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> I left once I saw that corporations are taking over. Redhat and Novel decisions started to set the direction, I felt I can not contribute anything. I sought

> I left once I saw that corporations are taking over. Redhat and Novel decisions started to set the direction, I felt I can not contribute anything. I sought refuge in BSD land as a consequence of this. I got sick of the whole drama around Gnome, systemd and everything else precluding me from properly using my computer. Everything is perpetually half-broken, bug reports and user demands are ignored if they don't fit their world domination agenda and so on. I still develop for Linux because they pay me to do it at $work, but it's increasingly unpleasant. Things are still fairly sane in the kernel (barring the occasional rushed device drivers or the whole ARM clusterfuck, but there are limits to how much that can be helped). Userland, on the other hand, is full of 0pointer-branded narcissism and nearly unworkable for anything that has to run for more than three months without constant attention. Great for devops, brain aneurysm-inducing for anything else.

pdkl95 11y ago
> 0pointer-branded narcissism It is possible to avoid that crap. Older - and much saner - software still works. Just ignore the "desktops" and run the specific tools you need in a saner windowmanager of your choice. # e16 - from my cold, dead hands
- notalaser 11y ago
  I think the only desktop I didn't stay away from was KDE, back in its 2.x and 3.x days. Then things like Nepomuk happened and sent me back to WindowMaker, which will be pried from my equally cold, dead hands. But it's getting pretty hard to avoid the octopuses. I managed to avoid e.g. systemd (not because unix philosophy something something but because they keep doing shit like [1]) by staying with Gentoo for a while. But the useflags gymnastics required to keep half-baked things out of my system became too time-consuming to be worth it. Some of the problems do remain (e.g. my desktop looks like it's 1996 and everyone has their own favourite toolkit again because GTK3) but at least I'm not debugging non-booting systems and strange things happening with USB sticks on a daily basis. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815586 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815586
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    > WindowMaker That's my 2nd choice. It's simple, lightning-fast, with almost no memory footprint. > bug=815586 That's a perfect example of the problem with the 0pointer monoculture. I works great, until you do something slightly more complicated. Of course, the suggested fix is to update to a newer version of systemd. I guess you're out of luck if that newer version has compatibility issues. > their own favourite toolkit again I guess I never cared much about looks. Looks and feel is important, but "working" and "not crashing" are far more important. One of the problems we're seeing is that the concept of the "distro" is largely dead. The damage done by systemd/etc wasn't just the bugs like your [1]. The forced monoculture killed the idea of different distros.
    - JdeBP 11y ago
      > Of course, the suggested fix is to update to a newer version of systemd. That's actually a boilerplate Debian bug closure message, mail-merged with the bug number, the maintainer's contact information, and the package's changelog. One can find it at the bottom of many Debian bug logs. The suggestion really comes from Debian. Moreover, the bug was in the "unstable" version of Debian, i.e. a version of the package (229-1) that had not even progressed to the "testing" version of Debian (which is currently at systemd version 228). Debian's policy on bugs in "unstable" can be read on Debian's WWW site at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable and https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ . The Debian message is, as mentioned, simply robotic Debian bug-tracking-system boilerplate. The underlying systemd bug reports have stuff written by actual human beings: * https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2572 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2572 * https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1866 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1866
  - wott 11y ago
    We seem to have much in common :-) I use WindowMaker, I moved half of my machines to BSD, the remaining is Gentoo, except one Debian server I do not dare to touch much (but systemd is pinned out). I am very disappointed (this is an understatement) at the turn Linux and open-source took in, say, the 2010s: a mix of corporations and brats messing the existing Linux ecosystem for fun or profit; open-source considered as a portfolio to get a job (hi github, I am talking to you) and generally as a mean to make money for individuals or companies one way or another; free software bricks used by companies that have one single goal which is to lock you in as much as possible in order to extract any penny they can from you (free software used against freedom, that takes the biscuit); Linux and free software being just tools/commodities, no more spirit (yeah, I know there have always been different spirits, but the most common and general attitude was far from being business-minded). I would not have minded if they had forked Linux/other projects and done whatever they liked on a new separate platform, even if this had meant a decline of Linux, but their insistence on affecting the existing ecosystem is... dreadful. I will probably someday move everything I can to BSD and keep one Linux system to run specific programs I would still need, as we often kept in the past one Windows machine to run specific software only available on that platform. For me, that will tell windowisation of Linux is completed. -- Mozilla is a joke. I have somewhere a plot I made that represents Firefox market share side by side with Mozilla's revenue along the years. The curves cross in opposite direction, like an X: market shares drop as more money flows in. They managed to build a wonderful and successful complex piece of software (and a mini-ecosystem around it) with very little money; but when hundreds of millions of dollars a year started to flow, they lost their footing.
pjmlp 11y ago
The interesting, or sad thing, is that many of us that had already commercial experience saw this coming and always stated that in the eventuality of GNU/Linux becoming successful it would be bend by corporations like any other OS that went big. But, as usual, youngsters stated we were just naysayers. And now GNU/Linux distributions are basically a 2nd coming of UNIX wars.

