1. The homeless are making themselves at home. It started with benches and sidewalks. Next door at the church, one or two used to sleep on the front porch. Since the weather got warm, they spread blankets all over the front lawn like a kindergarten class having nap time.
2. This place is trashed. Plastic bags blow through like tumble weeds in a western movie. Nobody thinks anything of throwing trash out of car windows or just dropping it on the ground as they walk down the street.
3. Nobody can drive. They turn without signaling, stop at every side street, ride your ass when they’re behind you, slow to a crawl when they’re in front of you, block up traffic on the interstate as they try to cut in line for the tunnel and nobody’s afraid to back right into your car while it’s parked along the street.
4. Rent is going up while the building is going down.
I was interested in getting a $50 pair of headphones for $10 until Amazon wanted an additional $6 to ship earbuds. Seriously? You could ball them up and ship them in a standard mailing envelope! Heh, yeah, no deal. But I chuckled even more at the thought of paying almost $400 for a used pair.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the philosophy and the results the open source software movement. Linux has come so far so fast it’s truly unbelievable. There are just a few things that remain to be addressed that keep me from really being able to switch over.
I read today that Ubuntu 9.04, the latest and greatest open source has to offer, was released today. I hate Gnome, so I downloaded Kubuntu 9.04 instead. It installed easily, cleanly added itself to my existing GRUB menu, booted quickly, and looks incredible.
Konqueror is (at least what appears to be) the only installed web browser. I am a Firefox user. The Linux fanboys are always bragging about the advanced package management that requires as few as a single click to install any given piece of software. While this is great in theory, the results were a little lacking. In Windows you download an executable file and run it. It installs the prorgram or simply updates your existing version.
To install things in Linux, you use what initially appears to be Add/Remove Programs from Windows and search for the program you want by name. Innocently, I queried “firefox”.
Fantastic! Two and a half screens of results! But wait, what is nobinonly and wasn’t Venkman the last name of a Ghostbuster and how is branding different from dbg or dev? Man… At the most, I’m used to having a choice between ZIP or EXE. What the hell is all of this stuff? Just never mind. I’ll go back to an OS I understand and play Left 4 Dead.
I want to use Linux. But I don’t have the time to learn a whole new set of Linux house rules. I was a kid when I mastered DOS 6.22 and I was a teenager when Windows 95 and all of it’s frustrations presented themselves. Now I’m closing in on 30 and digging into all this stuff isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be.
For now, the only Linux I’ll be able to continue to use is on my TiVo. But keep up the good work everybody out there pounding away at 101 magical keys to provide seemingly-unappreciative users like me with a (relatively) realistic alternative to Windows. You’re getting closer all the time.
