Yes, it took them 7 years to produce Vista, and yes, it does suck enough that most people (including me) have stayed with XP.

I think it’s okay to be fond of cutting-edge technology, but it’s called cutting-edge for a reason — there are more rough edges. Compare and contrast the experience you’d get on Debian stable versus testing, especially in terms of the graphical environment and all that. Open source benefits from a more frequent release cycle, and an attitude where it’s like, “if you screw up, that’s your own fault, RTFM” etc. Often interactions with developers can be hostile (if they’re the peculiar type) and support can be harder to obtain, not that these factors matter to geeks, but they matter for companies, and this is one reason why open source is yet to take over.

Regarding IE bugs, there are also Firefox bugs that need work. There was recently an article on Firefox taking forever to load on Windows due to some issue with obtaining sufficient entropy, but without providing any indication of activity besides hammering the disk, thus degrading the user experience. http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/07/09/the-firefox-3-5-fiasco.aspx

I should’ve looked at the README before speaking.

I think the crashes aren’t a huge problem, just pretty annoying, so obviously I’d prefer the code to be written in a more robust and stable manner. But this is true not only of KDE/Plasma but of Gnome and all other complex applications, and it seems like the most successful projects inevitably spend more time on making their piece of metal “pretty” and polished rather than keeping it stable.

“One of the advantages of huge proprietary development organizations like Microsoft is that they have tons of developers and can implement new features at a relatively quick pace, even if they’re half-assed. Developers’ pride in the FOSS community prevents this overly quick pace of development in favour of more secure, more stable platforms. Which is a good thing, I think. But nonetheless it results in a “slower” development pace.”

First, they don’t have “tons” of developpers. The FOSS community is, by large means, way bigger than the pool of real technical developpers at M$.

Furthermore, if you look at the current situation, it took them almost 7 years to produce a new OS. Furthermore, it sucks so much that serious people stick on XP. Even more, they had to produce, even though they had claimed they would not support XP anymore, a specific version of this almost-10-years-old OS for the netbook because their new developpements where not ready for them.

Each time I see one of these shiny new laptop running a 10 years old OS I feel astonished that this is possible. In particular when the guy running it claims to be some sort of geek found of cutting edge technology….

If you look at IE, it is the same story: most of the bugs take ages to be fixed, and the navigator remains uncompatible with a lot of specifications.

I agree that it might look different for the case of the Office suite, however.

All in all, you have the right to express yourself and to install and reinstall as many OSes as you want, but please try refrain yourself from making such general and vague statements…

KDE 4.2.4 on Debian works well for me … almost no crash at all for few days already

You can tell gksu (GNOME’s graphical su application) to use sudo instead of su by setting /apps/gksu/sudo-mode to true. On Debian, you can set this system-wide by doing update-alternatives –config libgksu-gconf-defaults , changing it to use sudo, and then running update-gconf-defaults. See /usr/share/doc/libgksu2-0/README.Debian for more details.