14/11/2004 @19:05:33 ^19:41:23

how ironic

I'm supposed to put something funny here but I don't think I could even if I wanted to

Did anybody else watch the epoch time pass 1,100,000,000

New hardware required me to upgrade my Debian installation from Woody to Sarge (stable to testing, if you prefer) Here is a list of just some of the things I don't like about it:

• Most obviously it has increased its disc space usage by 50% without actually gaining anything much. This would have been much higher had I not had the foresight to uninstall Galeon (and let Aptitude uninstall all the Gnome libraries it depends on - I do like Aptitude's ability to distinguish packages deliberately and automatically installed, but that was in the old version too)
• Upgrading Galeon would have resulted in Gnome 2 being pulled in. Not just the libraries, but all sorts of applets and services too. These people clearly have not heard of the term "dependency". Galeon, a web browser, does not need all the shitty little applets and services a standard Gnome 2 installation comes with. Applications depends on libraries, not other applications.
• So I tried to switch to Firefox. First thing, it's not the latest version, because of course Sarge won't let it in until it's all up to date and some shitty architecture that nobody uses is holding it up.
• The fonts are shit. RISC OS had better antialiasing in 1988.
• Firefox has no concept of how tabbed browsing should work. In Galeon the tabs felt like they were part of the program. In Firefox they feel like a quick hack bolted on. After all all Firefox has to do is be better than IE which is not hard. It can't even open all new windows in a new tab, despite my setting "browser.tabs.opentabfor.windowopen" to true. And it can't open new tabs next to the tab from which the new tab was spawned, it has to open them right on the end which is miles away. Seriously Galeon's tabs are so much better than Firefox's in almost every way imaginable, there are at least half a dozen more holes I could pick.
• Also isn't Firefox meant to have mouse gestures? Or is that in a version that Debian still deem to be part of "unstable"?
• Why the fuck has my compose key suddenly stopped working? I suppose Linux has a philosophical objection to keyboards with Windows keys on them but since they're there you might as well set them up to do something useful, right? Not any more!

Why does everything go wrong? Even Doom has not escaped the Scourge of Sarge. In particular the underlying SDL libraries to which PRBoom links work differently. Before, sprites and walls in the distance would still have detail, and indeed by increasing the resolution you could see stuff further away from you without them having pixels missed out by the scaling routine. Now, sprites that would be "out of range" on a 486 running doom.exe in 320x200 are plotted with similar loss of information, and so everything looks pixellated.

It is as if, instead of the game plotting onto a 640x480 canvas, it is plotting onto a 320x200 canvas and then SDL is scaling it up. I don't know if it's possible to change this behaviour using environment variables but it is incredibly annoying and makes fighting at a distance all the more difficult.