I could never get into POV-Ray. I just couldn't conceive how to make an interesting scene if I had to type in the definitions myself and there wasn't an interactive GUI to create and define shapes with instead. Blender is more my thing these days, and even then it's a bit of a handful.

I thought it was generally agreed (by whom I'm not sure, let's just say public opinion) that Quake 3 is the purest, most distilled deathmatch FPS to the point where it is the quintessential game to use when explaining what deathmatch is all about. Now I didn't play it much online as dialup was a shocking way to play a multiplayer FPS and even if I could, I probably would have sucked anyway. But it still was incredibly popular and even played without any mods it has a simplicity and charm that I think is rather appealing.

Having said that, Quake 3 appears to have been designed so that it would appeal to the pro gamers which was an emerging concept at the time and hence this "soul" as you call it may have been lost when designing the game. Similar complaints have been made about StarCraft II - that it's not as fun as the original because it was designed to accommodate pro gamers and e-sports, and so some of the soul of the original (which didn't have this aim at all) didn't transfer into the sequel.

Anyways, it's all good nostalgia. I still have all the Quake games and play them occasionally with newer engines as they are extremely quick to load, play and do things with (modern games have too many unskippable movies, animations in the menus to slow things down and waste time connecting to online services with pointless achievements). But maybe I'm a grumpy old man. :)

The problem I have is that, for all its flaws I still like Linux. I like the philosophy, the control, the freedom and the lack of in-your-face commercialism and corporatism that one gets in a lot of commercial software. So I try to ensure that whatever I do, I use as much cross-platform software and file formats such that if it does advance to a state where I'm satisfied I could use Linux as a primary system, the transition will be relatively painless. Until that happens, I'll keep following it with interest but not lose any sleep over having to deal with its shit.

Also someone modded my post troll before. Good old Slashdot - if you have an opposing opinion and even suggest Linux might not be the shining diamond that a lot of people make it out to be, you MUST be trollin'.

It's a trade-off. You trade less freedom for a substantially more polished desktop experience. If you want full openness you have to sacrifice a bit of your sanity and time to deal with the problems of unsupported desktop DEs and lack of financial motivation to fix their issues.

Most people I know who initially value openness value their time more as they get older, hence the Linux geeks move to OS X or back to Windows and deal with the compromise. It's a complete failure as a desktop OS compared to commercial vendors.

Yes I know, Phoronix is a pretty scummy website at times with Michael taking credit for basically every new thing that happens to Linux, but there are some interesting posts on its forum when its users are not constantly fighting with each other.

AdamW (Adam Williamson, "the Fedora QA Community Monkey" according to the project wiki) posted this in response to this very topic:

It does always amaze me how people are happy to download an entire *computer operating system* and throw it at their computer - with valuable data on it! - without even reading the damn documentation.

For Pete's sake people, it's an operating system, not a new version of Angry Birds. You might want to read something about it before hitting the big red button. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. There's a guy on the Google+ thread who says "Not knowing that The World Had Changed, I downloded the DVD of F18 and tried up upgrade my machine" - where do these people come from? And what rock have they been living under while three thousand articles explained that F18 has a new installer? Sheesh.

So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list. It works fine. If you want a nice polished version of newUI, you might want to wait for F19 or F20. It won't kill you. An operating system installer is a psychotically complex lump of code, it is not plausible that you can entirely rewrite one and get it working perfectly on the first try, and we never aimed to. We aimed to have something that broadly implemented the new design and worked reasonably well in simple cases, and that's what F18 has.

GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

(http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?77039-Alan-Cox-Calls-Fedora-18-quot-The-Worst-Red-Hat-Distro-quot/page4)

To which someone immediately pointed out the obvious:

Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.

Yup. Like I said in the previous story about Fedora 18, the state of Linux these days is appalling and I find no reason to suggest it to a happy Windows 7/OS X user at all. Windows 8 user, maybe, but I'd rather learn and teach said user the new way to do things in Windows 8 rather than switch to a completely different platform with its own quirks.

and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine

Nah. Eventually someone will come up with a robot that can perform maintenance on the burger robot, removing the human element completely. As for the maintenance robot, another robot will take care of that robot, and so on.

Eventually humans will be removed entirely from the design and manufacturer of said robots once they are designed with the appropriate skills. Once this happens, we'll all die in a nuclear holocaust as Skynet is born. All because of a simple burger robot.

