Why I hate white computers ========================== Disclaimer and Editor's note<<END_OF_DISCL ---------------------------- This piece was written in 2009-2010. It expresses my personal views and makes no claim to contain wisdom and/or truth. In the following the names of the guilty have mostly been changed. The particular brand of computers and operating systems I talk about have been renamed to 'white computer/OS' for no particular reason. All writing was done on a smartphone and I did not intent to fix those typos. END_OF_DISCL The Story Begins ---------------- About a year ago i made an error. Noone talked or tricked me into it, I did it myself with no external influences other than the usual information overkill from advertising, TV and other media. I bought a well-known, rather stylish smartphone. While that device is rather neat, not particularly cool or ergonomic, and I feel slightly uncomfortable when having to use it in public, it has this big, stinking problem: it needs a particular music software. The first thing it does after getting its first dose of energy is asking for that music software. Just like a newborn asking for the remote control after its first dose of mother's finest. Unlike the newborn, however, the stylish smartphone will just refuse to do anything if it doesn't get its music software. That's more like a two years old. Now, me being a pure Linux guy for like 15 years, that posed a problem. Buying a windows license was out of question and getting it to run in wine would probably not be worth the time. Well, so many people, even developers, even developers I know and trust, were happily using White OS machines and I decided to jump the train. I made an error and I accept my punishment. The Punishment -------------- I even paid for my punishment which came in form of a white computer. Aye! a nice piece if hardware it is, cleaned my desk from a lot of cables. But that wannabe operating system is such a crippled and broken piece of software. I really can't understand, why so many people still follow the cult. I mean it may have a future, I don't deny that. But it will take a while to grow up. The Focus Killer ---------------- The first thing to mention, and I might just as well stop writing after that, is, that it uses click to focus exclusively. Go and search the 'net for the blog of Steve Yegge, he has a very nice summary of that topic. Now, if I write 'exclusively', don't take that literally. As I mentioned earlier, that OS looks rather childish to me and here is one reason. White OS uses click to focus exclusively EXCEPT for the Terminal application which allows focus follows mouse, and all X-apps for which you can enable FFM as well (and Gimp in particular would be completely useless if you couldn't) and except for one application or the other which may choose to pass the mouse click used to activate the window to the buttons or whatever was underneath your pointer when you clicked. So, make sure to click right beside any button in Ciscos VPN window. By the way: do you wait for that VPN software to shut down your connection before you continue to work? I don't, because it takes like ten seconds or so, and I just refuse to wait ten secs for a network connection to shutdown. But that friendly piece of software kindly reminds me when it has finished shutting down the connection I already forgot about because my mind is already occupied with (hopefully) more important things by STEALING THE FOCUS! This is soo bad bad nono I have no words for it, and I can't tell the white OS to ignore the focus requests from that program. Anger. Ah, and just one more thing: why on earth does scrolling work under the mouse pointer, regardless of focus?! Eh, wait, almost, it does not work with the volume control. See, there's just no concept there, no consistency. It is the same type of inconsistency that got people confused when they saw GTK-, Qt- and Athena-apps on their Linux desktop. But if you paid for something, e.g. an OS, you try very hard to make yourself believe, it was worth the money. The Case of The Keyboard ------------------------ The second most annoying encounter was the case of the German keyboard. See, I've been typing for ages and I happen to have a good understanding for which keyboard will give me wrist pain and which won't. The cheap (as in feeling not in price) white plastic keyboard is an ergonmic catastrophy. The worst thing is, that the keyboard goes 'upwards'. In addition to that I don't want to confuse my brain with yet another layout. In the past I used a German layout on a German keyboard, a US layout, which is far better for programming tasks, with a German keyboard, US layout on US keyboard and a small collection of notebook keyboards. Today I just know what I want and on that machine I wanted a plain German keyboard (a PC keyboard if you will) with just the same layout as is nicely printed on the caps. And, wow!, those keyboard even manage to label the curly braces, the square brackets, the backtick and even the tilde, all of which are important to you if you're a shell person and a programmer, without confusing their users so much that they will have to spend the rest of their lives behind rubber walls. Seriously, why are those not on a white keyboard?? So I just plugged a quite normal PC keyboard into the USB socket and lo and behold the machine worked some magic and detected it. Actually I can't remember whether I had to reboot. Whatever. My computer, no wait... The computer asked me to press the key right of the left shift key, which is a smart thing to ask, because you can detect quite some different layouts from that information. So far I was impressed. After pressing that key the computer told me, it now knew what that new keyboard was and I could go ahead now. Can't remember, whether I had to reboot that time, either. Imagine my astonishment when I found out that it now used the new keyboard with the original layout of the white keyboard. No curly braces where the labels indicate, but right there where they were before, on that white piece of crap, unlabelled. What a dork! In Linux it is quite common and thus quite easy to pick the layout independently from the model. Desktops like KDE even ship whith a quick switcher which you can configure to any number of (supported) layouts. In the white operating system this just isn't possible and that's it. There is a file whic you can find on the internet and which was written by some brave person with too much time on his hands privately, which kind of solves this problem. For those who know: consider it the equivalent of writing your own xmodmap. Stone age, 'nuff said. To find that solution I've waded the seas of blackboard postings several evenings and found clearly phrased questions of people who also wanted to do this adventurous thing. And they, just as me, had to endure screen after screen of messages from sheep, that happily follow the cult, that they should really, really try that fine keyboard because the lords of ergonomy created it and thus it must be very good. Really. And