Today I read this rant about how the Linux desktop is not free enough. I almost stopped at the first sentence but still read on. I have to comment on a few things, but of course I don't have a google+ account, it's not free enough.

Desktop Linux Owns Too Many Apps

Ingo Molnar says: Desktop Linux distributions are trying to "own" 20 thousand application packages consisting of over a billion lines of code and have created parallel, mostly closed ecosystems around them. Not really, distributions maintain packages and you are always free to join discussions with most package maintainers/distributions, it's often easier than you think (mailing, IRC, etc) and mostly doesn't require creating an account with google. If your distribution isn't open enough, change. The typical update latency for an app is weeks for security fixes (sometimes months) and months (sometimes years) for major features. They are centrally planned, hierarchical organizations instead of distributed, democratic free societies. It's like that when you depend on your distribution to kindly package everything for you and make your life so much easier and virtually headacheless, however there is nothing stopping you from getting the sources and compiling the latest version yourself.

You seem to not understand that the democracy part is within the distribution, the devs and maintainers (etc) are the demographics that get to vote and decide when and how to implement updates/upgrades and such to their distribution. The passive consumer gets to use the whole thing for free with no questions asked. The passive consumer can also switch to any other distribution, or even create their own distribution, etc. I'm not sure what your vision of a free society is.

The Future is App Stores

No way I would think that, but I then read: What did the (mostly closed source) competition do? It went into the exact opposite direction: Apple/iOS and Google/Android consist of around a hundred tightly integrated core packages only, managed as a single well-focused project. Now I see what Ingo Molnar means by "free society", a free market. ...most new packages are added with a few days of latency (at most a few weeks), app updates are pushed with hours of latency (at most a few days) - basically it goes as fast as the application project wishes to push it. This is exactly why some people are happy to have their once a year updates. My requirement is that the software I use today isn't changed, updated, edited or removed potentially every few hours. If I do need the latest for a specific program, I get the source and compile or even get the easy to use binaries (like for Icecat/Firefox...). And if I always need everything to be bleeding edge there's a distro for that.

On a side note, I am going to guess that there could be less malicious code in among a quality distribution's packages than in an Iphone or Android App store. (Random search result: 30+ New Malicious Apps Spotted In The Android Market).

And so

I'll finish with this last bit: Desktop Linux users are, naturally, voting with their feet: they prefer an open marketplace over (from their perspective) micro-managed, closed and low quality Linux desktop distributions. This would be true if most Linux distributions were closed and low quality, actually I can't speak for most but I can speak for Debian as I've been using that for my workstations since 2002. I can say that it has always worked, updates are fast enough for me and the quality is so high I get dizzy thinking about it.

I've heard many good things about other distributions as well, they each have their ways of doing things which seems to correspond to many different people's needs and such. This sounds more like "free society" to me, the possibility to maintain an entire operating system and all the programs you want however you want.

I don't ever want my desktop or system to be managed or controlled by an "app store". I'm not against paying someone for their code, but I am against giving up the control of my system to every developer whose program I've installed. Mostly I totally respect the work provided by my distribution in keeping everything clean, coherent, maintainable and secure.

Stella GNU/Linux is finally born. It is a desktop focused, Gnome2 based Centos 6 remix (exact words of the maintainer). The features look really neat if you are looking for a CentOS/RPM based OS that is rock stable rather then bleeding (buggy) edge...

You can get it here (1 Gbps, IPv4, IPv6).

I am guessing that it is Google that introduced the idea of changing their site's presentation according to various events (I can be wrong of course). Today, Father's Day (if it weren't for search engines I wouldn't know this kind of thing) is no exception and I just noticed something funny.

It seems like DuckDuckGo and Google have the same idea of a modern day father, it is someone who wears a tie, preferably brown/yellow. They are both retro 60'sish as well. Mad Men, is that you ?

Meanwhile, at Bing, things are very different. For Microsoft's search engine the paternal image is represented by...... ... a penguin !

Microsoft has purchased Skype. Now I'm wondering what is going to happen to this software. I know its never been Free Software, however in it's early days it was directly available for GNU/Linux at a time where most other software vendors would not consider platforms other than windows and macos. Another thing is that I have to admit that it does work and it works well.

So what will happen next ? I predict they will first drop the GNU/Linux version. Then they will of course drop the p2p system and prefer a centralised method that will make it less efficient... Good side is that maybe more work, technical and promotional, might go into XMPP + Jingle (Jabber) and that would be cool. In the meantime, brb need to delete an account.

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.