PenGun wrote:Again, who is fighting? What war are you talking about? The only people who care are the people making money from Linux
Not even close to true. Stallman certainly seems to believe he is fighting a war, and I'm fairly certain making money isn't his goal.
Whether you think my opinion counts or not, *I* care; and not because the company I work for makes money off of Linux. I get paid whether there's Linux or some other commercial OS under the hood in our product, and regardless of what OS runs on my desktop. In fact, we've even have had some push-back from some potential customers and our (recently) new corporate overlords, who would prefer that we not use Linux for anything. Edit: And yes, we have contributed bug fixes upstream, so you can't accuse us of being "leeches" on the Open Source ecosystem.
If I didn't care, we wouldn't be having this debate in the first place.
If making money was the overriding consideration, I wouldn't be running it on my desktop and file server at home. I use it because I like the freedom and flexibility. But -- and here's where I'm probably going to lose you -- in spite of the fact that I am quite comfortable using the CLI, I *also* like having a full GUI desktop... and I'd rather not have to compile it all from source code if possible!
I originally learned to program in FORTRAN, and 8080 assembly language (on a system with 8K of RAM), and to this day still occasionally do "bare metal" development (assembler, even a little FPGA design in VHDL). So I've been there, done that. Am I proud of my skills in these areas? Yeah, sure. But IMO insisting on using user-unfriendly systems "just because you can", and looking down on those who choose not to, is silly.
I'm sorry you are offended that people are doing things which encourage the unwashed masses to defile your beloved, pristine, user-unfriendly *NIX. But not all of us old-timers feel that way; AFAIK I'm not quite your age, but I'm close... probably older than 95% of the other forum members here. My take is, you need to embrace the future, or get steamrollered by it.
PenGun wrote:and I don't care if they succeed or fail.
Then why are we having this debate?
Edit:
NovusBogus wrote:Also, real men use vi.
Heh. I think I'm the only person in my office that is comfortable with vi. I don't use it for everyday development work, but for quick edits of configuration files and creating short one-off shell scripts it can't be beat. Every *NIX system has it, it works whether or not you've got a GUI installed (or if your X Windows installation is borked and you need to install a driver via CLI or futz with your xorg.conf file... thanks a lot, ATI...), works well over slow connections, and if you understand regex it is reasonably powerful.
Edit 2: vi is kind of like the cockroach of the text editor world. It has been around almost forever, and I am confident it'll still be there after the apocalypse!