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Debian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!
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Comments (18)
Title4Clicks
This artice isnt anything more than a rant about "I dont have my packages" whine. Heavy on noise, low on signal.
The best solution is to look for another distro. Linking this to acceptance of free software is silly. If I were to complain about a distro, it certainly wouldn't be Debian, they do it their way.
Quoting:I didn’t contact these developers and I’m not going to name names (of course I can’t avoid mentioning the package names), because there’s really no point — I know and you know that these attitudes are endemic throughout our whole community, so it’d be unfair to single-out these three people.
Funny, when I write to developers and packagers of Linux distributions with questions or complaints I have, without exception, received a courteous reply. I've even received thanks for pointing out legitimate problems. So the idea that talking to developers in the Linux community is pointless and that bad attitudes are endemic is a load of crap.
I do see one bad attitude present. It belongs to the author.
Oh, and if Debian packages are badly built switch to a distro that does it better. Debian is neither the most popular distro nor is it considered the easiest to use. (Honestly, though, it really isn't difficult anymore.)
Is it just me or has Free Software Magazine published a lot of rubbish lately?
Agreed, Az. The author took three incidents and blew them up into "This is why all of Debian sucks, and why nobody will ever use them!!" It's like finding a few spoiled bananas at the grocery store, and launching a tirade on how nobody will ever shop at the store again ever. I guess he never noticed how much proprietary software ships bug-riddled and never gets fixed, or is abandoned-- so shouldn't it be dead by now?
**edit** I've yet to run into a showstopping issue with Linux; I could always find some kind of workaround or fix, even if it did mean distro-hopping. For example, I'm using 64 Studio for audio production after trying Ubuntu Studio and some other options, and it's a dream come true. An absolutely beautiful, excellent distro. But I've always thought that if there was some app that had problems and I really really wanted it fixed there would be a way to make it happen. Offer a bounty, give it some publicity and try to get some new contributors interested, something, anything other than just crabbing about it. At least try, anyway.
**edit** I've yet to run into a showstopping issue with Linux; I could always find some kind of workaround or fix, even if it did mean distro-hopping. For example, I'm using 64 Studio for audio production after trying Ubuntu Studio and some other options, and it's a dream come true. An absolutely beautiful, excellent distro. But I've always thought that if there was some app that had problems and I really really wanted it fixed there would be a way to make it happen. Offer a bounty, give it some publicity and try to get some new contributors interested, something, anything other than just crabbing about it. At least try, anyway.
@tc:
{sidetrack} How do you find Studio64? I just bought a tape deck, to transfer some of my irreplaceable cassettes to MP3 or Vorbis, or maybe even FLAC. Do you think Studio64 will help make that job easier?
{sidetrack} How do you find Studio64? I just bought a tape deck, to transfer some of my irreplaceable cassettes to MP3 or Vorbis, or maybe even FLAC. Do you think Studio64 will help make that job easier?
I've been annoyed by years-neglected bugs in distros just like this guy. I also have to agree with bigg -- if you can't get your work done in a given distro, don't kill yourself, just find another distro that does what you want and need it to do.
It's 64 Studio, gus3. It has all the same audio and video apps you can put on any Linux; what sets it apart is it's very stable and fast, and it has all the low-latency kernel tweaks you need for good computer audio. I don't know if there are any specialty Linux apps for digitizing legacy media; I use Audacity.
http://www.64studio.com/
http://www.64studio.com/
Right, 64 Studio. I must still have Commodore 64 in the back of my mind somewhere...
Yeah, you old people never quite make it all the way into the present.....
/runs
/runs
Hey now, no making fun of my receding hairline!
After spending an hour struggling to make Firefox play sound through my USB headset, and cussing Gnome's infinitely irritating habit of hiding the real application names, and carefully concealing everything useful and making sure you have no idea WTF command you're actually messing with, I changed my mind. The article is not nearly ranty enough. Growl! Foam!! Stab!! Die Gnome slowly and painfully, hahahaaaa in fear and agony. Would a nice little Help-About be too much to ask? Apparently yes.
For anyone else struggling with this problem, this is what worked on 64 Studio, which I don't know if it customizes Gnome or horks it like Ubuntu. But by god it works now.
