Rule 34

OMG Ubuntu reports on an Ubuntu Unity lens that allows searching for porn. Big deal, eh? Well, apparently, the world is in such a sad state that people have to post this stuff with a bunch of warnings and unnecessary remarks that are really stating the obvious (such as "whether it offends you or not", in bold), and people are still whining in the comments about how freedom somehow has to be magically equated to "not offending".

If porn offends you - it's your problem. Freedom is exactly that - freedom. Including freedom to do and say what others might not like or find offending.

KDE is the most Linux desktop

This article has caught my attention, mainly because it appeared both on Planet KDE and on Slashdot. The comment section of Slashdot was particularly fun to read, because it sort of reminded me what i have seen back in the day of KDE 4.0 release.

Basically, we have loads of users whining about how GNOME changes things in a way that they aren't where they used to be any more. And then there's Unity. Unity is another topic altogether, and while it may seem that its arrival was completely uncalled for (what? another Linux DE choice?!), that is actually not true. The real reason for Unity to appear is that GNOME2 sucked and the GNOME dev team is a bunch of assholes. Mark Shuttleworth embraced the coming of netbooks and understood that the touch-enabled desktop devices' arrival is inevitable, and he simply didn't want to wait for GNOME developers to pull their head out of their asses and look into the future, not into the past. So while Unity may or may not suck (earlier versions of Unity definitely sucked, didn't try later ones), it may or may not look like Mac OS X (latest versions definitely do share a lot of similarities), it may or may not be necessary after the GNOME Shell arrival, it was necessary in order for those GNOME dumb fucks to realize that backwards compatibility is not the only thing that matters.

And finally - thank God! - GNOME guys started thinking, and they pulled their heads out of each others' asses, and they started moving, and they released GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell. I didn't get my hands on them yet, but from what i see on the screenshots, they look pretty cool. No more Windows 98-ish look, GNOME 3 looks more like a mashup of Mac OS X and MeeGo. Which is good, because these are the interfaces people consider both beautiful and usable.

But what is it? Why GNOME users are whining? Aaaah, the desktop behaves differently from they are used to. Welcome to KDE 4.0 guys, now it's your turn. Pull your heads out of your asses (i like this phrase!), change is necessary. Face it - GNOME 2 has all but stagnated. It wasn't fun, it wasn't configurable. Some people confuse GNOME 2 limitations for minimalism, but whatever. Man up, idiots, if even GNOME dipshits decided that it's time to change - that's for your own good. Remember, GNOME knows exactly what every user needs. That's why they leave out so many configuration options, isn't it?

The problem here is that people are not against GNOME 3. They are against the change. Back in the day when KDE4 was introduced, it changed everything. It was practically rewritten from scratch. Why? So we could enjoy so many great software today. I think the real KDE 4 will be KDE 5. KDE 4, while being a major rewrite, has only laid the foundations. Hell, KDE PIM got Akonadi support only on KDE 4.6/4.7 - that's more than halfway through the development cycle. Despite it being a rewrite, it's still pretty much a long ass transition to the integrated, semantic future. GNOME guys are finally moving that way too with their Zeitgeist thingie. So essentially, things change. And people don't like it.

Look, here's one for ya. You know why GTK and GNOME sucks? Look how much time it took to write Unity. After two years it's finally usable. How long did it take for KDE guys to write two (!) releases of Plasma Active? Three months? Five? Moreover, Plasma Active is practically a project of a couple of weekend hackers. Unity has corporate backing of Canonical. Plasma, KDE and Qt in general are far superior in terms of getting working (and fast!) code as quickly as possible. KDE architecture enabled writing Plasma Active in so little time. KDE architecture enabled Calligra guys to write a backend, on top of which interfaces for both desktop and mobile can be built very quickly. GNOME doesn't have nearly as much power both from user and developer point of view, and because GNOME developers are idiots, GTK will never have that power.

But as much as i despise GNOME, i have to give credit for finally growing some balls and doing GNOME 3. Also, Vala is a terrific idea. Having a real object-oriented language which translates itself into native C code? Brilliant. Now developers can have the speed of native C and experience the full glory of ass-backwards GTK and GNOME architecture. The only thing i'm not sure of is how to debug this thing if it translates to C code? It sorta reminds me of Google Dart, only in case of Vala it actually tries to solve a real world problem of trying to write object-oriented code in a language that is more suitable for low-level system programming than for GUI stuff. Time will tell though.

