Linux drove me to get a Mac

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Thu Jan 8 02:39:06 UTC 2009


Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> 
>>> Of course, then I tried ubuntu 8.10 with **KDE4... and thus far -
>>> while it looks "prettier" - the broken functionality over KDE3 tends
>>> to lead to think that even Linux, at least in terms of the UI, is far
>>> from faultless in this regard.
>>
>>    KDE != Linux
>>
>>    If KDE4 doesn't work for you, you can use another DM/WM or whatever.
> 
> That's obvious to most people here, but not the point of the critique.
> 
> KDE4 was shipped by Ubuntu/Kubuntu (in preference to sticking with KDE3)
> as part of a non-beta version of a major distribution. This distribution
> is being recommended and given to people who may be new to Linux or
> unfamiliar with the available alternatives (let alone the methods
> required to enable them). In this environment, even us old-timers are
> seeing that KDE4.1 is just not up to the task. And if experienced users
> are having some frustrations, newcomers will have them tenfold.
> 
> The inclusion of KDE4 in Kubuntu 8.10 indicates a serious QC problem
> within the ubuntu community. For release 8.04 KDE4 was made available as
> a non-default option. In retrospect that policy should have been
> maintained for 8.10, a view that is not mitigated by the availability of
> GNOME as an option.

You're blaming the wrong party. It's not a KDE problem. It's a Kubuntu
problem. Ubuntu is a GNOME distro. Kubuntu is a valiant effort but
ultimately, it falls short. The hype surrounding K/Ubuntu is
unjustified. The enthusiasm of its fans is quite something and the fact
that magazines have sprung up targeting Ubuntu in particular is amazing
but this is definitely a triumph of marketing over technology. There is
nothing special about K/Ubuntu. It's less than meets the eye. People
talk about how easy it is to install but all the modern distros are
quite easy to install.

I've tried KDE 4 on the latest Mandriva, which seems to be a distro
dying an unfortunate and slow death, Fedora, and OpenSuse and have found
that they all beat Kubuntu in terms of polish by a mile. The "gamerz"
look that you mentioned is not present on Mandriva and can easily be
changed. It's just a theme. This is like the pointless and stupid
debates people have over whether the default desktop background in Hardy
is ugly or not. It takes seconds to change so who cares if it's ugly?
(Not that I think it is.)

I have been working on deploying Linux in a small school and originally,
I was going to deploy Kubuntu Hardy. I gave them the option of GNOME but
they preferred KDE because it seemed more familiar to them. That suited
me fine since I'm a long-time KDE user and I have developed PyKDE and
PyQt apps so I know something about the underpinnings of KDE. As much as
I tried to coerce Kubuntu Hardy into doing the sorts of things I wanted,
like kickstart deployments, system configuration management using
cfengine, FreeIPA for directory and authentication services, it was
usually a case of "you can't get there from here". Kickstart is
half-baked on K/Ubuntu. Preseed is the preferred mechanism and aside
from being more complex, it's just not as well-documented as Kickstart.
I couldn't get even the simplest cfengine script to work on Hardy and
thought I was doing something wrong until I tried it on Fedora 10 where
it worked immediately. Couple that with the mysterious and annoying
problem with kdm coming up in the wrong resolution for the monitor and
only syncing properly after a Ctrl-Alt-Bs, I had enough. I can't expect
ordinary users to put up with such nonsense.

I've always had a soft spot for Mandriva but I can no longer recommend
it since it really isn't a community distro at all. It's driven by a
sickly company that seems to have no idea of how to profit from
open-source, not that doing so is an easy thing. Mandriva has some great
technology but many things I care about are neglected, such as Mandriva
Directory Server and LTSP support. Laying off key employees like Oden
Eriksson, who are responsible for thousands of packages, is also not
exactly confidence-inspiring.

That left Fedora, CentOS, and OpenSuse as options. I'm comfortable with
Fedora and CentOS and less so with OpenSuse. OpenSuse has come a long
way and it is an impressive distro but the way they do things is
different enough that given my time constraints, I can't deploy it. That
left Fedora or CentOS. KDE 4 on Fedora 9 was unusable, not to mention
that like OpenSuse and CentOS, it didn't like the Intel Q965 graphics
chipset that are on many of the machines at the school. On reboot,
sometimes the monitor would be dark and I'd lose control of the keyboard
and mouse and couldn't even ssh into the machine. The only thing that
worked was a hard reset. Fedora 10 changed all that. I now have a stable
and functional KDE 4 that I can deploy via kickstart, manage with
cfengine, and authenticate against FreeIPA. Now if I could only get
kiosktool to work in KDE 3 or 4, I'd be happy.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3286 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20090107/8e2749d4/attachment.bin>


More information about the Legacy mailing list