Two Slashes

If you don’t know what Linux, Ubuntu, or Gutsy mean, or you don’t feel like reading an incredibly painful and technical post, you probably want to read something else.  Might I recommend one of the links at the bottom of the page?

This week was supposed to be a big excitement for Ubuntu users, what with the release of Ubuntu/*ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.  For many people, it’s been a fair experience.  Especially if these people are newbies, I’m talking of the perfect experience to get them into the Linux camp, and keep them for years to come.

However, Gutsy’s name has a double meaning that not many people are as willing to consider.   In a way, most people are correct in that the only real significance the name has is to differentiate versions and continue the trend of alliteration in the names set way back in the time of the “Hoary Hedgehog”.   However, I see a further significance to the name, as do many other people with (often unheard, or not-well-known) complaints about the new release.

Now, to be fair, I guess I owe a bit of back story before I launch into a ridiculous rant.  Since the time of Dapper Drake, I’ve kept an install of Kubuntu as my default operating system on my laptop (only using XP as a dual-boot option for times of necessity, like to use external video for reasons I won’t get into now).  This means that the majority of my work ends up being based in Linux.  With no problems, I’ve successfully used Dapper Drake and (with one small installation quirk) Feisty Fawn (6.06 and 7.04; I skipped 6.10 Edgy for reasons I don’t recall).  Anyway, since the release of Dapper, I’ve been pleased and more than happy to use Linux for the fact that everything worked, was recognized, and I really didn’t need to worry too much about what I was mucking around with because things usually ended up working (with only one or two notable exceptions).

Now, having had successful experiences with previous versions, one would assume that there would be nothing but good news surrounding updates.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for me, and several people just like me.   And I’m not inexperienced with Linux at all either, but the problems I’ve had are really turning me away from Gutsy and making me regret attempting to upgrade more and more as time progresses.

I’ll try to recap some of the more interesting of the problems I’ve had trying Kubuntu Gutsy here (while I reinstall and see if anything changes for the better), but there are so many it’s hard to even think to recount all of them.

• Shutdown no longer works.  At least, not without ugly hacks.  Yes, this is a very big, and seemingly very well-known issue.  Every version of Linux I’ve used on here in the past, be it Ubuntu or not, has worked perfectly in the power department, with no complaints whatsoever.  That is, until Gutsy.  Even the Live CD fails to power down the laptop when it should, instead giving me a black screen.  The hard drive is parked (as noted by the absense of being able to hear it and the distinct clicking sound it makes when you normally abruptly power off the machine) and nothing, including the keyboard, is responsive…but the only way the machine actually quits eating power is to physically hold the power button until it does so.

  Like I said, this appears to be a popular issue, with plenty of people suddenly in a similar situation.  But I find something as big and as common as this unsuitable for production-level software.  If you pride yourselves on having just released five alphas and some release candidates, one would expect the final product to uphold the standards set forth in them.  Feisty powered everything down fine; having to resort to holding down the power button not only is annoying, but it’s a great way to let your laptop overheat in your bag when you forget, and the thing sits there with the fan spinning full blast.

  Some people have reported being able to fix the issue by disabling ACPI support.  I tried it, and it worked for me.  However, this is unacceptable as ACPI is almost a necessity on a portable machine, which is why I’m not going to recommend it unless you’ve no need for what ACPI provides.

