Category: Technology

Why I abandoned GNU/Linux on the desktop

27 September 2012

I have experimented with GNU/Linux in dual boot with Windows from 1997 to 2000, and I have had GNU/Linux only installed on any of my computers, both at home and at work, since 2001. I have changed distribution relatively often—3 years with Red Hat (now Fedora), 2 years with Mandrake (now Mandriva), few weeks with SuSE (now openSUSE), 1 year with Slackware (don’t ask…), 3 years with Gentoo, few weeks with Debian and 6 years with Kubuntu—but I have not changed desktop environment that much—1 year with FVWM ’95 (those were the days…), 1 year with Enlightenment, 1 year with GNOME 1, and 12 years with KDE.

I have been a loyal KDE user, contributor and advocate since the release of KDE 2.0. I have donated 100 EUR to the KDE e.V. organisation each year since the announcement of the “Join the Game” campaign. Last but not least, I acknowledged the KDE community in my PhD thesis (at the end of the Preface, page xi). This was just in case anybody wonders about my credentials as a GNU/Linux and KDE user…

Unfortunately, KDE does not satisfy my needs anymore, and I was forced to look into other solutions. This post attempts to explain why I came to this decision, and I hope that the GNU/Linux and KDE communities will perceive this as a constructive critic.

KDE 4.0 was released before it had reached feature parity with KDE 3.5. This is because KDE developers intended KDE 4.0 as a technological preview aimed at developers, testers and early adopters only. However, the majority of KDE users did not understand that, which is legitimate considering that .0 means at least feature complete in any other project. As a consequence, many KDE users (including Linus Torvalds) found themselves with a desktop environment which was just half-baked, and eventually ditched KDE.

I expected KDE developers to adopt a more conservative release strategy in future major (point) upgrades, but apparently, they did not learn any lesson. In fact, KDE 4.4 was released together with a new version of KAddressBook which was rewritten from scratch and based on the Akonadi storage service. The new version introduced several regressions compared to the previous version shipped with KDE 4.3. As a consequence, once again, many KDE users found themselves with a half-baked KDE PIM suite, and eventually ditched KDE.

This time also my frustration started to mount. I wrote two verbose posts on the KDE forum to question this release management and propose a system of bounties for bug fixing. These two initiatives triggered a lively discussion in the community, but in the end, nothing happened.

KDE 4.9 was released one month ago. There are still many small nuisances with it, especially with the KDE PIM suite. And do not blame me or the packagers, please. Try to access an IMAP e-mail account with an unstable Internet connection: in the best case, Akonadi will spam the KDE notification system with connection error messages, which will eventually crash KNotify; in the worst case, Akonadi itself will crash. Try also to synchronise contacts and calendars with Google or any other well known social network: if you manage to make it work, consider yourself lucky if you do not have any loss of information.

Despite these years-old bugs, KDE developers keep spending resources on applications the world could probably do without, like the Rekonq browser and the Calligra office suite. Sometimes I ask myself if KDE developers use these applications for real, and apparently, the answer is that some do not: as you can notice in the official screenshot for the KDE 4.9 release, some prefer Chrome and LibreOffice over Rekonq and Calligra, which is not surprising at all. I often read complaints about the lack of resources to maintain the KDE project. Why not focusing on fewer applications of higher quality rather than more applications of questionable quality then?

I tried to look into other distributions and desktop environments, but the situation seems to be even more tragic. Let us have a look at the top ten distributions on Distrowatch:

And these are just ten distributions out of hundreds, as well as just seven desktop environments out of tens—among which I cannot resist mentioning Trinity, which is a fork of KDE 3…

Am I the only one thinking that this fragmentation is beyond ridiculous? The developers of these distributions and desktop environments are spending massive amounts of resources to develop redundant software and compete on a mere 2% of market share. Why not focusing on fewer distributions and desktop environments of higher quality rather than more distributions and desktop environments of questionable quality then?

Maybe there is a question of ego, or maybe there is a problem with the bazaar itself. But the fact remains: GNU/Linux has missed all the chances to become a mainstream desktop operating system, and I do not want to use a niche operating system anymore. This was a difficult decision, and I am sorry for that, but I need something that just works, and I need it now.

So long GNU/Linux, so long KDE, you served me well.

My new desktop operating system? Mac OS X. Do I love it? No, I hate it at times, but I will come back to that another day.

