Doodles & Useless Tutorials: A Personal Weblog

Now, some of you – free/open-source software enthusiasts – may have seen such posts back and forth between  Bryan Lunduke – from “The Linux Action Show” – and the “Linux Hater” – from his lame blog (in his own words) – let me analyze this for a second.

The “Linux” “Hater” as I see from his blog, he likes to bash everything and anything Linux. Okay, good. He likes to bash “Linux” and not GNU/Linux. I have a few things I’d like to say about the Linux kernel myself. But I won’t.

The “Linux” “Hater” seems to favor proprietary software, and some how takes pride in his restriction. And some how takes pride in the restriction of others. No matter what way you look at GNU/Linux, you can’t say it’s wrong, you can’t say no one should use it. At least someone who is sane shouldn’t ever think such things.

The only thing that is a logical complaint is GNU/Linux not meeting your own personal needs. I see a lot of these, most of which are more related to the use of GNU/Linux software not being seen as suitable by schools and careers, but, that is not a GNU/Linux complaint, that is a business complaint.

As for Bryan Lunduke. This is someone who believes in what Linus believes in. Use what works. Such views are why we have binary blobs in our current Linux kernel. Freedom and Politics are left out of discussion when talking about GNU/Linux. This is why he uses the term “Linux” for the GNU operating system, instead of the politically correct term “GNU/Linux.” And “open-source” instead of Free Software.

Bryan Lunduke also gave the “Why Desktop Linux Sucks, and What We Can Do About It” presentation at LinuxFest ‘09. Once again, no such thing as a “Linux Desktop” but I’ll move on.

At this presentation Lunduke suggested things like a unified package manager, and that distributions should use only such a unified package manager. As well as using gStreamer in all distributions, let’s not say anything about how Xine is better at playing proprietary video and audio codecs than gStreamer is, and DEB packages work better with Debian based distributions than RPMs do, RPMs which he suggested be the unified package manager.

Let me point out what GNU/Linux is all about “… people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.” GNU Philosophy The basis principles of all free/open-source software development.

Distributions use gStreamer and/or PulseAudio, etc.. DEB or RPM, etc.. GNOME, Xfce and/or KDE. Because the developers see such software as being superior. Freedom is allowing people to use which ever they choose.

To suggest such unified development for the sake of being like the rest, is to restrict people’s personal tastes and freedoms.

Thank you.