Re You Tiao

Luna is beautiful. We could just leave it at that. ... . ... . Okay, well, it's beta software and I see a lot of reviews talking about the unfinished programs on the desktop. I'm not sure why this is a huge deal. You can always install your favorite programs. I'd give Elementary OS a 9.5/10 against the field and 8/10 against its own potential. It's still in beta, but the "artistic vision", shall we say, is strong. I can get a good sense for where the developers want the OS to go, and it's good.

Bodhi makes a strong impression. I find its desktop environment ugly. I also find its endless customization options extraneous. I appreciate that it's based on the Ubuntu LTS core while still updating the kernel and user software. It retains the power and flexibility of the Ubuntu repositories and the PPAs, which is a plus. I don't see its claim to being focused on minimalism and elegance as being accurate. In my eyes, it's a distribution that does one thing better than others: allow endless cosmetic customization. In this sense, it excels when paired with skilled users. Some gorgeous desktops (the reason I first tried Bodhi Linux a year or so ago) are shared on the OS website. The "rolling-ish" aspect is nice, too. I think, against the field, Bodhi earns a 5/10, and against its own potential a 5/?, because, frankly, I'm not entirely sure what the entire distribution is aiming at.

Thus far, Linux Mint has been, bar none, the smoothest Linux OS to install and deploy. Out of 10 against the field, I give Linux Mint 10/10 and, against its own potential, a 8.5/10. Like its parent, Ubuntu, Mint could do with some extra months of bug-ironing. However, because of the oft-hectic release schedule (6 months!), certain details are left to updates or "the next release". I have found that, more than any other distribution, Linux Mint will just work. If wireless isn't working in Ubuntu, it'll probably work in Mint, etc. Because of its Ubuntu base, crucial software like Bumblebee is easily added. The limitations of already available hardware has been an unavoidable factor in my distribution choices, and I imagine its the same for many other home users. In this light, Linux Mint is a godsend, and an extremely well-designed and well-rounded one at that.

I decided to try openSUSE after my Ubuntu LTS installation began telling me Plymouth was crashing nearly every time I booted up. Small issue, really, but an excuse to hop distributions is ... I digress. Against the field, I give openSUSE a 8/10 and against its own potential a 9/10. I feel like it's a very polished OS, with a lot of attention to detail, so the high score for achieved potential. But, in comparison to top Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, openSUSE tends to be slower, slightly cluttered, and have slightly less software. Recently, the development cycle has had issues.

One of my favorite OSs since I first found it, Fuduntu unfortunately hasn't found much use from me. And that's because its repositories run very slowly in China, where I do spend time. Against the field, I give Fuduntu an 8/10 and, against its own potential, the same score. As an OS, it's more limited in scope than Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc. in that it focuses on netbook and laptop usability instead of being a distribution that can do everything GNU/Linux can be made to do. It succeeds admirably in providing a good user experience. The reason I call it one of my favorites is because it is just fun to use. The layout, general visual scheme, speediness, and even its oddball development team contribute to a good impression of the OS.

I'm starting off with the OS I've used the most and the most extensively this past year. Against the field, I give 12.04 a 9/10, and against its own potential a 7/10. I was very happy when it came out. The OS was much improved over 11.10 in all important aspects and was very capable thanks to its wide software support and Canonical's resources. The extensive availability of tweaks, tutorials, and feedback made setting up Ubuntu 12.04 smooth and easy.

From what I've encountered "distro-hopping" this past year or so, the most critical barrier to wider adoption for Linux isn't lack of high-end software, marketing, or all that but, rather, hardware compatibility. "It's come a long way, the kernel," is certainly true, but it's also true that for every 30 steps forward, one or two things break. Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04, for instance, required that I create a .config file for my Intel wireless card which, as far as I can tell, was supported just fine in the 2.6xx kernel line.

So, I'm tempted to start writing some reviews about the operating systems I've been using, testing, and installing recently.

I realize I produce quite an (over)abundance of verbiage in these posts -- please forgive, as I am still learning and processing a lot -- so, I'm going to trim each review down to two paragraphs worth of stuff.

I surprised even myself today and experimented with OpenSUSE. It's really not that big of a deal.

