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"You aint nothing but a Tomboy, crying all the time."

If you want a GUI on Windows, or using the Windows libraries, sure.

GTK# is entirely developed by the Mono project, and requires none of the aforementioned Microsoft parts. That means applications like Tomboy and Banshee should now be fully RMS-friendly.

Mono is more than just 'running Windows applications on Linux'. There is a large ecosystem of utilities developed with it, because (a) a properly object-oriented language with native bindings is much better than the C-with-Gobject alternative, and (b) Java was not Free at the time.

Try Magnatune. They:

• treat their artists far better than any of the major labels
• let artists license, not sign over, music for distribution so artists keep their copyrights
• let you listen to their entire catalog without charge
• work with music player programs (Rhythmbox, Amarok, Songbird, and proprietary software including iTunes)
• offer purchasing by the track, subscription (for streaming or download), and all-you-can-hear prices
• offer downloading in multiple formats including FLAC
• offer redownloading without hassle (compare this to what Apple told Wil Wheaton after Apple's software erased purchased tracks from his iPod)
• offer all tracks without DRM

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You don't need iTunes to put music on your iPod, either.

I have to say I disagree. Evolution works great for mail, and if that's all you need, it's a fine solution. But Outlook is about more than mail; it's also about calendering and task management. Evolution still doesn't have support for recurring tasks, and that bug was first opened almost nine years ago.

So what you are saying is that you want evolution, but that is one of the few options you never explored? ... and don't tell me it doesn't work. It does. I have used it any time I had to deal with Outlook servers. It works fine (i.e. as good or better than Outlook) when configured properly .

P.S. - Because it is a Gnome project the page makes it sound like you need to use the Gnome Window Manager. You don't. It works great with KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x. I suspect it works with most or all other WMs as well, so long as the gnome libs are on the system.

The whole premise that better usability will come out of getting usability designers involved in the free software development process is fundamentally misguided. It's really easy to get such feedback for most open source software. Just look at the forums and mailing list of people using the software, and it's trivial to find out exactly what are the confusing parts and what really needs to be improved. As for motivating improvements, most developers working on open-source software want their software to be better. But what does "better" mean?

The problem is that the developers working on the software don't use it the way everybody else does, which means there will always be a clash between their priorities and tastes and what regular users want. This means the people capable of fixing the usability problem believe many requests are misguided, and therefore don't do anything about them. I see this all the time, in projects big and small. On the open source project I contribute the most to, PostgreSQL, some of this disconnect is warranted. For example, users want the software to be super easy to use out of the box, while developers want it to be secure out of the box; that's a very hard split to reconcile. Sometimes instead you'll see features requested by DBAs that make perfect sense to other DBAs, but are shouted down as a bad idea too. This is because many of the most influential developers are not DBAs of large databases, which you'd expect almost by definition. They don't have the right context to fully appreciate some usability decisions. If the development community is healthy, when enough such requests come in eventually some concessions will get made, even if some of the developers don't quite get the motivating reason fully. Enough people complain about something, you just accept that's what everybody wants and bow to community pressure.

But there are plenty of communities where this doesn't seem to happen, and usually it's due to arrogance on the part of the developer rather than them not having design feedback. A classic example was last year's Pidgin UI disaster. Look at that ticket--the entirety of the user community was lined up against the developers, and the lack of response to that feedback even forced a fork whose tagline was "we work for you" as a noteworthy difference from the original project. Completely ridiculous.

I'm suffering from a similar bit of developer arrogance right now, with the standard GNOME terminal app. A change was made recently, first showing up on a lot of people's desktops via Ubuntu Jaunty, which reduces the ability to overload common function keys (like control-C) to either execute terminal functions (like "copy") and still work as terminal input if no text to copy has been selected. There's been a stack of bug reporters, and it turns out the only reason for the change was the developer thought it was a bug--there were no user complaints driving the change. The only right response in this situation, which is strictly a UI decision, is to man up, admit the change was wrong and you were wrong for thinking it, and thank your community for pointing it out. As you can see, that's certainly not happening here. (Yes, I can fix it myself. Not, that doesn't matter, because the thing I'm annoyed about is that it's a step backwards on the most popular default terminal people new to Linux use, which hurts the OS as a whole.)

You can collect usability data all day, that's easy. Doesn't take a designer, it just takes listening to your users. From where I'm sitting it looks like the hard problem is getting open-source developers to pay attention to what they're saying.

