The Grey Shadow

Ramkumar Shankar writes on his blog: “The day when Linux will take over the desktop (or at least have a significant footprint in the market) is still not upon us. That’s because there are a number of things the Linux community still doesn’t get, slowing down adoption of the OS in the home and home office.”

read more | digg story

I posted this story because even though it contained some tired-old overgeneralizations and misconceptions, it still raises some good points.

1. Over-generalizations: Mr. Shankar still echoes the old, tired FUD about “the Linux community”, trying to caracterize Free Software advocates as elitist, snobbish religious fanatics with a zealous hatred of Microsoft. It almost looks like it was talking about Mac fanboys! (yes, Tim, I know you use a Mac, but you definitely are not a fanboy).

   When I advocate Free Software, I try not to dismiss Microsoft; I try to present the case for software freedom. And believe me, with racketeers like the BSA breathing under your neck and whispering things like “software audit”, you usually tend to appreciate that.

2. Mis-conceptions: Some of the critiques were made under the assumption that for GNU/Linux to gain some footing in the desktop arena, installation should be done by clueless end users in the most user-friendly way possible. (Please note that I am using clueless in a respectful way here. I am not dismissing newbie or clueless users in any way.)

   This assumption is wrong. The only ones installing operating are nerds, script kiddies, consumers of illegal copies of proprietary operating systems… and computer manufacturers and systems integrators. I said it once, and I will say it again: It is completely unreasonable to expect an end user to install his or her own operating system.

   OS installation-related procedures (such as determining which particular version of the OS is suitable for a particular user) should be performed by a technically savy person—the resident nerd, the ‘whiz-kid’, the tech support representative… you get my drift. If you don’t believe me, try right now to install and configure Windows XP or Vista.

3. Good points: Despite all the shortcomings, Mr. Shankar still has some good points to make. GNU/Linux has very good hardware support, but it still must be better prepared to deal with all the hardware that is out there. Sadly, this is an issue with no easy solution unless the hardware makers get convinced about the value of having their drives ported to GNU/Linux. On the other hand, this is an issue that is mostly out of the community‘s reach, and he was talking about community.

   Another good point Mr. Shankar makes is that we need to keep improving the user-friendliness of our system and applications. Here he’s got a point. And I am not thinking on the command-line. I am thinking on things like the awfully cluttered KDE Control center, the extremely rigid GNOME settings, the stupid package-management tricks, and the arcane settings of many apps. We surely can do better!

Therefore, reading is recommended with a little bit of salt… or two.

Browsing over LXer, the GNU/Linux news site edited by my brother and friend Don Parris, I found this interview with Fred Miller. Fred is an old friend, back from several years ago. I met him at the CS-FSLUG mail list, and I found really nice to learn more from him and to have him featured in such a prominent news site. Go and read it; it’s an excellent interview with a commited Christian brother and Free Software advocate.

Rev. Harold Segura works with World Vision Latin America and he also serves as the Director of Theological Education for the Union of Baptists in Latin America. He was invited as an observer to the 5th Latin American Roman Catholic Bishop’s Conference in Aparecida, Brazil.

Harold published his recollections as a conference observer in a blog, Desde Aparecida, which is written in Spanish. Fortunately, there’s an English translation with almost all the posts, From Aparecida. I found the translation generally good despite some obvious translationisms.

This would make a great reading to those interested in the state of Protestant-Roman Catholic relationships in Latin America, and the particular spiritual needs of this continent. Enjoy!

I found this excellent article at All Unkept, Luke Plant’s blog : What’s so bad about the Nazis anyway?. It is a great application of slippery-slope logic in hindsight, and makes you question whether slippery-slope arguments are really that worthless. Recommended.

Last week I was busy downloading and installing a fairly comprehensive round of upgrades:

• WordPress 2.2: I upgraded all of my WordPress sites to version 2.2. Version 2.2 offers a number of improvements, such as support for widgets and full Atom support; but the changes I cared for the most were the speed improvements.
• KDE 3.5.7: The latest incarnation of the K Desktop Environment in the stable 3.5 series, 3.5.7, was released on May 22, 2007. This is perhaps the last release in the long, stable 3.5.7 series, and the changes are largely bugfixes and minor improvements in Kopete (the instant messenger), KPDF, KMail, and other programs.

  I installed KDE 3.5.7 in both of my workstations (goyeneche at work, and phoenix at home). Overall, 3.5.7 feels a little bit faster, and stable as ever. If you use KDE, this comes as Highly recommended.

• OpenOffice.org 2.2: Yeah, yeah, I know this is old news. After all, OpenOffice.org 2.2 was officially released on March 29, 2007. This release features a big code cleanup, and speed and stability enhancements. There are a number of feature improvements, especially in Impress and Calc (the presentation and spreadsheet modules, respectively).

  All in all, what I like best in this release is the slightly improved speed. I installed in my workstation and in the Win32 partition of goyeneche. This is also recommended.

• Thunderbird 2.0: I upgraded my main office e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird, from 1.5.x to 2.0.x. The new Thunderbird 2.0 feels much better, but has the same defects of his browser sibling, Firefox 2.0.x: botched colorscheme, even less settings to configure, forced (and incorrect) guessing of the screen’s dot density, and so on). However, I still think it is a worthy upgrade. What bugs me is a new dialog I see every once in a while: «This folder is being processed…». Go figure.