All in all, a pleasant experience. KDE is polished and gorgeous, in its own way.

It has taught me something, though. Its hard to resist the artistic temptation in open source code. You're coding because you love it, right? So you make decisions based on love. Even if that means destroying past usability. It's your Vision that fucking matters, goddamn it. So, you have Gnome 3 and Unity and endless forks of forks until eating becomes jabbing a morning star into your gob.

Well, in that sense, it's just like the Balzac piece: The Unknown Masterpiece. The narrator finds that perfect foot, that last piece of a painting more full than life, and the rest is blurred by madness. The madness is contagious and here's the Wiki link, and the full text on Project Gutenberg.

KDE on OpenSUSE reminds me of that foot. The temptation of mad brushstrokes has touched a lot of projects. It's affected KDE, too. You can see it in the menu options that allow you to tweak virtually everything. Yet, the usability remains and, provided you have the hardware, performance is smooth. It has not been demolished like Gnome. Of the major 3 full-featured desktop Linux OSs, Fedora, Ubuntu, and itself, OpenSUSE is the most stable, so maybe that's why it's kept somewhat levelheaded.

Not that Unity isn't usable. It wasn't for a good while, but the mad artists have scrambled and it works. Of course, there are now some five-plus alternatives with lengthy development histories, four I think also based on Gnome Shell. The UIs in Pear, Elementary, some other OSs based on Ubuntu, and Cinnamon.

Anyway, I'm thinking of installing OpenSUSE for work and general usage. Unity will be sticking around. Oh, Linux. And this line: 

discuss the limitations of language. Expressing logic requires the construction of a new language especially suited to the expression of logical constructs.

Well, what if philosophers are only scratching the surface of language's ineptitude? After all, if you think about it, how much of actual experience is captured in language? How much of a thing can be conveyed with language? The audience has never before experienced what you describe. Your meaning may be misconstrued. They may miss your point entirely.

I've used Ubuntu 12.04 as my primary OS for these past 8 or so months. It's great. Stable, productive, powerful, modifiable stock, it also serves as the foundation for many other distributions. The only other OS I really use is Linux Mint 13, which is built on Ubuntu.

Of the Ubuntu derivatives, I've tried mainly. Just now, I loaded up live sessions of Elementary OS Luna beta 1, Pear OS 6.1, and Bodhi 2.2.

I'd read good things about Elementary and Pear, and was revisiting Bodhi. I was thinking of replacing Mint with one of the former two. Cinnamon is good, but never really hit the sweet spot for me.

All three were good in their own way. Pear does an admirable job imitating Mac OS. The developers achieve their goal, but the effect was sickening to me. The big silver pear-with-bite-missing seemed crass. I changed the wallpaper. The OS was good. Well-designed, with a speedy implementation of Gnome 3, I understand why it gets high reviews. Elementary was similar, though, as it's a release-when-ready OS, it had a feeling of greater attention to detail.

Bodhi was much improved, but E17 still looks strange. As one reviewer put it, E17 looks dated and, in trying to look slick and up-to-date, draws even more attention to its dated graphics. Again, though, the OS succeeds at what it's trying to do: provide a minimalist, easily-modifiable, and attractive base.

That said, none of them measure quit up to Mint 13, which I will be keeping. Cinnamon in 13, despite being a little ho-hum, has the feeling of a mature product. Something stable and helpful to productivity, or play, that will get out of the way of the user. Pear, Elementary, and Bodhi all feature unique desktop environments, but ones that still seem idiosyncratic upon user interaction.

The developers of all three are obviously talented, and design features are elegantly implemented. However, it just seems like Cinnamon has "been through" more. More revisions, more testing, more eyes. I'm pretty sure it literally has, but that's also how it feels.

So, I'm sticking with Mint 13 Cinnamon due to a range of reasons I will vaguely call "greater maturity".

---

Mature distributions in Linux are not very many, despite the 600+ unique listings on Distrowatch. (The BSDs are quite mature, I suppose, for their type of work).

We have the major distributions that serve as foundations for others:

Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Slackware, openSUSE, Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat.

