Bad karma

Lets see, it's been almost 18 months since I originally posted Evolution of an Ubuntu user, but looks like they still haven't got their fucking act together.

I know a lot of you freetards out there dream of jobs where you can work on Linux, write code for Linux, and pen flowery blog posts that make it up on hacker news, but let me tell you, unless you're one of the few who are hired by Redhat to contribute nothing to their bottom line and instead work on their playground sand castle known as Fedora, it's going to suck.

So anyways, I had the awesome opportunity to upgrade to Karmic. Cuz I know, like shuttleman says, every Ubuntu release is the best fucking Ubuntu release ever.

Problem #1? Using update-manager to upgrade Ubuntu from behind the firewall is ass-slow. Yep, you guessed it. They try to do something that doesn't respect http_proxy and has to time-out before progressing. What year is this? really guys? Just because Ubuntards work out of their basement, doesn't excuse you from not supporting one of the most common practices in company network environments. I mean, it took us like five years to get you to add that damn option in the installer so that it didn't choke on a fat dick trying to the apt repositories. Now this. Amateur.

And while on the subject of proxies, it looks like your new shiny empathy client doesn't support proxies. Yep, there's a bug for that. Yep that's some empathy right therr. Obviously you totally understand your users get their shit done. Otherwise you wouldn't change my default chat app that fails to download my contact list, even from a server that's behind the proxy.

Problem #2? Wee! Something about my xconfig borked during an upgrade. And now I get a fucking strobe light prompt. I know you want to always give me a challenge to get a reasonable display, but do you actually have to try to damage my eyesight? What the fuck happened to bullet proof X? oh, right maybe that was only for intrepid, because, you know why add a useful feature if you're just going to keep it around for every subsequent release and not rewrite it?

Problem #3? Google reader on firefox is crazy slow. I mean, ff3.5 on jaunty worked just fine. But it's ok, nobody uses google reader. Yep, there's a bug for that, too, with a bunch of awesome Ubuntu contributors saying "me too!" "me too!" OMFG this bug is going to get fixed if we all keep saying me too! How many users does it take to fix a bug? None, you dipshit. You need a dev that gives a fuck.

Problem #4? I'm sure pulseaudio has something to do with this, but the volume on my computer appears to have exactly 3 notches between quiet and SUPER FUCKING TRIPLE SONIC BOOM YOU WIN! Ubuntu -- damaging your senses, one sense at a time. Maybe Linux is totally awesome if you're blind and deaf, and you just connect a serial console to your ass.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's a bug for that. Filed in March 2008!

Ok fine, I'm totally going to schedule three work days to upgrade when Lactating Leper comes out. If only there was some calendaring app that I could use to remind me.. because as far as I can see, Evolution is actually devolving. Come on Novell! just a little more. You've almost killed it! Only a few more smacks!

Target: Lusers

Just came across this wonderful email from the Fedora Advisory Board. In it, they try to describe who they're creating the Fedora distribution for. Here are their four criteria:

1. is voluntarily switching to Linux
2. is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer
3. is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with Fedora
4. wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser

This seems like a reasonable thing to do. I mean, it's always good to try to understand your user, right? Unfortuantely, the above description fails fantastically in so many ways. Look closely, and you'll see what they're really trying to say:

1. You're a freetard. If you're voluntarily switching to Linux, so that means you already find intrinsic value in it. Well, the software itself isn't up to par with the other stuff around, so what does Linux have that other's don't? We all know the answer to that one: freedom. But you know, the best way to improve your general purpose operating system is to build it for the tiny number of specific people who have already chosen to use your system. Everybody knows that.
2. You don't need any support, cuz you ain't gettin' any!
3. You can tolerate bugs, because our shit is full of bugs. You are also willing to file bug reports, only to see them linger forever. Another way of reading that is: you don't actually have a real life and you don't have anything else that you need to get done.
4. You only need a subset of features that Windows 98 had.

Brilliant! I think they've just created a nice 4-point summary why Linux is still on the sidelines of the desktop OS battlefield.

