Story

I really hate what has happened with Linux the latest decenium.

The truth is that we had a more functional desktop in the days of kernel 2.4. During that time even kernel versions meant stable and uneven meant development kernels. With 2.6 Linus broke this scheme as he considered it to slow down the development. We had really many broken kernels. Picking a working kernel was like a gamble. The latest years however he has managed to get some kind of stability back. Just when other things are beginning to get messed up in the whole community.

Then came the whole KDE messing with KDE4. And for those prefering a full blown DE, KDE3 was the only serious option. GNOME was not having enough of features and it was slow. Opening one folder full of pictures caused GNOME to crawl. KDE had a thumbnail cache and behaved a lot better. GNOME crashed often and had all kind of strange bugs.

Also, while most cherish the xorg fork from xf86, I am not happy with it. We had working graphics for many years. Sure the development was very slow comparing to what it is now for xorg, but it was stable. Now many times I have to fight quite a bit to get the graphics to work on even standard computers.

Slowly GNOME became quite useable. Then it was time to mess up that one too in the worst way splitting the already splitted Linux community even more. Now we have GNOME3, Cinnamon, Mate and many other DEs.

Then also came the Pulse audio change. Suddenly, having a working sound system was nothing to take for granted. Still, even today adjusting microphones, selecting recording sources and other settings are non-trivial. All this worked a decade ago. Meanwhile the BSDs never did the OSS->ALSA->Pulse conversion. They continued to develop on OSS and now OSS is able to play from multiple sources and everything works as it should.

Granted SystemV is not perfect. I have seen nasty race conditions with SystemV but I seldom have seen a system having trouble to get to a working condition. Now when systemd got introduced things began to break and things are more difficult to debug.

I hope they fork and bring back some sanity. Do as the BSDs did with OSS: Improving on what you have rather than throwing out and beginning from scratch. Do we want many years of experimentation with the init system rather than improving what we have in a stable pace?