Maybe you see it that way; I see it as a swipe at Apple et al's practice of locking down the hardware (and, in Apple's case, software) as much as possible to protect the system from harm and, incidentally, forcing users to 'dumb down' and do it 'their way'; in some ways this is a good thing, the same way that standardization is a good thing but stifles innovation and creativity.
That's charitable of you.
"I don't see any mention of Windows whatsoever, nor do I see where he says Linux is unusable..."
"Again, where is the word "unusable" in your quote? You still don't see any misquoting or misinterpretation?"
(etc.)
All I'm going to say here is I've read *many* a post by the person I was replying to on this subject and what I said was not an exaggeration of his opinion. Which is an opinion he's entitled to have and express, it's a free country, but it's pretty clear that if you needed to summarize said opinion in a single word "unusable" would be it. (Or possibly "garbage"?) He splatters on disgust with a paint roller and raises criticisms so broad that they're essentially unanswerable, why is the onus on me to not be "unfair" in responding?
Once again, what is your point? This is those two kids in the sandbox; one says "your sister's got a pimple on her face" and the other replies "Oh yeah? Yours is even uglier!", which, as I say, any criticisms of Linux usually disintegrate into because the defensive and maybe even insecure assumption of the Linux side is usually that the person criticising is a Windows user and thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bagels.
The point is that unless someone expressing an opinion as vituperative as "It's a nightmare!" can demonstrate that a reasonable alternative free of these problems exists and they're using it they're either ignorant or incredibly hypocritical. I could be wrong on this, but I believe the rule of thumb is that the *kinder* assumption in this situation is to assume ignorance. Therefore it's actually the more polite option to reply with an answer that points out the same flaw exists, well, everywhere in this case. What exactly do *you* think the proper way to reply to something like that would be? Let's think about this a little more:
If you mess with the wrong pieces you could indeed break it; "making it a nightmare for normal users" (rightly or wrongly) does not equate to "disqualifying it for consideration"; in fact, considering it is presumably what evoked the criticism, although we may all have different criteria for a "normal user"....
(jump)
I think that the implied suggestion that Linux (and, presumably, Windows) could be made less fragile is quite reasonable and hardly an "attack vector"; accusing someone of "attacking" Linux instead of discussing how this might actually be accomplished is what "doesn't contribute to an informative discussion and is perhaps even "unfair". Seeing it as criticism can sometimes lead to an informative discussion; perceiving it as an attack usually evokes a pointless and unproductive counterattack.
I'm sorry, but your criticism of my response to this seems hypocritical to me. Let's examine the "substance" again:
A: Massive directories (many megabytes, or indeed, gigabytes worth) full of inscrutable system files are a characteristic of every modern operating system. Therefore this entire line of discussion is a red herring to start out with; this is how computer operating systems are made. If you don't like it, fine, but it's not a unique attribute of Linux so it makes absolutely no sense to try to pin the onus for "fixing it" on Linux developers or to whine about it being a "problem with Linux" in the course of a comparative discussion.
B: There's the unsupported-by-evidence connection between complexity and fragility which, again, makes this a red herring. A reminder, the specific contention was that a
"fragile balance of a million discrete, interoperating components" "makes Linux a nightmare for normal desktop users". Again, putting aside the obvious comparison to *EVERY OTHER MODERN OPERATING SYSTEM* also being complex, where is the evidence that Linux is
uniquely fragile because it's, uhm, just like everything else? The fact that Linux runs a huge percentage world's servers is pretty persuasive evidence that the operating system is sufficiently robust to be trusted to not spontaneously explode under its own weight.
C: Like has already been discussed, it's completely ridiculous and unfair to expect Linux to somehow be uniquely resistant to a determined user attempting to sabotage their own computer by mucking around in the system directories discussed in A:.
(The fact is, of course, that Linux *already* is more robust than most historical desktop operating systems in that the UNIX paradigm expects the user to keep their personal mutable files inside their own directory and does not normally grant permission to damage the system files unless the user specifically takes action to escalate. What exactly is Linux supposed to improve on here? There's nothing specific being called out, AT ALL.)
Again, I see you ragging on me for giving a not completely polite answer to a broad, irrelevant, disingenuous and hypocritical stab that's essentially impossible to answer in a meaningful way. Why is this all my fault? (I guess I'm automatically the mean thin-skinned Linux user attacking the poor well-meaning victim just because.)
For the record, if you really want I could dig up some URLs to discussions I've had in the past where I've conceded that Linux has plenty of flaws: for instance, I basically gave up and used OS X laptops (while sticking to Linux or BSD on my desktop) for about four years between 2002 and 2006 because I got really frustrated with the pretty disastrous state of ACPI power management and wireless network card support at the time. (I'll note that the problems were at least as much due to obstinate and incompetent hardware companies as with the Linux development process, but it translated to laptop support being such a mess it was really pretty difficult to recommend Linux on them during that time to anyone who didn't want to spend hours screwing around. By 2007 or so things had *massively* improved, however.) Linus Torvalds is *not* the second coming of Charles Babbage and there's still some areas where it would be nice if someone could don an iron glove and vigorously shake "The Collective" into making more sense. (Advanced audio support is *still* far more fragmented than it should be, for instance.) But raising specific problems and discussing them fairly is one thing; screaming "IT'S A NIGHTMARE!" like a hysterical little girl from the sidelines is another.
