HAL must die!

[Jerry]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:48:52 -0600
Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> articulated:

> I blame Microsoft, GNU, and Canonical for this trend, mostly.

Chad, I believe I stand on firm ground when I state that you would
blame Microsoft if the sun didn't come up tomorrow. You obviously must
have a life time membership to "Slashdot".

Microsoft creates programs, utilities, etc. for Microsoft. With very few
exceptions, it does not actively create programming for a non-windows
theater. It certainly never created any programming for *nix systems
that deal with hardware discovery & configuration. Microsoft is not
your problem. The people writing software, drivers, what have you for
*.nix & *.BSD are your problem.

Contrary to whatever you may think, the over whelming majority of users
want a system that just works. They don't want to spend hours/days or
more just tying to get a printer or sound card to work. They would
rather leave that to people like you who have time to waste. Those of
us on the clock don't have the luxury of fiddling with a piece of
hardware when we could be doing something productive.

Two statements in your post stand out as being totally bizarre.

1) <quote>
People design software meant to eliminate the configuration and
management hassle from the end user, but it doesn't always work
perfectly.
</quote>

OK, what software always works correctly? That never fails, hangs, or
just blows up. Deal with it, it is a fact of life. Ask any of a number
of users who have tried to get OpenOffice to work as designed the first
time; or even ever.

2) <quote>
Unfortunately, it so zealously attempts to guess what the
user wants that it effectively *disallows* easy fixes when the user
discovers that something needs to be "fixed".
<quote>

Of course your statement is sans any documented proof, which in itself
is not news worthy; however, who's specific configuration should the
designers of said software use for a template? I know, yours, right? It
is obvious that the designers are attempting to guess what the user
whats. Obviously, they are not going to guess right 100% of the time.
It is just the nature of the beast. Are you trying to say that you
cannot manually change a configuration file? By the way, it will only
get worse as no one can come to an agreement on one unified replacement
for HAL. Nothing like fragmentation to make things work better. I
believe that XFCE has dropped all support for HAL too. Is that
Microsoft's fault too?

I have two Linksys Wireless-N PCI cards in front of me that work fine on
a Windows platform. FreeBSD doesn't even have a driver for them,
thereby rendering them useless. I suppose that is Microsoft's fault too.

-- 
Jerry ✌
FreeBSD.user at seibercom.net

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__________________________________________________________________
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