Why I don't bother with linux anymore except as a background server...

[acroyear]

In Greg Laden's Blog : Gnome vs. KDE, I wrote the following comment:

I've always been of mixed minds about these two. Now, mind you, I'm a developer and my history with X GUI's goes back to X11R4 and Motif 1.1.

From a development standpoint, each have their pros and cons

Gnome pro: multiple languages can be used.
Gnome pro: look & feel more like Motif
Gnome con: the toolkit APIs changed fairly often in non-compatible ways.
Gnome con 2: if you didn't think .NET and C# was worth it, then Mono was a huge time-sink and waste of resources.

Gnome con 3: GTK layer duplicated a TON of X11 calls for almost no reason. the great truth of programming: all abstractions leak.

On the other hand, it did *eventually* (took about 6 years) get to the point where a GTK program can run on Windows without an X11 server (Pidgin, formerly gaim), so in the long run it may have paid off to have hidden/duplicated all those pesky low-level X11 functions. Similarly, this now makes php a valid scripting language for desktop use on windows as well, rarely though I need it.

KDE pro: generally stable API
KDE con: only one language (at the time; things may have changed)
KDE con: at the time, most apps for it were very primitive

General Linux Desktop con: the administration tools are, well, incredibly inconsistent. even from subsequent releases for the same distro, I constantly find that some damned useful tool has been replaced by something next to useless, and it takes 3 more releases to find something as useful as what i had before...only to find IT disappear and be replaced by another useless tool.

So really, I don't care. I'm sick of the constant changes in the desktops' surface layers without any of them really getting to the heart of their faults, and I'm sick of the inconsistencies of things that I take for granted on Windows platforms, like guaranteed instant plug-n-play of USB hard drives (I still get surprised at distros that don't do this). At 38 with 50+ hour work-weeks and a desire to, well, read and relax and have a family and watch a movie or two and enjoy my music, I don't have the time to argue with distro testing and desktop comparing and all of that stuff that at 24 I thought was fascinating in the early years of all of this.

Yes: I was arguing with Linux distros and BSD for x86 and all of this stuff 15 years ago.

After 15 years, we should have been done with all of this by now and just gotten on with it.

This isn't "vi vs emacs" (go 'joe'!) anymore. This is two groups fundamentally wasting time making things that are 90% exactly the same and then arguing that the 10% is the end of everything. This is distros constantly changing the toolkits that administrators and developers NEED, ABSOLUTELY NEED to be stable so they can operate on rote, manage by exception, and just get on with their f'in' jobs. My job is not to figure out linux crap anymore. My job is to wrote code that works. Linux went from being a damn good tool to getting in my way more than Windows ever has, merely because every new distro changes EVERYTHING that I need to get my job done and I don't have time to relearn it all anymore.

15 years, and some of this stuff is basic and hasn't changed in a a decade or more (like, say, Apache configuration), yet every release has a brand new tool to do it and every release has every administrator just falling back on command-line and home-grown scripts because it is no longer worth their time to see if the next batch of tools will do what should have been done 15 years ago.

and THAT is why Linux will never "win" the desktop wars.

At least with Apple, Jobs created the "screw backwards compatibility, 'cause the next one will always be better" mindset up front and ran it successfully...well, until the current "5 functions, 1 button" garbage that is the new shuffle.

geeze, that got long.  sorry...guess he tapped into some pent-up anger from my struggles to find a simple linux distro for acting as a digital photo frame and video jukebox, which is all i need at home right now...