[UFO Chicago] Re: Brian's Conversion from FreeBSD to Debian and Questions on X

[Larry Garfield]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 10:39 am, Jesse Becker said:
>
>
> --- Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:
>> 1) (K)Ubuntu: Good for "it just works, I don't want t
>> deal with setting the damned thing up" users.  That
>
> Except, that in Brian's case, it *didn't* work. :)

Well, it does most of the time, anyway. :-)

>> 3) Free vs. Non-Free.  Uh, how is this a problem in
>
> I think that the problem is many users don't understand the
> distinction.  The same folks who want it to "just work"
> probably not going to care much about distinction the
> free/non-free packages in Debian.  So long as you don't
> have to actually *pay* for it, they consider it "free."
> IMO, this is not actually Debian's fault, as it's a
> cultural thing.  Personally, I find it annoying but not a
> problem (just add the non-free stuff to your sources file),
> and I'm all for Debian attempting to educate the public.

Agreed.  The problem here isn't that Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu does
the same) split them up, it's that they have to do so in the first place.

I'd much rather spend time making people pissed at the DVD Consortium for
the hoops you have to jump through to install DeCSS on a Linux box (since
they are all legal, not technical) than blame the distros for covering
their asses from the legal sharks.

>> If you want to complain about the FHS, why are programs
>> still putting everything into ~/.program ?  That makes
> the
>> home directory nearly useless, hidden files or no.  Why
>> aren't we using ~/etc/program yet?
>
> Actually, I *LIKE* having $HOME/.program/ (as opposed to
> $HOME/.programrc).  The reason for config files in ~ is so
> that a user can override the system defaults if they
> choose.  On multi-user systems, this is critical; on a
> single user system, not so much.  Regarding a directory
> instead of a single file, I'd rather have a single
> $HOME/.program directory with mutliple files underneath,
> than have several ~/.prgramrc files for one application.

I don't mean have a dozen .programrc files per program.  I mean replace
~/.xmms/ with ~/etc/xmms/, ~/.gaim/ with ~/etc/gaim/, etc.  That's one
thing I like about what KDE does.  It has a single ~/.kde directory, and
ALL KDE apps put their stuff under there.  You can even change that if you
want to.  It only ever adds a single file to your ~ directory, rather than
one-per-program.

--Larry Garfield