Wow … the Linux world is turning to shit in a great big hurry. The strength of Linux is, of course, its wonderful kernel and powerful suite of tools. Terrific window managers like Gnome came a long and gave it a user friendliness and familiarity to rival Windows. Some of these distributions are really small and fast and of course they are infinitely configurable.
So where is the catch?
Well, recent distributions are getting fat and slow. OpenSUSE does not impress, for example. The new Gnome is sliding off the rails with some kind of weird combination of toy applications and inscrutable UI. KDE is ok, but again it’s a bit of a pig.
But the problem that trumps them all is the incredibly poor support for vmware. There are many ways to get a decent integration, but the problem is that none of them work in most distributions. You can search the web for hours (I did exactly that today) and come away shaking your head. I tried at least 4 VMs today for hours and hours and finally I am defeated.
I am cloning the massive VM that I have been using all along. A decent performer with a pig for a hard disk. My Ubuntu VMs (I have 3 of those) are all better, yet not one of them will succumb to advice that has apparently worked for others. I am not a Linux specialist and I have no interest in learning the arcane bullshit that the Linux nerds talk about constantly. I’m not a SysAdmin and have zero desire to be one.
This whiz bang “better Apple than Apple” “cloud is king” with a bazillion splinter distributions with ever more inscrutable interfaces trend is going to kill this great little OS. And that’s kind of sad … I really like Linux. Unix in general has a rich history. I am really enjoying using it and want to continue developing software on it.
But I have a pounding fricken headache from trying to do the trivial: Mount a fricken folder inside the VM. I just cannot get the obvious to work in any of these Linux distributions … something that just works in Windows. Every … fricken …. time.
So .. bye bye Ubuntu. I like you, but you really suck at connecting to the outside world. OpenSUSE … yuck. Open VM Tools. Yuck. Crap, crap, crap.
There .. I feel .000001% better, What a waste of time …
