Comment Re:Pointless (Score 1) 755
Are we talking about the folks who put together Debian, or about the people who write software who happen to work on Debian?
I didn't think you got the memo that they are spying on you. I mean we can pretend the snowden leak didn't happen, or be coy about the extent, or the fact that bits and pieces of been leaked for years, many times appearing on slashdot. We can pretend that he hasn't been the victim of a massive character attack against him.
The fact that you think they take a huge interest in what an average person has to say scares me more than the fact that they bother to go over everything they can get their hands on. Also realize some (a.k.a. most) don't live in the US, and we actually think about who we vote on.
Guess what, the world is full of jerks. Studies conclude that rude people are more honest. I don't find Stallman paranoid one bit, most of his "paranoia" over the years has been proven justified.
I think the real issue is you simply don't like what he has to say.
Actually I do not like what he has to say, he instantly kills any possibility of cooperation with his behaviour. His "no binary drivers" thing pretty much stops proper hardware support in its tracks.
my reaction has been just the opposite, drivers for all but the most obscure devices simply load themselves with no interaction. Except the full performance video card drivers. Thats as easy as installing a package and restarting.
Assuming you'll get more than a black screen on reboot.
I've always had driver hell on windows. Half the devices don't show on install, god help you if the ethernet driver doesn't work, and you can't find the install disk. Then you get to the 50,000 diffrent versions of the driver, the buggy piece of shit that comes with windows, or is it driver on the manufactures website which is poorly translated from cantoneese, into mandarin, into russian, into english, that took you 3 hours of searching to find because the company either merged, went out of business, or obsoleted the driver.
Funny you should say that, it took me about 10 minutes to find and download the windows drivers for everything in my latest computer. It took me about 10 hours to get an acceptable performance out of my Intel WiFi chipset on Linux though. And I sort of gave up in the end and use a cable these days. So yes, if somebody who has written drivers for heavily customized embedded systems can't get it to work in a reasonable timespan, then there might be a minor issue with the drivers and operating system.
Also, drivers don't have configuration files in linux, they are kernel modules, most of them come with the kernel and are located in
Yes, because it totally doesn't store the parameters in a series of shell scripts that are executed at boot. *cough*
Anyways, point still stands. I'd rather have people like Stallman than people like you. There are many reasons to be concerned about privacy, and its been proven that closed modules like DRM, and various phone home utilies exist, track users, and many times leave personal data out in the open, or on company servers, where identity theft is one of the fastest growing, hardest to catch crimes there is right now. We have a hostile government that doesn't give a shit, because they use the same methods to spy on is, and it makes it easy.
We don't need people who don't take Freedom, openess, security and saftey seriously. We also don't need people who are quick to make political compromises to fit in with powerful people, at the expense of the general populace.
I should point out I stopped reading at "hostile government". Guess what, you determine who's in the government. Its your own damned fault, get your head out of your ass and do something about it in the voting booth next time.
We don't need "year of the Linux desktop". It does not benefit either GNU or Linux, we simply do not need it. It would be nice sure, but its simply not essential. More important is taking a stand and explaining to the rest of society why we do, rather than what.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
majority share, trend is going towards linux. All the big companies run linux webservers, exception of netflix for FreeBSD.
If I got a penny for everytime I run into windows systems... Even saw a few very very old netware servers recently. Anyway people make the incorrect assumption "servers" equals "web servers" sadly, and then indeed linux has the majority market share. But a lot of software used in an industrial setting simply does not work on Linux/BSD/..., or turn-key systems are bought which quite often run Windows. Or god-forbid: HP-UX, though that one is actually fairly nice if you have some time to sit down with it.
[citation please]
Yes, because things like Cray Linux with customized micro kernels don't exist... Its not because they say "oh hey it uses
nope actually. all the android kernel patches have been mainlined since 3.4. What you mean is that they don't run the GNU userland, but instead their own userland based on BIONIC C lib, and their own custom version of java. I trust you understand the diffrence between kernel and userspace. It becomes more aparant when you run custom roms.
Keep on dreaming. If you were to run a fully unoptimized kernel on a phone you'd drain the battery in less than 2 hours most likely. (Please note: I do not consider compiler conditionals the same code. because you could really just put two complete different versions in there and switch between them with conditional constructs) People seem to forget how big of a deal scheduling and power management is on mobile devices. The battery capacity hasn't increased that much over the past years, the power management on the other hand has made huge steps forward.
if you're using ubuntu or mint it does, simply slip the install disk and bam.
You wish.
It's no different for Apple. Good luck installing Mac OSX on a Thinkpad or worse an Acer. But no one has a problem with this.
Apple/OSX, lol. That summarizes my comment about Apple software and hardware. And Acer is still a lot better than Compaq used to be.
Get rid of your Broadcom card and get an Intel card instead. You can get them for $15 on Ebay. Broadcom sucks.
Its Intel, sadly the driver again requires specific configurations to be fully functional. And there's no hope of ever getting WiDi to function properly either.
If you have Intel sound you shouldn't have that problem.
Again, not going to shop for specific hardware just to make an OS work. If you can't even support Rockwell/Conexant and Realtek properly I wouldn't you have good hardware support.
First of all, Linux is already mainstream on servers, super computers, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.
On servers its not uncommon, but you'd be amazed what's out there. Contrary to common belief web servers aren't the only thing being run. On super computers its usually a heavily customized version, you could just as well use BSD as starting point to be honest. On smartphones it has been so heavily modified that you wouldn't recognize it if you start taking a closer look at it. And in terms of embedded systems I commonly run into non-Linux things. In fact when we step away from ARM I very often see very specific RTOS implementations that have nothing in common with Linux. NetBSD is very common, custom things even more so. You'd be amazed how far you can get with a few lines of assembly and a C or Ada compiler in a few hours.
Second, what have Stallman to do with anything? If there would be no Stallman and GNU, there wouldn't be Linux. But today Stallman don't play a major role in Linux development anymore.
He's a prime example of the mentality that keeps Linux from achieving mainstream desktop and laptop use.
Third, a Linux system is pretty easy to use. Just install it and it works. And lastly, no user care one bit about the discussion over systemd. Users are just using what is the default and if it works, it's fine. Sysvinit and systemd are just fine for users, it's only the hardcore old school users that are whining about systemd.
Now if the default worked I'd love to do that, sadly it rarely does. (Disclaimer: I don't shop for linux compatible hardware, I just shop for what gives the best performance for the least cash like most people do.)
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