Of these, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, RH, Ubuntu, and Slackware are full-featured OSs out of the box. Arch and Gentoo are powerful, but rely on the user to, in effect, be the architect of their own system. The user then has to devote the requisite man hours necessary to be one's own sysadmin as well as get other stuff done.

In addition to the previously mentioned six, there are a number of derivatives, few of which could be called fully mature in the way their bases are. (I'm excluding minimalist, niche, specialist OSs from this discussion).

Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Lubuntu are not really forks. The same goes for KDE versions of Fedora and Gnome versions of openSUSE.

Which leaves, really, Mint, and perhaps Zorin. PCLinuxOS and Mageia are not derived from the aforementioned six and are excellent distributions in their own ancestral tree.

There are many, many good and very good OSs like Pear that fall just short of having the collective experience and user backing of Mint and the like. #!, for example, Semplice, Pinguy.

It doesn't take too long to notice a trend in the open source community. Projects take a long time to reach maturity, and developers love to fork and start new projects. So, we have many excellent projects that slowly lose inertia over time.

One OS that stands out for quality is Fuduntu. Perhaps because it runs on Gnome 2, or perhaps because Fewt, it's project head, is a very experience developer, it has the feeling of a very mature and stable product. But, even then, it suffers from a lack of resources. Upgrading software can often lag because it doesn't have its own repository servers.

but I'm still trying out new distributions. Just to fuckin' do it. Well, really, to see what's out there.

There have been some exciting releases recently. If it weren't for the bullshit secure boot coming out with Windows 8 -- awful, awful, on so many levels -- I'd say Linux has a pretty good chance at grabbing market share.

I mean, there really is no appreciable difference in learning curve and functionality between Windows 7 and Linux Mint 12 or 13. In fact, after getting used to Gnome or KDE or whatever desktop environment the user decided to install, new users would probably come to prefer features like the software center, which make downloading and updating software much more centralized and straightforward.

But, regardless of how easy it is, it's still not as easy as having it pre-installed on your computer.

/rant

I tried out GhostBSD today in a short-lived experiment. I've had really no experience with BSD. It didn't detect my wireless card, the perennially PITA Realtek XU(*U93493i4, so I stopped that experiment there. BSD is interesting to me because of its alleged structural advantages, but I'm not ready to invest time into it because I need that time to explore different levels of Linux architecture.

Right now, downloading, are Fedora 17 and Mageia 2, both of which are promising. Also on my list, but not yet out, are Deepin 12.06, a Chinese Mint-like distribution geared toward desktop users whose only weak point seems to be loose default security settings, and Trisquel 6, another Ubuntu-derived distribution that only features free software. If you can't tell, Ubuntu 12.04 has me excited and I'm ready to try out its derivations.

Man, I don't even drink the stuff.

MATE, the desktop environment for Linux, now sits prettily atop both Linux Mint 13 and Linux Mint Debian Edition, as well as Salix 13.37 and, I'm sure, others.

And let me just say that it is pretty great.

On my Asus 1201t, with its single core AMD processor and 2 GB of RAM, MATE still runs very responsively. I have yet to really test it on another system. I will say that I prefer it to Cinnamon, though both desktop environments seem to share a design philosophy geared more toward usability than form.

I'm currently running the Mint 13 MATE edition and, after searching a good while for a desktop Linux distribution that was 1) fully-featured (with extensive repositories), 2) quick to setup (since I do a lot of installing and reinstalling), and 3) resource-light, (and 4)) compatible with my Radeon HD3200, I think this edition really is what I've been looking for.

Ubuntu 12.04 is a great base for this, but Unity is still decidedly clunky in comparison to desktop environments like MATE, XFCE, and LXDE.

So, who would have thought this messing around with open source software would actually be useful? I mean, I guess I figured it might turn out to be useful when I started messing with it. But, really, I was just fascinated and drawn in to the technology, and also because Windows was acting up on multiple computers around me.

I'm now setting up a web server to serve video and Django apps.

Yay. As is usual with Linux, dealing with choice is a large part of the process. What to use?

I mean, first there's the distribution itself, which is to be used in the development server(s) and, presumably, the staging and production servers, too.

Then there's the server itself, as well as what module you want to use to run the Django framework.

