Tough love: Linux needs more haters | Hacker News Reader

Tough love: Linux needs more haters

blogs.zdnet.com

17 pointstx10 comments

LinuxHater's just trying to point out some of the mad stuff we need to fix so that folks who don't want to learn to love the command line can learn to love linux too. Printers have been diabolical to set up in unix & linux forever! (PS: man-in-the-street can't administer any OS that's why they need all the help they can get)

Exactly. Linux hater shows the things Linux apps need to fix so that Linux can become a desktop OS for mainstream people (beyond the limited eeePC-type environments), and that everyone else can get the hardware and app support they want as a result.

I love the site, and I suspect the people who react badly to it are those that don't actually know as much about the platform as the author does.

Maybe I should set up a blog called 'FreeBSD Haters', the first post could be on why getting a printer to work is so hard, and the second on why Firefox doesn't work properly...

Does FreeBSD try to be a desktop replacement for the everyman?

PC-BSD does.

It depends what you mean by 'desktop replacement' and 'everyman'... I'm a programmer, I use FreeBSD at home, and it's great for development. It's also pretty good for multimedia, for example I now much prefer Amarok to iTunes.

The only downside is that a few things are ridiculously difficult when (in my opinion) they shouldn't be, for example setting up printers.

I don't think the average 'man in the street' could install FreeBSD as a Windows replacement, but then they couldn't administer Windows properly either.

I use FreeBSD on my desktop, and years of hardware problems has taught me to be very selective in the hardware that I buy.

For example, I only buy networked printers that support Postscript, such as many HP or Kyocera models. Then one line in /etc/printcap is all that is needed to be away and printing.

Similar story for networking devices, RAID cards, etc... you buy the ones you that are reputed to work well and avoid the others..

Wanna be a useless blog, everyone knows that BSD is dying. (Just a pun, okay, I use OpenBSD as a secondary operating system on my laptop).

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

Also, Anyone have a link to the thread were linus talks about the benchmark as a bug report?

This article slipped through the cracks a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249387

Reply on news.ycombinator.com