Firefox looks only for the default sound card, so first use asoundconf to find your sound card names, and then to set the default to your USB device. Do this only as an ordinary user, not as root:
$ asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards: NVidia MobilePre Headset
$ asoundconf set-default-card Headset
Then go into Preferences-> Sound and set the 'Sound Events' and 'Music and Movies' playback to ALSA. I don't know if Firefox needs to be restarted; I'm so vexed and rummy I forgot and I don't care either. You figure it out.
It seems that setting these to USB Audio should work, but once it did and once it didn't, so this might not be the definitive way to do it. This will be a LinuxPlanet article when I work it out more completely. A nice calm one.
Oh, and that silly-looking little Gnome volume control in the systray? If you right-click or double-click it actually brings up a mixer, which is a graphical front-end to alsamixer. Do Edit->Change Device when you have more than one sound card.
I hate computers. Thank you, we'll be here all week!
For anyone else struggling with this problem, this is what worked on 64 Studio, which I don't know if it customizes Gnome or horks it like Ubuntu. But by god it works now.
Firefox looks only for the default sound card, so first use asoundconf to find your sound card names, and then to set the default to your USB device. Do this only as an ordinary user, not as root:
$ asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards: NVidia MobilePre Headset
$ asoundconf set-default-card Headset
Then go into Preferences-> Sound and set the 'Sound Events' and 'Music and Movies' playback to ALSA. I don't know if Firefox needs to be restarted; I'm so vexed and rummy I forgot and I don't care either. You figure it out.
It seems that setting these to USB Audio should work, but once it did and once it didn't, so this might not be the definitive way to do it. This will be a LinuxPlanet article when I work it out more completely. A nice calm one.
Oh, and that silly-looking little Gnome volume control in the systray? If you right-click or double-click it actually brings up a mixer, which is a graphical front-end to alsamixer. Do Edit->Change Device when you have more than one sound card.
I hate computers. Thank you, we'll be here all week!
When I first used Linux, I mean really first, back in 16 floppy disks to install (because I didn't know about accessing repositories on the 'Net so I got the entire Debian of the day), I wrote to one developer to ask, "What is the default directory for the HTML files for the web server?"
The Debian developer responded in great hostility and vitrol, with several comments that added up to RTFM!
I wrote back, saying where I had looked and what I'd read, and he realized that I had in fact Read The Fine Manual and it wasn't there. He had assumed that I would know it's /var/www
That was also before I knew about /usr/share/doc which, in Debian at least, is the wellspring of all technical information. It's not always UNDERSTANDABLE, but it's there.
The Debian developer responded in great hostility and vitrol, with several comments that added up to RTFM!
I wrote back, saying where I had looked and what I'd read, and he realized that I had in fact Read The Fine Manual and it wasn't there. He had assumed that I would know it's /var/www
That was also before I knew about /usr/share/doc which, in Debian at least, is the wellspring of all technical information. It's not always UNDERSTANDABLE, but it's there.
Defoma?
I really don't understand the Defoma issue. I just drop my .ttf files in ~/.fonts and then run "fc-cache -v" to update the font cache. There are a ton of really old articles about Debian and fonts referencing Defoma and other tools and font managers, but I have never used them.
Defoma is required if one intends to use the font with ghostscript, postscript printers, non-xft X server font (or with xfs) etc (the problem mentioned in article, I believe, is true only for X server/xfs font registration). For regular desktop usage it should not be required but the author does not make it clear why he wanted to go the defoma route.
In 14 years, I've never bothered with it. My "custom" fonts are dealt with inside of KDE, for personal use rather than system wide.
Obviously, it's an issue for advanced users, rather than just "users".
Obviously, it's an issue for advanced users, rather than just "users".
It would be a nice thing to have a Linux font manager like the other operating systems have, where you can sort and group them any way you like, create a default set, have previews, and make nice printouts of the character sets. There have been attempts at making something like over the years, but as far as I know they've all fallen by the wayside. So maybe it's harder than it looks.
I believe that KDE4.something has a font manager in it. Then again I know just enough about KDE4.x to be dangerous to myself and others being an avowed Fluxbox user. I do keep an updated install of KDE4 around though to poke at once in awhile, but good grief does that thing take awhile to compile. Almost as bad as OOo.
I have heard a few good things about fontmatrix though never felt the need to use it. I do not think there is any font manager that will do all that defoma does, though, as mentioned by Sander, for the author's case dropping into ~/.fonts is all that was required.
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