you can get used to it. Really. Try it. Follow the cult. Crap! It's worse than reading flame wars about Emacs vs. vi, KDE vs. Gnome and even postings about the removal of parentheses from Lisp. Unbearable. There is a professional software engineer who writes a very clear question and a bunch of new kids has nothing better to do than trying to make him a true believer. I wonder what it must have felt to see a Spanish missionary in south America some 500 years ago for a priest or whatever of the Inca. Maybe they felt just as I did? Who knows. If there is any parallel, history does not give reason to relax. To come to the end of the keyboard story. The xmodmap-lookalike worked, almost. Some things where still strange. Eg the super/windows key worked like the fruit key on the white device and as the meta key in emacs. But my fingers are programmed to expect the alt key as the meta. After one year of using that crooked layout my fingers can't do all the emacs tricks on other machines with the same speed as before. This is probably the hardest part of the punishment! And of course home and end work differntly on the white OS: they jumpy to the beginning/end of the text you are writing. Useless. At that time I had an unusable computer, due to click to focus, on which I could not type like I wanted. But that was not the end. One PATH to Rule Them All ------------------------- So, at some time I could type curlies. Shortly thereafter I wanted to do some Java work. Not really programming, bless me, but I needed Netbeans and I needed to checkout the sources with svn. Unfortunately the svn that ships with white OS is so frigging old, it wouldn't work with the repo I needed to checkout. A few days earlier I spent some time figuring out which extension mechanism to use, macports or fink, and without any reason picked ports. So a newer svn was just a port install away. After that I could easily check out the sources from the command line. Since Netbeans has a svn integration module, I wanted to make Netbeans use the ports version of svn, too. That's easy, I thought, just adapt my PATH. So I modified my .bashrc and re-logged in, but Netbeans didn't find the new svn binary. So I put my PATH config into ~/.profile and did the login chacha. No change. Again I had to read screens over screens of garbage from people who dealt with a unix-like for the first time, just to find out, that your desktop environment is not the child process of a shell and thus has no notion of any config over there. Instead you can keep a second configuration of your PATH in some kind of plist-file which you'll have to keep in sync with your shell config manually in the future. Congratulations. The gain is that Netbeans will now know the right path even if started from the dock and not only if started from a shell. But if you start it from the built-in search capability the new process will be a direct child of the first process (known as launchd over there and init on Linux), which happens to ignore both of your previous configs. Since changing the environment of that process means fiddling with the boot process I refused to do it and now start Netbeans via the icon in the dock. It's such a slow startup anyway, that moving to the mouse is not too big a burden. But what brilliant mind came up with the idea of three distinct ways of setting the PATH? It's been there for like 30 years and works just well, thank you. No need to change that. Braindead. Now, what about crashes? I can remember having to reboot the hard way twice. No too bad. The first one was in the early days, so it was probably my error. The secon time was when the Dock-thing went down. It stopped working for no apparent reason, and I can't imagine any reason for doing so, anyway. The Missing Window ------------------ So, WhiteOS has Spaces. Not the big key on you keyboard, but concept that is well known as virtual desktops on -say- Linux. Over there you may even choose between virtual desktops and viewport, depending on your environment, but WhiteOS at least has spaces. And they're proud enough of it to feature them in some advertising clips. There they show off how damn cool Spaces is, it even continues to play a video when showing all desktops. Ok, it has a boring blue background, but you get a nice overview of your open windows. Actually, you don't. When a dialo opens while you're in spaces it will popup just there: in the overview. And if you move down to one desktop that popup may end up anywhere, on any desktop, I couldn't detect a pattern. Even worse: sometimes they end up behind other windows. I mean, how stupid is that? As if that weren't enough, some windows, especially dialogs, don't show up at all in the wannabe overview. People tried to tell me that those were not native application, or just apps that have been badly programmed. Well, it happens to popups from the calendar program as well as the music software, e.g. The information dialog of a CD. So there you are: Spaces. Big thing. Has been there on X-Windows for ages and the modern overview in Gnome shows the desktops just as they are: with background image, with panels, with live views of playing movies and loading browsers, heck, even with all dialog windows. Deadlock Dock ------------- Maybe it's just my long time behavior that I use Spaces and all the cool kids use the Dock. Ooh, look at that polished surface effect. Cute. And the happy jumping icons. My son, who is pretty young, really likes the jumping duck and I've been starting and stopping that FTP-program for good while. Actually, the Dock is a rather central piece. One day it stopped working and I knew no way out other than rebooting. I could not navigate to a terminal, because the dock didn't work, I seem to remember starting new terminal using the search facility to no avail, so there wasn't any chance of curing things by some command line magic. At the end Reboot it was. I could still reach the reboot menu item. Just that I had some unsaved files in NetBeans and Netbeans opened a dialog to ask me what to do now. Thereby it managed to stop the shutdown process which told me it couldn't shut the system down because some program didn't allow. I was told to stop that program first, which I couldn't because I could neither get there nor kill it hard using the dock. Deadlockdock. Ok, this episode wasn't particularly funny. Those things happen on all systems. It's just that people keep saying that WhiteOS may have some edges but it just works. No, it does not. It evenn has to reboot when the webbrowser has been updated. The End ------- Please, don't even start thinking about pointing me to things that have been fixed in the meantime. Actually, you'd better stop thinking about ANY kind of feedback. All this is history to me. No more WhiteOS, thank you. I'd rather give windows another try and see what they improved in the past 15 years. -- [Editor's note: here the original text stopped. It was never finished and never will be. There were some notes to myself but I never got around writing the rest of it: someday Android saved me.]