Bonum Certa Men Certa

“The New Software Is Full Of Bugs…They’ll Be Upgrading For Years.” How IBM Red Hat Keeps Customers On The Hook. Bruce Perens Endorses Devuan.



Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

I

’ve always been a James Bond fan.



I must have seen some of them 20 times.



There was a line in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies that made me laugh when I was 13, and it was obviously about Microsoft.



Elliot Carver:
Mr. Jones, are we ready to release our new software?



Jones:
Yes, sir. As requested, it’s full of bugs, which means people will be forced to upgrade for years.



Elliot Carver:
Outstanding.

-Tomorrow Never Dies


I thought about this again today when I saw a link about Bruce Perens endorsing Devuan. He is a former Debian Project Leader, and says Devuan GNU/Linux is how he would do Debian if he were in charge today.



The people running Debian today are basically IBM flunkies who swallow everything Red Hat vomits out on top of us, including systemd.



Devuan GNU/Linux replaces systemd with a normal init system and fixes software to work without it.



But why does it do this?



Essentially, IBM Red Hat is creating software that is gargantuan and hard to understand, and is full of bugs. They do it so that their customers can never stop paying for support.



If things just work for the user like they did with GNOME 2, X11, and Upstart, then nobody is going to pay Red Hat to give them patches and training and support. Because they can just install anything and it will basically work, like Linux distributions used to 15 years ago.



Fedora 9 was a much better release than Fedora 38. I didn’t really have any problems out of it. Essentially, I think things were just too calm and so Red Hat had to make some disasters (GNOME 3, Wayland, systemd, portals, Flatpak, and pipewire) that would take decades of patching to sort out.



(I’ve blogged about how pretty much all of these have severe bugs that nobody is interested in fixing that have made my computers less reliable than the one I used with older versions of Linux.)



Microsoft behaves like this too.



When things are too calm and working too well, like they do oh so briefly sometimes (think Windows 2000 and Windows 7, not Windows Vista, 8, 10, and 11), they have to throw in some nightmares that people hate and then sabotage the alternative (which is sometimes the previous version of their own product).



Over the years, Microsoft has done things such as deliberately destabilize Windows 95 with bad dlls that leak resources, retroactively put in WGA in Windows XP, added telemetry and monthly megapatches to Windows 7, sabotaged Windows Update in Windows 7 to deny security updates to people with Skylake or newer CPUs, etc.



I literally just blogged about how Microsoft screws people over with office suites and how IBM is prodding LibreOffice users to stupidly do business with Microsoft.



They haven’t exactly been subtle as far as tossing a grenade down the hatch to ruin something you already use, and if they haven’t done it to Windows 10 yet, they probably will eventually.



What these companies that sell licenses and support are good at is making sure you’ll always need more of it.



I’m considering checking out Devuan now that their new release based on Debian 12 is out. It certainly can’t hurt to look and see how it acts on my older laptop.



Although I have to say I’m impressed by how stable openSUSE Leap with KDE is.



They’re still pushing back against IBM Red Hat bullshit in some ways. I noticed systemd complaining the other day that the thing that shits binary coredumps into your logs wasn’t there. 🙂



Roy Schestowitz mentioned in one of his videos the need for more “community” distributions.



No community of people who actually used the stuff would ever design anything like Microsoft or IBM Red Hat have produced. But many people seem to be apathetic enough to figure out how to tolerate the failures and pay for endless parades of patches and new licenses.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Our Case is a Very Easy Win, the SLAPPs From Microsofters Were a Grave Error, and Censoring Information Won't Work (It'll Only Ever Backfire)
Censoring is what people do when they lose the argument
 
