On Mon, 27 Aug 2012 10:08:36 -0400
"D. Michael McIntyre" <michael.mcint...@rosegardenmusic.com> wrote:
> I'm writing from GMail in a web browser. I hate using a web browser
> for email, and have been using KMail for over 10 years. I love KMail.
>
> So somewhere after midnight I got the upgrade notification thing from
> my running Kubuntu 10.04 LTS that 12.04.1 was available. Interesting.
> That's the first time in years I've actually gotten one of those
> notifications.
IMO, the IT world is in a major transition period, which started
somewhere around 4 years ago (probably with the iphone), and will
continue until, perhaps, somewhere between 2016 and 2020. (Hopefully,
it will not extend much beyond that - otherwise, it will be more
painful than some can bear.)
As most (probably everyone) on this list knows, the main transition at
this point is from the "desktop" (GUI on a PC - Windows for most
people, but also OSX and Linux) to either or both of:
- mobile/tablet-based apps, most of which make heavy use of web
and/or internet connections.
- web-based applications, where the main characters are the "browser"
and a web server, a group of web-servers, and/or "cloud-centric"
systems (which, perhaps, is a synonym for "group of web-servers").
For both of these options, most of the work will be done on servers on
the web and the user's "computer" will be mainly a client making use of
services running on these servers.
Unfortunately, this transition is causing, and will continue to cause,
major "growing" pains for those who are used to (i.e., almost all of
us) the current system/paradigm. These growing pains are showing up in
the Linux world as, for example, the GNOME team's desire to push
their project into this new world/paradigm, and their users' resulting
pain in finding things don't work as they used to - the transition is
only, perhaps, 1/4 to 1/3 complete, and how it will actually turn out
in the end is known only to those who both have access to, and have
been willing to use, a future-oriented time machine (which is, likely,
no one). Everyone else has to guess, and it's likely that most guesses
will be off by quite a bit.
In the meantime we are stuck with these painful transitional
technologies, such as GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity, which to many people
seem like (and perhaps are) monstrosities. I don't think the Linux
world is alone in being affected by these transitional pains - many
people are wondering what the fuck they are going to do when Windows 8
(or Metro, or whatever-the-fuck it's being called now) comes out. It's
trying to bridge this transition, too, and, IMO, is not doing a very
good job of it. (Prediction: Microsoft will be, in about 10 to
15 years, the Sears of high-tech companies - they just don't have the
right philosophy, vision, and creativity needed to keep up.) Apple may
do better than both MS and Linux, but their position at or near the top
in the near future is nowhere near guaranteed.
And - again in the meantime - we have to make do with what we currently
have in this confusing transitional period. The people (IMO) likely
to feel the most pain in these times are the pseudo-geeks: those like
Michael and most of the rest of us on this mailing list who have a fair
amount of geeky skills/talents, but not enough to know how to maneuver
around the obstacle course of changes resulting from this transition.
The more common naive Joe/Sally user can for the most part trust MS (at
least until MS becomes a has-been, which will take several years) or
Apple to tell them what to do and will likely not have enough demands
such that they experience great pain (maybe a little, but not like
having, say, an amputation). And the true-geek will be able to use
their pain to direct themselves to a workable, perhaps
partly-hacked-together, solution. But the pseudo geek will likely have
the demands to insist on something better than what's available, but
not the skills to whip something up that will fulfill what they need.
Result: mucho pain.
But - to allude to the subject of this thread -: I don't think this
automatically leads to the conclusion that things look bad for the
future of Linux. Linux is used, probably, (mainly because of Android)
in more devices these days than any other major OS (i.e., Windows,
Windows-phone, IOS, OSX). And Linux appears to be the de facto OS for
most embedded devices these days. Also, Linux is what Chrome OS is
based on - another future-web/cloud-oriented technology. With all this
reliance on Linux and with all the talented/skilled developers on this
planet with approximately 7 billion people, it seems likely to me that
something very good and useful will emerge in the next 5 to 10 years.
It may take a while, and we may have to go through quite a bit of pain
until then, but I think it's likely something workable for us
"pseudo-geeks" will show up well before we die. Until then, I'm finding
KDE4 on Fedora 17 quite workable. (I've been using KDE for many years
and have found it quite usable [even with the 3 -> 4 transition] for my
"pseudo-geekish" demands.)
Another factor in this transition that is important to us, of course,
is how will computation/realtime-heavy requirements such as music/MIDI
recording and playback, which are not likely to be fulfilled - at least
for many decades - by an internet-based system, fit into this
transition and what will it look like when the transition is "over"?
Who the fuck knows? Anyone got a time machine?
[Apologies for, perhaps, a little too much hyperbole and/or meandering
in this post. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that the vodka has not
worn off yet.]
> I decided to burn some hours fooling around, and give it a go. How
> much breakage could there be?
>
> The clicky link thing failed immediately with error code 1, but no
> matter. I googled it, and figured out I should run some sudo thing
> from the command line.
>
> That failed about five times in a row, with several minutes between
> each iteration, because I had a lot of trouble freeing sufficient
> space on /var, but it did eventually get me there without any
> additional issues.
>
> I was pretty impressed that it replaced several thousand packages
> without giving me the sense that anything too awful was going to get
> broken. My old installation was, well, old, and full of random little
> cruft nuggets.
>
> So that was around 0400 when it first booted, and here it is around
> 1000 by now, and I'm posting this from my shiny new GNOME Classic
> desktop. I took one look at the non-classic GNOME and could scarcely
> decipher the completely mutilated train wreck of a thing it called a
> desktop, so I tried the classic version instead, and it looks...
> Well, identical. They're both just spectacularly awful. I can't
> imagine why anybody would use this hideous piece of shit for more time
> than it took to find the logout button.
>
> Oh, and every single word I type is in red, because the language stuff
> apparently got screwed up in all this too.
>
> As for KDE? Forget about KDE. Hours of googling errors later, I
> finally gave up and installed GNOME, which is completely unusable, but
> at least it doesn't fail instantly with a cryptic error for which
> there is no solution in all of google space.
>
> There are many references to the lnusertemp thingie not working, going
> back for years and years, but not a single hint or tip contained in a
> single one of them was useful. Not unless you consider it progress
> that I graduated from an instant failure to X11 coming up in a black
> screen with an endless stream of meaningless errors on the console
> anyway.
>
> I've been doing my bit to make all of this better for 10 years now,
> and it's extremely depressing to see that everything is just as bad,
> if not worse, than it was the first time I tried Linux 11 years ago.
> This is progress? This is a completely and hopelessly broken train
> wreck.
>
> I guess I have to figure out how to use the GNOME crap to download and
> burn an ISO and do a clean install. Maybe that will work.
>
> My computer had been up for almost 18 months before I decided to try
> upgrading it. You'd think I would have learned that for every stable
> thing in Linux there are 50,000 hopeless train wrecks in between.
>
> I tire of this so-called progress.
>
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