[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Nate Duehr]

Michael J. Hammel wrote:

> You only see the desktop.  The rest of the non-desktop software world
> has higher standards for development.  Most especially in communications
> and military (and NASA) projects.  I've worked on interactive cable
> systems, international phone switches, high availability clusters,
> supercomputers, and 24/7 data center systems.  You don't get away with
> buffer overflows so easily in those environments.  What you're doing is
> comparing the breadth of civil engineering to a small section of
> software development.  It's not quite apples to apples.  

EXCELLENT POINT!  Thanks Michael.  I guess the analogy would be that 
Civil Engineers building big structures that are important to lots and 
lots of people, do so to high standards, as do software engineers 
working on similarly important things...

But the house-builders do just enough Engineering to get by, just like 
desktop OS's?

:-)  I like it.

> 
>> Linux seems to meet neither goal, 
> 
> Don't lump the OS in with the distributions and desktop.  They are
> distinct pieces by design.  Whine about the desktop if you'd like.  The
> kernel is not nearly as problematic.

The end users don't know (and shouldn't know) the difference between 
"Linux" (the kernel and toolchain), the "distro" (packaging and maybe 
integration), and "the desktop".

They know they put the CD/DVD in, and it doesn't work.  That's all they 
know at that point in time -- then they are forced to learn all this 
"stuff" that perhaps only a developer should know, because the 
open-source model is developer-centric.

I loved the xkcd's... I'd missed one of those and the other one I'd 
forgotten about.  Great stuff.

Nate