It is exactly for the reason that I am not an expert in it that I don't do plumbing nor farming. And, the world will be a safer place if plumbers don't do any heavy IT work either.

There's a clear distinction between (end) users and admins. Apple, for one, tries hard to blur it, but the distinction is there.

Since when cluelessness is not a excuse? The internets ain't your city park where all dogs wear muzzles and a purse accidentally dropped on the ground will be brought to you by the discreet police no later than in five minutes. If anyone in charge of a computer goes carefree to the point that his computer becomes a zombie, this becomes *my* problem, not just theirs.

Mod parent poster emphatically up.

It appears we put accents differently.

> but a software update after you purchase it would be nice
I believe P2K phones had no directly user-accessible way to apply any updates (well, except rebooting with * and # held pressed etc), and hence, no updates were ever made available. Anyway, the relative simplicity of the underlying OS wouldn't warrant all the trouble of enabling the update mechanism. That is, once the device has been tested in 2006, it will work until the end of time. But, with Android, I do see provisions for updating (my recently bought) Milestone, -- and here it makes a perfect practical sense.

Generally, until they settled on Android, I think Motorola had been in great irresolution about which platform to develop, and possibly, they chose to stick to the tried and true P2K as an interim solution that had lasted too long (10 years as you said). To die in dereliction is the ultimate fate of all embedded Linuxes unless they go all the way and get synced with the mainline. Considering the great flux mobile platforms are in these days, it's hard to blame them for lack of insight.

> I'm not talking about aftermarket mods, ...
> Motorola has not supported that community at all.
And I was emphasising precisely the existence of knowledgeable and helpful community, individuals who literally love the brand, even when this affection seems to be unreturned. Their purpose is not to subvert, break, crack, remove protection, but largely to make a better use of all the hardware is capable of. Put differently, Motorola's indifference here is more like nVidia's stance on the development of nouveau: "We have no intentions to help them, but neither will we be in the way." Whilst Apple's (and Sony's, for an even better example) anal locking down of their devices only tends to provoke untoward efforts for the sake of teenage bravery.

For me in particular, it matters that Motorola does not do some dark obfuscation or encryption or checksumming that prevents any 3rd-party mods from running on their devices. And, in turn, it matters for me that there are many geeks (not crackers) among Motorola owners.

> And if you apply a software update that you download from a website, you're voiding the warranty
That's all true. However, exercising judgment and reading what they write in bold capiltals at the beginning of the howto ("Before reflashing, give a proper think to it and answer this question in double-affirmative: Do you really need reflashing?"), leaves all responsibility with the device owner. All fair.

And if you take it too lightly and eventually brick your phone, there are manuals on how to bring it back to life.

> Phones are hardware, but the software is key. ... but if the software is buggy and lacking functionality,
> they will turn to a new source.

There is a big community around Motorola mobiles (modmymoto.com, motorolafans.com, motofan.ru). For each of their architectures (P2K, MOTOMAGX, EZX), there is a good deal of mods, flashes, skins, language packs, all things software existing in all possible colours and varieties, eventually bumping into the hardware limits. And all of it works.

I bought my L7 back in 2006 in The Netherlands, and it had (reasonably) no Cyrillic support. After a week of texting in translit, I had reflashed it, and have been happily texting ever since -- all it had taken me was, google the matter. Do I owe this improvement to Motorola? Yes, but only for making it possible and not being in the way.

You see the care and attention you seek in Apple's being ever at war with modders, where every next system update wrecks the phone that's been previously jailbroken: I see in this a monumental waste of resources. If Motorola refrains from enfocing their control over the devices they sold to you, this is by no means negligence, and least of all, evil.

Out of developers etiquette, yes, they shouldn't. They are sure hell expected to respect the choice of WM by the user, or face accusations of being racist.

But, not all WMs are born equal. A good deal of them make their living by simply being small. It is absurd to require of the GIMP developers to cater for them too. For a decent workflow, to start with, you need 4G+ -- who on earth would consider a WM with exceptionally small memory footprint in preference to whatever GIMP devs happen to recommend?

1. A good WM matters, additionally, for the configurability of its actions. Having to reach with the mouse for a window's title to move that window is, admittedly, a sane default for the masses, but for a designer who needs to drag two windows apart which GIMP has just batch-opened, and needs to do it quickly, holding Win key and click-dragging at anywhere the window, gets him a +200% boost in efficiency. And, if he happens to own a keyboard without the Win key, he will want to be able to remap that for whatever his left thumb is hovering over. In Windows, the most usable key modifier for a designer, is reserved. How's that cool?

2. For those with a decent WM which respects freedesktop.org hints and where windows can be made sticky by regex matching at creation time, it's oh so logical to have toolbox and palettes sticky and keep images in windows on several workspaces, and switch between them by sliding to an adjacent workspace (ideally by just hitting the screen edge). Second, if your WM supports viewports (along with workspaces), you can spread an image window over several viewports and work on it in parts, similarly by sliding up/down/sideways. Finally, enabling the Wall plugin (rather than that rotating Cube which has littered youtube ad nauseam) in compiz will give you an overview of all your viewports at a key press.

I challenge any MDI proponent to beat me on these two points.

The reason Photoshop never had multiple-window GUI is that such is the Windows way. In Adobe Reader for Linux, interestingly, they implemented their own MDI for GTK+. Looks like Adobe just has it carved in stone, while Photoshop users keep thinking Adobe UI designers have tried and tested it and proved that is the best way to get windows organised, period.

In most things open source (at least, open source by birth, less so originally proprietary projects that get eventually opensourced) you first get that itch to scratch, and then -- given you do it better than others -- you find there are people willing to pay you for that.

It's not like you first find yourself needing money, and then consider getting into an open-source project for a pay in preference to other means and wages.

Don't expect a particular version of FF to get entrenched and pose an obstruction in the way of newer versions that will follow. The notorious lock-in around IE6 is a microsoft-only disease.

Because FF is so emphatically standard-conforming, whatever works in version X is bound to work in version X+1. Yes, extensions need to be kept up-to-date with every new release, but no site (well, except quakelive.com :) relies on a particular extension installed.

Wrt plugins, Mozilla plugin API is fairly stable and well-rounded. The same Flash plugin works with FF 1.5 all through 3.5.

Note how (relatively) abrupt was the decline of FF2.0 neatly matched by the increase in version 3.0 share, and, later, 3.0 promptly giving way to 3.5. That's just people upgrading, and most of the time, automatically either through built-in Firefox updater or via general distro upgrade.