Corporate creep in Linux? (mini-rantette)

Been reading a bit on people complaining about KDE's "features" and other
similar "What the hell is it doing NOW?" stuff, and I'm thinking that
there is a significant drift toward corporate convenience in Linux distro
development, including Slackware (audience gasps!).

While "improved market share" is obviously helped by providing
installations that have all the clicky-interface controls traditional Win-
D'ohz users have come to expect (due to being trained by M$ software to
expect things to work that way) I have a concern that the "traditional"
ways of doing things are being slowly eroded by this feature-creep.

For example, I spent way longer writing a usbmsd loading script than I
needed to because the HAL system kept getting in the way, and, because I
now don't have a range of devs to manually assign, I'm still expecting
resources to go missing as some automated process steals them before my
scripts can use them.

In "the good old days" we got to write things as we wanted them and they
stayed that way. These days that is becoming a luxury as learning how to
use the software that controls your hardware is replaced by auto-this and
auto-that, which don't always do that brilliant a job, and can take
longer to fix when they barf that simply hacking a plain text config file
would have done doing things "the old way".

I've recently switched back from using Xfce4 (the luxury sports-estate
car of GUIs) to IceWM (the open top kit-car car of GUIs), and having
recently played about with KDE (the Prof-Pat-Pending-mobile of GUIs) I've
noticed a distinct difference in the concepts behind these GUIs, and the
thing that gives me cause for concern is that we appear to be sliding
toward the click-it-for-me world of Win-D'ohz with all this semi-
automation, especially as a lot of it seems to be created and maintained
by coporate development teams that encourage increasing levels of
dependancy on ever more complex software, to do only the same jobs we
were doing a decade ago with much lighter software.

In the 21st Century, one might expect flicker-fast boot ups, and light-
switch responses from software, but no, things appear to be slower on
average, and way more disk-space is used up for tools that should surely
by now have become sleeker and more optimised for what they are supposed
to do.

Am I suffering from classic nostalgia here? Or is there a distinct
presence of corporate "just leave it to us" development replacing the
ingenuity of home-hackers we used to admire so much?

Does everything need to look feel and work like Win-D'ohz to appeal?

Are we being slowly trained to expect "click-me" interfaces by default?

Maybe its time to start up some kind of "Campaign for Real UNIX
\Linux" (CRU\L) or something? Some kind of grass-roots thing that at
least could establish that there IS still a desire on the part of many to
NOT have 5GiB of auto-stuff getting in the way of things that used to
only need about 500MiB to do pretty much the same thing?

Or am I just getting old(er)?

Scuse... The meds nurse is here. Later.

--
*===( http://www.400monkeys.com/God/
*===( http://principiadiscordia.com/
*===( http://www.slackware.com/

On 2009-09-09, Mike Jones <Not.RemoveThis@Arizona.Bay> wrote:
>
> Been reading a bit on people complaining about KDE's "features" and other
> similar "What the hell is it doing NOW?" stuff, and I'm thinking that
> there is a significant drift toward corporate convenience in Linux distro
> development, including Slackware (audience gasps!).
>
> While "improved market share"

If you-know-who shows up, you are hereby banished to using SuSE till the
end of days. It will be a specially configured SuSE that doesn't allow
runlevels 2-4, and doesn't run gettys on tty[1-6].

> In "the good old days" we got to write things as we wanted them and they
> stayed that way. These days that is becoming a luxury as learning how to
> use the software that controls your hardware is replaced by auto-this and
> auto-that, which don't always do that brilliant a job, and can take
> longer to fix when they barf that simply hacking a plain text config file
> would have done doing things "the old way".

Perhaps. Perhaps I just don't have the right hardware? Most of what I
use (in Slackware) uses a text config file, but I don't have much in the
way of exotic hardware.

> I've recently switched back from using Xfce4 (the luxury sports-estate
> car of GUIs) to IceWM (the open top kit-car car of GUIs), and having
> recently played about with KDE (the Prof-Pat-Pending-mobile of GUIs) I've
> noticed a distinct difference in the concepts behind these GUIs, and the
> thing that gives me cause for concern is that we appear to be sliding
> toward the click-it-for-me world of Win-D'ohz with all this semi-
> automation

IIRC blackbox and/or fluxbox still come with Slackware. [checking...]
Ah, yes, blackbox. Or if you don't like the bundled version, the source
builds fairly easily. Slackware also comes with my second-favorite
terminal emulator for X, rxvt. (I've recently discovered urxvt.) So
you will only slide toward Windohz if you let yourself.

> especially as a lot of it seems to be created and maintained
> by coporate development teams

If the other you-know-who comes back, you will be forced to use his
shell scripts till the end of days.

> Maybe its time to start up some kind of "Campaign for Real UNIX
> \Linux" (CRU\L) or something?

How about "Campaign for Real UNIX Et Linux" (CRUEL)?

> Scuse... The meds nurse is here. Later.

Ask her to bring enough for the entire newsgroup!

--keith

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