cosminaru blog » WhyLinuxWont

Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Episode 5

Cosmin Marginean — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:30:22 +0000

… because Gnome sucks Gigantor penises.

For whatever reason, the gnome-settings-daemon in the Gnome version shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 eats all your RAM. By all I literally mean ALL. I have 4GB, and in a few hours it was using 3GB. Pure awesomeness.

Is wonderful how completely useless background processes end up doing this kind of crap. Why doesn’t this ever happen to MySQL or JVM? Motherfuckers…

* http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10051835
* https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/485923

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Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Episode 4

Cosmin Marginean — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:46:15 +0000

I want to change the date. I don’t want to compile a kernel module, biatch.

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Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Episode 3

Cosmin Marginean — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:37:47 +0000

The Read-NoWrite-Web (not even on your fuckin’ machine).

The original Excel file published on a web server:

Downloaded this on Windows to fuck around with it.

Download on Ubuntu to edit and etc…

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Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Episode 2

Cosmin Marginean — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:20:03 +0000

The “playa”…

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Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Episode 1

Cosmin Marginean — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:15:32 +0000

Why does desktop-background-changing in Ubuntu has to be rocket science?

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Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Intro

Cosmin Marginean — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:13:41 +0000

I am a big fan of Linux for quite some time now. My migration from Windows to Ubuntu (although bumpy) was a very successful one in the end.
This is however only because I have an enormous patience when it comes to improve my working conditions on the long term, and, of course, because I’m a fuckin’ geek programmer.

However, I am 100% convinced that I were to be an accountant, secretary or languages student, I wouldn’t touch a Linux even if you would point a gun at me. I want to start a series of articles to prove why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows”. I know is an old topic, but there’s just too much of this in the Linux community and especially in the Ubuntu community.

Before getting threatened by some frustrated Linux garage programmers, I want to state something clearly. As already mentioned, I like Linux and I really really really want to see a decent desktop distribution one day. But this is only because I know what I am doing at least half of the time. The thing is that there isn’t any Linux distro (or that least none that I know of) that is capable to deliver a humanly usable desktop to non-IT-literate users. Such users are the ones around which I want to focus my posts, so I will try to stay out of the development-related topics as much as possible (although there would be plenty of those too, unfortunately).

Most of what I’m going to post is obviously Ubuntu related since I don’t have the time and resources to install a new distro every fuckin’ weekend – I did that in college, but I got a life in the mean time. So to all those CentOS, Fedora or openSUSE fanboys that are going to bitch about things like “oh, but my distro doesn’t (or does) that” – you are totally missing the point. The same for the ones whining about “oh, but this requires proprietary drivers, bla bla, freedom and free software, bla bla, we don’t want to pay to use software” – just die.

My only hope is to have the Linux geeks pay attention to the common user and not the one that is able to compile his kernel at 3 AM. That’s the only chance the Linux has if we really want it to ship on more desktops than Windows.

Stay tuned. Or find out in the mean time what you should be using Linux for.