[brlug-poly] thanks

[Will Hill]

Just for you, Shannon, I'll tell you why XP is unusable for me.  To continue 
your analogy, this is a small fish that I'd usually throw back where it could 
die or grow larger and be more fun.  

It's funny to post here as what follows is mostly a technical discussion.  

XP's closed source nature make it buggy and useless.  The list of problems 
starts with power management and extends to a lack of applications, stupid 
data formats, poor GUI and printer management.  It would be easier to say 
that everything Microsoft is second rate and leave it at that, but I'll go 
into details for someone who loves file permissions on systems with 12 minut 
half lives.  

Power management, the  most important feature in a laptop to me, is wasted in 
an OS that works best when booted daily.  The whole point of mobile computing 
is to take your work with you.  Even the best session management, which XP 
has none of that I'm aware of, fails to bring up your work exactly as you 
left it.  So, without power management, you lose your place and have to waste 
your time booting your computer and looking up all the things you need to get 
the job done.  Compare that to having everything you need already opened when 
you open the lid.  

XP's sorry single screen GUI makes place keeping difficult anyway.  If I've 
got more than two or three documents to look at in several programs, the 
single screen gets crowded fast.  Not being able to slide documents to the 
side so I can look at them easily is frustrating, but not nearly as 
frustrating as their pathetic task bar which reduces everything down to a few 
icons that continuously change positions.  Finding your work is like playing 
"hit the gopher".  I don't remember how to make the screen split, to it's 
very difficult to compare things side by side.  As I recall, it was different 
in every application and changed from version to version.  It was much easier 
for me to discover these features in Enlightenment and KDE applications where 
they are very useful.  

All of the above assumes I have programs to work with, which is not true.  In 
the non free world of XP, I have to pony up money or search the world wide 
web for applications that are probably trojaned.  Out of the box, XP does not 
even include a spell checker.  I need the red letters kmail and most other 
free text editors give me.  I also want tools like a spreadsheet, iso writer, 
compiler and so on.  I was amazed to learn that XP Home does not include 
programs, like flash, Real, Xine, xmms, noatum and so on, for watching movies 
or listening to music the way that Mepis does.  The average person who really 
uses their computer for work and play will have to dig up dozens of extra 
applications.   It would cost me hundreds of dollars to duplicate what Debian 
provides at no cost.

Once I've managed to find and purchase what I need, I'd then spend all sorts 
of time actually putting the software on my machine.  The install process is 
typically an insulting affair of "I submit", reboots and other nonsense.  If 
only that were the end of my troubles instead of the beginning.

Between crashes caused by malice and incompetence, install is never over.  
Because the companies that own this process think they need to earn money by 
selling you the very same program next year, the cycle goes on and on.  
Because non free companies don't co-operate, there's a good chance your next 
upgrade will screw up one of the applications you need.  Things get really 
messy when the owner goes out of business and you have to get your work back 
out of their roach motel.  Roach Motel?  That's another way of saying 
non-free data formats suck life.  Your work goes in and never comes out and 
this was done intentionally to make migrating to "competing" applications 
difficult.  I could rant for hours about what a disgusting mess things like 
the Outlook format are.  Microsoft's ballooning install requirements prove 
that the complexity of these formats is more for planned obsolescence than 
for performance reasons.  When you add worms, Microsoft got more fragility 
than they wanted from the registry.  The only way to keep XP free of worms, 
spyware, adware and all that is to wipe and reload, a task that's only made 
less tedious by yet another program you have to find and master.  Bill Gates 
especially hates programs that allow end users to duplicate his software, so 
programs that make backup easier are a particularly difficult thing to keep 
working.

So, let's say I'm in one of those 12 minute miracles of non free software.   
I'm not reloading, virus scanning, Windoze updating, or anything like that.  
I've gotten all the programs I think I need.  I'm plowing through the 
painfully disorganized GUI and getting work done with the greatest of 
determination.  I have actually produced something that is worth sharing or  
demanded by others.  Now what?

In my case, I'm stuck trying to share that work even with myself.  XP does not 
have ssh and I would not trust it if it did.  There are free samba clients 
out there, so I can use that to get my work of that one computer but it would 
be much easier if I could use a file manager like Konqueror to securely move 
things around my network like I do now.  Without those programs, I'm stuck 
choosing between a completely insecure home network and sneaker net.  

Getting my work to others is an even bigger pain.  In the XP world, I'm stuck 
emailing Microsoft formated junk.  I'd like to print out a pdf, but I have to 
get more software to do that.  Awful things happen when I start mailing Word 
docs, for example.  If I've bothered to use any text formating, it gets 
screwed up if I change printers or computers due to inconsistent font sets.  
As things are, I simply sftp pdfs or html to any of several web servers that 
I can then direct my friends.  

Free softare is all about sharing, non free is all about sucking money.  The 
net result is that non free software is expensive and difficult to use where 
free software is cheap and easy.

That's why XP is useless to me.  

On Saturday 22 October 2005 04:27 pm, Shannon Roddy wrote:
On 10/21/05, Andrew Baudouin <andrewmb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "XP is unusuable" is a ridiculous comment. I have no qualms about
> > letting you know that.