Not Even My Wife Reads This

In the beginning (of fancy Linux desktops), I was a KDE user, because it was first.

Then I was a Gnome user, because it's what came on Red Hat and I didn't care that much.

Then Gnome 2.0 decided to remove lots of features in the name of ease-of-use, and one of the features they removed was proper Unix-style point-to-focus, which I cared about a lot more than I cared about Gnome, so I was a KDE user again.

Until last night. My KDE 4.2 plasma app kept crashing. Without plasma, I had no toolbars and no way to restore a minimized window. An hour into trying to debug the problem, it hit me that I didn't need to do this. I could just switch back to Gnome.

Sure enough, gnome 2.24 is stable. It has point-to-focus. It doesn't have a terminal as nice as konsole, or a CD burner as nice as k3b, or a music player as nice as amarok used to be before they wrecked it, but it's not crashing.

You can keep most users with inertia. It takes hard work to chase them away. Stability first. Not removing basic useful features second. New stuff last.

I've been using Python 2.6 (and 2.6.1) as my primary Python in Gentoo for months, but it was hard masked until a couple of days ago, which meant nobody except developers and crazy people was supposed to use it. Now it's finally unmasked and in unstable (~x86, ~amd64, etc.), so it's recommended for people who are only slightly brave. Just in time for 2.6.2 to come out so everyone can upgrade again in a few days.

Lots of distributions write a lot of really important tools in Python (such as Gentoo's portage package manager), so they tend to be really conservative about upgrading it. I remember finally giving up on Red Hat when RH 7.3 still shipped the ancient 1.5.2 as the default Python. (Of course I'm still stuck using Red Hat at work. And they still ship a seriously outdated Python version, though I have to admit 2.4 isn't nearly as bad as 1.5.2.) Now I just have to wait for Ubuntu and Red Hat and Debian and Mac OS to upgrade, so I can use 2.6 features in Slugathon without feeling like I'm asking my hypothetical users to jump through too many hoops.