Here's an idea

If you're a freetard, but you need to run Windows at work or something, I've got an idea for a utility that will keep you true to the cause.

Well, a mockup for it anyways. I call it kanye-freetard-notify:

Suggestions box

I had to start using an Ubuntu box at work again, so I've got some fresh (or refreshed?) hate to unload. Since some of you seem to think I'm doing this to be constructively critical of Linux (you can think whatever the hell you want), I'll write these as if I was dropping notes into a suggestions box:

Please add a --shit-that-fucking-works flag to apt-cache search

How many hours do I have to waste wading through the monument of shit known as the debian package repository? I cringe to think of all the hours wasted arguing about how to correctly package apps and libraries that just don't work to start with. As a user, I don't care that the repository contains fuckteen different twitter clients. Could you just tell me the three that work? Oh wait, actually, this is open source, so could you tell me which one is th only one that kinda works?

Not only are you distracting me with having to try shit that doesn't work, you also are bewildering me with choices, most of which I don't care about, and most of which I have to spend time figuring out that I don't care about.

If you haven't seen this talk on the paradox of choice, go see it.

Everytime I use apt, I think I experience all the negatives that this guy talks about. 10 bazillion packages! Hurray! I don't even feel like trying to find one anymore.

I'm sure somebody is going to point out that on Ubuntu, that's why they separate main and universe and multiverse. Like main is supposed to be the good shit, and the rest of it is, like, whatever. Well you know what? If I stick to just the main repository on Ubuntu, then the whole thing sucks African gorilla cock. So don't go telling me that it's great because there's all these packages but then only 100 of them are actually useful. Because if you compare that set to what's available on a real desktop OS, it's just pathetic.

Please don't switch the Chromium PPA builds to 64bit on Ubuntu AMD64

The Chromium project recently made some noise about going 64 bit. I'm pretty sure that the Chromium PPA folks are going to switch to the x64 build for Ubuntu x64 as soon as they can.

Can I jus remind you that the Flash plugin for 64 bit is still alpha? and still crashes all the fucking time?

The greatest thing about the Chromium PPA is that its 32bit! I can actually use a stable flash build (though there are other issues), and it kinda mostly works. I can't say that for 64bit firefox and 64bit flash.

A lot of people have been using 32bit stuff for a long time. And especially in open source, that's the only way you know that something has a chance in hell of working.

Oh and BTW. Did anyone notice that Snow Leopard implemented browser plugins in separate processes? They pretty much made nspluginwrapper. Except it works, apparently.

So let's take stock. Yes, nspluginwrapper has been around for a long time. It's kind of a good idea and kinda works. Then Apple folks decided to do it, and it was done.

Sadly, so typical. The freetard line about, "oh open source is so flexible, it often implements new things first". Well you know what? When an idea is actually good, commercial companies still seem to be able to better implement these new things in less overall time.

Anyways, I think I've got a few more suggestions, but they'll have to wait.

No,it's not dead

It's just that all the new posts you want are actually in git.

Just too lazy to make a stable release.

The fail train that is Munich

Wow, nice link in the comments.

http://linux-software2009.blogspot.com/

An entire blog dedicated to the failure that is the Munich Linux transition.

Hopefully the rest of Germany and Europe can learn from Munich's mistakes.

Why don't we all go over to this guy's blog and give him a nice warm hug.

To all you mono haters

Take that.

But seriuosly. Why don't we all just wait another 20 years until everyone forgets that C# came from Microsoft. Then can we use it? I'm sure by then, the real OS'es of the world will have moved onto something even more productive, and freetards will continue to re-discover everything all over again.

Oh, and btw. Gnote is the most retardonkulous project ever. Could you guys also port Banshee, Beagle and F-spot too? Fuck. Not only do you guys waste your time creating busted clones of proprietary software, now you're creating busted clones of free software too? Amazing.

Actually, I don't think my left buttcheek agrees with C++. Could we please get a port of Gnote to assembly code?

Oh wait, I think there's a lot of IP in intel x86 assembly. Hmm, how about then you port it to something that runs on the OGP card. That would be, like, totally awesome.