Links 04/06/2025: Linux Foundation PR Spam and Lee Jae-myung Wins Election
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Future Leaders of the World and Platforming Jordan Peterson
Links for the day
Links 04/06/2025: WSL Backfiring on Microsoft and "Disney, Microsoft Announce Massive Layoffs"
Links for the day
Say the Truth, the Rest Will Follow
There's no guarantee that writing the truth will result in an audience (or readership), but over time - in the long run - people generally gravitate towards what they know or feel to be crude truth, not just what's comforting (albeit false or self-deluding, usually groupthink dictated from above)
How to Expose High-Level Corruption Without Getting in (Too Much) Trouble
Democracy depends on free press and freedom of the press depends on being able to safely publish (and keep available) material that bad people don't want to be known to anybody
In-Depth EPO Coverage at Techrights Turns Eleven
11 years is a very long time
Windows Measured Below 10% in Afghanistan, GNU/Linux Gaining a Lot
about 80% are Android (Linux) users, compared to only about 10% for Windows
Poland's Political Predicament and Social Control Media
Democracy and fake "tech" don't mix well; the latter tends to interfere with the former and that's why we get more "Putins" out there
EPO: Taking Away From the Staff to Give More to the Rich
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) wrote to EPO staff earlier this week
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 03, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, June 03, 2025
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part I: It's a Lot Like the EPO
we can commence a series soon
Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Inescapable Questions and Quitting All "Oligarch Tech"
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Linux FUD From Slopfarms, Blaming Linux for Microsoft Issues; Even WebProNews Has Become a Slopfarm (Googlebombing "Linux" With Slop Images and Fake/Plagiarised Text)
The Web is really getting bad; it's also overwhelmed by fake material or plagiarised material, wherein the plagiarism gets disguised/hidden by LLM sausage factories
Links 03/06/2025: Tiananmen Square Massacre Censorship and Growing Military Activities Around Taiwan
Links for the day
Linux is Already Dominant (Android), Let's Make GNU/Linux Dominant in Desktops/Laptops as Well
"Dr. Stallman recently warned everybody about Microsoft."
The Loyalty to Microsoft and the Salaries From Microsoft (Funding SLAPPs Against Techrights and Tux Machines)
Garrett always knows better. He knows everything best.
Windows Falls in Italy as GNU/Linux Jumps to 5%
Italy knows a thing or two about digital autonomy
Nigeria is All Android and Google
Windows down to almost nothing in Africa's largest population
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Second Wave) Not Limited to Redmond
"More layoffs at Microsoft as axe falls in Washington and California"
Gemini Links 03/06/2025: Forth System and "Common Lisp is a Dumpster"
Links for the day
The Leaks Were Right: Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in May, Then Another Wave in June
Just as we've been saying for over a month
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 02, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, June 02, 2025
Last Article From Australia's Sam Varghese Was a Year Ago and It Covered the Release of Julian Assange, Who Will Apparently Come Back as 'Politician'
It'll soon be exactly 12 months
Hungary Seems Hungry for Linux
Windows down by a lot
Like in Europe, Bad News for Microsoft in US and Canada
If it loses those "regions", then what's left?
About 8 Waves of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 (in Less Than 5 Months), Now Vista 11 "Market Share" Decreases
Really bad news for shareholders of Microsoft
statCounter Sees Bing "Share" Falling Over 0.5% in One Month, Now Lower Than Before the ChatGPT/Bing Chat Hype
Bing has been part of the mass layoffs for quite some time
After Microsoft's Bankruptcy in Russia Android (Linux) Will Dominate Asia Completely
Windows probably peaked in "XP" or "2000"
Microsoft's Demise is a Global Phenomenon
mass layoffs justified using mindless buzzwords
All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux in EU and the UK, All-Time Lows for Microsoft
Combining ChromeOS and GNU/Linux, it adds up to and almost reaches 6%
India: Windows Falls to 50% in Desktops/Laptops and 8% Overall
laptops/desktops fell to 16% of the whole
statCounter: GNU/Linux Up to 4.7% "Market Share" This Month
30,000 Microsoft jobs may be eliminated by year's end
Microsoft is in Trouble and Microsofters Know It
"I've been happy on Win 3.11 for years."
[Video] New Introduction to Richard Stallman's Contributions Including GNU Emacs, GNU/Linux, and Software Freedom
from the channel previously bullied for supporting RMS
Links 02/06/2025: South Korea to Vote, Russia Blitzed From Within
Links for the day
Links 02/06/2025: Political Leftovers, DRM, and Patents
Links for the day
Links 02/06/2025: Microsoft Spins Layoffs as "Slop", Frontier Settles Lawsuit
Links for the day
When You Publicly Boast About Wanting to Violently Attack People (Even Colleagues) Finding a Job Will Prove Difficult
there's a lesson to be learned here
The Web We Lost, the Information Lost Due to Microsoft's Attacks on Companies Like Yahoo! (Before the LLM Slop Frenzy)
When it comes to news sites, what can we say?
Covering Corruption in Poland, Including a War on Science (Due to Bad Politicians)
What we're about to show is that skilled and experienced scientists in Poland are besieged by bureaucrats
Gemini Links 02/06/2025: "Star Wars Day" and "Security Day"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 01, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, June 01, 2025