The whole premise that better usability will come out of getting usability designers involved in the free software development process is fundamentally misguided. It's really easy to get such feedback for most open source software. Just look at the forums and mailing list of people using the software, and it's trivial to find out exactly what are the confusing parts and what really needs to be improved. As for motivating improvements, most developers working on open-source software want their software to be better. But what does "better" mean?

The problem is that the developers working on the software don't use it the way everybody else does, which means there will always be a clash between their priorities and tastes and what regular users want. This means the people capable of fixing the usability problem believe many requests are misguided, and therefore don't do anything about them. I see this all the time, in projects big and small. On the open source project I contribute the most to, PostgreSQL, some of this disconnect is warranted. For example, users want the software to be super easy to use out of the box, while developers want it to be secure out of the box; that's a very hard split to reconcile. Sometimes instead you'll see features requested by DBAs that make perfect sense to other DBAs, but are shouted down as a bad idea too. This is because many of the most influential developers are not DBAs of large databases, which you'd expect almost by definition. They don't have the right context to fully appreciate some usability decisions. If the development community is healthy, when enough such requests come in eventually some concessions will get made, even if some of the developers don't quite get the motivating reason fully. Enough people complain about something, you just accept that's what everybody wants and bow to community pressure.

But there are plenty of communities where this doesn't seem to happen, and usually it's due to arrogance on the part of the developer rather than them not having design feedback. A classic example was last year's Pidgin UI disaster. Look at that ticket--the entirety of the user community was lined up against the developers, and the lack of response to that feedback even forced a fork whose tagline was "we work for you" as a noteworthy difference from the original project. Completely ridiculous.

I'm suffering from a similar bit of developer arrogance right now, with the standard GNOME terminal app. A change was made recently, first showing up on a lot of people's desktops via Ubuntu Jaunty, which reduces the ability to overload common function keys (like control-C) to either execute terminal functions (like "copy") and still work as terminal input if no text to copy has been selected. There's been a stack of bug reporters, and it turns out the only reason for the change was the developer thought it was a bug--there were no user complaints driving the change. The only right response in this situation, which is strictly a UI decision, is to man up, admit the change was wrong and you were wrong for thinking it, and thank your community for pointing it out. As you can see, that's certainly not happening here. (Yes, I can fix it myself. Not, that doesn't matter, because the thing I'm annoyed about is that it's a step backwards on the most popular default terminal people new to Linux use, which hurts the OS as a whole.)

You can collect usability data all day, that's easy. Doesn't take a designer, it just takes listening to your users. From where I'm sitting it looks like the hard problem is getting open-source developers to pay attention to what they're saying.

I have to disagree with your premise that non-corporate sponsored FOSS lacks "first rate product". While admittedly I am not a typical consumer/end user, I do find that Gnome is just as professional and useful ("first rate") as OS X's Aqua -- and I do switch between the two regularly.

Gnome is corporately sponsored... Red Hat, Novell and I think even Canonical are contributing resources to GNOME. Read more on the GNOME Foundation pages

Hey, that's great - ( http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject ) But probably, some non-Gnome specific document should be used, as "common denominator" document for Gnome, KDE and all.

Actually a heroic developer has already done that:

http://live.gnome.org/Gnote/

I do maintain what I said: Not everyone likes UI design, and in general F/OSS projects are sorely lacking in that regard. KDE 4 is a rare--but hopefully changing--exception to this rule.

As you noted, there are some really shining exceptions; several of the FOSS media player offerings also come to mind. But overall (and with a heavy heart), I've got to agree. For instance...

I still can't stand Gnome. I don't see that changing in the future...

Oh brother, talk about a case in point. A perfect example of a project that just doesn't seem to give a shit about design, either in the sense of "aesthetically pleasing" or "sensibly laid out." (Hold the flames, Gnome folks, I just don't care anymore.)

And to add insult to injury, it's a pain in the ass to make, apply, or customize themes (see bug #552097 among a cast of thousands), so you're mostly stuck with what your distribution gave you. I have no idea why people put up with that sort of thing. It's a terrible situation, and one that no one seems at all interested in improving.

Ironically, my first impression when I tried KDE 4.2 under FreeBSD some months back was that it looked incredibly good. It reminded me of a sort of open source Mac OS-alike. The design was clean, consistent, and impressive. There are a few expected sharp edges here and there, but I look forward to using it once it stabilizes. For now, I expect to stick (impatiently) with KDE 3.5.

