Digg

Now I like technology news sites as much as the next guy, but and this might just be me, digg seems to be run by a bunch of Mac and Ubuntu fanboys. The last few posts on the front page at the time of writing are either about Ubuntu, Macs or some torrent site which doesn’t work.

Slashdot have more scientific posts at the moment, but that has been known to change, and I’m not insinuating that digg do not offer similar content, just not the same volume, it just appears to be random mac or Ubuntu stuff.

In fact, one of the more popular “diggs” recently involving Ubuntu was a scheme were some people send out free “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers in return for a self addressed envelope. Obviously something amazing for Ubuntu zealots out there, but does this kind of thing really have to be on the front page of a site visitted by millions of people each day?

Then we have the sheer amount of newbie tutorials, I’m a great supporter of these things, god knows I use them enough myself, but again those that make it to the front page, which is what probably 90% of people read, appear to centre around Ubuntu. It’s great to have tutorials on managing users in Linux, and explaining the role of root, but does it have to based on Ubuntu? By basing it on Ubuntu, the tutorials only make use of the GUI tools available in Ubuntu (which some people may not even know exist judging from a recent conversation) one not only limits it on one distribution, but also makes people very dependant on GUI tools.

In my opinion a paragraph or two about “adduser” in a root shell should have been included, not only to broaden it a little but also to make people aware of command line options not only existing but in some cases being a lot faster than their GUI alternatives. Why wait 30s (probably a hugely exaggerated estimate) for a GUI tool to load when you could have done the same thing in the command line far quicker?

On the other hand, I think that Ubuntu although being Debian based and having new packages (yay!) tends to do baby its users a lot, and seems to emulate Windows in some respects, but then that’s my opinion and maybe I’m just bitter. Bitter about things such as gcc, which you’d expect to be installed as soon as you’ve finished setting up you system (after all Mandriva has it), not being there. Now someone I know has repeatedly stated that the ‘average’ user doesn’t need to compile from source, and if they need to install something they can always install it through their package manager either online or from the install CD. Personally I think that’s a load of balls as there’s bound to be the odd packages someone out there may need, which aren’t in Ubuntu’s package sources, but then maybe I’m just strange, surely having an overly simplified which reaches millions of users who expect things to just work, be exactly like windows and never having to compile a single thing is a good thing!

And yes, I realise I just went on and bashed Ubuntu rather than sticking to my original point, which is that Digg seems rather like some kind of tabloid newspaper.

I expect I’ll get flamed for this, so thank you for reading.

Ebola