• Using a screensaver apparently causes the laptop to quit responding.  Yet again, this is another issue that I never had with Feisty.  Not that there’s much else to say than that.
• Suggesting that there’s a distro upgrade available when I’m running the latest build isn’t exactly helpful. Let me rephrase that:  Adept keeps suggesting that there’s an upgrade to Gutsy available.  Which would be helpful, say, if I was still on Feisty.  But seeing as I’m already on Gutsy, and the little tool it downloads to “continue the upgrade path” already sees I’m on Gutsy, it makes sense if everything else could seem to see that too.
• Where are the Kubuntu desktop effects? Exactly what it sounds like; I want to make my windows wobble on command.  Instead, Compiz seems to enjoy making sure I don’t have a window manager by the time it quits (Emerald starts with it, but doesn’t restart KWin at the end of the session).  Which is funny, because everything seems to be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Gutsy CD and working better than I would have expected.  Why can’t this methodology be easily applied to the KDE crowd?
• Hamachi refuses to start without beating around the bush.  Once again, there’s something changed between Feisty and Gutsy that plays with how well Hamachi functions.  While I don’t exactly blame either party for the break (it’s an OS upgrade of sorts, stuff happens), it shouldn’t take a ghetto hack involving decompressing Hamachi with UPX (which should be a non-issue at this point anyway) to get things working again.  Seriously, if people wanted that kind of thing, they’d probably be compiling their own kernel with Gentoo by now.
• I no longer seem to be able to add local printers via the Printer settings panel in the KDE Control Center.  Wait a second, it’s my machine.  Why am I no longer able to add printers to it unless those printers exist on a network connection (at least, using the GUI; there’s always the “edit-CUPS-configuration-files-and-pray-everything-works-when-you-restart-the-daemon” approach which still seems to be a viable option) is beyond me…what happens when I need to hook up to a printer directly?
• Strigi is annoying to no end when you trigger it accidentially.  Searching is a necessity, but I don’t call it efficient when I decide to reuse a tab Strigi is running in in Konqueror, only to find that every time I try to type a new URL, it overwrites it with one of its own.  It’s not exactly funny, now, is it?  Should I start taking things like the gas pedal off the developers’ cars?
• OpenOffice toolbar icons?  What icons?  Yup, there’s a bug in the included version of OpenOffice that for some reason makes all your toolbar buttons the text equivalents.  Yes, I’m aware it’s a configuration option to make them look like that anyway, and I know all about the different icon themes.  But flipping with the settings doesn’t work.  You’re stuck with the text.  (Hmm…for some reason setting the theme to Crystal suddenly allows about one of three different themes at the bottom of the list to work again…)

Given all the negatives, I must say that I have noticed that installing packages (once downloaded) appears to go a lot faster for me than it used to; even installing a big clump of packages doesn’t take more than a few seconds.  And I also enjoy the fact that the included version of KNetworkManager now seems to support VPNs through the aid of VPNC (or, I don’t remember having this capability before), which helps enormously considering my school requires one to connect to the campus wireless network.

However, also seeing how the *.04 releases seem to run better for me, I think I should stick with those for a while.  But if you’re one of the people who’s gutsy enough to put it all on the line for Gutsy…go ahead…be bold, be gutsy.

A question was posed in the TechCentric IRC channel about why Linux seems to have taken a backseat to other, more graphical alternatives. Of course, Windows. Yes, Mac OS X. Hell, throw OS/2 in there for measure. Well, funny thing I mention graphics, because that’s what it’s all about.

Take a trip back to the age of the Apple II. Yeah, remember? Well, even if you don’t, or had little experience with one, it’s part of my point. If you noticed, they never had mice. Everything was keyboard-driven. There was no such thing as “point-and-click”; the monitor simply couldn’t sense what part of the screen you were pointing at. Think of it as talking to a blind, deaf person; they can’t hear or see you, but they can feel your touch - a la, you can’t dictate orders to it, and (like I said) you can’t just gesture at something and expect the computer to comply. You actually had to touch the thing in certain ways (typing commands, anyone?) to get it to do anything.

This form of input had a few limits to it. For example, you had to know how to instruct the computer to do what you wanted, whether it be some funky acronym for the Canadian French word for the command you wanted, or whether the command wanted to know your pants size in addition to what it needed to do. This required memorization, and a certain amount of brainpower (which is proving to be a really finite resource in today’s world). You couldn’t just type “Move File A on Disk B to Disk C as File D.” and expect the computer to comply with anything other than the DOS equivalent of “WTF?”.

There were some benefits to doing things this way. If you wanted to be anywhere near productive, you had to be able to provide input to the computer as quickly as possible. And if you can follow where I’m going, this isn’t a place for hunt-and-peck typing. Ah, yes…you actually had to LEARN the sacred art of touch typing, with as few mistakes as possible. You never know when one mistyped command makes your 200KB of hard-written letters disappear. (Oh wait, am I jumping ahead past the invention of the software word processor? )

So, fast forward to the introduction of the Graphical User Interface. And the mouse. “Hey! Look over here! I’m making gestures with this newfangled pointing device…and the computer’s following along! I don’t have to type the name of my programs anymore; I just ‘click’ their name and the computer starts them for me!” If you don’t get it already, this is where the trend starts to fall. People are no longer “learning” to use a PC by throwing commands at them or typing; they simply move a bloody box around and watch as the computer does all the important stuff like figuring out what the devil they’re trying to do in the first place.

