[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Nate Duehr]

On Jul 26, 2008, at 8:46 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 16:13 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
>> Again, I'm not a software designer, so asking me to code a  
>> replacement
>> for Visio is the open-source community's way of saying open-source is
>> not willing to take on the hard challenges, I guess.  (And I have no
>> problem with that... I'm not taking it on either.  But it's reality.)
>>
>
> That's not really what open source is about.  It's always been about
> scratching your own itch.  That's why you hear a lot of "if you want  
> it,
> code it".  The idea is that the source is available to anyone  
> willing to
> scratch their own itch.  The problem these days is that the user  
> base is
> so large that the number of people available to scratch itches is a  
> lot
> smaller than those complaining about poison ivy.

The user base of commercial applications has always been what?   
1000:1, 10000:1, 1000000:1?  The promise of "open-source" was that  
more eyes made lighter work and things would ultimately be better than  
the commercial products.

But it hasn't worked out that way, for a lot of reasons.

Aren't there certainly more developers working on say, some broad  
topic like "open source desktops" versus how many work on them at  
Microsoft and Apple?  But the two commercial companies put out a  
cohesive (even if flawed - NEVER as flawed as desktops running Linux  
and certainly never as much breakage!) product that works.  The open- 
source desktops because of [insert whatever real or imagined reasons  
here] can't ever seem to get to something that works as well, let  
alone BETTER than the two big commercial desktops.  It's sad.

Or as the blog guy would say, "But we've got jiggly windows!  You  
don't have that!"  So what?  If it takes going to something called an  
InstallFest (no offense to those here who particpate in the CLUE  
ones!) to get the damn thing to have 3d acceleration, mount an  
external USB drive, and all that... without 10 years of Linux  
experience... something's still utterly broken in Linux... mainly, the  
thought processes of those writing for it.  I think.


>> Every once in a while I open up Dia to see it hasn't made any serious
>> progress toward anything that can make complex drawings.
>
> Try TGif.  Or XFig.  They aren't as pretty as Visio or other desktop
> apps, but they do the job.  But they weren't designed for desktop  
> users.
> They were designed to get work done.


It's that whole "they weren't designed for desktop users" thing that's  
starting to wear thin with me.  I actually enjoy doing things with  
software that WAS designed with my boring old "desktop user" needs in  
mind.

If you look at the lofty goals of most distros -- they have words in  
them like "pick the best software for users" and things like that...  
but that doesn't happen either.


> Personally, I use Dia nearly everyday at work, drawing design diagrams
> for software architectures that I'm working on.  I do very detailed
> designs before writing the code.  Not for anyone else.  Just for  
> me.  So
> I can understand what I'm trying to accomplish.  And later, write
> meaningful documentation based on that design.


I've used Dia for things too.  But that wasn't my point.  My point is  
that none of those applications equals one copy of Visio, and they've  
all been in development for years.

Pretty bad track-record.  But there's probably a reason -- I'm an evil  
user who sent my money to the closed-source competitor.  Must be my  
fault?  LOL.

Sorry - I'm in devil's advocate mode after reading this guy's blog.  I  
think in a lot of ways he's right, and the open source community has  
the blinders not only on, but super-glued over their eyes.  Only a few  
apps in the entirety of everything uploaded to the world have EVER  
been better than their commercial counterparts for speed, reliability,  
usability, etc.  Apache is a good example, perhaps.

He has another article (just look at the graph if you're easily  
offended by the rest of his ranting and foul-language -- I'm not)...  
that kinda describes the state of most of open-source...

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-software-isnt-really-free.html

I think it covers the state of "Linux drawing programs" pretty well.   
GIMP is impressive and saves people a lot of money, but ultimately if  
they want a job, they better know PhotoShop.  GIMP on the resume'  
doesn't help nearly as much -- I don't think.  (You're a graphics  
guy... you tell me, if someone walked into the average graphics design  
place and wanted a job, would they get on only knowing GIMP?)

Anyway, I don't put GIMP in the "network diagram" category anyway...  
it's designed for other things, and as a copy (basically) of  
PhotoShop, they didn't do the hard design work anyway -- Adobe  
engineers did.

The foray into this blog also let me to the Unix Haters Handbook,  
another gem I hadn't read. http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

It's dated, but I've run into most of that stuff in the last 10 years  
or so... and it's pretty much got me convinced Unix is insane.  I knew  
it already, but couldn't put it into words!  (GRIN)  Of course, I make  
my living (less and less, interestingly... many of our products where  
I work are a mish-mash of OS's that don't really matter because you  
never see them... they're completely hidden from the end-user and  
often not accessible to the technician either anymore... but not quite  
there "yet"...) from Unix and Unix-like systems.

But in reality... I make my living fixing whatever my company decides  
to sell, so I dunno... they have used a lot of Unix in the past, but  
that changes...

I don't care what OS it runs on, as long as engineers can't ever seem  
to release something without bugs -- as long as they can't figure out  
how to do that, I'll have a job!   (GRIN - Which probably means "for  
life" or whenever I finally get bored with seeing the same old string  
parsing problems in the sixth different language they've tried as the  
"latest and greatest" thing for developers and go find some other  
career that is less repetitive and painful, like banging your head on  
your monitor day after day after day.  This week's "fun"?  A system  
has a "new" feature where you can send it a string with data in it to  
provision something -- I can't give any more details than that, other  
than to say ... oh, they're telephone numbers.  At 70 phone numbers,  
the string parser barfs and doesn't finish and also doesn't throw an  
error.  Same bugs, different decade.  Getting boring...)

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com