Showing posts with label Arch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arch. Show all posts

Saturday, October 2, 2010

The Fifth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this episode of the podcast... The Thoth, Inerg, Mekapaedia and Crazy2be discuss their favorite distros and why they like them. Also, a new segment is introduced called 'Try it for a week'. Remember to enter our contest to win a Starcraft 2 Beta key, or Plain Sight. All you have to do is send an email to Guysonfoss@gmail.com telling us you want to be entered. Keep in mind, if you want your voice to heard on the show, send us an audio clip of you saying what you want to say and we'll probably play it on the show. Another note, we are now on itunes so if you have one of those newfangled ipods, you can download our lovely voices directly onto your device. Show Errors: Meakapaedia accidentally said Fujita instead of Fujitsu; XGA instead of XFX and Pacman -Syu instead of Pacman -Sy.


News
Netflix comes to Canada
Sidux is Sidux no more 
Google Turns 12
They're rooting everybody out here
Mandriva forks
LibreOffice
Go-OO 

Topics
Peppermint
Moblin
Chromium-OS
Mint
OpenBSD
Arch Linux
Gentoo
Plan 9
Mandriva
Windicators

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Why I hate Ubuntu

This isn't a rehash of the same things I've been saying for quite a while, it seems, it is a clarification of why I am saying them.


Certain people might say "You're saying them because you like to be controversial, annoying and contrary!", and they would be right. But that's not the entirety of my reasons.


The original hatred stems from use. I used Ubuntu for quite a while, under the guise of Linux Mint, and it worked fairly well. The packages were about as recent as the Pre-Cambrian era, but at that point it really wasn't an issue. I then moved to Arch, because largely, I was bored and wanted to try something new. My skills with Linux grew exponentially during my use of Arch, and I went from nearly no knowledge of the internals to what I would call a fair knowledge of the internals. I can't hack the kernel yet, unfortunately. Lack of C experience.



What did happen though, is when I went back to Ubuntu, the experience was frustration. While Arch made you work all the time, and Ubuntu didn't, when you did want to work Ubuntu got in the way. It is nowhere near as compliant as Arch, and gnome doesn't help. XFCE helps a bit, but my the package manager is the same. And oh, how I hate apt. Why? Because it doesn't have a "force" option. In pacman, I could delete the kernel for all it cared. Why is this important? Let me refer you to a more experienced man:


"UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn


The reason the "force" option is important in a package manager is because sometimes there are package conflicts that the package manager cannot sort out, so you need to yank out one dependency and install a replacement, or install the conflicting package first and then the dependency, etc... The inability to do so is infuriating. The obsolescence of packages wasn't great, either.


And then came the time I tried to run Xubuntu off a USB stick. It was slow as all hell. Arch Linux? As fast as normal.


After the noncompliance and the slowness of Ubuntu made me leave it for Arch, and occasionally along the road, Gentoo, I started to grow in a more philosophical way in all aspects. Then I looked at computing.



What did I realize?


Ubuntu, OS X, Windows and all those kind of purported "user-friendly" operating systems actually make computer user harder for the average person. "What?", you might say, akin to my mate Crazy2be, "That doesn't make any sense.". It does, actually. It does because it makes it so the average user requires no skills, and thus develops no skills, in using an operating system. I understand using a stable, supported and easy to use system in a business environment, but in that case you're probably using AS/400 and Windows XP, so the point is moot.


I suppose there is an argument that people should be able to choose. Sure, you annoying libertarian, but then you can choose with Arch Linux. The choice comes down to "pacman -Sy kde" or "pacman -Sy gnome". If you're not sane, that is. The real answer is "hg http://hg.suckless.org/dwm"


So what I'm saying is basically I hate ubuntu because I hate using it, and it is a symbol of what I consider the unskilled corruption of a hobby OS. I'm also telling the average computer user "Go and install Arch Linux so you can learn some skill. For your sake as much as mine."


With your help, we can eliminate things such as this from being needed to be hung up:


Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Fourth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

This week on the podcast: Waffle Monster makes his return and we talk about stuff! Remember to enter our contest by emailing us at Guysonfoss@gmail.com! Also, if you don't already have Dropbox and you have been considering it, help us out by signing up with our link by clicking here!


News:
Mint Debian
Sidux
Uberstudent
Schools Spy on Students Through Webcam
Engineer Terrorists 
Dell's New 7" Tablet
FCC Opening TV Airwaves
Facebook Down
IBM Single Atom DRAM
GOG down then up again
Garry's Mod For Mac

Topics:
Diaspora
Microsoft Security Book
OpenBSD
Installing Gnome on OpenBSD

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Monday, August 31, 2009

Well that went well...

Well, I'm not longer using puppy linux. I can't ever get git in the package manager, so it's not quite a dev platform. Oh ya, and I screwed up my save file permanently because I made it too big. So I said screw that and tryed Ubuntu mini remix. Nothing. Worked.

Well, I'm back to my old standby, Arch Linux. Ah, like a breath of fresh air Arch Linix is by far the easiest distro I've ever dealt with. More compliant then Gentoo, not Debian-based (I now declare my hate for Debian), small and with a massive supply of packages (if you install a AUR installer such as yaourt).

So I've installed it on my usb stick and after fixing grub (grub works weird-ish on USB drives) I quickly have got the nvidia driver and wireless drivers installed, have a window manager (Fluxbox!) and a wireless connection mananger (wicd!).

Yay! So ideally this'll work well. Shoulda done it in the first place, really.

*Raises Glass* To Arch Linux!

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