The Most Puerile of the FOSS Aficionados

The website Planete Beranger recently published an interesting post "Wrong ways to promote the FOSS", from which the title of this post was taken. The core observation of the Beranger argument is:

I'll only say that there is no such thing as a "troll". This is a word invented by the most puerile of the FOSS aficionados, unable to cope with the existence of:

• legitimate critiques from users of FOSS;
• illegitimate critiques from users of FOSS;
• legitimate critiques from non-users of FOSS, deterred by real problems;
• illegitimate critiques from users of FOSS, hasty and judgmental people;
• curses, vandalisms and the like.

I got to see the Most Puerile in action over the weekend on OSnews in the comment section of the article "Top 5 New Features of Ubuntu 8.10 Interpid Ibex" (and yes, Intrepid is spelled wrong) posted by Eugenia Loli-Queru on OSNews. Eugenia was rightfully complaining that instead of adding new features of questionable value that perhaps the developers should clean up some of the long existing messes, such as the interface faux-paus in Gnome Control Center. Sure enough 'freetard' ralph lept into the discussion with his own brand of trollish behavior, accusing her of 'abusing' a news submission to complain about said interface problem. Then, when she attempted to defend herself, the lively group modded her down to the lowest level, -5. Which is interesting considering she (was) a long-time editor on OSnews.

That didn't last long. Apparently when she posted another article that included a link to my now-favorite site Linux Haters Blog, she got flamed again to the point where she resigned.

Which leads me back to Beranger's latest, where he rants about problems with Frugalware, Sabayon Linux, Debian (Because it's the best? No. Because it sucks less), openSUSE 11, KDE 4 (And no, I don't need a "Folder View", I need the classical way the icons show up on a KDE3 and on a GNOME desktop! Period. You motherfuckers.), Firefox 3 on Fedora 9 (and RHEL 5.2), KOffice 2.0 alpha on Windows (and the way it won't install)... In short, he's reached the end of his rope. And it's sad to say that he's going to stop reviewing Linux and other tools because he's had a belly full with the poor quality and the even poorer attitude of many of the vocal supporters and developers.

I'm on the hairy edge of just pulling the trigger and blowing Linux away myself, in spite of spending $120 on Mandriva late last week. I don't want to be treated like a rock star, I want consistent quality from release to release. Everybody wants all new features from release to release, many of them poorly implemented versions of features found in Windows and Mac OS X. The primary reason I find Mandriva useful and stable is that it actually seems to be more conservative in its inclusion of software, and it seems devoted to producing a quality product. You damn sure won't find that in Fedora, openSUSE, or Ubuntu any more.

I leave you with this small snippet from the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly:

Once again, Mandriva seems to be a winner here, earning high marks from both the reviewers and the users on various forums for its 2008.1 release. Fedora, on the other hand, was the exact opposite - the distribution's first release under a new project management has been rated rather poorly by most reviewers, while it also received a major thumbs down from their KDE users.