More Grafix!!

Lusers are always screechin' that they could write kick-ass Linux drivers for hardware if the designers would just open their specs. Nowhere is this heard more than in the arena of graphics cards. For years, Linux zealots begged the big companies to release specs, and they would have kickass drivers written for them in no time.

Well, along comes Intel, who believes the hype and releases the source code for their graphics cards. It has mostly worked out, and there have been few issues (I have still heard people report Suspend issues with Intel cards). However, Intel GPUs have a reputation for being simple and not meant for high-end performance.

Well, that is just dandy. Now, AMD/ATI comes along and says, "well, if Intel is going to give in to a <1% markeshare os, then we will too!" They opened up a bunch of their docs and let the freetards loose on them. Some of these docs have been available since September 2007. Most of them have been available for nearly a year.

Let's check up on the progress, shall we?



Wow! Support for textures and pixel shaders is at best mostly done on R500 and later cards. Those are hardly necessary for modern games (or any 3d application), though. Are there any other problems?

The following subsystems have not been implemented yet or show some limitations:

• 3D acceleration is only implemented on R5xx and RS6xx upto now. Also no XVideo on newer chips (needs 3D engine for scaling). Still, fullscreen video is working fluently with shadowfb for many users. An experimental 3D bringup tool is now available for testing.


• No TV and Component connector support so far.


• Suspend & Resume isn't completely tested, but works on a variety of hardware. Your mileage may vary. Note that typically you need some BIOS workarounds on the kernel command line, ask your distribution for that.


• No powermanagement yet. Depending on your hardware, the fan might run at full speed. This turned out to be really tricky.

Well, the freetards have managed to create a little 3d acceleration, and they have not fully managed to fix the major problems with the fglrx drivers: bad ACPI support. It only took them 15 months to do it! I feel freer already!

You Get What You Pay For

The following paragraphs are from a rant an anonymous contributor sent to me. To comply with his request, I have edited it where I deemed appropriate.

There are two major problems that Linux faces concerning its spread on the desktop:

1.) Applications

2.) Drivers

Both problems will not change in the near future, so 2009 will not be the year of Linux on the desktop. Neither will 2010. But what is the real problem? The real problem is ignored by those who are "in charge". What do I mean with that?

1.) Applications

Desktop-Users need commercial applications. That's just the way it is. The extra ten percent of features that makes an app usable for your average Desktop-User are the 10% that every developer hates; those features are hard and boring to develop, and implementing them is just no fun. You need to pay developers to implement them.

Do you really think that something like Photoshop Elements is going to be created by the community? My father, whose hobby is photography, shelled out 70€ for PE. He does not regret it, even though the activation is a PITA. Why? It just works: it works with his camera; he gets results fast; there are a bunch of tutorials and books available, etc.

In Linux we are stuck with Gimp. Sorry, but no cigar! PE calibre software will NOT be created by the community. It just takes TOO much manpower, TOO much work. No one is coding that in his spare-time.

This kind of software will also not be created by an open-source company. There is no business-model that would supports the effort. Just imagine if Adobe released PE as open-source - you think that people would still shell out 70€ for a boxed-version? Nope, people would just copy it. There are some exceptions. For example, Mozilla receives their money from Google not from their users. 

Sun supports OpenOffice, but it still has issues. The spell-checker sucks even in the 3.0 version (at least for German). BTW, you can buy an add-on for OpenOffice: the Duden-Spellchecker. It is closed source and costs approximately 25€. Apparently, Sun bundles it with StarOffice, so if you buy a boxed version of StarOffice, you will have a proper spell-checker.

See? That is another typical example of the difference between open and closed source software. Will a great spell-checker be created by hobbyists in their spare time? No! It is a repetitive, boring task, and coding skill alone does not suffice. You also need language experts. Will they work for free? No! Then who will pay them?

