DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 1/11/11, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I've spent a lot of time googling for solutions to problems with
> Linux.
> You know what? I get pages of results from support forums - every solution
> is
> different and comes with statements like "seems to work", "doesn't work for
> me",
> etc. The advice is clearly from people who do not know what they are doing,
> and
> randomly stab at things, and these are the first page of google results.
>

That's my biggest problem with Linux. Having technical problems is not
the issue, finding the right solution in the sea of forum posts is the
problem. When I have a problem with something breaking down on
Windows, most of the time a single google search reveals the solution
in one of the very first results (it's either on an MSDN page or one
of the more popular forums).

This probably has to do with the fact that regular users have either
XP or Vista/7 installed. So there's really not much searching you have
to do. Once someone posts a solution, that's the end of the story
(more often than not).

I remember a few years ago I got a copy of Ubuntu, and I wanted to
disable antialiased fonts (they looked really bad on the screen). So I
simply disabled antialised fonts in one of the display property
panels, and thought that would be the end of the story. But guess
what? Firefox and other applications don't want to follow the OS
settings, and they will override your settings and render websites
with antialised fonts. So now I had to search for half an hour to find
a solution. I finally find a guide where the instructions are to edit
the etc/fonts.conf file. So I do that. But antialised fonts were still
active. So I spend another 30 minutes looking for more information.
Then I run into another website where the instructions are to delete a
couple of fonts from the system. OK. I run the command in the
terminal, I reset the system, but then on boot x-org crashes. So now
I'm left with a blinking cursor on a black background, with no
knowledge whatsover of how to fix x-org or reset its settings.
Instinctively I run "help" and I get back a list of 100 commands, but
I can only read the last 20 and I've no idea how to scroll up to read
more.

So, hours wasted and a broken Linux system all because I wanted to
disable antialiased fonts. But that's just one example. I have plenty
more. GRUB failing to install properly, GRUB failing to detect all of
my windows installations, and then there's that "wubi" which *does
not* work. Of course there are numerous guides on how to fix wubi as
well but those fail too. Bleh. I like open-source, Linux - the kernel
might be awesome for all I know, but the distributions plain-simple
*suck*.