On Tue, 23 Dec 2008, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 02:03:39PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote:
>>> The "upgrades" I've been getting from Microsoft over the last year seem
>>> to break various features of legacy stuff...
>>
>> I know.  But it also happens in the GNU/Linux world.  I just had a note 
>> on my Ubuntu desktop machine telling me I had to reboot (that is not 
>> good because I should almost never have to reboot and it is a big 
>> hassle).  So I rebooted and Gnome would not come back up.  It said that 
>> it couldn't find pulse-session.  Well, that's because I uninstalled it. 
>> Unfortunately, the uninstaller didn't know to delete one of the X11 
>> initialization files.  I had no idea what was going on but I happened 
>> to know a few tricks that I learned recently.  So I started with...
>
> There is a difference between that kind of bug, and the kind of bugging 
> that Micrsoft and others (Quicken is my notable example) employ, in 
> other to force you to part with your cash in the hope of keeping things 
> working.

They may do it intentionally, but I'm not sure that we can prove it. 
Clearly the Ubuntu folks didn't mess up my system intentionally.


> A newbie who goes around uninstalling things will get his comeuppance.

In my case, the sound card didn't work until I uninstalled pulse audio. 
So the newbie on my system would have had a comeuppance either way.

Mike