Other examples are nice fonts, Video-Editing Software, Audio-Production Software (Cubase or Logic created as open-source from the community? Come on!), Handwriting Recognition, OCR, Home-banking Software and so on. For each of the software programs mentioned, there is a half-assed open source clone. All of them each are not taken seriously by those who really work in the respective field. Can Gimp replace Photshope/PE? What about Ardour for Logic/Cubase replacement? Is there an alternative for Adobe Acrobat? I don't think so. 

Anyway there are two conclusions you can draw:

1.) It is simply not true. Gimp rocks, and I have to relearn everything I know, and I am not willing to change, and it is all my fault that I have problems, and FLOSS basically rocks. Anyway, the makers of the Distribution have provided, from their repositories, me with every software program I will ever need. 

2.) You should try to make it _easy_ for ISV's to target Linux as a platform.

Apparently lots of Linux users choose #1 and write long, screeching blog posts about the benefits of apt-get. Unfortunately, the major players are not listening. If you are an ISV, shipping software for Linux is not worth your time and resources. Either you should, like Opera, test your binary against zillions of distributions, or you should not ship a Linux-version at all.

Even for open-source developers, this state of affairs sucks. Take for example Anki, which is one of my favorite tools for learning a foreign language (I never said that open-source apps will never work). Anki is basically the effort of one developer. It is a nice application, but it is also not as "big" as a full-blown commercial application (i.e. those that you must shell out 70€ for). Basically, Anki is donationware. Apps like Anki, which were shareware ten years ago, are now usually developed as open-source+donations, and it halfway works. However, these applications are usually neat yet small tools: 7zip, Anki, Miranda, etc.

The developer of Anki does not have the time to test his cross-platform application against zillions of distributions. For Linux, there is only an Ubuntu package. However, this guy develops fast, and there is usually a new version every month (or sometimes every couple of weeks). The _one_ Windows binary works on all versions of Windows. The _one_ MacOS binary mostly works on all major versions of MacOS.

There is no package for the distribution I am currently running, OpenSuse. It is not in the repository, and if a software package is not in the repository, the user is _lost_. What are his options? Should he recompile every time a new version is released (sometimes every two weeks), because make uninstall is known to just work? I tried to alien the ubuntu package, but it does not work. I also tried to manually compile the program, but the compilation failed because of some weird dependency problems with QT which I could not understand. In fact, it is easier to ship a piece of software for a Hackintosh than it is to ship it for Linux. Think about that.

This problem will not change. Lusers do not like to shell out money for applications, and they do not like commercial applications in general. Software makers do not ship anything for Linux because they have no clue what they need to ship. Common users do not use Linux because the commercial applications are not present. Therefore, the situation will not change. Regarding LSB, I think we have covered that already.

2.) Drivers

If you are some independent maker of hardware and want your device to run under Linux, you are basically required to open source your drivers. Any other option will not work for your users. There is no way you could do something (yeah, I know it sounds like a completely weird idea) like shipping a driver-cd with your product. You could also go the NVidia route. That might work if someone really wants your hardware to work under Linux, and you are well compensated for your efforts. NVidia is an exception.

Pushing people in this manner to open-source their drivers actually works in the server world. If some Fortune 500 is using Linux on their servers, and they buy 1000 servers with Intel mobos, those boards are required to work. The company shells out a lot of money, so there is a real financial incentive for Intel to open-source their drivers if they want to sell their hardware. This works because Linux has a significant market-share in the server-world.

On the desktop, Linux is not even remotely in the position to make these demands. All the freetards, however, act like the unknown maker of your webcam absolutely _needs_ Linux-compatibility for their device to be sold. Do you really think they will open-source their drivers _ever_? The freetards are saying, "I am insignificant, yet the world should adapt to me. I will never adapt to the realities of the world!" That attitude just does not work.

There is still no stable driver-ABI, so the driver situation on the desktop won't change. Linux on the desktop? A joke.

Unfortunately, both of these problems are not technical issues. They are instead dogmatic issues. This is why Linux will not take off on the desktop. These two problem have existed for 15 years, and if you install Linux on your desktop today, you still face the same problems.

