Thoroughly current Mountain Lion on a Macbook Pro here. When I enter "file:///" into apps, I get directory listings, not crashes.

At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.

Ljubuncic's experiences with software are usually the opposite of mine. I installed F18 on multiple drives with multiple partitions with none of the issues of problems he discusses. That's not the first time that's happened.

The new Anaconda has taken a lot of flack. Some is justified. Much of it seems based on people who are, first, mad that it isn't the old Anaconda; second, mad that it doesn't work like the old Anaconda and makes them think about how to use it, and, third, think their experience with the old Anaconda means it was "intuitive". It wasn't. Expecting software to be "intuitive" is just falling victim to sales-pitch hokum.

Consider:

If your spouse enjoyed gaming, your spouse would already be playing games.

If you convince/cajole/annoy your spouse into playing games, your spouse will, more than likely, do it just to please you and/or to shut you up on the topic.

*You* think games are more interesting than movies. Others may not. (I watch few movies and think games are mind-numbingly boring.)

If your spouse is bored and you are looking to help with that, good for you. But, expand your search.

You don't need to change you're comfortable ways: Don't upgrade.

Just don't pretend developers are obligated to keep updating the innards so you can run current software.

Developers who give their stuff away for free usually do pretty much what they damn well please.

Framing the question this way misses the point. Civil disobedience is "disobedience" precisely because people choose to violate the law to make a point and are willing to accept the consequences.

It's that readiness to put themselves at legal risk that makes civil disobedience a potent tool for change.

You can't disobey if it isn't illegal. People engaging in civil "obedience" are indistinguishable from everyone else.

>> " just vastly more productive using that interface?"

Some of have never like pointless wiggly windows and ugly, gaudy over-large shiny dock icons that look like they were designed by a 1950's middle school art class.

Compiz irritated me for years. Turning it off was always top of my agenda. I like and use docks, but can't stand Cairo. I don't know what taste is, but Cairo has never had it.

Use what you like. So will I. But neither of us gets to equate what we like with what is better.
 

>>"... just vastly more productive using that interface?"

It's just what they are used to. They confuse familiarity born of experience with better design and intuitiveness. That leads to entirely bogus rants about how the Gnome devs are supposed to let biased online anecdotal rants plot their course.

The differences between all of the desktop GUI's -- Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE, OS X, Windows, etc., are minor. In all and each of them, we type on keyboards, move on on-screen cursor, and click on icons. Gnome3 does away with cute little icons in panels and deprecates minimization and people freak out as if those two things were the only way to do anything. People rant about Windows 8 because it is different than what they know. Yet, wait until Microsoft replaces Windows 8 with something entirely different and people who have used nothing else but Win8 will be ranting about how wonderfully easy, productive and intuitive it was.

  Some people are so conservative and so rigid that they can't muster up the ability to deal with new software on its own terms, instead bitching because it doesn't work like the old software they know.

I don't get the "at the mercy of" thing. You aren't at the mercy of musicians. They are at your mercy. They make music and hope someone is willing it listen and, ideally, pay for it.

Learning enough about programming to have some very basic idea of how software works is a decent, but not amazing, idea. Like understanding enough about mechanics to have a basic idea of how a car works.

But, that kind of knowledge really won't make you a better driver or a better tech toy user.

Acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to craft a real application for any platform requires serious effort, more effort than most people are willing to put in. People who are curious should follow their curiosity, but that's it.

I asked a dev why the new Anaconda UI wasn't developed separately and then rolled into the next available release whenever it was ready. The answer: Installers have to be developed in conjunction with whatever it is that they're installing. The requirements and dependencies are such that going it alone won't work.

That makes sense. But, I think some fundamental UI design commitments were made early on that are biting them now. Particularly the manual partitioning interface. I find it just plain difficult to figure out what to do with it. It is, for example, possible to put specific partitions on specific drives. But, it ain't easy or obvious. I think it's legitimate to assume that anyone wanting to manually partition drives has at least a basic understanding of the concept. Give them the old Anaconda approach to that, wrapped in the new UI's look.

I still haven't seen an option in the new UI to set partition size at all of a disk or all remaining space on a disk. However, if you specify a size that's more than what's possible, the UI pushes it back to all available space.

I run CentOS as my desktop and it's great. That's what happens when Red Hat takes a good Fedora release and debugs and polishes it for several years.

However, there's no doubt that, at its core, CentOS is aging. At some point, I fully expect to move elsewhere because I will want be able to run what I want to run.

On Fedora 18: I've installed and played with several of the alpha, beta and test candidates. Other than the new Anaconda, this looks like a very nice release. The new Anaconda design, at present, does not present an obvious workflow. I.e., the first few times I used it I wasn't sure what I was supposed to click on or do next. Manual/custom partitioning has been a real quagmire. The new design is the kind of app that really needs little bubbles of explanatory text that pop up when you cursor over them. For starters. (An installer is a complex application, with intimate links to the distribution it installs, yet it needs the capacity to be quickly adapted to new releases. So, I'll cut them a lot of slack.)

Anyway, I've never understood why Fedora commits itself to the 6-month cycle, unless there are internal Red Hat requirements. At the least, have the deadline, but keep it internal only. Why set yourself up for public basing when you don't meet an artificial schedule?

I run a CentOS 6.3 desktop. My experience has been that updates, security and otherwise, have been released rather quickly after their upstream release, in about 1-3 days. I wouldn't expect quicker from anything done by a little batch of part-time volunteers.

Dunno about the mood of the developers; I don't frequent the lists. I've found, tho, that a lot of developers don't know how to deal with users, in person or otherwise.

You fail to understand what I said.

We had the capability to go to the Moon more than 40 years ago. That capability did not atrophy through lack of use. The Saturn and Apollo programs were cancelled and defunded by Congress with the approval of President Nixon. That was a conscious political decision to eliminate that capability.

Ditto the Shuttle program: The program was cancelled and defunded.

We never, obviously, developed a Mars capability. NASA, however, had post-Apollo plans for Mars that were not funded.

The director of NASA does not wake up in the morning and decide, unilaterally, to start a program to put people in orbit, on the Moon, or anyplace else. The decisions to do those things come from the White House and the enabling legislation and the money comes from Congress.

We currently lack Government-operated manned space capability because the government does not want to do it, not because the nation lacks the capability.

That's got nothing to do with NASA's technical or engineering capabilities. It's solely the result of political decisions, as are all major decisions about NASA's human missions and objectives. They've all existed at the behest of the White House, and they all ended when the White House pulled the plug. Those are major decisions and NASA doesn't get to make them on its own.

It's about money. There's all kind of pushback when even marginal boosts to NASA's budget are mooted. A lot of that is cynical politics playing to ill-informed people.

We've had the capability to support a space station, a lunar base, and exploration of Mars since the Apollo era. We haven't done so because we chose not to do so.

Stallman is very much more concerned with how his software is made than what it can do. That's an attitude that's the mirror image of pretty much the rest of the human race. He has constructed an elitist pedestal of pseudo-morailty around software development and placed himself on top of it. Free software has obvious advantages in terms of spreading technique, etc., but Stallman's trashings of anyone who does not adhere to his gospel is demagoguery at its finest.

I'm much more offended by the clutter and annoyance of Ubuntu's lens feature than I am by the supposed offense of the product's becoming one of millions of Amazon Associates. Ubuntu is trying to make a bit of cash, and that seems to offend a lot of people much more than any perceived violation of the Stallman Code.