Linux: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
It seems like in the tech world, there is one constant you can always count on: everything you use will be just one step shy of perfection.
Canonical's latest LTS update of Ubuntu is a prime example of this. Pretty much everything works out of the box. There's a few annoyances with the new indicator applet not yet supporting Thunderbird, and some weird placement issues with notifications, but everything else is quite usable. No problems video or audio, 3D desktop compositing runs buttery smooth, and wireless connects without any issues whatsoever.
Surely, I thought to myself, Canonical and/or the GNOME team must have screwed something up. They wouldn't let Linux get away withing being usable and accessable, would they? Then I tried doing a little bit of filesharing on my network.
See, GNOME has this thing called GVFS, which, in theory, makes it easier for you to access and browse shares, not unlike how you can make Windows treat shared folders on a network and FTP servers like a drive on your computer. I suppose whomever was writing GVFS to replace the old system sort of forgot that most home computers run Windows, and thus compatability with SAMBA (which is what Linux uses to play nice with Windows shares) is pretty damn important. While I can use the command prompt to run SAMBA and browse my entertainment center's share just fine, it's nothing but issues trying to browse to the same with Nautilus.
But this is pretty much what I've come to expect from open source anymore. The neckbeards are so hot for making their precious OS do new and exciting things that they forget to make sure that new stuff works properly before foisting it upon their posterboy distro. Like how they shoved PulseAudio into Ubuntu before it was fully functional. Like how they tried to pimp Netbook Remix when it was still a pain in the ass to get wireless working on most netbooks. Like how they put a beta version of Firefox into an LTS.
Ghh. How can something be so awesome, and yet such a clusterfuck.
Canonical's latest LTS update of Ubuntu is a prime example of this. Pretty much everything works out of the box. There's a few annoyances with the new indicator applet not yet supporting Thunderbird, and some weird placement issues with notifications, but everything else is quite usable. No problems video or audio, 3D desktop compositing runs buttery smooth, and wireless connects without any issues whatsoever.
Surely, I thought to myself, Canonical and/or the GNOME team must have screwed something up. They wouldn't let Linux get away withing being usable and accessable, would they? Then I tried doing a little bit of filesharing on my network.
See, GNOME has this thing called GVFS, which, in theory, makes it easier for you to access and browse shares, not unlike how you can make Windows treat shared folders on a network and FTP servers like a drive on your computer. I suppose whomever was writing GVFS to replace the old system sort of forgot that most home computers run Windows, and thus compatability with SAMBA (which is what Linux uses to play nice with Windows shares) is pretty damn important. While I can use the command prompt to run SAMBA and browse my entertainment center's share just fine, it's nothing but issues trying to browse to the same with Nautilus.
But this is pretty much what I've come to expect from open source anymore. The neckbeards are so hot for making their precious OS do new and exciting things that they forget to make sure that new stuff works properly before foisting it upon their posterboy distro. Like how they shoved PulseAudio into Ubuntu before it was fully functional. Like how they tried to pimp Netbook Remix when it was still a pain in the ass to get wireless working on most netbooks. Like how they put a beta version of Firefox into an LTS.
Ghh. How can something be so awesome, and yet such a clusterfuck.