So, what did I choose? My hardware really limited my choices for me in terms of distribution. I would have chosen between Ubuntu or CentOS/Scientific Linux but, as the latter two do not boot reliably, I obviously went with Ubuntu LTS.

I started out working with Apache and mod_wsgi before reading articles about nginx and lighttpd praising the two lightweight servers for their scaling ability. Choosing between nginx and lighttpd wasn't difficult, as development on nginx is apparently progressing steadily and incrementally, while lighttpd has been experiencing quality issues. Nginx also has beautifully simple configuration files.

There are a number of ways to host Django apps with nginx. You can use it as a reverse proxy in front of an Apache server running mod_wsgi, compile nginx with uWSGI, allowing nginx itself to serve Django apps, or run it with a dedicated Django server called Green Unicorn. I never really considered the first method, since it seems Apache is being phased out. Green Unicorn was what I moved toward, setting up a basic system on a test installation of Ubuntu 12.04. Then, I read articles that placed the efficiency of uWSGI, now built into nginx, higher than that of GUnicorn. Recent documentation for nginx with uWSGI for serving Django apps is more common, too, leading me to believe that it's the de facto standard for now and has been for a while.

So, my next move is to get a basic website shell up with uWSGI and nginx.

Malcolm Shabazz

Philosophically, I don't find Christianity all that compelling. Interesting, yes. In a way attractive? Yes. I can understand it's charm and effectiveness.

Accepting Christianity, however, on philosophical terms, has deep implications for cultural autonomy, among many other things.

Interestingly, I think Christianity is a great example of the strength of cultural fusion and amalgamation. Judaism + Hellenic Philosophy creates what we call Christianity. Further variation produces different branches of Protestant thought. Heretics are and were common in the religion, and the constant tilting for primacy creates effective final products, which constantly change.

First off: Alexei Ignashov is an amazing fighter. Probably my favorite super heavyweight.

I'm a fan of Remy Bonjasky, Iggy, Alistair Overeem, Tyrone Spong, and Aerts -- though Aerts more for his personality and longevity than fighting style. Gokhan Saki is also fun to watch, but he's a bit like a super heavyweight Mike Zambidis in that I don't see him winning a major tournament or doing well against the very top fighters because he gives up so much in size. Can't beat him for ferocity and furious technique, though. He would absolutely brutalize people his size or smaller.

Of all the fighters I've listed, I think The Red Scorpion is the most technically complete. He's certainly the most graceful fighter in the ring, out of those listed. Badr Hari and Ernesto Hoost come close, and Andy Hug surpasses him in that athletic grace of movement, but what Iggy does, he does well and it looks good.

He can slip, counter punch, clinch, throw combos, low kick, high kick, body punch, all of it (do not recall seeing him teep). He's very technically sound, throwing clean techniques with an awareness of defense. I don't believe he's ever been outright KOed in the K-1 ring, his stoppages coming from leg injuries.

He seems to have problems zeroing in on the fight at hand, which largely comes from habits outside the ring, I believe. Hard to focus when you've been diluting training time with vodka, as the rumor goes. His talent likely also contributes to his lack of urgency, since there isn't much of a real threat coming from across the ring. When he's in against a dangerous opponent, such as Hari and Schilt, you see a different Iggy.

This in contrast to Aerts, who just fights. That's what Aerts does. He doesn't showboat, take time off in the ring, amp himself using emotion; he just fights. It seems his natural state, and when he defends, he defends, when he sees an opening, he exploits it, when his opponent is hurt, he slams the shots in.

Bonjasky is remarkably consistent, as well. He comes off as a complete professional. He fights like it's his business -- and it is. He makes sure he wins. If he can get his opponent out of there, then flying kicks and knees it is. If his opponent is a present danger, he defends and grinds them down. People criticize him for not fighting with the same balls-out bravado as perhaps Hari or Saki, but Remy is an intelligent fighter who makes sure he does his job.

Hari, for some time now, has been an emotionally charged beast in the ring. It's led to some erratic performances and some victories that could have gone to him have slipped by because of that. He's a potent mix of athleticism, chip-on-the-shoulder drive, and technical talent. His last outing was very impressive.