How to blow 1.6 million EUR

14 January 2011

The University of Smallville needs to build a new student centre. The centre will offer services to students such as programme enrollment and exam registration and will provide a new auditorium, library, swimming pool, gym, etc.

On the 14th of September 2006, the University Board decides to initiate a project called MegaCentre for the new student centre, to which it allocates half a million EUR. The University has, among others, a Department of Architecture, a Department of Engineering and a Department of Facility Management. One might expect that the University Board would assign the management of MegaCentre to one of these Departments. On the contrary, however, the University Board assigns the management of MegaCentre to the Student Affairs Centre. The Student Affairs Centre forms a working group composed of a project leader, a project co-leader, a technical leader and two co-workers. Again, one might expect that someone from the Department of Architecture, Engineering or Facility Management would cover one of these roles. On the contrary, however, all members of the working group, except for the technical leader, belong to the Student Affairs Centre. The project leader and co-leader do not have specialist educations in architecture or engineering. The technical leader of the working group has an education in engineering but does not belong to the University. The working group spends more than one year and half a million EUR planning MegaCentre.

On the 13th of September 2007, the working group presents the plans for MegaCentre to the University Board. According to these plans, the construction of the building will be assigned to the external construction company Nonchalant, which guarantees the use of state-of-the-art construction techniques. Moreover, once the building comes into service, the maintenance will be assigned to the Department of Facility Management. The University Board accepts the plans and allocates an additional 0.9 million EUR to the project. Nonchalant spends more than one year on construction of the building, on completion of which it presents a bill of 1.1 million EUR.

On the 4th of February 2009, the building is inaugurated with due ceremony, after which it enters into service. Unfortunately, faults in the building’s design immediately become evident, with problems such as poor insulation, a leaky roof, an unreliable alarm system and poor handicap access, to name but a few. Both employees and students soon become frustrated. Again, one might expect that the working group of MegaCentre would demand Nonchalant to honour its contractual agreement, repair all faults and pay any necessary fines for damage caused. On the contrary, however, the working group simply allows the Department of Facility Management to deal with the faults as they see fit. The Department of Facility Management hires construction workers and assigns them to the repairs and alterations. The construction workers do what they can, but after one year many design issues remain unresolved. The head of the Department of Facility Management, who has an education in engineering, decides to perform a thorough evaluation of the building. On doing so, he discovers that the building is constructed with obsolete rather than state-of-the-art techniques, and that these would not guarantee minimal safety in the event of a natural disaster. Finally, he concludes that it will be necessary to reconstruct the building from scratch using appropriate techniques.

On the 29th of April 2010, the head of the Department of Facility Management presents the evaluation to the University Board. At this point, the University Board finally acknowledges that severe action must be taken and sues Nonchalant for damages, excludes the Student Affairs Centre from the project, hands the management of MegaCentre to the Department of Facility Management and fires the employees responsible for public money wasted hitherto.

Do you find this story unbelievable? Well, now replace the name Smallville with Bergen, MegaCentre with EksternWeb and Nonchalant with Bouvet, and reread it here.

The big 3-0

22 December 2010

Yesterday the universe had plenty of happenings: a winter solstice, a total lunar eclipse, the darkest night in 400 years, and, last but not least, the last day of my twenties. Yes, it had to happen: I turned 30 today. “What is important is to be young at heart”, some might say… Bullshit! I honestly hate this big 3-0 and all the social expectations that it implies. Anyway, entering a new decade always triggers some self-reflection. I have looked back at the last ten years of my life, and, inspired by the novel Caos calmo, I have written down some of the things I have done during these years:

Countries visited

Italy
France
Norway
Spain
Russia
Germany
Estonia
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Hungary
Denmark
Latvia
Moldova
Cyprus
Ukraine
Finland

Mountains climbed

Fløyen (400m)
Ulriken (640m)
Rundemanen (560m)
Sandviksfjellet (417m)
Lyderhorn (396m)
Damsgårdsfjellet (350m)
Løvstakken (477m)
Corno grande (2912m)
Preikestolen (604m)
Kjerag (1110m)

Airlines taken

KLM
SAS
Iberia
Ryanair
Sterling
S7
Aeroflot
Lufthansa
Estonian Air
Alitalia
Norwegian
Vueling
AirBaltic

Laptops owned

Sony Vaio PCG-FX801
Toshiba Satellite A100-703
ASUS Eee PC 1101HA
Dell Latitude E6500

Mobiles owned

Nokia 5110
Nokia 6110
Nokia 7110
SonyEriccsson Z1010
Siemens MT50
Siemens C55
SonyEricsson K610i
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Camera owned

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72
Canon EOS 350D
Olympus μ 1030 SW

Cars owned

Škoda Fabia 1.9TDI (2001 ed.)