(Admittedly, the Apple II did have graphics capability - very limited graphics capability - and you still needed a keyboard to control what you were doing. So call my mistake if you want, but you’re forgetting that there’s more than just a pretty red square at stake here.)

Ooh and ahh all you want, but like I said, this is where intelligence begins to lose importance as a prerequisite for computing. You don’t have to memorize commands; you don’t have to lay a finger on the keyboard unless you want to write a note at all. The mouse, with far fewer buttons than a keyboard, is part of the reason.

I’ll stop assuming you’re thinking about old copies of Mac OS a minute and lead you instead to earlier versions of Windows. Yes, my friend, there were Windows before 95. Again, people were dumbstruck by the simplicity compared to previous computers. Not only could people use their blasted mice like with the Apples, but (in the case of those who could remember what a console app was) console apps could be run too; a true case of having your cake and eating it too, if you will. Along comes good ol’ ‘95 - “Oh look! All my programs are accessible from this one gaping button, and all the stuff I’m doing shows up on this bar here!” - and people are further retarded by “technologies” such as Autorun. No longer do people have to browse to the blasted CD, find the appropriate application, and launch it; instead, they sit back and watch as the computer brings the contents of the CD to THEM. Same thing with getting a new peripheral; plug the thing in, and instead of installing anything (in most cases), Windows goes through that hurdle all by its lonesome.

So, returning to the question at hand. Why isn’t Linux or some other alternative operating system mainstream? You want the truth? The keyboard…it scares people. When they’re not using it to type letters to their grandmother (which by the way, is now so advanced that the letters can move, show up blue and big and bold, and appear as if on a wooden tabletop), most users don’t want to be hassled with it. It’s a reminder of times past; times where people could only make their computers go as fast as their little fingers could move (which in some cases was not all that fast at all). And with the surging downfall in the mental capacity of most people today, it’s becoming harder and scarier for people to actually have to do more than click a box and watch their worries disappear with the contents of their Recycle Bin.

You see, it isn’t just eye candy that draws people. Compiz Fusion (or whatever the heck it’s called), transparency - anything extra isn’t the primary focus, it’s just a benefit to make things look better while things are (purportedly) getting done. It’s simplicity and automation; being able to walk up, move the mouse as little as possible and avoid the keyboard at almost all cost, and go 1/8 of the way while the computer does the remaining 7/8 and then some. If people actually wanted to put physical movement into anything, would there be such a market or demand for dictation software? Would operating systems even need to include something like that?

People want the computer to follow the fallacy that it brings information to them, rather than bringing them to the information. This isn’t Google…its the operating system, and it’s supposed to make things easy, right? Perhaps we’ve gone too far, and people are just too lazy now to understand that to get the most out of anything, you need to put some of the work in yourself as well.

In short, it isn’t about what you can duplicate from another operating system that draws people to it (since they can get their calculator anywhere), it’s how much work they have to put in to get some sort of benefit to using the OS in the first place. The more maintenance, typing, or dabbling people have to do or hear others doing, the less they become interested in following that footpath.

This is the place where we have our major split. The average Windows users are lazy, and assume they are like magnets in that everything comes to them, be it the Internet, their music, viruses (you have to admit, most viruses DO come TO you), or a girlfriend (I wish. ), and that as far as they’re concerned they don’t care about their keyboards - they’re second class input devices. Mac users, well, they’re not as lazy, since there is still the extremely occasional typing to do, and the keyboard helps out in some of the applications they have. There are 10 types of Unix users as well: GUI users who have no idea what a shell is and are probably only using the OS because a relative with computer savviness realized that they had thirty installed copies of Bonzi Buddy and needed an out badly, and those people who don’t like their mouse, but prefer navigating around a system using all ten (eleven, if you somehow have an extra) phalanges and avoiding the mouse (aka the opposite of the average Windows user).

To sum everything up nicely:  to get the more “common” lazy man, you simply need to provide enough cupholders, and make sure there’s a built-in auto-sensing back scratcher too.  That’s all everyone really wants.