[KLUG Advocacy] A nice 'lemon' article

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

Just in case you thought that wonky Linux bashers were on the way out, 
I found this gem (supposedly about VMware) while baby sitting a CRM
import.

http://www.sdtimes.com/cols/javawatch.htm
Title: "Schizophrenic Development"

Did you know that RedHat is unable to work as a DHCP client without a
kernel patch?  Huh, apparently all this time I've been patching the
kernel of every machine I've unstalled while in a sonabulistic state.

"Red Hat out of the box can’t acquire a DHCP-provided IP address when it
boots. This is a well-known kernel bug, for which there’s a simple fix,
easy to find with a Google search, but it’s ridiculous to expect an
average computer user to do this work."

Nice, eh?   

*Not very 'well-known', since I've never heard of this.

And he follows with -
"Only in the developer/open-source community is it considered acceptable
to ship a product with a well-understood show-stopper bug, and expect
the person who bought the product to research a fix and apply it
manually."

Oh, and it has some other good ones too.

"Linux demonstrates why you shouldn’t let developers specify products.
Linux is too complicated and too hard for a non-developer to use. The
existing graphical front ends don’t fix this problem. Apple’s
solution—to write what amounts to a robotic system administrator—works
fine, but the Linux community doesn’t seem to have either the will or
the ability to go this route. The only way to solve this problem is to
get the UI specification process out of the hands of developers and into
the hands of end users, something that’s not likely to happen."

Apparently KDE and GNOME don't actually have HIGs written by people who
are paid to just do human interaction crap.  (Although I'll give him
props that KDE doesn't actually show any realized signs of having a
HIG).