Non-uniform distributions are then easily visible to the naked eye.

It is hard to see any quality differences in the graphs accompanying this article which are essentially big red rectangles.

It is impossible to see with the naked eye whether the fluctuations in these graphs are simply due to randomness or to a shortfall of the associated algorithm.

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.

Don’t you mean that it will be available in the NEXT release of Debian?

Or do you have an apt repository just for these newly created packages?

Or does it go into volatile?

Or what?

How do other people get access to these new packages before the next stable release?

The mysql dependency comes from KDE upstream.

Regards, Lisandro.

My main point is that your problem with device notifications and docking stations sounds like a ‘paper cut’, the kind of non-bug that degrades the user experience. Ubuntu recently launched a project to minimise this sort of thing, under the banner of the ‘100 paper cuts’ project.
See: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-June/008655.html

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.

The applications I’m complaining about are things like:
- SolidWorks (a CAD tool for designing parts and assemblies, used in manufacturing and mechanical engineering)
- SpectrumSoft Micro-Cap (a version of software similar to PSpice used by my school)
- AutoCAD (another CAD tool)

Luckily this is changing, but only for the large & most popular distributions:
- MathWorks MATLAB (runs on Linux and Solaris, etc.)
- Wolfram Mathematica (which has versions for Linux and MacOS X)
- FEKO (runs on Linux and Solaris among others)

Anyway, I still consider SolidWorks to be a rather big program not supported on Linux, which is a big issue for those working on Civil Engineering programs. There are most probably others which are very domain-specific that I don’t even know about.

There is a nice matrix comparing cross-platform capabilities of CAD software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software

Oh, one final thought: perhaps that KDE Recommends: should be moved to a Suggests: instead, on account of its heavy dependencies, requiring mysql-server installed on desktop machines.. WTF!

Oh, and on another note, I re-installed Debian using the non-expert Auto Install and it installed Gnome rather flawlessly, much like installing Ubuntu, which was pretty nice. So kudos to those who have been working on the main installer; it seems as though the advanced ones really give you some rope to hang yourself with, though :-)

I don’t mind installing recommended packages, but I think installing mysqld with a standard KDE install is a bit obscene.

I suppose installing drivers is a PITA. Debian and Ubuntu were better there, it recognized most of my stuff out of the box. However, the *support* for hardware in Debian isn’t great. While it recognizes stuff, it hardly lets you use them to their full potential — for example my issue with dual monitor stuff done automatically.

I don’t think it’s too much to expect that a Display applet or whatever would do it automatically, without me having to muck around in config files, since I’m not always using the same hardware.

I’d like Ubuntu/Debian to adopt something similar to hardware profiles, as it might be a bit faster than re-detecting the hardware every boot-up.

For now I don’t mind Debian, but have rebooted back into Windows and am now trying to get my Debian environment to work both as dual boot and inside my VMware container. To its credit, Kubuntu managed to do this out of the box — I just installed it on a separate partition and then added it to VMware. I’m not sure if this has to do with the versions of GRUB used, however.

One problem I had with Ubuntu is only related to its release procedure. I wanted to use a new package recently uploaded to Debian, frama-c-gui, which I understand is a program for helping to track down memory issues in C programs.

Unfortunately that wasn’t available in Ubuntu 9.04 and I wasn’t sure how to get the package from whatever the “unstable” equivalent is for Ubuntu.

I finally figured out how to get Debian installed using the automatic install rather than the expert installation thing, so things just worked out of the box. It installed Gnome (much like Ubuntu) but that’s okay with me, I’m using Gnome now. Here’s hoping it crashes less than KDE’s plasma!