[conspire] Fwd: Ubuntu 6.10

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:25:34 -0800, Edmund J. Biow wrote:

> You guys are far too kind.  Quit it.

OK. You suck! Happy?

> Forget about compositing 
> windows managers altogether if you have an Via Unichrome or an old Rage

Are you sure? There are two different drivers for Unichrome, and to get
the good one, you have to recompile X.org, because no distro ships it, and
both drivers are still being worked on. Unichrome typically has 64MB VRAM,
and Rage can have up to 32MB, but current ATI cards are typically half a
gig. How much is enough?

> That said, because of Intel's modest efforts I am shopping for an Intel 
> motherboard and CPU for the first time since my Celeron 333 circa 1998.
> The Core 2 is apparently a great CPU (after Intel was very much behind
> the price/performance curve since the introduction of the Duron/Athlon
> line IMO) but I don't need top of the line oomph and the AMD X2 uses
> less energy with the right motherboard.

If you're a fan of DRM/TPM, by all means, get all the Intel hardware you
want. If not, contribute to improving the Linux situation on AMD-based
motherboards.

> virii

No such word.

> if you don't run Windows Update and keep forking over ducats to McAfee 
> or Norton.

When M$ dumped both McAfee and Norton as certified development partners,
they lost the access to the Windows internals they relied upon to keep
their databases up to date, and stopped catching new malware in a timely
manner. The anti-virus purveyors who never had that status, and thus never
relied on it, including both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech ones,
suddenly started intercepting things left and right that Norton and McAfee
couldn't see.

> But we are kidding ourselves if we think that Linux doesn't have a 
> steeper learning curve than Windows, even if you only compare properly 
> set-up systems.

I don't just think that Windows's learning curve is steeper, I _know_ it
is. Your Fedora sound example is merely an example of why Fedora isn't
really suited to anyone. Fedora is a bigger obstacle to displacing Windows
as a dominant OS than pre-installation.

> I've installed Ubuntu specifically because of those tools because I 
> thought they'd make my life easier.

No wonder you were disappointed. Those tools aren't what make Ubuntu make
your life easier; not dealing with the kinds of problems you had under
Fedora are what make Ubuntu make your life easier.

> I've installed every release of Ubuntu since 4.10 & I just 
> don't see what everyone else apparently does in the distribution.  
> Particularly Edgy has been much buggier & more annoying than the 
> competition in my opinion.

When I saw 4.10, I thought, "Well, here's another distro I'll never use."
But gradually, I started noticing more and more hype about 5.04, so I
figured I'd give 5.10 a try (in July 2005), and it immediately exceeded
all the buzz about 5.04, without even being released. Eleven months later,
when I saw 6.06, I immediately realized all sorts of things wrong with
5.10 that were now right. That set the bar rather high for 6.10, so a
disappointment was already in the making, and it turned out to be worse
than I ever imagined. Edgy Eft is to be avoided.

> The incentive is stronger for hardware makers; if 
> suddenly 20% of desktop users were using an open source operating system 
> companies like Broadcom might be more forthcoming providing 
> documentation and being less insistent upon non disclosure agreements so 
> they don't find themselves excluded from purchasing decisions.

Broadcom would be idiots to open anything up even if 80% of desktop users
were using a free-as-in-speech OS. They get included in purchasing
decisions more by keeping stuff to themselves so that software has to be
fully reverse-engineered than their competitors who fumble along trying to
appease a community that they don't really understand. You may find what
Broadcom has done to be distasteful, but in the end, it has resulted in
freer software for their hardware. While some may say this was in spite of
them, I say it was because of them. You compare them to Sun, but when was
the last time Sun made hardware that wasn't open? Clearly, Sun is far
closer to being a part of the community than any 802.11 manufacturer will
ever be. Also, nobody cares about what Real does anymore.