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KDE 4.2 Is Released
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 27, 2009 07:02 PM
from the nice-and-gui dept.
from the nice-and-gui dept.
OhReally writes "It's a great day for Free Software: KDE, the desktop environment for Linux, Windows, Mac, and (Open)Solaris, has just reached version 4.2, exactly a year since the release of 4.0. This is a version suitable for broad usage, with many improvements all across the board, and lots of bugfixes. You can leave a comment or congratulate the developers here."
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Woah (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
Go to Settings --> Destop --> uncheck Desktop Effects.
That was easy.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a way to detect CPU/Gfx card acceleration capabilities and disable them in certain conditions? E.g. if there is no hardware support for transform and lighting?
Windows does it, OS X does it. It would prevent a lot of criticism. Not sure about CPU detection but at least OpenGL should give tips about hardware in multi platform manner and it could be scaled to support OpenGL ES in future (on PDA etc.).
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
In the official announcement (http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/index.php), it says "KWin only enables desktop effects in the default setup on computers that are able to handle them."
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
It already does.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
Correction: I tries to do it, and often succeeds. But sometimes it fails. Is it KDE's fault or the video driver's fault? When the user has a locked system he doesn't care!
The reason it works in Windows and OSX, is because the manufacturers write complete drivers. But in X11 the drivers are hit and miss. Either you have undermanned open source drivers working with incomplete specs, or proprietary drivers that just don't care. It's starting to change, but not fast enough.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Interesting)
When the user has a locked system he doesn't care!
I do care! I care because I want to look for a solution, not throw my hands up in despair like some other users do.
How else do you think things get fixed? People like me notice and write it up. It gets fixed.
How long have you been running 4.2? Have you submitted any bug reports or contributed in testing? No? Then you have no right to bitch about it.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
How long have you been running 4.2? Have you submitted any bug reports or contributed in testing? No? Then you have no right to bitch about it.
You must be new here.
KDE 4.2 is possibly the best thing for Linux since the kernel, but that doesn't mean we still can't bitch about the most minor, picky, features.
Now, stop bitching and go fix something. :-)
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
And you can even configure power management profiles that disable the desktop effects, for when your battery is low for example. Having used Gnome for the last few years I'd forgotten just how flexible KDE is.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
Although KDE 4.1 sucked at multiple levels, I'm finding KDE 4.2 to be a whole lot more polished, responsive and light. It even makes it possible to once again play sauerbraten something I wasn't able to do with KDE 4.1 with it's craptastic sub-20 fps performance. That's refreshing.
Beyond that, it fixed some nasty bugs from KDE 4.1 that were quite shocking and it also packs some features that went missing from KDE 3.5 like auto panel hiding, which is always good. Although it still suffers from nasty bugs, things are looking up. To put it bluntly, it's finally in a decent 4.0 state. It was a shame the KDE team had to drag KDE's brand name through the mud simply because they grossly failed to manage the user's expectations with the version numbering nonsense.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree about the version numbering, from day 1 its been obvious
4.0 was for testing
4.1 was for developing
4.2 is the 1st end users release
4.3 the 1st release that will be truely ready for end users.
4.4 will be tweaked
4.5 will be so finished they'll get board and start over with a complete security overhaul because they went so far on the web integration that its going to be easier to start over than to just port kde4 to qt5
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Re:Woah (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that obvious? I know, it's their software, they can do it however they want, and it's my fault for not reading the warnings, but you've got to admit that's completely different than any other project. Almost every other project would have called 4.0 an alpha, 4.1 a beta, 4.2 would have been a release candidate, and 4.3 would have been the official 4.0 release.
Naming releases completely different than anybody else makes it non-obvious in my book. Considering how much grief they've gotten from people complaining it's not ready, I'd guess I'm not the only one.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a mistake. It happens, it wasn't ill-intentioned. It seems to be fixed now, so all that can be done is to learn a lesson about how expectations can and can't be managed in the future.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a KDE developer, it seems that most of us are embarrassed by it all and just keeping our heads down, coding the best we can, and hoping that it will eventually blow over.