Fifteen years ago winmodems were the problem. Today it is wireless lans. Fifteen years ago your GDI-printer did not work. Today your printer/fax-combo does not work. Fifteen years ago you wanted to install the new Netscape 4.x. Nowadays you want to install Firefox 3, but your distro is not shipping new packages for the next six months.

Linux on the desktop is a joke. Nothing more.

I Don't Want to Go on the Cart . . .

Yeah, yeah. I know it has been over two months since the last post. First I was busy with exams, then I was busy with the Holiday season; now I am back in school. I will try to do better and post something more often. Anyway, this blog is not dead. My hatred of Linux is still red hot!

Why Linux Is Not More Secure Than Windows

Alright, every once in a while, I come across a truly stupid Linux article and have to give it a rant of its own. This stupid post goes on to describe how Linux is more secure than Windows. Let's eviscerate this mismash of stupidity and FUD, shall we?

Since the 1970s Unix has had a proper permission based system.

So it has an old feature. Big deal.

Every computer has an “administrator” account called “root”.  The root account can perform any function whatsoever on the system.

That does not seem very secure. If an attacker can get the root password, the system is completely at his mercy. Plus, Windows NT/2K/XP/Vista has this feature as well.

You have access to one single directory known as your home folder.  To do any task, or for any program to execute any task, outside of your home directory, you will need to give it the root password.

You can setup this feature in Windows XP and especially Vista. Vista makes it easy to install and run as a limited user, and if an action requires administrative privileges, they are only a sudo away. Even in XP it is not terribly hard to create a limited account. I think the default account is 'Power User' who can install software but is still restricted in some ways.

Every file, program, etc.. has a series of three permissions on it.  One for the user, two for the group, and three for world (or everybody).  Each of these series has 3 different types of permissions, read, write, and execute. 

Only 3? Uh, Dude. I think you should Google something like Windows ACL (I just did it for you). You should find a site like this one.

Again, the registry, by default can be editted by anyone or any process running.

Since I wasted so much time with Linux, I am quite unfamiliar with the innerworkings of the Windows registry. Are you telling me that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE can be edited by users of any privilege level? I highly doubt it; otherwise, it would have definitely been listed as a criticism. Wait, I think you are still talking about the default permission thing, aren't you?

Linux doesn’t have a registry, it has a folder which contains configuration files (one file per application) that controls settings for JUST that program. 

Dude, ever heard of Gconf? It has all the features of the registry and all the problems.

Because open source software is open to the world, the code has many many more eyes on it.  So bugs and vulnerabilities get patched sometimes two and three times faster than corporations are able to patch theirs.

Yes, when a security flaw is found, the code can quickly be patched, but this is true in the proprietary world as well. The real test is getting the patched binary out to the users. When a major problem is discovered, like the WMF vulnerability a few years ago, Microsoft can move quite fast.

The problem is, the grand majority of users have no idea about computers, software, and technology.  They know what they need to know to perform their tasks and that’s it.

Yes, this is true. This is also something that many lusers don't seem to understand.

With Windows, you go scouring the internet looking for that program that will remove spyware, or help you balance your checkbook, or allow you to talk to friends and family over IM.  This is problematic as most people are unaware of what web sites offer legit, virus free, spyware free, applications that do exactly as advertised (for free or paid for).

Well, you could help them by giving them a link to download.com (I did it for you again). I have heard that they run the software through some checks to prevent uploading malware. It is easier than teaching them how to use Linux.

In Linux it’s a bit different.  There is one place to get a majority of your software, and this same place has the ability to update all your software as well.

Of course the binary they are downloading is not always exactly the same as the one compilable from the code released by upstream. It often contains patches, and sometimes these patches can cause major security problems.

Many distributions use what’s called “Secure Linux”

Uhhh.... Mandatory Integrity Control? It was included by default in Windows Vista, which was released nearly two years ago.  Where have you been?

Again, when you install proprietary software, you never really know who has access to what.  Since the code is closed off, the maker of that software can include any backdoor they wish.

Yes, but if they screw up, the backdoor will be found, and if the backdoor is found, then people will be hesitant about using the software. A software company that needs buyers to give it money to survive will have a vested interest in not screwing its users (at least, not too much). Sure, freeware developers can include spyware as a revenue stream, but this just illustrates the principle of TANSTAAFL. 