Not at all; I just find it unnecessarily rude and hypocritical to resort to name-calling insults while preaching politeness.
Where did I call someone specific a name? I used terms like "idiot" to describe a hypothetical user who, not knowing any better, did something really stupid. You do know there's a
very popular serious of books that all carry the title "The Compete Idiot's Guide to (insert subject here)", right? (See also:
(insert subject here) for Dummies). Those books are designed to cater to people who are willing to admit that, yes, when it comes to a certain subject they're an idiot. (Face it, at some level we're all idiots. It's all about context.) And the "sock puppet" thing was, again, aimed at a generic entity and was describing how someone who's knowledgeable about a subject can end up feeling when they hear what sounds like the same "It's so tragic you can't help but laugh" story over and over again. (Generally told by someone you on one hand sort of would like to help but on the other are so turned off by their angry/hysterical reaction it just seems like a lost cause.) It was intended as a sad commentary on both the giving and receiving end.
It would indeed be awesome; we could start with your posts... ;-)
Um, okay. Again, I'm sorry if I offended you personally somehow. Here, I'll try extra hard to be polite here and respond to something you seem really concerned about:
What I do see is a criticism of the attitude of Linux developers (and users like Tor and Ole) who (for example) totally ignore and refute comments like the ones about case sensitivity and insist that because they find it useful in certain obscure circumstances and it's not a problem for them or their (free tech support) wives and fathers it shouldn't be an issue for anyone, even XP user.
Well, just offhandedly I'll note that wives and fathers are probably using the GUI, and many (most?) of the available file selection dialogs and file managers have options for tweaking the sort order. But we'll ignore that...
I'm not aware of anywhere in the real world where names, etc. are sorted according to case (although I'm sure you'll come up with one ;-); as to it being irrelevant because no ex-XP user is going to use the CLI, perhaps I'm wrong: is it not possible to save two copies of your latest spreadsheet/document/picture etc. with file names differing only in the case of one or more letters? Could this not be confusing the next time you want to load it? I don't really expect anyone to actually make **ix case-insensitive at this point but it would be nice if the fact that some people have an issue with it could be acknowledged instead of the usual "It works for ME, so what's your problem?
What's the worst case scenario if your Linux-using relative or SO saves two documents with the same name but different case anyway? You have to explain once that the filesystem is case sensitive, they go "oh", and they find the other one by scrolling the file dialog ever-so-slightly.
From a broader perspective, here's something to think about: maybe the reason people who are used to it don't consider it a problem just rightly don't think it's a "problem", they consider it an "idiosyncrasy", "just how it works", or don't really think about it at all. I know you're going to call foul and accuse me of "throwing sand" again, but let's ponder the nature of computers for a second here: Let's pretend I have a directory full of files named "1.txt" through "10.txt" on my DOS/Windows machine. What happens when you type "DIR" in that directory?
You'll get a listing of the files in an unintuitive order, with 10.txt after 1.txt, followed by the other digits That's just the way the beast works. Is it ideal? No, obviously not from a human point of view, but that's how it works and short of your command shell output being generated by the ever-elusive "natural language computer" that mankind has been working on for decades there are always going to be cases where the default presentation isn't going to be ideal because it's generated by a very simple set of rules.
(At this point I could smugly point out that on Linux it'd be easy enough to pipe the output of "ls" through "sort" to get the numbers in the correct order but I'll skip it because it's beside the point.)
The DOS filesystem happens to be case insensitive, that's just how it works, and it happens to be different than the UNIX convention. It's an attribute that happens to make it *slightly* less likely that you'll get confused by some edge case like naming two files the same way other than capitalization, but really, is it such a big deal? Out of all the things that are "hard" about using computers is this really worth hyperfocusing over? How is it an issue that even really needs a "defense"? (I can't say for absolute certain but I suspect the reason the DOS filesystem is case-insensitive is, having evolved from OSes that ran on some pretty darn primitive computers, it was designed around the assumption that it couldn't necessarily depend on the output device being capable of mixed-case. On some of the old home computers with uppercase-only character generators it's possible to run into some really irritating case-related issues with "invisible" lowercase letters screwing up an uppercase-only BASIC interpreter. Sometimes these were worked around by wedging case-insensitivity in as a breakfix in newer DOS versions, etc.) Case sensitivity is in Linux for backwards compatibility and complete POSIX compliance so it's a thing that just "is".
(And likewise, Windows happens to be case insensitive because of tradition,
except for when it's not.)
For the record, on some abstract level I generally agree with
the sentiment that it would be nice if computers were generally more forgiving and kind to humans, and when dealing with humans case sensitivity isn't usually particularly useful, but I also make the possibly flawed assumption that the people who hang out on obscure computer forums should be well versed enough with how computers work to understand that making computers kind and lovable isn't an easy problem and the range of solutions available is often constrained by the necessity of backwards compatibility. We can fuss about it, or we can just deal. (As noted, if the cost of "just dealing" makes switching to Linux from your current OS of choice too emotionally difficult then don't. It just, again, seems to me at least like a really odd thing out of so many things to get wound up over.)
