Eleven is Louder

Ahahaha...

Haha that's a good read.

I disagree slightly.
You promote yourself to slackware when you are confident that whatever they haven't done, you can do.
Then it's stable. En route, a good preparation is LFS.

Mind you, on the title 'Loving & hating linux' it tells me that you have reached intermediate user level, as defined:
User, n:
A person operating a computer, broken into three levels
1. Beginner - Is afraid to do anything in case he presses a key that breaks the whole computer.
2. Intermediate - Doesn't know what to do when he has pressed a key that broke the whole computer.
3. Expert - Breaks other people's computers.

1 members found this post helpful.

That's simply fantastic!

Nice article. Thanks,

Where do I fit in? I started with Slackware.

Fedora & SUSE both look offended...

If you demote yourself to another distro, and put everything "must-have" onto it, when it borks, you will appreciate Slackware.
I have Fedora as well for the Electronic Spin. There was hell shoehorning it onto the system; over it's lifetime it is never stable, as it is a testing ground for RHEL. So if you let it update, it swaps the bugs you have (and are not bothered by) with other bugs, until something you compiled conflicts with the latest update. Then you get these amazing and devious faults nobody can fix. It usually took me about two years to get that far.

...there is a clear and not so constructive tendency for a certain kind of Linux user to misrepresent and misjudge things based solely on their distribution-centric point of view. This attitude towards other Linux distributions is not solely the fault of the user as this particular distribution, unlike other Linux distributions, openly voices its negative opinion of other Linux distributions. Given this any rant, comment or question flowing from that specific point of view, however seemingly honest at first glance, will only serve to idealize that distribution, its deities and its propaganda. The way the majority of these users go about voicing their allegiance should not ever be mistaken for a faithful representation of what Linux is, or should be, all about.

Is it the distribution that openly voices a negative opinion of other distros? Or is it a subset of the dedicated user's of the distro, ardent advocates and true believers, that do that?

Anyway, what distro are you referring to?

My description of Fedora is hardly fair. Slackware also. You do have to write your own scripts in places, or hack theirs. Fedora is very good on configuring multimedia things to work. I tried to compile wxwidgets for slackware, a dependency for kicad, and it was like groundhog day
compile wxwidgets
compile another dependency
compile kicad, which failed with a wxwidgets error, and that's several hours gone.
compile wxwidgets with more options (which fails)
compile wxwidgets again
compile another dependency
compile kicad, which fails with a wxwidgets error
...
That's why I have the Fedora spin.

All what is needed, if you don't want to fiddle with dependencies. Of course for the occasional program that has not a Slackbuild available you will have to do it manually nonetheless.

--

Anyways, I don't really understand what those issues in the article are about. Most of the issues in the article aren't really issues.

You are choosing your OS dependent on boot time? Really? You are doing it wrong, just use hibernate, boot time becomes a non-issue.

You have dependency problems? Go for Debian or Ubuntu, it is hard to find software that is not in their repos or has at least a DEB package available.

Programming on Linux is a non-issue on any distribution, I have yet to find a distribution that comes without programming tools in the repo or available from third parties.

There are Linux or distro-specific zealots. Surprise, you will find zealots in any aspect of life, from DEs/WMs over OSes over hardware, ... . Or when it comes to cars. Or teams in your favorite kind of sport. Or favorite kinds of sports. Or super heroes. And so on.

Oh, the last piece, software changes over time. Of course it does. Why shouldn't it? But it is open source, it is easy to do something when there are changes you don't like. Either use something different or pull out your IDE and start coding yourself. Do I have to agree with any change that the developers make? Of course not, I personally don't like Gnome 3 for example. Does that mean that those changes are necessarily bad for everyone? No! Does that mean that I am entitled to demand from the developers to make changes? No! Does this mean that I am not allowed to criticize them? Also no, I can tell the developers that I am not satisfied with their changes, but that doesn't mean that the developers have to revert them. And if they don't want to, well, fork the code, like the MATE and Trinity people did. Or recreate the former experience, like the Cinnamon or Consort people do. Or just try to revert the changes yourself, like developers of plugins for Gnome Shell do. You can't code? Doesn't matter, be a beta tester and report bugs, create themes,donate money or hardware to support the development or just spread the word.
It is open source, there is nothing that can't be changed, you just have to be active, this isn't OS X or Windows where you have to passively take what they give you.

Rant over.
Am I an anti-zealot now?

Heh. So true.

I used Ubuntu for several years because it came on my Dell laptop back when Dell did that and the Broadcom wireless worked.

Unity finally drove me to put Slackware on that machine and figure out the Broadcom, with LQ's help, but I've always had Slack on at least one box. The only other distro I like almost as much is Debian.

Got Mint on my Win7 machine because I figured setting up the dual boot would be easy with Mint (it was).

yeah i have a love/hate relationship with linux. i love it when things work. i hate it when things don't.

Actually, I think that statement applies to computers in general.

My girlfriend is a Windows user (I'm tried to convert her, but her work is a Windows shop).

She would say the same thing about Windows.

I do know that, when I have to help her out with something Windows, it leads me to appreciate Linux even more.

Haha, so true!

But really, Linux is really GNU/Linux, despite "the majority of software in the average Linux distribution being neither GNU or FSF in origin" (majority of software in the average Linux distribution is neither Linus nor Kernel.org nor whatever in origin, too).

And i use Catalyst, so no RMS type here.