A few days ago I stumbled onto this website called Planete Beranger, and read some of this man’s mostly accurate problems and criticisms of Linux. You can read his post here, but I think that I can accurately sum up most of it. I would also be very grateful if you either leave a comment of your thoughts on this or e-mail them to me.
The first and main point of his was that bugs often never get fixed in many versions of Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc. because for some reason a completely new version has to be released every six months even though often times it takes a couple of months for a “stable” version to be working properly. I also fail to understand why the system needs to be completely redone every six months. Another one of his complaints (the one I agree with the most) is that there is essentially no consistency and/or real organization in the open source world. Another problem he mentions is that many programs built for KDE have a hard time running in Gnome and vice versa.
A part of this man’s argument that many Linux user’s will probably not like is there really is hard to give good reasons for Windows user’s to use Linux. I have also found it rather hard to promote Linux to anyone. There are also no really large commercial backers of desktop environments which is a great hindrance to (coherent) development. And if you have looked around the Gnome and KDE websites they could use a lot of work. He also goes over the fact that visual effects like a spinning cube are really not that important especially when the actual features required to do work often break in the newest release of something.
It also seems that distrobutions of Linux that use Gnome are using only single-panel layout(I did not know this one) which makes no sense considering that now you generally need to have two panels to hold everything.
He was also talking about Hans Reiser a little. It seems he was convicted of murderering his wife. I have no real information on this so I will not say much about it.
After this he goes off on a few different topics such as: problems with sub-pixel rendering, inconsistent patent policy in some versions of Linux, an article Britannica, and a few other things.
Mr. Beranger also got his Bugzilla account banned (look here) after asking for some documentation and offending some Gnome developer who would no just write up some short documentation. From what I read on the previous link I cannot blame Mr. Beranger for being angry at the Gnome developers.
It seems that he also used KDE 4 and found it to be rather annoying to use. I guess that I am not alone in thinking that maybe KDE 4 should have been released at least six months later.
My article about Chess in Linux also got mentioned in his website. Again, I do not fault him for saying that those chess games were not very good, that is why I stated that the games I went over needed a lot of work.
After this he goes over a few applications, how the internet is not going to shut down because it is unlikely that we will not have enough IPv4 addresses. There are these little things called Variable Length Subnet Masks, NAT, private addresses, and IPv6 is slowly being adopted. I am a CCNA, I like to at least think that I know something about networking.
Before I close this, I read a few other interesting things on this site. If you go to ubuntustats.com you will see that there are so many bugs in Ubuntu 8.04, this really should have been released in another six months to a year. And it seems I am not the only one who’s keyboard and mouse would just stop working for some odd reason.
To sum up, I believe most of his criticisms of Linux to be well-founded and accurate, although I wish that he did not bring politics into it (I am far more conservative than Mr. Beranger). Mr. Beranger wrote a pretty good article, at least I think so anyway. Please let me know what you think. I have some trigonometric identities to verify now, some other work to do, and I will be watching Ironman in a few hours, so that is all for now. Good day.
Sin Cere,
Dirk Limon
ccna01
kadflynn