And unlike the NSA developed SE Linux, this code is held private so no one can review it

There are many ways to find backdoors: running applications through a debugger, monitoring network connections (the big one), etc. Since this potential Windows backdoor was found, it looks like it is possible to find backdoors in closed-source software. It is also possible to include backdoors in open source software; just look at the Underhanded C Contest. 

So, basically, these are the security enhancements that Linux has over Windows? Call me a Micr0$0ft $hi11 if you want, but I do not think these 'advantages' outweigh Linux's other problems.

Rants and Laughs 8

Alright, I know I just did a Rants and Laughs a few days ago. It is nearly the end of the semester, and I am quite busy. Anyway, here is some more fodder for all of you.

Well, it looks like the Indrema clone may have a few problems. and it is shipping with Windows as well, but the developer hopes that this will provide a 'stepping-stone for Linux EVO gaming.' Suuuuurrrrre it will. Score one for Linux gaming!

Linux Journal posts a message from a 'clueless Linux user.' One of the major problems with Linux is that it is a piece-meal system, so if someone complains, the organization that receives the complaint can just say 'not our fault; it is the fault of that other organization whose software we use.' Yes, I know he should not have called a magazine, but still.

Some luser asks if there are any good Linux video editors that do not crash. You got me there!

Some peter-puffers discuss the link between opening-up and decline in share price. It looks like open sourcing really is the Hail Mary Desperation Pass of software.

Some luser thinks that good things are on the horizon. WTF?! It just looks like a bunch of distro releases to me. Big fuckin' deal!

Finally, here are two user-submitted rants.

My rant about the "it's free, but download the add-in yourself" mentality :

"In Indonesia, personal internet connection is much worse compared to
Singapore's or Australia, and rarely used due the relatively expensive
tariff and slow speed. So, having a software that require a direct
internet connection is such a burden. For example, antivirus software
that don't have offline update functionality is doomed to fail in most
Indonesia's rarely connected computer user.
That's one of the reason I use Mint. Instead of painstakingly
connecting to my university internet connection, all I have to do is
install it, and forget it. MP3, FLV, WMA, name it. I don't have to use
repository disc or other cumbersome methods.
The same things applies to Novell's Go-OO fork. After installing Sun's
OpenOffice, I found that there's no spelling checker in Indonesia.
Great. There's no extension available in their site either. But all
Go-OO releases I've tried and love, include Indonesian and many others
by default. And there's also that hybrid PDF export that should be
very useful, presentation minimizer and report builder (developed by
Sun but they don't include it in their own release, strange), directly
integrated in Go-OO. All I have to do is install and forget.

How long will this continue? Even if I have a fast internet
connection, I'll prefer releases that include useful stuff by default,
not the one that give no clue how to add those."

Is there any other field with this mentality in Linux-related?

Here is another rant by thepld:

Found this gem on Amarok's blog:
http://amarok.kde.org/en/node/570

After some discussion, we have decided to extend Roktober since we are so far away from our goal and we think that maybe part of the problem is not enough promotion, so if we extend a few weeks maybe we can get this going. Not everyone follows the developer blogs, so if anybody missed the blog entry put up by our treasurer regarding Roktober, here are some highlights (or read the full entry):

• we have seen a huge fall-off in donations from outside the EU and we're wondering why this is;
• we are planning on giving two prizes this year so we are giving entries in the drawing based local currency;
• towards the end of last year we spent over €2000 to send 12 people to aKademy;
• the project spent about €1500 on technical and administrative items like server hosting, domain administration, develop resources (books) and hardware;
• in addition to aKademy, we spent over €3500 attending free software conferences around the world
• each developer/contributor team member was given two t-shirts. A small thank you for the large amounts of time put into the project by volunteers who are doing this for fun, not profit.

