OSNews

It's not a question of profanity, it's a question of respect. You link to an article which if posted here as a comment would be fair grounds for deletion or even being banned, according to the rules.

Edited 2008-07-05 22:31 UTC

Bullshit, Eugenia. I'm a fan of a lot of what you do, but your admiration of the Linux Hater is dead wrong.

I'll admit the excessive use of profanity is a bit off-putting, but I, too, am willing to look past that and get to the meat of the post. Unfortunately, there isn't any, or at least, precious little.

What the Linux Hater does is use profanity to disguise his vacuous opinions. The rationale is that if he expresses his opinion strongly enough, with such forceful language, that to disagree with him would be inviting idiocy. No-one wants to be associated with 'shit-eaters' and 'jackasses'. And anyone who marginally agrees with his side of the issues finds him or herself nodding along, "yeah, stick it to those f--ktards!"

The Linux Hater's conclusion is "So what's the answer? I say f--k 'em all. Go invest your time in something else where the devs aren't so full of themselves." Tell me, is that really worthwhile? Has the hater actually said something interesting and insightful? His conclusion: giving up on open-source development because he doesn't like the community - really the solution?

And the truth is I -would- have a lot more respect for the LH if he could clearly, intelligently and respectfully articulate his opinions. Instead of opting to be a respected voice, he simply ops to be a loud one.

Let us pay him no more heed.

This is what I got out of the linux hater post

1) Forking is not the answer
2) Normal people do not want to have to learn all sorts of new paradigms to use their DM
3) If you are going to do something radically different, call it something different. I think the implication was that KDE4 itself should have been a fork
4) To the end user, whether everything is better or not is irrelevant. It being completely different makes it bad.
5) Instead of whiz-bang features like plasmoids, focus on getting stodgy old features like wireless and stand by working really well.


Now, most of the points I don't agree with, a few I do. But regardless, there is definitely intelligence in the sea of profanity.

I think point 3 makes the most sense. Imagine a KDE-experimental branch where ideas are prototyped, reworked, and then backported into the trunk. Would have side stepped alot of the problems that 4 introduced in both the product and the community.

I've found many of Linux Hater's posts bang on as well (some quite amusing), and he actually has a go at people like SJVN and all the loser journo's who like to stir up storms:

This is one thing we can agree on. There are a few clueful journalists, but for the most part the tech journalist crowd is neither technically savvy nor journalistically sound.

"meat of the post"

What meat? I like funny posts like this one like the next guy/girl, but I don't see much meet.

Maybe when he talks about how innovation should be incremental, but that's a rather misguided notion anyway. Incremental doesn't get you very far.

Besides that comment, he just repeats what has been said over and over again everywhere. Been there, done that, got the sucky t-shirt.

Earth to KDE devs: we don't need plasmoids! we want boring, old wireless networking to work.

Of course, it's a fun post. But I can't take any of it seriously - I suppose he's actually a lot like Steven JVN. Writes controversial crap to get hits on his blog. Maybe OSNews shouldn't support him.

Maybe when he talks about how innovation should be incremental, but that's a rather misguided notion anyway. Incremental doesn't get you very far.

I agree!
We saw how far "incremental" can bring you: To KDE 3.5.x. Pretty far, but probably not far enough.

I can still remember when the 2.x Series began, and switching over from 1.x was labeled as "painful" and "unintuitive" by some journalists.
My experience 3 months later was: It is a smooth and nice transition, some features were missing, others were there, but nothing happend that made me seriously look back to KDE 1.

The switch to KDE4 will not be as painful as some of the journalists seem to think, because it is ONLY A DESKTOP. And we usually don't work with the desktop, we work with applications. If people can find their way through an office suite, a game or an editor, they can find their way through KDE4. And if they can't find their way through KDE4, they need someone to help them with EVERYTHING a computer does, and this helpful person will make KDE4 behave the same as KDE3 does. I too have a mother who will at some point in the future switch to KDE4, and I don't see a reason to panic (or complain).

Unfortunately LinuxHater is neither dead on nor funny. Unless you find the rantings of an apparent 12-year old who's watched too much South Park funny.
Yes, the lame-ass excessive profanity DOES take away from the message and if you cant express yourself in other ways chances are that what you have to say isn't all that important.

I have to agree with you. Words are just words and I don't really understand why people get upset about them.

I agree with the part of the article that asks what would be wrong about using QT4 without radically changing everything from the ground up?

KDE4.0 should have been KDE3.5 with whatever changes it needed to be built against QT4. When you change everything you should call it something else, like KDE X, or KDE Vista, or QDE or something else. It does make the people using KDE3.5 feel like they'll be left and no more effort will be put into it since everyone will be working on KDE4.

But on the other side, I feel that it is kind of silly complaining about numbers. They wanted to change everything so they chose a new number, that number was 4. Before having a complete working system they need some milestones with targets, those milestones are 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 etc. So those numbers gave the illusion that it is a complete system? Shame on the distros that try luring in new users by saying "we got the new shiny kde...switch to our distro". They knew better...and it probably worked against them. They probably got new users for about 2 days before they switched to a distro that used a working KDE.

BTW, I use XFCE but have tried out KDE4 every once in a while.

No, KDE 4.0 should be what KDE 4.0 is. A new major release, introducing major new frameworks. Just like KDE 3.0 was, and KDE 2.0, and KDE 1.0. I don't see any reason to start doing things differently all of the sudden.

If we would've ported KDE 3.5 to Qt 4 first and then did a release we wouldn't have been able to keep KDE binary stable during a major release cycle - believe me, that's major shitty.