So feorlen tells me the Apple Design Award winner int eh Open Source category is a front-end to TeX.

Oh, for God’s sake.

C’mon people, grow the fuck up. This is the new millennium. There have been superior typesetting tools to TeX since…oh, I don’t know, about 1990 or so.

The Unix world is amazing. Instead of TTY terminals, Unix users now run a GUI so they can open a dozen TTY terminal windows. Instead of WYSIWYG editors, Unix people still cling to antiquated systems like TeX and Scribe. Until Apple came along, nobody had ever written a GUI for *nix that was worth a goddamn anyway.

ATTENTION, LINUX AND UNIX USERS:

Linux will never beat Windows ont eh desktop until my father can install it and make it work. Got that?

Yes, Linux is technically superior to Windows. Yes, it’s more stable. Yes, it’s more efficient. But guess what? XWindows sucks. The Red Hat installer sucks. The productivity software, for the most part, sucks.

Clue-by-four time: Desktop users do not LIKE to have to make kernel mods. They don’t WANT to drop down to a command line to find out what’s up with the cable modem not responding. They want to turn the computer on and make it go.

I’ve been using computers in general since 1976. I’ve owned two PDP systems (as in, in my house). I’ve been using Unix since before most Linux hackers were born. I can code in assembly language as fast as I can type. And you know what? It takes me 20 minutes to set up a MacOS or ‘Doze system and all friggin’ WEEKEND to set up a Linux system. Not because I don’t know Linux, but because every piece of hardware that’s at all unusual means a trip to Google and an hour of configuration hell–and God help you if you’re installing on a laptop.

Writing installers and GUI middleware isn’t sexy and wins you no “cool points” with the open source community the way a nifty kernel hack does, but until someone gets it working easily enough that my barely-computer-literate dad can make it work, Linux is going to continue to have its clock cleaned on the desktop. Got it?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled LiveJournal activity.