[STILL DRAFT] Random Thoughts on FLOSS

Introduction

After more than 5 years using exclusively Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux as my laptop operative system (no Windows partition), lately I have been experiencing more and more problems to manage it. Upgrading to MDV 2009.1 was mainly a huge deception, so I would like to describe here what I think it went wrong.

Just in case anyone wonders, I'm only an average user, more accurately, a user that has some experience after investing some time in front of the computer. I'm not a programmer, so I couldn't contribute code to the projects I use. My background is in humanities, I'm not a technical guy, but I think I know how to use a computer and Linux.

As a user, I have been reporting bugs in FLOSS each time I found one. Linux is installed in English on my computer, being Spanish my mother tongue, solely because of bug reporting. The vast majority of the bugs that I reported were fixed and I really appreciate that. But lately, my impression was that the bugs report I wrote weren't even replied. I got more and more tired of reporting bugs and I felt that my system having more and more regressions.

Consider that some of the facts described here happened and were written up to a year ago and some were written later. New versions from both distributions have been released. And in recent times, I have been using my computer mostly offline.

Why Don’t You Report the Bugs?

After a description such as the one before, the question that arises is why I didn't report the bugs. The short answer is that I'm tired of reporting bugs and things going worse.

The long answer is probably that I have reached a point of expertise (or simply a user level) where I feel somehow I should provide my own fixes for the issues I report. I'm afraid that this describes both me and the FLOSS community. I'm aware that there is not a thing such as “the community” and this is an abstraction (the same happens with the “average user”: who is (s)he supposed to be?).

I might be wrong, but I think that the problems I face as a user are related to the way the community of FLOSS developers is built as two sides of the same coin.

One of the amazing and of the most important things about computers is that one doesn't need to know how to program it in order to be able to use them to create new content and new ways to interact with people. But this is not to say that anyone can use a computer proficiently (computers don't read minds, they follow instructions, as Donald Knuth wrote) or, what is even more important, that Windows or Linux are for everyone. If using a computer involves system administration, I'm afraid that either computers, Linux or Windows are not for everyone.

An efficiently desgined operative system is the one that simplifies complex tasks and somehow conceals to the user the difficult parts. System administration is one of these both complex and difficult tasks. Making things easy is fine as long as the user doesn't forget that (s)he is dealing with a simplified version of the issue.

Linux is designed in a modular way. Not only the kernel, but also programs themselves. Not only from the developer perspective, but from the user perspective: it is called “dependency satisfaction”. No program is written 100% from scratch. It depends on libraries and on the operative system. But this part is hidden to the user in Windows or Mac OS, because of a different packaging system.

go and fix it yourself: sorry I can't

Any Linux distribution provides more software than any commercial distribution. This is software packaging and it is great. And in my experience, although I have paid to Microsoft full licenses in all my four laptops (Windows came preinstalled and I didn't asked for a refund), I had to solve the problems I had with Microsoft's operative systems alone and there was no customer support for me. I have never paid for Linux or any FLOSS, but I found many hands that helped me solve the issues I experienced. I came for the freedom and I stayed for both the freedom and the (better) quality.

But I'm afraid that being better than your alternative doesn't make you good.

The important issue with being part of the community in FLOSS here is not even belonging itself, but enabling real cooperation that empowers people to improve software (or at least to fix the problems).

modular design requires a much higher grade of cooperation than monolithic design

The Basic Missunderstanding

Some say that UNIX is not user-friendly, because UNIX expects users to be UNIX-friendly. This might be the case with Linux, being a version of UNIX.

At the beginning of 2009, a local news agency reported that a student was about to miss their online classes because Dell sold her a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled (the heading was Woman blames Dell for missing online classes, but everyone misread Ubuntu instead of Dell). What was the visible reaction of the “community”? Some kind offers of help, a huge chain of extremly negative comments, Facebook harrasment to the poor student and demeaning language for not being able to handle a laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. It seems that the woman studied art, not computer science.

What was the wrong assumption in the diagnosis of the problem by this crew of Ubuntu users? Problems don't exist appart from people, so the same issue that is problematic for me may or may not be a problem for you. Quoting one of the greatest writers of the world literature:

ἄλλος μὲν τεκεῖν δυνατὸς τὰ τέχνης, ἄλλος δὲ κρῖναι τίν᾿ ἔχει μοῖραν βλάβης τε καὶ ὠφελίας τοῖς μέλλουσι χρῆσθαι.

Depending on your background, you might be able to understand this Plato's passage or not. The same happens with computers and with Linux. We have translated versions of Plato, but we don't have “translated” versions of Linux.

no organization this is sometimes chaotic no binary thinking: one way or another (both as they are right now). importance or care: i have to care more about my own work (irresponsible)

And as a kind of warning, consider that these words have been written after having

who owns my data? Sorry, but saying that Microsoft is evil doesn’t change anything. I’m still locked up. gnome is a mess video is a mess swftools aren’t compilable opera and flash evolution is something to forget, a real nightmare not enemy of FLOSS (if you aren’t with us, you are against us) cathedral or bazaars (not only one). I'd rather prefer a library as model.

Concluding Remarks

It might be well that I wasn't the kind of guy to use Mandriva, altough I realized it five years later.

But if the more experience a user gets when using something, the more problems (s)he experiences, this might have nothing to do with the learning curve. It might have to do with the design and real audience for that product.

FLOSS is probably ready for non-experts, but it still has some rough edges that need to be polished if developers want it to be used by people that only work with computers and not for them.