Ranter or evangelist?

[gilpel at altern.org]

Why is it that, when I insert an audio disk, I see it as an audio disk on
my desktop, but when I click it, GNOME shows the .wav files that are
present. No application is suggested, even under "Open", to play the
damned music. If I go to Application, sound and video, the first option,
"Audio Player", opens XMMS.

Great! I click the forward button... I'm presented with a list of the...
no, no, no! not the files on the CD, but the files in my home directory!!!
Wow, we're really moving forward! I painfully navigate to /media, there's
nothing in /media.

Let's check mtab, my DVD/CD is on sr0, I believe. Nope, nothing there.

Well, if the intend was to scare away Mac and Windows users, I would think
that the success rate is 100%. I've been using Linux for 8 years and even
"I" am scared! I do understand Fedora is for geeks, but would it make
their life that difficult if things kinda worked? Didn't anybody notice
that the present set-up makes absolutely no sense?

At least, normally, you should go to => System, Preference, File
Management, Media to select a default CD and DVD player. Still impossible!
No option to change anything. I wrote about this. Nobody replied.

Who's responsible for setting things this way? Is anyboby responsible
somewhere or is it "We do all this together in a haphazard way" ? If so,
never expect any significant market share for Linux. Radio-Canada will
continue to use Windows Media because "Linux is too hard for ordinary
people" (MSFT trademark).

You think I'm a ranter? I've been told this quite often. But, while some
people write code, I write to the Quebec Press Council.

I explain that a certain so-called journalist is just a Microsoft
sycophant. Every time he used Windows Vista, of course, there were a
few... almost bugs. but certainly no show stopper.

With Linux, the question is more complex. When a new version of Firefox
comes out, for instance, instead of waiting for the upgrade, he gets the
executable at Mozilla and, then, everything gets really complicated.

Of course, the Press Concil understands perfectly what's going on. I made
sure my basic complaint was very easy to understand: I explained the
journalist NEVER discussed the appropriateness for the State --
television, amongst others -- of using proprietary format and never
discussed tied sales. That's it, that's all.

Still, after counceiding that the Press organisation lawyers had well
understood my POV, the Council judged that the journalist gives a lot of
coverage to Linux --  they didn't elabore on the kind of coverage: they
can't evaluate, of course -- and, you know, given that Linux hardly has 1%
of the market share, they found the coverage was adequate.

So, I filed an appeal... and sent a copy to the Professional Federation of
Journalists... I got my appeal.

But the fight is far from over. The Press Council is heavily subsidized by
the employer of said journalist, and Radio-Canada, another member of the
Microsoft club. Seeing subsidies vaporize scares the shit out of those
learned men: they could lose their precious jobs!

So, they'll try every trick in the book to give a very mild tone to their
judgement. But I have a few other tricks in my book to set the records
straight, though having the support from the Linux community would
certainly help.

Cause... do you really believe I got any help from local coders for this
fight? I got none, absolutely NONE. Why? Cause I'm a ranter. In other
words, though I am not a programmer, when I see things that are not done
correctly, I say so. They tell me I should fix the bugs.

Why is it that there are so many programmers and I can't even set a
default application for reading CD and DVDs? While I'm alone to do what I
consider my job, why is it that the whole community doesn't get its act
together to do such simple things?

Sometimes I wished I could proselytize in a more positive way. I'd like to
tell Apple users that Linux equals or surpasses OS X in user friendlyness,
but it doesn't. It was like this ten years ago, it is still like this now.
Countrary to what we could think from the success of Steve Jobs at the
helm of Apple, in the Linux world, the only people who count are
programmers. They'll fix things... soon.

But Linux is not so young anymore. After 18 years, it has 1% market share.
I believe there are some organizational bugs that need to be ironed out.
For now, from an administrative POV, Linux is a merry-go-round that
doesn't make much sense.

What do you say, am I a ranter or an evangelist? Is it good for Linux to
be ruled by programmers, the alternative not being necessarily the
marketing department? :)

Red Hat has some clout. How come they don't say "We want a music player
that first detects CD files and plays them" and accept to include them on
the default CD only on this condition?

Etc., etc., etc.