To be honest, even I thought it was a reasonable idea at the time to release early. The trouble was that none of the application developers wanted to even start developing for KDE4 until we had a release out (since they wanted to develop for a stable API). And we risk ending up being like enlightenment - where they are never happy with the code and are continually improving without ever releasing.
Anyway, benefit of hindsight and all that.. :-)
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you for that sincere response. The best way for it to blow over is to keep improving KDE at this rate. You guys are awesome, and I've long since forgiven you for the 4.0. (Actually, what I remember thinking was "How could Fedora put this in a "stable" release?")
Thank you for your work.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, the fact that they explicitly say "don't use this, not for end users", and you can't fucking read makes it their problem?
The fact they named it 4.0 is much louder than whatever they said.
Remember how Wine took a decade to reach 1.0? That's what we expect from Open Source. You can scream and bitch all you want, but if you named it .0, it's your fault if it sucks.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
What a bunch of bullshit, I am so sick of hearing this nonsense. There were blog posts by a lot of the KDE people, it was (obviously) all over the damn front page of kde.org, it was on frickin' Slashdot, it was in every Linux forum. Everybody knew. You knew. I knew. We all knew. "Here is KDE 4.0.0. It is API stable. It is totally gonna eat your children, but it's API stable. Now code, people."
To further butcher a bad analogy I saw a couple posts down, this is kind of like getting on an interstate with a big sign on the ramp saying "NO FUCKING GAS FOR A LONG TIME! TURN AROUND AND TAKE A LEAK!" and bitching about the incompetence of the highway department when your car runs out of gas.
Seriously. This is getting ridiculous. You can obviously read, because you can write. I'm sure you saw the announcements all over the internet when it came out, God knows everybody else did. If you chose not to believe them for whatever reason, I don't lend your ill-informed self-centered opinion one goddamn bit of credence. Why should anybody care what you think of anybody else's version numbering?
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why should they label it based on your expectations?"
Because this is what communication is about.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new to IT if you haven't learnt that "suitable for early adopting users" means "hey, come be our guinea pigs, if you dare". If you consider that to be suitable for end users, you must hate your end users a lot.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
Then I say the same thing when I switch from XFCE to LXDE.
Then I say the same thing when I switch get rid of my entire DE and switch to RatPoison.
Then I just say screw it and switch to the shell, kill all daemons and um, well by that point there's not much left, so oh well.
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, very impressive.
Now I can go back to using Gnome knowing it wont hog my CPU as much.
That's funny. I decided to use KDE over Gnome years ago 'cos Gnome was way too slow.
That's because Gnome wasn't able to hog your cpu you see...
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Thanks to the KDE 4 Devs! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been tracking the 4.2 betas on Kubuntu's repositories, and the final release is working very nicely. KDE 4.2 is finally at a stage where the 4 series can replace the 3.5 series for the large majority of users, and I've been using KDE since 2.0 came out.
Now I know there are going to be a ton of complaints about how "broken" KDE 4 is... but I have my own response to the critics [blogspot.com]. Is KDE 4.2 perfect? No, but I challenge you to show me a desktop that is "perfect". KDE 4 has finally gained critical mass, and even more great stuff is in store.
Thanks again to all the KDE 4 developers and bug testers who kept working even when it wasn't easy or popular! Your perseverance has paid off.
Re:Thanks to the KDE 4 Devs! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, in the pyrotechnic sense of the term.
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Re:A couple of questions (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Icons: If you like the old ones so much import them. Due to the fact that the "old" KDE had multiple sets of Icons there was never any "one" set of icons that were the perfect standard for all time anyway. Nice attempt at a troll though.
2. K-menu working the same as the old one: YES and it has existed since KDE 4.0. If you read my post you would have seen exactly how to add it as well.. although that might require using a mouse in a slightly different way than the exact way you claimed you used to do in in KDE 3.5 so maybe it's beyond your comprehension.
3. The taskbar manages tasks and can group them together or not group them together and can have one or more rows depending upon how you configure it. I'm sorry if one task item might be off by one pixel which would cause you to have a cardiac infarction.
