One reason why I left Linux
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Many of you don't know this guy, but he's called Eric S. Raymond and he was one of the initiators of the Open Source movement in the early days, and being one of the most fervent supporters and evangelizers still today (perhaps, not as much as Saint Richard Stallman of the GNU Church - that picture is true!! It's actually him!
) Anyway, he knows what he's doing and he was trying to configure a networked printer at home and he had quite a hard time, so he wrote an eassy about it: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story. He has a few good points in there...To those of you not very familiar with open source, this will perhaps be somewhat less interesting but it tells two things: 1) Why OSS is not quite "there" yet, in terms of quality of software and 2) Why I stopped using Linux, sick of fighting with countless configuration files. And you know what the funny thing is? Apple is using the very same printing framework (called CUPS), same tools, same config files, same everything in Mac OS X but with a different graphic tool to configure, and the difference in ease of use is just incredible.