When I saw mbinkle respond to my anti Moblin tweets with the comment: “yeah, I expect perfection from public betas too. Beta means ‘retail ready’ right?”
I appreciated Binks’ attempts to rip on my grievances with Moblin,. I attempted to form an equally witty reply, but found that Moblin 2’s browser would not let me scroll back to the top of Twitter and let me input a response. So, I opened a new window, scrolled back down, and clicked the reply button. Nope. That shit doesn’t fly. Not in this OS.
Realizing that the comment was likely going to be longer than a Twitter response will allow, I came here. While writing this post, ever time I attempted a hard return to make a new paragraph, my screen grayed out giving the error message “www.http is not a valid protocol”. Don’t know where it was nabbing that from, but hey, more power to it.
(There it was again). So, to get to the heart of the matter, I don’t expect a public beta to be perfect. When I tried to open the browser settings and it said “Sorry, these aren’t ready yet.” I thought, “Oh, okay. Well, the browser still works, gives me a viable way to store my bookmarks, good enough.”
(There it is again). But no. The browser is just fundamentally broken. As in - it doesn’t work. No cookies are stored. Everytime I tried to go back to Twitter, it wouldn’t let me. The Instant Messanger doesn’t connect. Brendon says he cannot connect to the Internet at all, and agrees that it is stylish but not very functional.
(And again, twice that time, because the cursor was blinking and I tried to type, but it wouldn’t let me, and when I clicked the message appeared again). So, while I do not expect anywhere near perfection from a public beta, I expect it to work. Some of the features could be missing, and that’d be just fine, as long as it was a barely working system. Everything looks very nice. The GUI is damn sleek, and eveything looks splendid. Hell, even the file system and the word processor (yes, the word processor) LOOK really really good. But they suck functionally. Some things even don’t work at all.
(FUCK!) I’m not asking for perfection. I want bare minimum workability. As clever as you surely think your comment was, you wouldn’t be laughing if I hooked you up on a date with the most beautiful woman in the world and then you took her home and found out that the two of you couldn’t fuck. You’d break down or go into a rage, much like I am now with Moblin 2.
(THREE FUCKING TIMES): As a final note, you cannot even copy and paste properly. They have a pasteboard that you seem to be able to copy text too, but cannot paste it from there, and it is a third application. I had to manually retype your tweet. Garbage.
More ranting from her onward: As a further note, so many other things are broken too. All of the main selling features, even the connection to Twitter through the status tab, don’t seem to work at all. Moblin 2 (in its current version) doesn’t do much, and what it does it doesn’t do terribly well. Having this as my only operating system now on my netbook is kind of like being a kid and getting a toy for Christmas that is smashed to pieces with a tiny card that says “Fuckin’ play with it - From Santa”.