Let me guess: You never actually used KDE 3 and your trolling... AND the next post about KDE 4 will be how much you hate it because you don't think the developers have added anything new & exciting whily also making KDE 4 a carbon-copy of KDE 3 for no reason other than the fact you cannot make minute adjustments to some simple changes.
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Re:A couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
> Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how
> much better the system is for developers.
Bull. You don't care for eye candy. I don't care for eye candy. End users care. No matter how hard we wish it were otherwise it remains a fact. And if the new stuff makes things easier for developers it usually means more stuff gets developed. And remember, users don't buy an OS for what IT does, they buy for the applications they can run on it. So if KDE4 enables better apps to get written faster that benefits users.
As someone who has used GNOME since it first replaced FVWM95 as RedHat's default DE I'm starting to consider KDE. The last of the license issues (that launched GNOME in the first place) are finally fixed and GNOME has been making it crystal clear I'm not in their target audience for years.
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Nice improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking of switching to XFCE this week (after about 8 years on KDE), but I think I'll hold off.
good job devs!
Future Roadmap (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that KDE has laid the framework for development, and recreated most of the features from KDE 3 as well, where do they go from here? Can they do something truly innovative?
(No, widgets aren't innovative).
The folderview, as a fullscreen containment with wallpaper theming is a plus. I'm looking for other innovations in how we interact with software.
Adjusting dialogs and the interface to work well on small form factors is another step in the right direction, but honestly I think they also need an Oxygen-widget derivative specifically for minimalist screens.
Multi-touch gestures are trendy, but other than mobile devices, I don't expect to touch my PC screen.
The concept of a fully-realized semantic desktop sounds interesting, but is currently half-baked at best.
Would it be a crime for KDE to steal some of the better innovations from OS X and Windows 7? Should KDE offer an official dock, or revamp the taskbar? What about both?
Kwin, for all its nifty-ness could take a few pages from Windows 7.
What about a crazy concept? People keep talking about a Web OS, cloud computing, etc. I've seen a proof of concept of Plasmoids served via a web plugin. KDE runs natively on Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris today. What if you could store your KDE desktop settings and sessions online?
Sit at any computer with most any OS, and have your desktop. Plasmoids that aren't installed locally could even be served up online.
Where do you think KDE should go in the future?
Re:Future Roadmap (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
I've been running SVN builds of it for the past couple-three weeks. It is stunning the improvement over even 4.1, let alone the crapfest that was 4.0
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Interesting)
Get over 4.0. There is no changing what happened and it's too easy a bitch anyways.
KDE 4.2 is functional and should work beyond expectations for most typical home users.
It even intergrates google gadets into plasma!
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly, the KDE developers almost said plainly that 4.2 is finally KDE 4 ready for most people and usable. The release announcement on dot.kde.org says that this is "a compelling choice for the majority of end users", whereas the previous versions were "targeting enthusiasts".
As for my own anecdotal experience, I've been running 4.2 RC and upgraded to the final build a couple of hours ago, and it's definitely improved. Fixed a bunch of rendering issues I experienced, Plasma is more functional, Wine-installed apps go where they should in the traditional launcher and the new power manager seems good. And yes, after I installed 4.0 a year ago, I actually felt as if jokes about Vista are biting me in the ass, I really wanted to use 4.0 but had to go return to 3.5 because 4.0 just didn't work.
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Re:1 question (Score:4, Informative)
im fairly sure linus uses fedora.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I should start running.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
KDE was adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a 'user' release, but was solely for third party developers to actually get involved and start porting, and to make a difference.
Wha?!? Please point me to where on the KDE4.0 release http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/ [kde.org] page they made it "adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a user release." They did say:
The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.
and
The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities.
and
Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well.
and
KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes.
I wish the KDE fanboys (and the KDE developers themselves) would stop trying to rewrite recent history and just admit there were mistakes made.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish the KDE fanboys (and the KDE developers themselves) would stop trying to rewrite recent history and just admit there were mistakes made.