Motorcycles owned

Yamaha FZR600 (1994 ed.)

There are many other things I could write down. All in all, I have been lucky to have had so many opportunities. I am curious to see how these lists will look like in ten years time…

NWPT 2009 and Danish language

24 October 2009

I have not written any post about my summer vacations in Italy, Spain and Hungary, but now they are far away, and I will skip them. I just want to share my experience at the last conference I participated, namely the Nordic Workshop in Programming Theory in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Denmark.

As always I travelled together with Adrian and this time I had to share the hotel room with him since my travelling budget for 2009 has been in red since July… Fortunately, Adrian is not employed at the University of Bergen but the Bergen University College, and it seems that funding is less problematic there. 😉

The conference was well organised and covered many topics of computer science. Adrian and I spent a lot of time modifying the slides rather than listening to the talks, but the presentations of our two abstracts went fine in the end.

During my stay, I had the chance to test my skills in Scandinavian languages with some locals. Just for the records, written Danish and Norwegian (in the bokmål variant) are rather similar, so similar that reading Danish is not a problem for me, but the spoken counterparts are considerably different. Spoken Danish sounds like a continuous stream of (guttural) noises to me, with no chances to understand when a word stops and when the next starts. 🙂 I hope that no one will take it personally if I say that it seems like Danes do not make any effort to pronounce words correctly.

But there is even more. Danish has a rather weird number system. The tens from fifty on are not based on the number ten, as is the case in most European languages (French being another outstanding exception). This strange system combines two archaic ways of counting: twenty-based instead of ten-based and fossilised expressions for two and a half, three and a half and four and a half. This is the result:

50halv-tred-s(ind-s-tyve)half-third-t(imes-of-twenty)
60tre-s(ind-s-tyve)three-t(imes-of-twenty)
70halv-fjerd-s(ind-s-tyve)half-fourth-t(imes-of-twenty)
80fir-s(ind-s-tyve)four-t(imes-of-twenty)
90halv-fem-s(ind-s-tyve)half-fifth-t(imes-of-twenty)

After this experience, I think that these Norwegian comedians are not so far from reality. 😉

TOOLS 2009

5 July 2009

This time it was the TOOLS 2009 conference in Zurich, Switzerland. Adrian and I arrived on a Saturday, without any particular plan for the evening. Many locals suggested us to go to Lucerne because of the first edition of the Lucerne Festival. Adrian managed to convince me to go there, and I have to admit it was a good idea. Plenty of people, plenty of music, plenty of local food and drinks. And right after the sunset, the best fireworks I have ever seen: 25 minutes of pyrotechnic show with lights coming from both sky and lake… Amazing!

All the stereotypes about Swiss precision and efficiency were destroyed in one go on the way back to Zurich. We were supposed to take the train from Lucerne at 2:30, but probably too many people shared with us the same plan. 🙂 The result was kilometric queues on the ticket machines and people packed in trains like in India. The train we took did not even arrive in Zurich, and despite the promises of the railway’s personnel there, no further train came before one hour. In the end, tired of waiting, we took a taxi back to the city.

Well, despite this “original” start, the conference went well. The ETH, which hosted the conference, is located on top of a hill with a spectacular view over the city. The event was well organised and composed by several co-located conferences and workshops. Adrian made a brilliant presentation of our last work “A Diagrammatic Formalisation of MOF-Based Modelling Languages“, and many asked questions. I feel like the goals of our participation in the conference have been all fulfilled. The city was lovely and welcomed us with a great warm summer weather. The food was also great; to eat once more authentic Fondue and Rösti was a pleasure. 🙂

I left Zurich by train on Saturday, and my destination was not Bergen but Tortoreto, my hometown in Italy. The trip home was a sort of odyssey. The train I took in Milan had broken air conditioning system, and I had to stay inside it for five hours with no chance to open the windows. If this was not enough, the catering services of the Italian railways had a strike the very same day, i.e., it was not even possible to buy water! Italy is somehow able to remind me every time that the choice of moving abroad was the right one.