It sounds like somebody needs to try linux mint. It's silly to judge the entire linux ecosystem by the follies of one or two distros.

Whenever someone presents an issue they're having with Linux, someone always tends to pipe up and says"oh try instead, it's much better!" Another distro might indeed be better... but it likely has its own quirks that another distro doesn't, and another distro which doesn't have THOSE quirks ends up having ANOTHER set of quirks, and so on. There's no one perfect distro in terms of trouble-free operation.

Having said that, I too am a fan of Linux Mint and wouldn't touch Fedora even out of curiosity as I know it's bleeding edge. But... my issues with Linux still exist no matter which distro you try, even the ones targeted at a friendly desktop use.

Oh I know the difference. It's just that no-one really cares; if I was really fussy I'd say GNU/Linux (just to keep the Stallman fanboys at bay), but again, no-one really cares. We're just discussing things here, casually, without having to worry about what is really a nitpicky thing you've just noticed. Everyone knows I'm talking about distros - only certain people who have few actual problems in their lives get twitchy if someone says Linux instead of distro. :)

And I'm sure I could find many examples of hardware that don't work at all in Linux or only partially operate in Linux, but work perfectly with full functionality in Windows. Even if it involves manually installing drivers instead of the hardware working out-of-the-box, that's still far better than not working at all.

As for doing research, fuck that for a joke. I once bought a laptop with an Intel 965 graphics chipset and did the research to ensure it would work with Linux. Everyone said it did, so I followed through. Turns out it worked as best as it could in Windows 7 but had issues with locking-up in certain OpenGL games/apps and video tearing in Linux - thinks that the fanboys conveniently failed to mention and could only be found in some Phoronix articles/posts if you looked hard enough.

Not to mention the occasional kernel regression (apparently this particular controller was more reliable in older distros, and hence older kernels) and it's just not worth it sometimes. The world is a bit more complicated unfortunately.

You watch them too? Sometimes I think they sound like a couple when they bicker...

The last time I tried it was last week (Linux Mint 14 running MATE). I ditched it because of a big issue when trying to use the USB 3 ports on my desktop - maybe 1 out of 10 attempts would the ports actually work when you plugged an external HDD in. A known issue with this particular USB 3 controller (Renesas uPD720200) and it's a big issue as I use the USB 3 ports to backup and shift large volumes of data every few weeks, and it would take many many hours longer to try to do so using any other method (and wouldn't' be as easy). Works perfectly in Windows 7, fails in Linux. Don't care if it's bad vendor support or whatever, it's merely the facts.

I guess my point is that try as I might, I honestly cannot find something on the desktop that Linux can do which Windows cannot (and generally the opposite is more common when ti comes to device and software support). I wish it were not so, but I wish a lot of things.

But I must be severely brain damaged, for I still enjoy using Linux and continue poking with desktop distros every so often, even though logic dictates I should have given up ages ago...

I'm no Apple fan but I've used the occasional Apple product and can certainly see and feel the quality of the design that goes into them. It just so happens that Apple are good at both design AND marketing. They wouldn't be worth as much as they are without at least some decent products.

KDE seems nice, but it's also the anti-GNOME - GNOME has too few functionality, KDE has too much. Nothing against a lot of functionality (I definitely prefer more to less), but when it gets to the stage where you have a dedicated checkbox in KDE which allows you to toggle between a tick or a cross for the Checkbox style, I think it becomes a bit too much. Makes it harder to find the actually useful options you want to fiddle with.

Having said that, the KDE team doesn't appear to be interested in destroying what they've built by chasing the touch phantom, so I guess there's that.

Remember, users are not the enemy, if you treat them like they are the enemy, well then you won't have enemies for long.

This is more insightful than you think. It's also pretty damn obvious (but not to discredit you writing it, as it's still a good point as it's apparently not that obvious to a lot of people).

If you treat your users with contempt, they will not deal with you any longer than they have to. Once they can find a way to live without you, they will piss off at the first opportunity. Unfortunately there are many people in the open source community who do think their users are idiots and treat them as the enemy when they complain about the direction some software is taking (GNOME 3, Ubuntu, etc). Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.

Sometimes all a person can do is complain, but that doesn't mean the complaint is baseless. It has a use if it's part of a culmination of complaints as it shows user dissatisfaction. And that can be enough of a sign that things are going down the wrong path in itself.