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And yes, this really is worse than Lindows. That's providing (well, attempting to) basic computer users with a more stable version of a simple computer.
A quick translation for the non-compu-nerds:
Pretend Red Hat is a cutler selling, among other things, Swiss Army knives. The knives have a basic blade, and a lot of other fold-out toys, some of which are blade-like.
The Swiss Army people think that regular knives are swell, but that it's kind of nice to have some other stuff around.
Plenty of people still just only buy a good, old pen knife because it's what they wanted and they know that it will do exactly what they want it to do, but when in a situation where the only thing on the shelf is a Swiss Army knife and they need a new knife, they'll buy the Swiss Army knife and just not use the other stuff.
But then there are some other people that complain that, when they buy a Swiss Army knife, they're remarkably unimpressed with the plain old knife. That the interesting part is the corkscrew, hand-drill, miniature saw, and nail file, and that the knife really works better with all this stuff unfolded at the same time. How, they ask, could you possibly ever just use a pen knife after seeing how swell the Swiss Army knife is?
Well, by marking this bug "WONTFIX", Red Hat is saying, "We're breaking all the regular knife blades off of the Swiss Army knives on our shelves so that we stop getting complaints about how boring the regular knife blades are."
June 27 2003, 07:41:23 UTC 8 years ago
This type of behaviour is not even close to new for Red Hat (or really any major Linux distribution), they've always been unwilling to admit they've made a mistake. Their workers (and this applies especially to Debian as well) like to view themselves as infallible, and everything they do is right and for a purpose. Even when it fegs things up.
This is why I've switched to using BSD when I want a UNIX -- the BSD guys are genuinely concerned with making a good operating system, whatever pace they work at, and don't often skip over bugs that they caused. That, and you have less marketing hidden deep within your system to deal with.
July 1 2003, 19:22:44 UTC 8 years ago
I've had nothing but NetBSD on my own computers for, um, five years now, I think...
... but I work out here in the really real world, where the only BSD with a prayer is FreeBSD, and that only as a Postgres DB server.
At (my, but it's generalizable) work, developers, 80% of whom are using PuTTY on a Windows machine to do all of their coding on the Solaris and (Red Hat) Linux machines I maintain, really do want and expect this kind of bullshit.
sigh
My response to all this is this kind of crap in my dotfiles:
# Do away with RH evilness
[ `alias | grep ^ls=` ] && unalias ls
[ `alias | grep ^vi=` ] && unalias vi
But there's only so much of that you can do before you're waiting ten minutes for a new login shell...
July 1 2003, 20:26:17 UTC 8 years ago
I'm afraid of work and haven't yet ventured out into the real world, so I can only imagine the horrors that plague it. The fate of *BSD sounds dismal, from what you report.
The fact that you have to deal with Red Hat routinely is a true shame, I don't know how long I'd last under conditions like that. I don't really like the Linux kernel that much -- something about the rate of development (especially under its model) strikes me as a train wreck waiting to happen. And the distribution model (or should I say models -- they're all somewhat unique and I would only ever use one: older versions of Slackware) is a whole separate issue, worthy of a dedicated rant.
I'm not really sure where I was going with that...