There were mistakes made.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
From the 4.0 beta 4 release notes. Apparently someone forgot that paragraph in the final notes, but it still stands.
Anyone who actually cared at the time, and was looking over things, playing with pre-release versions, looking over blogs, actually listening to what people were saying, it was said countless times. One KDE developer joked it was the 'eat your children' release. [blogspot.com]
Even in the KDE keynote address (at the launch event, available online [google.com]), they talked about how it was more of a foundational release.
Several months later, they officially countered [groklaw.net] many of the points being put forth about KDE 4.0 and 4.1.
People are happy enough to complain, but people, including KDE developers, were talking about this for months in advance of KDE 4.0's release, and after. It's been widely expected that KDE 4.2 would be the 'proper' release for a long while.
It's not that KDE fanboys, or developers (I'm neither) have revisionist history, it's that some people who'd prefer to argue or complain after the fact, weren't paying attention or conveniently develop amnesia.
Who was expecting the KDE folks to pull a magical perfect fully functional release, all of a sudden out of their collective arses, concurrently with KDevelop, KOffice, Amarok, and other software versions, when they had to rewrite major portions to take full advantage of Qt 4.4? KDE 4.0 was internally in development for over two years [kde.org]. It took them a scant year to circle the wagons after a "we're eating children and releasing early to sync up with third parties and make it possible to develop against more conveniently" release to make a stable user-oriented version. Big deal. According to other posts and snarky comments on Slashdot, it's taking Windows 7 3 years (with no development libraries or early previews to target as an average developer, until Beta 1 SDK released, concurrently with Beta 1 itself) to release an annoying graphical update to Windows Vista. People tend to be 'slightly' overreacting and skewing for their own fan base there as well.
KDE 3.5.10 was released just this last August (2008). I'm not saying that 4.0 or 4.1 was a great idea, just that it was sensible from their point of view, and warned about in a copious manner. It's fairly unbelievable that people would freak out -that- badly if they weren't interested enough about the software or desktop environment to read anything surrounding the event, including previews [arstechnica.com], beta notes [kde.org], statements from individual developers, color commentary from the peanut gallery, or much of anything else.
When KDE 3.0 was released, did every possible feature and customization for 2.x somehow survive immediately? People used to be more on the fence until a few releases in.
I bet that by the time KDE 4.3 is released (currently scheduled for July), it won't even matter that everyone was so eager to complain about the developer versions when the stable version (3.5) was still available, worked, was maintained, and could easily be installed side-by-side.
Even if, somehow, you were confused about the nature of KDE 4.0 or 4.1, no one was holding a gun to your head to force
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
No, *you* are attempting to define the meaning of version numbering. There is no such standard. Lots of teams, companies, groups, and lone crazy hackers number their projects in lots of different ways. The current version of Ubuntu is 8.10. Not because it is the tenth update of the eighth major version, because it was released in October of 2008. Go bitch at them for their non-compliance with your holy version numbering scheme.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Insightful)
Of COURSE it's their fault. They were FORCED to explain that time and time again because they deliberately chose version numbers that say the exact opposite.
Besides, IMHO, 4.0 wasn't fit for developers either. Even in 4.2, they're STILL calling some of the APIs experimental.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
Of COURSE it's their fault. They were FORCED to explain that time and time again because they deliberately chose version numbers that say the exact opposite.
At the end of the day what 4.0 means is that the kdelibs it ships will not run KDE 3 applications. It's a major incompatible release.
What we could have done instead is to forgo releasing until it was at 4.2 quality or so, pushing back the betas and RCs to that point.
Although 4.2 is a year away from 4.0, delaying 4.0 until it was 4.2 would have taken much longer than a year, since people only test releases [lkml.org].
We at KDE did not communicate effectively enough that 4.0 would be in many ways a step down from 3.5, but we didn't force distros to shift to it, and people able to grab theirs from source are certainly more than capable of going back to their distro's 3.5 packages.
So could we have done better? Of course. But I disagree with the notion that you can't make a release just because it's not suitable for 95% of the user population.
