People Who’ve Never Run Linux Shouldn’t Write About Linux
The title of this post occurred to me when I read the post Our Linux Dream. Somehow, even though people get the idea that specialized fields require some experience in that field before you can say anything intelligent about it, people hear the word “Linux” for the first time, Google it long enough to see Tux the penguin, and go “OK, I’m qualified now.” To go through that list of Linux-dream items one by one…
1. A website where we can tell if a piece of hardware is compatible with Linux. - We have that. It’s called the Hardware Compatibility List and it’s referred to as “HCL” throughout the Linux Questions site. I’ve gone so far as to use online access from the computer store to check it, with the graphics card I want to buy in hand.
2. Microsoft Office for Linux - Well, see, there’s this thing called “proprietary software”, which is what Microsoft Office is. They have no reason to port MO to Linux , because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer want Linux to die. And if you can’t produce documents with OpenOffice that are compatible with Windows, then you don’t know what you’re doing with OpenOffice. Mail the document to your Windows-using friends and ask if they can open it. I can see wanting Internet Explorer on Linux (they have done it with Wine) for web developer testing, but wanting to spend several hundred bucks on a whole software suite just to test your .doc format is ludicrous.
3. Great photo/video editing programs for Linux - Linux has that, but if you’re saying this, then your definition of “great” is Photoshop. Heard of Blender? Here’s the first look at the new animated movie “Peach” they’re using Blender to produce. That’s what I call “great”. Note, this isn’t somebody else’s picture stolen and filtered like you’d do in Photoshop, this is drawn from scratch by artists with skill. Keyword: “skill”. But here’s hundreds more graphic tools for Linux. Can we at least read the list, let alone try the programs, but just pronounce the names of them out loud to ourselves one time, before dismissing the existence of them?
4. Legal codecs bundled with all/most distributions. - Well, that isn’t Linux’s fault. Ask the patent holders of those codecs. Did you think the case was where the owners of the codecs were begging to have them distributed for free on open source systems, and the distro distributors were refusing because they’re mean people? And what if I don’t want proprietary software mixed with my distro? The commercial distros are there for a reason, anyway, for people who want proprietary codecs. Or there’s distros like Mint, based on Ubuntu and focused on out-of-the-box multimedia support.
5. A fresh start on the desktop - We have that. Go to XWinman and look at it. AAaaallll those programs are desktops, just like Gnome and KDE. If you check screenshots on other posts on my site, you’ll notice that I use something besides Gnome and KDE. An alternative to KDE and Gnome exists; it’s running on my desktop right now. I’m not making it up.
Thank you for playing, LinuxLoop, but I see we need to do some homework before we get recognized as an expert in tech blogging. The thing is, I wouldn’t mind if it were just one site getting it wrong. But I see this stuff every single week, people insisting that something doesn’t exist just because it didn’t fall out of the sky and bonk them on the head. You could have found anything on that list by typing it into Google, verbatim.
You know, Google, that company that runs Linux?
Have something to say !?Guest blog for us !
Original post by Rea Maor