pdkl95 11y ago

> 0pointer-branded narcissism It is possible to avoid that crap. Older - and much saner - software still works. Just ignore the "desktops" and run the specific tools you need in a saner windowmanager of your choice. # e16 - from my cold, dead hands

notalaser 11y ago
I think the only desktop I didn't stay away from was KDE, back in its 2.x and 3.x days. Then things like Nepomuk happened and sent me back to WindowMaker, which will be pried from my equally cold, dead hands. But it's getting pretty hard to avoid the octopuses. I managed to avoid e.g. systemd (not because unix philosophy something something but because they keep doing shit like [1]) by staying with Gentoo for a while. But the useflags gymnastics required to keep half-baked things out of my system became too time-consuming to be worth it. Some of the problems do remain (e.g. my desktop looks like it's 1996 and everyone has their own favourite toolkit again because GTK3) but at least I'm not debugging non-booting systems and strange things happening with USB sticks on a daily basis. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815586 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815586
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > WindowMaker That's my 2nd choice. It's simple, lightning-fast, with almost no memory footprint. > bug=815586 That's a perfect example of the problem with the 0pointer monoculture. I works great, until you do something slightly more complicated. Of course, the suggested fix is to update to a newer version of systemd. I guess you're out of luck if that newer version has compatibility issues. > their own favourite toolkit again I guess I never cared much about looks. Looks and feel is important, but "working" and "not crashing" are far more important. One of the problems we're seeing is that the concept of the "distro" is largely dead. The damage done by systemd/etc wasn't just the bugs like your [1]. The forced monoculture killed the idea of different distros.
  - JdeBP 11y ago
    > Of course, the suggested fix is to update to a newer version of systemd. That's actually a boilerplate Debian bug closure message, mail-merged with the bug number, the maintainer's contact information, and the package's changelog. One can find it at the bottom of many Debian bug logs. The suggestion really comes from Debian. Moreover, the bug was in the "unstable" version of Debian, i.e. a version of the package (229-1) that had not even progressed to the "testing" version of Debian (which is currently at systemd version 228). Debian's policy on bugs in "unstable" can be read on Debian's WWW site at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable and https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ . The Debian message is, as mentioned, simply robotic Debian bug-tracking-system boilerplate. The underlying systemd bug reports have stuff written by actual human beings: * https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2572 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2572 * https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1866 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1866
- wott 11y ago
  We seem to have much in common :-) I use WindowMaker, I moved half of my machines to BSD, the remaining is Gentoo, except one Debian server I do not dare to touch much (but systemd is pinned out). I am very disappointed (this is an understatement) at the turn Linux and open-source took in, say, the 2010s: a mix of corporations and brats messing the existing Linux ecosystem for fun or profit; open-source considered as a portfolio to get a job (hi github, I am talking to you) and generally as a mean to make money for individuals or companies one way or another; free software bricks used by companies that have one single goal which is to lock you in as much as possible in order to extract any penny they can from you (free software used against freedom, that takes the biscuit); Linux and free software being just tools/commodities, no more spirit (yeah, I know there have always been different spirits, but the most common and general attitude was far from being business-minded). I would not have minded if they had forked Linux/other projects and done whatever they liked on a new separate platform, even if this had meant a decline of Linux, but their insistence on affecting the existing ecosystem is... dreadful. I will probably someday move everything I can to BSD and keep one Linux system to run specific programs I would still need, as we often kept in the past one Windows machine to run specific software only available on that platform. For me, that will tell windowisation of Linux is completed. -- Mozilla is a joke. I have somewhere a plot I made that represents Firefox market share side by side with Mozilla's revenue along the years. The curves cross in opposite direction, like an X: market shares drop as more money flows in. They managed to build a wonderful and successful complex piece of software (and a mini-ecosystem around it) with very little money; but when hundreds of millions of dollars a year started to flow, they lost their footing.

pjmlp 11y ago

The interesting, or sad thing, is that many of us that had already commercial experience saw this coming and always stated that in the eventuality of GNU/Linux becoming successful it would be bend by corporations like any other OS that went big. But, as usual, youngsters stated we were just naysayers. And now GNU/Linux distributions are basically a 2nd coming of UNIX wars.