If that’s not what you’re looking for, you know the lightweight options better than most: Opera and epiphany aren’t bad choices but lack the same dev backing. You know as well as anyone that Lynx is novel but not practical for today’s web.

Firefox (or the OSS community) will have the Linux bugs worked out eventually, just not on the same time frame as the other OS’s. You’ve hung around Linux circles long enough to know this, Greg.

A good example is comments like “There is nothing wrong with X in Linux.”

X is great; I love X; it makes my life much simpler. But there are plenty of things wrong with both X-the-protocol (if you’re trying to do certain kinds of high-performance graphics for which it simply doesn’t offer sane APIs) and with the particular implementation in Xorg. If you’re particularly curious, I can give you a specific list of technical issues I’ve run into with X that aren’t a problem with other display systems. But fixing those issues means first admitting that the issues are even there!

And when someone brings up a technical problem with some aspect of Linux, the most common reaction seems to be to deny that it’s there, heap personal abuse on the person who dared to suggest something might need improving, and proclamations that Linux is the best thing ever. None of which really helps _improve_ Linux. And whatever else you can say about it, Linux is not a shining jewel of utter perfection. Neither is any other piece of software.

I wonder what it is about the Linux community that makes so many of its members so insecure and defensive,

What are you saying? Explain yourself!

But seriously, I think we are insecure and defensive because a huge amount of the commentary that comes from beyond the community is both negative AND incorrect, and very often, seems intended to do damage to forward progress. It is very common that when I post something positive about Linux, suggesting that people try it, I get a half dozen people showing up to give a long list of things that went wrong for them. That would be fine if they were not FOS. (and by FOS I don’t mean free open source) When we hear people complain about how ever time they install something they hate the fact that they have to compile the binaries and all the dependencies are screwed up, we know we are hearing from someone who is either a) repeating something they heard; b) relating a 10 year old experience or c) simply trying to scare people away.

My Linux posts are divided into two types. The ones where I encourage people to try Linux, and the ones where I’m either neutral about it or I explicit say “Linux is not for everyone”. When I do the latter, I don’t get the anti-Linux trolls. When I do the former, I do. This tells me that there is a category of web-troller who feels that it is their job to tell us Linux supporters to shut up, or even to make sure that we always say to stay away from Linux unless you are a geek.

Then again, this sort of thing happens in other user communities too; maybe Linux users just tend to be more vocal.

No, we’re just more correct.

I wonder what it is about the Linux community that makes so many of its members so insecure and defensive, with a need to lash out at anyone perceived to be offering a slight or criticizing some technical aspect of the Things That Are Holy (of which there seem to be many). Then again, this sort of thing happens in other user communities too; maybe Linux users just tend to be more vocal.

Or did you not get to read my entire comment in context? The context isn’t linked to from the Slashdot story, certainly, and the quoting is somewhat selective in all the coverage, as usual.

No comments on the “blaming the victim” (who’s the victim? X driver developers?) bit, nor the “anti-Linux rant” bit (been using Linux for going on 15 years now).

Hope is in sight – there is a good possibility the problem will be resolved by Firefox 4.1. In addition, there is a work-around for anyone who want to try this is FF4.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTAyMA

“…hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver).”

http://www.osnews.com/comments/24264?view=threaded&sort=&threshold=0

I plan to try out FF4 on a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 running in VirtualBox.