KGet fucking sucks

Seriously, guys, is this what you call a download manager?

First of all, the why having two plugins to do the same thing? Yes, one of the KIO-based file downloaders is multi-threaded, but why keep the single threaded then?

Second, the behavior is destructive by default. Why does it delete everything instead of leaving the files and deleting just the download job? I've just lost 20 GB worth of downloaded data, thank you very much.

Third gripe is that not only we have two KIO plugins, they also both suck big time. I mean, no matter how much i hate the thing that Firefox has become, there's still a couple of things it does best in class. One of them is download management, with help of DownThemAll extension. This is hands down best download manager available in a cross-platform manner. JDownloader sucks and will always suck 'cos it's Java. Others either don't work on anything but Linux, or don't work on Linux, or even work only on Windows. And they all suck anyway. KGet can't download for shit. It can't parse download.php-type files and rename the files afterwards, so whenever you download practically anything which is not from FTP, you're pretty much fucked, because you'll end up with a bunch of download.php files.

And final complaint is that torrent plugin sucks fucking greasy nigger monkey balls. It can't even scan files if they weren't downloaded by exactly this instance of KGet. Try to continue download with another KGet from another Linux? No luck. Delete everything. Try to transfer your torrent files from KTorrent to KGet? No luck. Delete everything, start from scratch. This isn't even funny.

Thankfully, KTorrent is one of the best torrent clients available. God bless KTorrent developers, KGet developers - burn in hell, you fuckers.

Firefox fucking sucks

I use Linux as my everyday operating system. I love KDE, i love the developer culture of Free Software, i love lots of things about KDE, Linux and its ecosystem. But there are some areas where it not only lacks - it sucks monkey balls. One of these areas are web browsers.

What the fuck?! Web browsing is just about everything most people do with a computer today, and you still can't come up with a decent browser?! Let's see what we have. Internet Explorer? Only old ass versions, only on Wine, and they suck anyway. Safari? No Linux version, and Safari is probably the most inflexible piece of software ever written. Chrome? Hands down fastest rendering and fastest Javascript, no desktop integration whatsoever (looks and feels alien on ANY desktop), extensions suck, and Google is trying to do batshit insane crap with it, like pushing to make it a gaming platform, or allow it to execute native code, or other less than useful stuff. Opera? Bloated proprietary piece of shit (i don't know what do they need extensions for - they already have everything and the kitchen sink in there), sucks at rendering and sucks at Javascript, and hipsters love it. Firefox? Piece of shit with an asshat development team.

Don't get me wrong - there was a time when i was a fan of Firefox. It was a new kid on the block, it had tabs, it was small and fast, it blew IE out of the water, and it was cool to like it because it was all open source and ideologically correct. Yes, Opera had tabs too, but Opera, while being a proprietary piece of shit, sucked then, and it sucks now. Firefox 2 ruled with all its glory.

Things started to go south about the time of release of version 3. Firefox started sucking big time back then. The most unnecessary and idiotic "feature" ever introduced was the "awesome bar". Firefox developers were saying shit like "give it time", "you'll get used to it", blablabla. Well guess what, i didn't. I still despise this fucking "awesome" bar, i still haven't got used to it, and i still miss the old address bar. Sadly, with all the addon flexibility Firefox has, no one is still able to replicate the old address bar.

Firefox also started to be a memory and resource hog. Every time a new version came out, i was pleasantly surprised that it was faster than the previous one, only to discover that it was faster due to some addons being disabled out of compatibility issues. And it got all the bloat back by the time the next release was on the way. The development team was bragging about how they work on memory problems, how they optimize startup time, how they do this, how they do that - but Firefox only seemed to get slower and slower.

Another problem with current Firefox is the development cycle. No, seriously, what were you thinking?! You want to have a rolling release? Fine, but why inflate version numbers? Why not do 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 etc.? Current alpha (Firefox 10? 11? 28?) looks exactly like Firefox 4. So what was the point of all these version numbers? Firefox management didn't just shoot itself in the foot here - it blew out both its legs with a fucking bazooka. Sorry guys, rocket jumps only work in Quake. Not to mention the whole "user is an idiot" mentality that plagues Chrome developers. Admit it, Mozilla, Firefox 4 looks like Chrome.

