Max Kanat-Alexander

So, I just started using Fedora 9 yesterday, and it has some really great things that I've noticed so far.

PolicyKit is the best integrated authorization and keychain system in any OS I've ever used. It's awesome--it does everything I want it to do, in exactly the way I want it to do it.

Firefox 3 is awesome--the usability and general interface enhancements make this the best browser I've ever used, by far. The AwesomeBar really is awesome.

The "Locations" thing in the Date/Time dropdown in the panel is great. It's a small thing, but I really love it. Now I finally know exactly what time it is in all the places where my co-developers/workers live, and whether it's day or night there. (And even what their weather is like!)

And everything seems speedier, in general, which is nice. :-)

The only problem I've had so far is that sound still doesn't work in the flash plugin with PulseAudio--same problem I had in Fedora 8 (and yes, I do have pulseaudio-libs.i386 installed).

-Max

So, every now and then I see somebody complain, "Oh, Linux is bad because I had to spend X much time getting Y to work, why don't those Linux people fix that?", as though "those Linux people" were responsible for testing and fixing every piece of software in existence.

On the other hand, when something doesn't work on a Mac, people say, "Wow, this doesn't work on a Mac. The vendor should fix that!" If I can't open a certain file type on a Mac, nobody blames Apple. This is a much more sensible viewpoint. The software vendor is the one responsible for making their software work, not some nebulous "those Mac OS people."

When you're on Windows or Mac OS, vendors test their software there. They support their software. There are vendors that do that on Linux, too, and so their software works on Linux.

In actual fact, though, even in areas where official vendor support is lacking, Linux developers have done an unbelievable job at making things work. Instead of complaining about the few areas where things are difficult, I think people should instead be amazed at how almost everything does work, thanks to the enormous efforts of thousands and thousands of open-source developers worldwide. The things that don't work are all being worked on, and barring areas where there are legal difficulties (like video cards) or where hardware vendors make life difficult (like wireless), everything is coming along quite nicely, and with some patience you'll see that almost every "it doesn't work" or "this is hard" gets fixed as time goes on.

-Max