As I have already made known, I like Wesnoth. A while ago I decided I wanted to make my own campaign. A merfolk campaign. You don’t very often get to play as the merfolk so I decided it would be all about them. To make it fit in with the Wesnoth world, I made the story, a couple of characters and side plots related to the mainline campaign The Rise of Wesnoth. In the Trials of Tyco (TOT for short – yes the title is a tad embarrassing) Lord Typhon is away helping Prince Haldric cross the ocean to the new land of Wesnoth. Tyco his son has to deal with some issues (or trials) while his father is gone. Anyway, this was a lot bigger project then I first anticipated. I wrote the story and the dialog. Copied and pasted and fiddled with other peoples code and even did a bit of programming myself. And I drew a few pictures and one portrait (sadly no where near Kitty’s class). And recently I got very very tired of opening and closing Wesnoth to play test it. Goodness gracious I’m rambling. Just play it. I think most of the bugs are out, and I hope it is entertaining. But I’m not positive that the difficulty levels (Normal and Medium) are feasible. Feel free if you want to work on it too. Because thats the other thing I’m posting about. I won’t be around for the next year and a half. Not that I posted that much before, but I won’t do any now. Just so you know. Well I hope you enjoy your year (and my game if you’re into that kind of thing) and maybe I’ll return to type again someday. Fare Well.
I think Ubuntu would be improved if Canonical took a more democratic approach. Let’s start with an excerpt from Canonical’s mission statement: “To realize the potential of free software in the lives of individuals and organizations by: Delivering the world’s best free software platform.” Ubuntu wants to succeed on the desktop. All in all its actually real people(meaning non-developers) who use and want to use Ubuntu will be what makes it a success.
Every new version of Ubuntu has a few obvious changes. Some recent changes have been the removing of ctrl alt backspace as default, making the update manager automatically start, waiting 60 seconds on shutdown, computer janitor and others. I think that there should be an easy way to vote on these new changes. Having some kind of monthly or bi-monthly poll on Ubuntu’s website, would be a good way to prevent frustration as well as cruft build up. Just because developers think a certain feature is the greatest thing since sliced silicon, doesn’t mean it will be embraced by the community. (Keep in mind I am a FLOSS programmer.) Some of these changes annoy me and some of them are okay. The recent changes that make Ubuntu more like windows or mac should be removed right away. Like the pop up update your system message. Which was even more annoying than on windows because you have to manually close it every time. Luckily they have removed that, but replaced it with something just as bad. They just make the whole update manager pop up. Which is a bad idea for computer-illiterate users. Personally I think its even easier to ignore than the old way. Not many people are going to use buggy clones of proprietary software when they can just get pirated copies just as easy. To really succeed on the desktop Ubuntu must stand out as it’s own by being original, easy to use and stable. Which IMO makes gnome a very good choice. Launchpad is also a very Ubuntu has been pretty good at being original but some things are lacking. Completely hard crashing during a user switch is not a very good advertisement. (Which had to do with the buggy ATI graphics drivers. Which albeit is AMD’s fault. But the OS should catch it before freezing the whole computer.) I think Ubuntu would improve if they were more open and took users input more into account.
Some recent developments in Free Libre Open Source Software lead me to believe there is trouble brewing. With growth comes problems. And it seems many projects aren’t living true to their principles. Instead they are once again just trying to copy proprietary or other software. Some examples. The new version of the Gimp plans to enforce a single window a la PhotoShop design. I sincerely hope they keep an option to have multiwindow mode. It’s a complete abandonment of Gimp legacy as well as Linux heritage.
OpenOffice recently showed off a prototype copying Office’s Ribbon. There was fortunately a loud and angry outcry. But unfortunately that doesn’t mean it wont necessarily happen. The ribbon should be a plugin for those who think that way but forcing that on unwilling users is the exact same thing Microsoft did. Next in line is Firefox new GUI. They appear to be copying chrome this time as well the Ribbon again.
Finally one more troubling example that happened recently. That of Ubuntu disabling ctrl-alt-backspace as default. According to this poll (albeit nonscientific) 88% thought it was a bad idea, yet they did it anyways. Fortunately its still Linux so you can go and change a config file and fix it. Ctrl alt backspace to me is one of the great things about Linux. If X crashes that doesn’t mean the kernel has so there is no need to reboot. For instance I was working on KQ recently and it completely locked up. (You need plain lua to run KQ you know ) I switched to a virtual console ctrl alt F6 and did a killall kq. But unfortunately KQ was stuck in fullscreen mode which left X on a wonderful 320-240 resolution. Trust me it looks great on my 24 inch Monitor. And the screen was locked to a small section so I couldn’t access any menus. With a quick ctrl alt backspace X was restarted and I could go on with my work. The reason behind the change was so people didn’t accidentally lose data. Personally I don’t know how anyone can accidentally hit a keyboard combination as awkward as ctrl alt backspace.
Some of these examples are probably only problems to me but it does make me wonder about the future of some of my favorite FLOSS. It goes back to why Wesnoth is such a good game, its not just a Yet Another (insert name here) Clone. (YAC’s I dub them.) I think that if FLOSS projects really wants to succeed they have to be original as well as functional. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case. Just look at all the horrible Office YACs out there(Office included). There has to be a way to make a word processor that doesn’t make you want to throw your computer off a cliff.
) I switched to a virtual console ctrl alt F6 and did a 
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