The main problem with Firefox though is its complete inability to integrate with KDE desktop, which is largely fault of using this piece of shit toolkit GTK+. I still can't understand why those Chrome and Firefox idiots picked GTK+ instead of Qt. Maybe back in the day Qt wasn't a viable alternative, and Firefox being so old ass and having lots of legacy code would find the transition to Qt too expensive, but Google, why?! Why?! Why did you choose a toolkit that looks like ass on my desktop?!

Complete lack of visual integration is not the best part of it, though. The best part is, since i want to have my passwords stored in my KWallet, whenever the new shitty Firefox version comes out, it breaks the KWallet addon. I just can't live without KWallet integration, and this is the only thing that breaks on every fucking update!

It's been a while since i started looking around for better browsers, but they all suck. Chrome lacks DownThemAll, which i can't live without, and is not well integrated into KDE and looks and feels like ass. Konqueror just plain sucks. Doesn't render websites correctly, no extensions, Flash crashes, and due to its swiss army knife nature, whenever you press the wrong button, some lame-ass panel or viewer shows up which i don't know how to turn off.

Rekonq? I have high hopes for Rekonq. It already has KGet integration, which is sorta like having DownThemAll, but it's not nearly there yet. It doesn't store passwords in KWallet, which is really strange, given it's a native KDE project. It also lacks extensions. Some time ago, Chrome extensions were promised, but they didn't materialize. It also promises some interesting ideas like ownCloud sync, but again, it's not ready at the time of this writing. With KGet and KWallet integration though, i can live without most of the Firefox addons (and some of them are available as Chrome extensions as well), but unfortunately some extensions i would strongly prefer having, Ghostery being the prime example (as far too small amount support the Do-Not-Track option). Greasemonkey would be good to have too.

Update: Nope, it does indeed store passwords in KWallet, it just does it differently from Firefox, which is why i couldn't locate them in KWallet Manager - they're stored under Form Data. This makes rekonq barely viable an alternative to Firefox. I wish i could import passwords though. I might look into writing a password import script either from CSV, or from KWallet itself. Probably, CSV/XML would be a lot more useful for the community. I still miss extensions though, and while rekonq has its own flavour of AdBlock, i would really love to see something like Ghostery or Scrapbook.

So, what does it leave us with? Some lame-ass half-assed slow-ass unbranded-ass browsers like Arora, IceWeasel, Namoroka or whatever their names were? Or a semi-usable extension-less rekonq?

It's really simple guys. I just want a browser that integrates with my desktop, and that is reasonably fast and allows at least some degree of flexibility. This is what i'm not getting.

Have your cake and eat it too?

Yes, bitchez, i'm back! Just had some changes in my life that required my full attention. This one will be a little short as i still have stuff to do, but who cares. Oh, and wow, a couple of weeks ago i kinda had this blog's one year anniversary! I missed it but again, who cares.

Anyway, this time, the bullshitting will be about having your cake and eating it too. For example, copyrights. Media and software companies now insist that piracy is theft. It is a very convenient way to equate analog world with digital world, but it's misleading. When you sell a physical CD, you can't sell it again later. With digital distribution this is not the case - you can make as many copies as you like and sell them.

In fact, in the simplest case, to "sell" digital copies you just need only one copy, means of receiving payments and some form of distribution, be it a rapidshare account or a personal website (both of which don't require any effort whatsoever). To sell analog copies, you need... Well, you know what you need - a distribution platform, a place to store all these CD's and loads of other expensive stuff. So selling digital copies is in no way analogous to selling analog copies, and thus downloading a song for free from elsewhere does not equate to stealing. If anything, it's more like getting it from another retailer, one that has a better price, more convenient delivery and DRM-free format.

You insist that it is stealing? OK, you want to equate digital copies to analog copies. Fine. Then give back our rights of first sale, rights to share it with a friend (like you would share a hammer for example), returns and refunds in case of bad product and loads of other things that are associated with physical goods. Oh, you're now insisting that selling digital copies is not actually selling, but "licensing", so those pesky consumer rights don't apply? OK then, if "selling" isn't actually selling, then stealing isn't actually stealing.

And no, rent analogy does not apply here. After all, you don't have to upload back (read - return) your song after some time passes, do you? So how is that renting? OK, not renting, licensing? Fine, but then piracy is not theft either, it's simply a license violation - kinda like driving without a license. While license violations could have serious consequences, it's still in no way similar to stealing. So shut up and fuck off.