Huh. Somebody linked to my post on hacker news, which resulted in some interesting comments. Some of them are fairly insulting, but, hey, whatevs.
Mostly, I feel I should clarify: I tend to write a certain way on this blog. The post in question was deliberately bombastic; it was reflecting a certain frustration I often feel with Ubuntu in general (yes, I should have more appropriately titled the post, shut up). A lot of people mentioned “why didn’t I do x, or y, or z” or “He didn’t know X, y, or even Z” and my point was more, “Why doesn’t cat > /etc/motd just work?” – followed by a lot of other questions. I wouldn’t say that it was written out of nerd rage: it was more written deliberately in an inflammatory style. Yes, obviously, looking at /etc/motd would have shown me it was a symlink, and yes I could have just removed it: you’re missing the damn point. What’s the point in telling a rabbit hole story if you just fix the problem and forget about the underlying issues that cause it to begin with?
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://deadmemes.net/baughj-fsf.png){kind=small}
5 comments
James
2011.12.07 at 10:27 pm (UTC -4)
Fuck the haters, bro. They’re attacking the tone of the piece rather than refuting the central point. Keep up the good work.
Miklos
2011.12.08 at 3:44 am (UTC -4)
I found your post highly amusing and another glaring example of over complication in the Debian/Ubuntu distros.
tep
2011.12.09 at 5:13 pm (UTC -4)
Your message is dead on, and I *liked* the style. You called it true, they broke the “consensus paradigm” with no warning and for no good reason other than they wanted to. *And* they didn’t document it (the old man pages are still there and incorrect.)
I wholeheartedly support “out of box thinking”. But Jebus, *thinking” is part of that equation. Do what you do for a good reason, after you’ve considered the pros and cons. Do some analysis, build some consensus.
But then, I’m a curmudgeon, I’ve been suspicious of the RAM and CPU usage of every UNIX release past 4.4BSD.
jr
2012.01.01 at 2:42 pm (UTC -4)
read the blog and found myself mostly agreeing with the (heartfelt, I’m sure) points you made.
on the up-side, you needn’t worry about Xubuntu users’ opinions because, apparently, users do not exist. proof? run ‘who‘ in (XFCE) Terminal and get — nothing.
darkfader
2012.04.27 at 6:13 pm (UTC -4)
This is funny that you got flamed for pointing out what a total mess these “smart ideas” are.
Anyway, thanks. I had not dug into the issue yet since it was really awkward to see something kept messing with those files that are totally *not* in the distro turf, but normally always site-local.
I’m still pondering if I should go integrate my motd with update-motd.d or whatnot.
I guess IF I tried that I’ll find the next Ubuntu update will wipe my changes, so I rather won’t bother.
I’ve never seen such a chaotic unstructured mess.