Apparently, they're having problems getting pity money to finance their software. Please note that they spent over €5500 to send people to FOSS conferences. What the hell do they even do at these conferences? Oh wait, I remember: Pat each other on the back about how wonderful free software is, and celebrate the advent of the Year of the Linux Desktop ™. In fact, only €1500 was actually spent on anything relating to actual software development.

I also enjoyed the subtle jab at non-EU countries. I think I know why no one is donating: We actually have our priorities straight and recognize there are more problems facing the world than having a fucking open source media player that can't even do replay gain. And hey, weren't OSS projects supposed to make money by selling support? They must have missed the memo.

Rants and Laughs 7

It is time once again to see what is going on in the freetard community.

• PC Authority has an exclusive interview with Richard Stallman. Stallman's comments suggest that he is still off his rocker.

• Commies and freetards clash in Kochi, India. I hope they both lose!

• Once again, Nvidia helps bring Linux Graphics out of the Dark Ages with its new driver that supports the VDPAU API. This new API helps accelerate the decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 bitstreams. Meanwhile, the freetards cannot decide whether to extend XvMC to support more formats or speed up development on the VA API. Decisions, decisions...

• Freetards have finally mau-maued Adobe into releasing a 64-bit Flash plugin. Reading the release, I get the vague impression that Adobe only did this to shut up them up. Um, Adobe, x86-64 is so last Tuesday! Where is my Linux ARM port? I love the reference to my predecessor BTW. 

• Freetards cheer that the US Navy has embraced open source. First of all, the memo said that the Navy would adopt systems based on "open technologies and standards." This does not necessarily mean that they will adopt open SOURCE.

• NEWSFLASH!! The Linux kernel has poor documentation! Kernel developers are unsure how to fix this. Linux wants better Release Notes; some suggest example code for new features (that would be helpful); some suggest scrapping most of the in-tree documentation. If kernel developers want better documentation, they will have to FULLY document what is already there and have the diligence to keep the API stable for longer periods of time. When you can develop a kernel module with your 2-3 year old copy of Writing Linux Device Drivers or Understanding the Linux Kernel, then I will say the situation has improved. Until then, have fun writing camera drivers with the Video4Linux1 API documentation aspiring kernel hackers!

• Happy 25th Birthday GNU! Here is your birthday greetings from washed-up actor Steven Fry! It has been 25 years (well, it will be on January 5, 2009), and you still have not produced a complete operating system! How is the HURD and that Lisp Window Manager you wrote about coming along BTW?

• Some luser informs the community that maybe they should not be so prickish in their promotion of Linux. What?! You mean we should NOT tell people that, by using Windows/OSX, they are condemning themselves to Proprietary Hell? The NERVE!! Of course, since the dude is an astrologer, he must know all about promoting a faulty product through "clever marketing."

• Here is a list of all the games natively supported by Linux. Wow, 373 titles! That is like 1/100th of the number of games available on Windows. Also, it kind of fudges the number a little, since it includes every Linux emulator you can run a game on and every single Linux compatible Doom or Quake engine. Linux is truly the next generation gaming platform!

• Another luser writes that Theora will replace Flash. Yeah right! If you can get Youtube to even support Theora playback, then we will talk. Oh, what's that? There are some issues with Theora that need to be 'ironed out' before it can present a credible threat to Flash? "Despite being supported by Opera and Firefox, Theora has a number of challenges ahead. The first lies in its performance -- both the encoding time and the video quality trail behind the common XviD/DivX-style MPEG-4 ASP codecs, let alone next-generation HD codecs like H.264 and VC-1. " Well, maybe you can get Nvidia to help you out?
  

• Here is an article that lists the problems migrating from Exchange to OSS solutions. "One reason is that none of the open-source programs are really ready to serve as drop-in Exchange replacements. There's also some additional work that needs to be done, and it's not work that Windows administrators are used to doing. Even a veteran Linux administrator, though, might find setting up a full-powered Exchange replacement for a good-sized company a challenge. For example, Scalix 11.4 requires Apache, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, and either Sendmail or Postfix to be installed before it can work. That's not hard, but when you factor in the need for managing disk performance it becomes more of a problem. E-mail server applications, have trouble scaling, because of disk performance bottlenecks. To run a groupware server for more than a small business really requires shared disk arrays. Put it all together and you have a serious Linux system administrator's job, and it's not one that a former Exchange administrator is likely to be able to handle." TCO, the bane of lusers everywhere, has struck again!
  

