* Homer peremptorily fired off this memo:
> This is where the argument that "proprietary = professional = better"
> completely falls flat, since there is absolutely nothing "professional"
> about the utter garbage that I've just spent the last few hours battling
> with.
>
> I'm referring to Adobe Reader for Linux version 8.1.2, which is provided
> as proprietary freeware in an RPM package.
>
> I recently decided to compare features and PDF rendering on three PDF
> viewers, Adobe Reader; Evince and KPDF. As it turns out, all three are
> pretty comparable, other than the fact that Adobe Reader is somewhat
> slow; bloated; and (as I later discovered) has a badly broken uninstall
> RPM script.
acroread is /very/ slow and bloated, though it has been quite awhile
since I've installed it because of its bloat.
> It's when it comes to uninstalling Adobe Reader that the "fun" really
> starts though. The first clue that something went wrong was when the
> "rpm -e" command took an inordinate amount of time to complete,
> certainly longer than I expected. As I later discovered, this was due to
> the "%post" scripts that formed part of the package, which are executed
> "post" uninstall, ostensibly to restore the system configuration to its
> previous state. What these scripts /actually/ did was completely wipe
> out the system MIME settings for PDF, requiring me to manually restore
> them using RPM and KDE Control Centre:
>
> http://forum.fedoraforum.org/printthread.php?t=181598
>
> I then discovered that Firefox was unable to handle PDF files correctly
> too, since the Adobe RPM had failed to clean up garbage it left behind
> in the plugins directory (nppdf.so). Even then, I still had to force the
> plugin cache to refresh, by deleting ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat
> before I could finally download PDF files again using Firefox.
>
> What a bloody mess, and all thanks to Adobe's non-standard and broken
> RPM of their proprietary Slopware.
It's amazing how many commercial vendors just don't take the time to get
it right.
> Is anyone still confused about why I advocate keeping the Windows
> paradigm as far away from Linux as possible? As IBM's Bob Sutor recently
> said; "Stop copying Windows". This mess from Adobe is just one of the
> many reason why. The "Windows way" of doing things is not only broken,
> but is /mysteriously/ broken in ways that cannot be addressed by the
> user - beyond trial and error, and even then the best one can hope for
> is a workaround rather than an actual solution. That makes it not only
> broken, but actually dangerous.
I'd go even further, and be wary of any proprietary vendor glomming onto
Linux.
They're welcome to produce software for Linux, but they'd better do it
right.
--
Nice guys finish last.
-- Leo Durocher
|
|
