Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
When I got my first diode and resistor from my father when I was 11 years old, it was clear what I was going to be when I grew up. I tinkered about with all kinds of electronics including logic circuits from the Texas Instruments 74LS00 family chips (does anybody remember those?). At the university, somebody told me about something called a microprocessor. There was the Intel 8080, the Motorola 6800, and a new kind: the Zilog Z80 at a whopping 2.5 MHz! The Z80A runs even at 4 MHz ! Wow….
So I build my own computer from parts, with an enormous amount of memory: 16 K bytes. Dynamic memory of course, if I wanted to use static memory I could get only 4 Kbyte at the same price. Sensitive stuff though, dynamic memory. Without refresh, it could remember what I put in it for only a few seconds. I was happy to use an EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) to contain the OS, because a hard disk costs as much as a new car, and even the new 8 inch floppy drive costs a month salary. So I used a compact cassette drive to act as a floppy, slow, but it worked. Programming was done by hand in (hexadecimal) machine code, so I knew everything there is to know about the Z80, even the undocumented instructions! I made my own version of CP/M, the predecessor of DOS, from specifications. I impressed all the people around me with my printouts – did I have a print shop? But the screen was text only.
Then the world changed. At first there was the Atari 1040ST (Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz), and later the Atari Falcon (Motorola 68030 processor at 32 MHz) with a beautiful graphical interface (like Windows has, years later). Microsoft DOS and later Windows was rubbish (and it still is), so I refused to use it. But Atari went bust, and in the shops you could buy programs only for Windows, so at last I caved and I bought me a PC with Windows 98.
A few years before that (1984), I got a job at a very large steelmaking company where I learned to program a very advanced type of computer, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 11 with the RSX 4.5 operating system. I got this job because I had written programs in machine code, and they just bought a $100,000 program, written in machine code, which needed to be altered to fit their needs.
These PDP 11’s were programmed in a high level programming language called RTL2 (I do not think you have ever heard of it). Later, we switched to the DEC VAX with the OpenVMS operating system, and started programming in Pascal. It became a lot easier then. We are still using these computers, 25 years later! Why? Because they do NOT crash, and viruses do not exist. At one tim,e we decided to reboot one of our VAX’s because it had been running flawlessly for 2.5 years and we were not sure if it would reboot correctly after a (rare) crash (never happened), so we wanted to do the reboot at our convenience, without the pressure from production. Of course, without any problem.
After working there for 28 years, I expected programming to become more functional versus technical, but what happened? Microsoft happened. They have taken over the world, we are programming in C again (back into time), and the computers have to be rebooted at least every month, if only to update bad operating system programs and the virus protection.
When I caved and started to use Windows, I was looking around for an alternative. At the university I was using Unix, but that looked unusable. There was also Linux, with RedHat and other distributions, but it looked harder to work with than Windows. The “read me first” documentation was several hundred pages long. At a large computer conference, I was offered a free CD with something new, named Ubuntu. I never heard of it before, and the CD lay around on my desk for years without being used. But the name Ubuntu kept coming back in the media, and, when there was an “introduction party” (everybody loves a good party) for Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support, I decided that it was time to learn more about it. Well, it wasn’t a real party, but everywhere there were happy looking faces and I was impressed with what I saw. Especially Virtualbox got my attention. When I left, I got a FREE CD with Ubuntu on it. How can it be FREE? Even the CD itself must have cost a lot of money to produce – especially that large number of CD's. But I learned that Ubuntu is more than an operating system. It is part of a community in which people do things for others, gladly, without asking for payment of any kind, although a thank you note is appreciated.
I installed a dual-boot and was surprised with the short time it took (15 minutes instead of a whole day, no motherboard drivers needed, etc.). When I tried to change the visual effects, it told me it did not have the drivers to do that (bummer). And then it asked: “shall I get it for you?”. Yes, of course! All done.
But I needed a lot of time to get used to the Ubuntu way. And I also needed to get things done, so I went back to using Windows. I tried several times, whenever I had the time to play around (full job, single parent, girlfriend an hour drive away), but I gave up when I bought a new CPU/motherboard and Ubuntu refused to work on the new CPU. But I did keep Googling about Ubuntu, and found an ISO-file with Ubuntu 10.04.2 on the Ubuntu website. Later I realised that I could expect this, as 10.04 is a LTS version, and my new CPU did not exist when 10.04 was created, so it needed to be updated.
At this moment, I am using 11.10 because I wanted to program in Pascal, and 10.04 did not have Lazarus/FreePascal in its repository. The rare Windows programs for which there are no suitable Linux replacement (yet) are running in (each his own) VirtualBox virtual computer.
Everything beautiful and perfect? Unfortunately…. no. In the early days of Ubuntu, there were bugs in the programs and even in the kernel. But as time progressed, things got better. Bugs were fixed, the kernel became more stable, things became more intuitive to accomplish (GUI instead of terminal…). But then there was Unity. All kinds of things didn’t work any more, and the internet was filled with people telling the world this was wrong. To start a program you need to know and type its name instead of selecting it from a list with a mouse click, as in Windows. If I would be a Windows convert, I would walk away and never look back. What are the people behind Ubuntu thinking? In a forum about creating desktop icons to start a program, one of the developers of Unity replied with “It’s only 50% ready, the next version will have everything fixed”. My reply was that “if it is not ready, do not distribute it. To beat Windows, Ubuntu can not afford to be less than perfect.” Then the “liboverlay_scrollbar”. Lazarus was not adapted to it yet, and I got all kinds of crazy errors. Thanks to the Lazarus forum it was fixed within a day (try that on Windows!!!!), but it shows that new things are introduced not as an option, but obligatory. That is “not done” in an open software environment.
Did they forget that the USER has to be in control? Change the desktop to his needs and taste, and get things done without looking for hours for a way to do it or having to type commands in a terminal, or even change settings in system files with great risk of breaking his system. As a system designer (I have created a lot of human-machine interfaces, drivers and applications), and end-user at the same time, it is my opinion that the look and feel of a desktop should be adjustable and not depend on the “engine” that is used to activate/display it. It should be intuitive, so I can use it without having to read manuals. For example: If I want to change the background, I must be able to simply right-click on an empty part of the screen and get an interface to specify my wishes (like on Windows). In Ubuntu, I have to browse through tons of programs to find an application that is capable of doing many different things, among them the adjustment of the screen. A very annoying behaviour I came across is the fact that the border of a window is by default only one pixel wide. Just try to click on it with your mouse to grab it and move it to resize the window! On average that takes me three tries, with (if you “miss-click” outside the window) the chance of the unwanted effect of the window below it popping up (or even doing something unwillingly if a button was in that place). There are themes with thicker border lines, but there are only a few available after installation, and finding a suitable one on the Internet is very hard, because of the choices, choices, CHOICES you get. It may be an advantage of open software that you have so much to choose from, but too many choices is equally as bad as only a few choices.
But everything is not lost yet. Once the people behind Ubuntu give us back the choice of the look and feel of the desktop, we can start again telling people who use Windows how great Ubuntu is, and offer them a stable and reliable platform that looks and feels like Windows, but is not. In the meantime I will use Gnome classic.