Gentlemen, we can compile him. We have the technology.

Today, esr posted his thoughts on the Linux Hater's Blog which, among other things, led to a discussion about binary distribution vis-a-vis source distribution. I will now share my thoughts on the matter.

Gentoo Linux was my second Linux distro (my first was Mandrake). I know source-based distribution can have many benefits especially when the distribution is designed to cater to it as Gentoo is. Before the Ricers descend on us, let me say that I know optimization is NOT one of the benefits; you can -funroll-all-sanity all you want, but it is likely to do nothing, crash the app, or make it even slower.  USE flags, when they work properly, and the options are actually supported, can be a great way to customize a system to suit your particular needs. 

When I was new, I thought this kind of customization was awesome because it let me only use what I wanted to use. Since I used plain Fluxbox (what fun would Gnome or KDE have been with Gentoo; plus it compiled quicker), I would disable any support for KDE and Gnome, since I did not use them, and if I did not, it would drag in a whole bunch of libraries, and it would take 10-15 hours to compile.  I do not want to think about the amount of time I spent messing with various USE variables to reduce the amount of 'unnecessary' dependencies for an app I wanted to install. Of course, I would have to remember to add the USE variable modification to /etc/portage/packages.use for that particular application, or it might screw up the next time I updated the system.

Ahh updating! I remember that well. Gentoo was a bitch to update! It always appeared to be simple: "emerge --sync; emerge --update --deep --newuse world". However, it took many hours, and the computer was rendered unusable for most of the time. Since it was such a pain, I would go months without updating the system; then I would have to go through hell because the developers changed a whole lot and I had to do the emerge world dance two or three times! Of course this was the best case scenario. If something failed to compile . . . 

Apart from the pain of installing and updating the system, I remember the rest of the time being a breeze. At its peak, around 2004-2005, Gentoo gave me the best user experience with *nix I ever had. Most applications just worked. I had very good things to say about its 32-bit chroot. I could compile lots of programs, and my desktop was still responsive. Multimedia support was bar none! Xine + MPlayer + XMMS could handle anything you threw at it. Gentoo's versions made it easy to add support for MP3, DVD, WMV, etc. I still have not found a better or more versatile pair of media players than Gentoo's Xine (for DVDs) and MPlayer (for everything else). MPlayer could play practically any file you threw at it no matter how corrupted it was; sure, sometimes there would be no sound, some sound, skipping, linear viewing only, random freezes, but it WOULD play). No matter how much experience I have with freetardism, I will never understand why the distros seem to be dumping these two great players for the utterly brain-damaged GStreamer (which is another rant for another time).

The packages seemed to work so well that, now that I think about it, I am not sure if I completely agree with Linux Hater that distro-maintained packages (or ebuilds in Gentoo's case) are NECESSARILY a bad thing. Maybe the package maintainers have more influence over the quality of the application than most people realize.  Maybe whatever Debian/RedHat and their followers do to produce binaries is the really fucked up thing. Of course, this site lists certain, uh, problems people have had with Gentoo, so maybe LHB's point still stands.

However, not all packages worked well. If I ever used ANY masked packages, I was preparing myself for a world of hurt.  Since masked packages usually featured a lot of masked dependencies, I would usually have to install a bunch of unstable applications just to run one I wanted. Often, I managed to install all or most of the dependencies, but the app I wanted or one of its last dependencies would not install or run properly, so I was then stuck with a bunch of unstable libraries with no obvious (to me) way to go back. This was actually a general problem with Gentoo. By emerging only my essentials, I thought I was getting a lean, mean optimized machine, but as I added new applications, I would have to add a bunch of new dependencies. When I unmerged that app, the dependencies would still be there which soon made my Gentoo system just as full of cruft as any other distro. Sure I could "emerge --depclean; revdep-rebuild", but I would first have to update the entire system (which I hated doing because it took forever), and sometimes the orphaned dependencies would trouble the install. Now, I know that some of this mess was my fault for installing unstable but 'shiny' applications. I wonder how much of the Linux annoyances are caused by the lusers themselves who scream for the latest ub3rc001 but highly unstable application? If most of Linux's usability issues arise from the demands of the users themselves, then FLOSS has a major systemic problem with mass-market adoption.

