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. ⬆