Besides, IMHO, 4.0 wasn't fit for developers either. Even in 4.2, they're STILL calling some of the APIs experimental.
Even if that's the case (and I'll admit I'm not sure as to what libraries you're referring to), are you really trying to claim that an entire desktop release should be held back because there is a library that may change? (Let's assume that we clearly announced in the API docs and such that the interface was subject to change)
Even if the library changes, it's not likely to change that much, which gives developers a leg up in getting started. And if 98% of the library API is frozen and you only use 25% that's in the frozen set, what's the issue?
This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Just because a release is not suitable for 100 developers doesn't mean that the other 99900 developers who want a release should have to wait.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
KDE was adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a 'user' release, but was solely for third party developers to actually get involved and start porting, and to make a difference.
Well, here's the original release announcement for KDE 4.0:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/ [kde.org]
Now can we please stop with this revisionist history.
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1 question (Score:5, Interesting)
Amarok 2 does not have support for an equalizer, because Phonon (KDE4's media backend) does not have equalizer support. I have seen no timeline which indicates that there are even plans to add equalizer support to Phonon (although, presumably I'm not the only one missing this feature).
A google search of "phonon equalizer" yields nothing of any value.
Does anyone know if there will be an equalizer for phonon?
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Re:/.'ed... (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of madness is it to link a dynamic forum message to slashdot? It is really irresponsible as there may be actual people needing to post/reply to that forum. What happened to linking a basic .txt file as "release notes.txt", even pdf wouldn't crash a server.
If I was a KDE user/ 4 adopter and needed official help, I would be really pissed now.
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Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:5, Informative)
KDE 4 series runs natively on OS X and Windows. I think good willing ones will try KDE 4 and it will serve to Linux/FreeBSD eventually.
KDE has been always targeted by trolls, it is not a FOSS matter, it is side effect of "desktop wars" and even GTK/Qt philosophy, C vs. C++ thing.
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Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:4, Funny)
By that I believe you meant that KDE is targeted by jealous trolls because Qt is so much better than GTK. ::ducks::
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Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows users and OSX users are going to attack Linux users on every front in every way endlessly and relentlessly.
I don't know if that's real fair to say. Linux users have a stigma (right or wrong) of being egotistical holier-than-thou types, from the new user newsgroups and IRC channels, all the way to here. Linux users are very quick to point out why your way sucks and why their way is better and clearly more superior, even if your only fault is that you use a different text editor. Moreover, the entire site of Slashdot is one big Microsoft troll, right down to the sarcastic and biased headlines and summaries, through to the tired 1-line comments marked +5 (has anyone made a joke about how Balmer likes to throw chairs lately?)
I don't see a lot of Windows and OSX users going around attacking Linux users. I do see a lot of Linux users who go around attacking anything that doesn't involve compiling your operating system.
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Re:No Critisism of F/OSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
"People here attack F/OSS Software almost constant."
People here attack proprietary software almost constantly, and in far greater numbers, too. There are an equal number of trolls and astroturfers on both sides, which is impressive considering the proposition that most "/. users Are WINDOWS users", as if that means they automatically support proprietary software or are automatically opposed to open source solutions.
Windows crashing jokes and Apple cult jokes are okay, but Linux pile of half-broken crap jokes aren't? Develop a sense of humor, because guess what, there are pros and cons to everything, and not everyone has to have a religious devotion to everything discussed.
Windows has its uses. Proprietary software has its uses. Linux has its uses. Open source software...you get the picture. People can make choices. Developers are free to release their code with an iron fist heavily slanted in their favor, or they can send it out into the world with no strings attached, or they can find some suitable middle ground. All approaches are valid. People are free to choose to walk into limitations--everything has them: Windows, OS X, Linux all have flaws.
If Linux users get attacked constantly, it's that small subset of "Linux users" who believe that There Can Be Only One Software Model and that TEH LINUX IS PERFECT. They are trolls, astroturfers, and zealots themselves.
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Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling the day when I can say "It's good to hear Windows isn't garbage anymore," is far, far away.
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Funny)
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