Now that I have reminisced enough, let's get back to my original point regarding binary distribution. Let's take the (admittedly anecdotal) information above and apply it to source-based distribution as a whole. This model will treat all maintainers of upstream projects as a single source-based distribution. This model will treat the package maintainers of binary distributions as the users of the source-based distribution.  Now, first off, we can see that the package maintainer's task is a bit harder since he does not have automatic dependency resolution. Sure, the project documentation usually lists its dependencies, and most heavily-used libraries are already packaged in most distributions, but it still does not beat good ol' emerge app.  Now, the packager is in the same boat at the Gentoo user. He knows the specific needs of the distro better than upstream knows them, but upstream knows the software better than the packager knows it. Like Gentoo users and their USE variables, the package manager can add patches to the code and configure it with various options to better integrate it into the distro, but sometimes the modifications will break certain assumptions upstream has made, and all hell will break loose. 

Which one should we trust: upstream/source_distro or the packager/source_distro_user? I think we should trust upstream more, since they know the code better and can better avoid doing stupid things. Now, the best solution is when the maintainer and the distro packager are the same people, since they can then develop their app with integration in mind. This is probably why FreeBSD, despite orders of magnitude less funding, always felt more coherent and polished than any Linux distribution.

Of course esr does list some relevant problems with binary distribution:

I actually used to build my own RPMs for distribution; I moved away from that because even within that one package format there's enough variation in where various system directories are placed to be a problem. Possibly LSB will solve this some year, but it hasn't yet.

First, why were you building RPMs? What advantages do RPMs have over plain old TGZs except signature support and various metadata that could be included in the filename? By only building RPMs, you were excluding all the other non-RPM distros for no appreciable gain.

Second, wasn't the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard supposed to solve this by standardizing the system directories? Wasn't it released 15 years ago? If that didn't work, the the Linux Standards Base should definitely have fixed it, but it seems to have failed. If, after 15 years, you still cannot determine the location of a mail spooler or logfile, then OSS has a MAJOR problem!

Third, what exactly did you need in those system directories anyway? In your book, the Art of Unix Programming, you wrote about this

Often, you can avoid this sort of dependency by stepping back and reframing the problem. Why are you opening a file in the mail spool directory, anyway? If you're writing to it, wouldn't it be better to simply invoke the local mail transport agent to do it for you so the file-locking gets done right? If you're reading from it, might it be better to query it through a POP or IMAP server?

If you were looking for applications, couldn't you just use /usr/bin/env? I am sure that is present on any Linux distro worth mentioning. If you were looking for libraries, then maybe you should statically compile your program.

I know there are some downsides to distributing statically compiled binaries. They take up more RAM and Hard Drive space, but RAM and Hard Drive space are both really cheap nowadays. Even low end notebooks feature 2-3 GB of RAM and 300-500GB hard drives; the typical user has RAM, Swap and Disk space to burn. The other problem with statically compiled binaries is that it is a bigger problem to update a library with a serious bug or security hole. However, the major proprietary software applications for Linux also have this problem, and they seem to have done okay. If the software developer is halfway competent, he will be tracking the development lists of all the libraries his app depends on, and he can then issue an update as soon as a patch for the affected library is released. Plus, open source has the advantage that, if the developer is being lazy or whatever, anyone who cares can (theoretically) download the source code for the app and its dependencies and produce a fixed binary. However, all of these downsides melt away after the feeling of navigating to a project's home page, downloading the Linux binary, installing it and running it just like in Windows and OS X!!!

In short, binary distribution has many advantages over source-based distribution, and Linux crusaders would do well not do dismiss them.