merlin026 wrote:Thank you for the time you have taken to answer to my complaint.
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I know that linux is lagging behind Windowz, I know about the closed source versus open source uphill battle, and I did find the updated 01 October version of Adobe's Flash player for linux - before writing you I tried to install it and it didn't work (no surprise).
Um, that just isn't the point. Flash is closed source. The only thing stopping it from working is Adobe. Nothing to do with linux.
I am just getting impatient with the fact that the open source community doesn't seem to see the interest of working more closely together than they seem to be doing right now. One of the reasons of the supremacy of Microsoft may be lying just there: it is one company (as far as I know).
Microsoft is more than one company...
What, so we're all supposed to get together every few days and sit in a big circle writing code together? Never going to work. The fact of the matter is that OSS is a huge thing, and it caters to a huge range of needs. Would you expect software from you're mobile phone to run on you're TV/Media Centre? Or you're PC? Linux runs on all these. Linux programs can be ported to all these platforms. There is quite simply too much diversity for the original coders to cover everything.
Linux and/or GNU developers all seem to pick one distribution or decide to create a new one, and in my opinion that disperses the power of thought.
It's almost as if they have the freedom to do what they need with the code. Who'd have thought, free software giving people the
freedom to do as they want. All you need is the time and desire to make it work how you need it. If you have the time and the desire, why would you want to use software that isn't perfectly suited to your needs. Perhaps more would get done if everyone worked on the same project, but then, at the end of the day, we'd have one product, that does one thing.
Take a look at Opera, there are 57 (!!!!!!! FIFTY SEVEN !!!!!) different opera versions needed for Opera to work on linux, and they don't even cater for all distributions available on distrowatch.
Do you know why? It's because Opera is closed source. All this precompiled binary stuff is only really in linux to help n00bs get to grips with it. At the end of the day OSS is about OSS, meaning it's default system is source code. It takes maybe 10 minutes to learn to use it, and is just as easy as anything else. All you need to do is switch from the idea of a nanny OS hiding everything from you and doing everything for you to the idea of an OS where you do what YOU want.
I have embraced the linux world back in December 2003, and I still think it is worthwhile to have an open source alternative to Windowz, yet I get tired of the stumbling.
I hate to say this, I feel like I'm having a go at you, which I'm not, but learn to run. I've been using linux for a lot less time than you, and I haven't had the troubles you've had, because I realised early on how something like the FSM has to work, and that you simply can't have everything handed to you on a plate. America didn't simply decide one lazy afternoon to be free, they had to fight for it. Don't you think it was worth it though?
Other examples:
I cannot consult my messages in Skype under linux. That really sucks professionally speaking.
Today I wanted to install Miro (former Democracy player). Even for the major distributions there were still plenty of bugs and installation issues one would have to resolve by oneself.
Take it up with the skype developers. Anyway, it's yet another closed source app.
So, you think it would be better if it was closed source, or a windows app? Bugs happen. Always. The beauty of OSS is that it lets you fix them, or at least tell others about them, and have the fixed.
So: who is going to take the lead in this and decide to quit working on some ego project and start working on one of the major distributions like Debian and Gentoo and Fedora and one source based distro. Let there be one distro for each type of package: one RPM based distro (Fedora), one DEB based distro (Debian), one tar.gz based distro and one source based distro. Amen and inshala.
I really don't think you get this. The FSM isn't about 'sticking it to the man', or getting things without paying for them. It's not about the knight in shining armour gallantly using his open source sword to rid the world of the evil Dr. Gates *maniacal laughter + thunder clap*
It's about freedom. It's about allowing people to do a they please. Freedom like this doesn't come easily, often people have to work long and hard to make things work just the way they want to, but they
can!
You're also free to use closed source software, even propriety software like windows. We might not agree, at all, that you should, but we give that freedom too.