' Debian unstable and pushed the result at "human beings". The outcome of that is history - if anyone reading happens to be one of those people who had no issues and everything ran like a dream, then good for you. The "rest of us" remember it differently. The last release I used, which didn't last long as it was crap "out of the box" and I had already switched to Debian etch, was 9.04. I installed that as any user would have and the first problem I remember was that the gdm login screen was broken. There were also numerous bugs and breakages with the notification bubbles from within gnome. There were yet more issues - can't recall all of them. I remember that the apologist fanbois best comment was "just run the LTS!". Well errmm yes or I could just run Debian....

Then when the 10.04 LTS was released, even the forum admin of ubuntuforums at the time said it was crap... (all buried in the "archives" by now of course). He was taken to one side, backtracked, etc... corporate loyalty comes first of course and he could not just go and say the "product" was crap even if it was crap... and the staff are just unpaid volunteers...

p.s. I was one of the few people like liked the elephant shit themes - didn't mind those at all. Some of the desktop backgrounds were pretty good.

p.p.s. My excuse for using it? They had me with this:

https://papaur00.files.wordpress.com...ell-done-2.jpg

(if anyone was let down by Ubuntu, it's me...)

Posted 10-28-2015 at 09:04 AM by cynwulf cynwulf is offline

Updated 10-28-2015 at 09:06 AM by cynwulf

I liked the brown theme very much, because I like brown. Ubuntu also usually has nice screen backdrops, which is not surprising, given that marketing is the distribution's life-blood. Although I think Slackware's website is beautiful. Simple and very "computerish".

My favourite fanboy comments were the responses to complaints about the bugs in Unity when it was introduced. "Those are not bugs. They are features." Undoubtedly, those people are in the vanguard of the Linux Crusade to convert the computer infidels.

Posted 10-28-2015 at 09:40 PM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline

I agree, the Slackware website is simple and well designed. I find websites of that sort easy to follow and read - I find the clutter of "selling" style websites confusing and a big headache to wade through. I can stare at such websites for an hour and not find what I'm looking for - mainly because it seems that they are designed to hide what you're looking for in tiny text down the bottom and push useless crap to be the main focus.

The FreeBSD and NetBSD websites are ok as are those of Debian, Gentoo and Arch Linux (apart from the odd big moronic button and the omnipresent "tab" bar things across the top of some of those sites).

Compare these to OpenBSD's however, which intentionally embraces 90's retro html only web design and DragonFly's which follows a similar format. Much in the same style/approach as Slackware's.

The difference is of course that none of these sites are trying to "sell" anything to anyone.

Then have a look at any Red Hat, Canonical or openSUSE site and witness corporate absurdity in all it's glory... Red Hat's site is in fact a train wreck of 'nasty moving red bits', huge graphical banners and photos of grinning office staff. They obviously paid some trendy hipster 'web developer' a lot to write that crap, but I've seen better websites at grocery stores. This is unfortunately what you get when people sit around a boardroom table and circle jerk over their "image". I had a quick look at the site on waybackmachine and it looks like the the full on stupidity started some time around 2012.

Unity was mainly disliked by a section of Ubuntu users simply because it wasn't gnome 2.x ... Back then quite a few switched to Debian and got gnome-shell instead...

I don't think bugs ever really came into it, at least not for the majority. The main real issues with unity, are that it isn't very portable (as far as I know all attempts to port it stalled - so much for "giving back" eh?): https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipe...ry/161713.html

(And of course there's the well known privacy issues.)

So you have a GUI shell, released under free licences but pretty near impossible to port to another Linux distribution, let alone another OS, with built in spyware as a nice bonus (and still many people don't get what they're all about).

Posted 10-29-2015 at 06:09 AM by cynwulf cynwulf is offline

Updated 10-29-2015 at 06:11 AM by cynwulf

Quote:

I don't think bugs ever really came into it, at least not for the majority.

It was for me. I started with Ubuntu 8.04 and dropped it shortly after the arrival of Unity. There were four factors that gave me incentive to switch:
1) The bad design that was ugly and hindered productivity.
2) The bugs that seriously hindered using some applications.
3) It slowed down my system significantly.
4) Shuttleworth's "use it and you will learn to like it" attitude.

A combination of poorly designed GUI and bugs. That was how I saw Unity. Reading interviews with Shuttleworth at the time where he explained his attitude also opened my eyes to the reality of the project. Unfortunately, many people refused to remove their blinders and kept following the carrot.

Posted 10-29-2015 at 07:07 AM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline

The reason why I stand by the statement that "bugs never really came into it", was because at the time Ubuntu was as buggy as hell anyway, so bugginess and breakage were just a fact of life. You'll note that I don't say "is", because I haven't used any Ubuntu in well over 6 years and not seriously for longer still.

What turned users off Unity initially was that it wasn't gnome 2.x

I remember breakage in gnome and all sorts of problems with other software - especially update manager and network manager. But to be honest I always found gnome and other gnome software to be a buggy and inconsistent mess and avoided it long before version v3.x was released. It tended to be better in Debian stable because they froze at an older release and had time to iron out most of the bugs.

Posted 10-29-2015 at 08:46 AM by cynwulf cynwulf is offline

Updated 10-29-2015 at 08:50 AM by cynwulf

	I still do core installs with a minimal iso. Ignorance is bliss I guess. Ubuntu does try and mess up a Icewm menu layout from core iso though. It takes me a bit of time to unsnarl the tangled up layout.
	Posted 10-30-2015 at 10:22 AM by rokytnji

	Quote: What turned users off Unity initially was that it wasn't gnome 2.x True, because until then many, if not most, Ubuntu users did not know there was more than one GUI. Quote: I still do core installs with a minimal iso. Why do you do that? A glutton for punishment or do you like to keep abreast of what the dark side is doing?
	Posted 10-30-2015 at 05:53 PM by Randicus Draco Albus

Quote:

Why do you do that? A glutton for punishment or do you like to keep abreast of what the dark side is doing?

Because the user wants alot and has XP or Windows 2000 hardware is why. Do you think I get all my favours from the City with my good looks?

Ubuntu is just easier to install, setup, and support for the elderly here in my little metropolis. Icewm, Synaptic, Rox Desktop for Icons.
Makes Ubuntu almost bearable, and easy to handle.

They have all the codecs and stuff a 80 year old loves to handle. Even https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Accessibility

I have no druthers while being pragmatic getting a seniors gear online for free.

Posted 10-30-2015 at 06:54 PM by rokytnji rokytnji is offline

My latest freebie from the city

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...74/index2.html

scroll to the bottom for the latest freebie.

Posted 10-30-2015 at 06:58 PM by rokytnji
Quote:

Do you think I get all my favours from the City with my good looks?

Yes.

Posted 10-30-2015 at 08:05 PM by Randicus Draco Albus