Gimlé

I usually don’t complain or try to correct Dave Winer. As far as I’mnormally concerned he’s a guy that’s done quite a few interesting things butlets his temper all too often get in the way. That temper of his has cost him a few potential allies and burnt a few bridges.

But like Larry McVoy, who has a similar personality, he’s innovated in ways thatarguably would otherwise not have happened at all.

Certainly a pioneer irrespective of what you think of the man.

So I’m going to assume that the following statement—quoted from his website onthe 30th of October (at around 16:40 GMT, for those who suffer from insatiable curiosity)—is a result of Winer not keeping up with the arguably fast moving GNU/Linux scene:

And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly)hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere. And the user interface of Linuxsucks.
Dave Winer—Scripting News

What can you say to that? How to you respond to somebody who has just mischaracterized dismissed a whole computer platform out of hand?

Well… I’ll at least take you through my own computer history up until recently(which at the same time conveniently explains my recent quietness). That way youcan at least be aware of where I am coming from when it comes to operatingsystems.

I’m a Macintosh guy when it comes to computers. Have always been, will always be. Was hooked as a kid by a Hypercard children’s puzzle stack and consolidated by the fact that they were generally just good computers.

The only Windows computer I’ve ever had was an old DOS machine my mother used for her linguistics research (on language uptake and bilinguality in children, I was one of the main research subjects, which explains a lot).

We had Windows for it somewhere, version 1.0.1 or something similar.

That, is the extent of my Windows knowledge. My experience with Windows is limited to applications which are cross-platform in the first place. Web Browsers. E-mail. Director troubleshooting.

So the Apple Mac interface is my only reference when it comes to the computingexperience.

And my new computer, a fairly new athlon-based machine, is a GNU/Linux only machine, Slackware at that.

I don’t even dual-boot between GNU/Linux distributions.

The new computer is something I had to do, my old ibook was simply too slow. Working had become painful. When I had spare time and given a choice between writing up something short for the weblog or sitting on a comfy chair and reading a novel the novel always won hands down.

The experience of using the computer had become about as pleasant and user-friendly as trying to clean your teach with a powerdrill.

So I needed a new computer. The question being, what to save up for?

Apple’s computers were not an option. Overpriced being the keyword here. As muchas I like those machines I simply can’t afford them yet (maybe next year).

A PC it was then.

A PC with GNU/Linux.

It’s time to look at Dave Winer’s off-hand dismissal, point by point.

And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user whoactuallyinstalled it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly)hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere.

Unfortunately, for Winer, this is simply untrue. Besides, it’s not an issue withthe linux kernel itself, but an issue with the distributions which are the actual operating systems. Most, of them come with firewalls and quite a few come only with essential services turned on.

Much like Mac OS X, in fact. OS X doesn’t come with the root enabled while thenormal user has quite a few privileges out of the box. The GNU/Linuxes on the other hand come with a root user while the default user has almost no privileges speak of.

I’d say that that balances out. The Linux kernel itself isn’t any more or lesssecure by nature than the XNU/Darwin kernel that OS X comes with and many of theservices are the same between the two platforms (OS X comes with Apache and Cupsfor example, as does Slackware).

So I’m not quite sure where Dave Winer gets this idea from. The only source I can think of is the unpopular atrocity that is Lindows, which is the only Linux distro that fits Dave’s description.

The installation thing is misguided as well, as that’s something that has improved a lot in the last few months. Quite a few of the new distros come with versions of the linux-hotplug system which makes hardware detection and setup a cinch.

Turn off the machine. Install a card. Turn the machine on and the coldplug system will detect the card and install the driver automatically on bootup.

Installation on desktop machines, generally isn’t a problem anymore. (Laptops being an area that’s still problematic due to the proprietary and nonstandard nature of the hardware).

The only thing that’s even remotely close to the mark is the user interface issue, and that has changed a lot in the last few months with the release of Gnome 2.4 and will improve further with the impending release of KDE 3.2.

These two releases are, to steal one of Alan Kay’s phrases on the Macintosh, thefirst Free Software desktop environments whose graphical user interfaces “are good enough to criticize.”

GNU/Linux serves all my needs and unlike the designers of Mac OS X (who blatantly disregard their own user interface guidelines), the programmers and designers of the Gnome and other Free Software environments, take user interface design seriously.

As a platform, it might not be ahead of the game, but situation certainly isn’tas bad as Dave Winer paints it.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.