Absolutely. It fits together very well, adheres as closely as possible to the rule of least surprise (yes yes, with a few exceptions), and is the most eye-poppingly gorgeous desktop I've ever seen, bar none.

I've been back and forth between KDE and Fluxbox since 4.0.0, working through or around or with the bugs as much as possible. And yeah, it's pointy in spots, and yeah, I've reported more bugs in the last six months than I previously had in my life.

But I stick with it, because at least the bugs in KDE are bugs. They are not, generally, flaws, if you catch my distinction there. You know, not to name names or anything ;)

[offtopic]

I'm admittedly pretty annoyed by the colloquial use of "cowboy" in urban centers as a derogatory term.

You know, it's funny this should come up here on Slashdot. I've thought about this a whole lot lately. I think it's a pretty systemic cultural problem that distresses me greatly. As near as I can tell, it stems largely from two things:

1. All mass media in this country comes from New York or LA, with no exceptions. All television, film, and publishing. All of it. So essentially, two cities whose combined population is about 4% of the population of the country are the only ones with any sort of cultural voice. This is Not Good.

2. People who aren't from here have come to identify "cowboy" (or anything having rural or mid-America connotations) with "ignorant bigot fuckstick redneck douchebag." Partially because that's what the TV tells them, and partially because a handful of raving sociopaths (who IMNSHO should all be pulled behind the barn and aired out) seem hellbent on proving them right.

Sorry for the rant here, but like I said, it's been on my mind :)

[/offtopic]

I recommend the ass one

http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/images/3ubuntu.jpg

You know allude to it, but don't post a link? Here, let me fix that for you. NSFW, of course.

http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2005/3ubuntu.jpg

Wow.

1. Top menus? You can install globalmenu
2. Mac? There's no dock in Gnome, either, so I don't see that it's particularly Mac-ish.
3. LXDE is GTK, too, so it doesn't do global menus without the globalmenu package, either.
4. Looks? Gnome uses GTK, just like LXDE, so the themes are the same. If you don't like Gnome's looks, then you don't like LXDE's, either.
5. Memory? 192MB RAM use for a fully loaded desktop isn't much these days, though it's certainly not LXDE's 48MB.
6. Ubuntu has Tomboy by default, which includes Mono, but it's easy to remove, doesn't remove anything else, and isn't a part of the default Gnome desktop.
7. Ubuntu doesn't ship with Beagle. It uses Tracker, which is written in C. It's not on by default in Natilius, either.
8. Gnome has looked and acted nearly the same for six years. It gets assaulted for that. That's vision. It also has a strict HIG.
9. The Gnome Foundation has elections. That's not community governance?

LXDE does virtually nothing. That's why it's fast. Don't pretend that Image Viewer has the same features that EOG does, or that LXDE has a document viewer, or a video player, or any of the hundred other things that Gnome has that LXDE doesn't. Deskbar? Heck, LXDE doesn't even have a browser.

If LXDE on Debian does everything you want, you must not want to do much. Either that, or you install a bunch of extra stuff to make up the difference.

And, yes, I know what I'm talking about. I use LXDE (on Sid) at home and Gnome (via Ubuntu 9.04) at work.

I was trying to figure out what he is talking about. Specifically, which major desktop redisigns Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu are planning.

For kde, the "social desktop" thing, is just a bunch of desktop tools for helping users enter the kde user/developer community. May be cool or not, I don't know, but it's not a redisign of the desktop.

For gnome, the new thing is the "gnome shell". The screencasts here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Screencasts show that it looks pretty cool. I think it may even be useful. But again, from the user's perspective, it's not a radical redisign of the desktop. There are huge changes under the hood, and 3d-desktop effects are leveraged hopefully for something that is not just pretty but also useful.

About Ubuntu... I don't know what the guy is specifically talking about. The one thing I have seen so far is the new way that Ubuntu does notification icons. And I like it, I think it is much less intrusive than previous ways, and I just wish Thunderbird and Skype and other programs that do things "their own way" would also start using it.

I would recommend you the Treestyle tabs addon for firefox. (see a screenshot)

The plugin moves your tabs to the left (similar position as the history panel, but without replacing the panel, that way you can open other left-panels like scrapbook, history, etc in addition).

Doing this achieves three things:
1. You get more vertical space which usually is limited in today's "wide screen" computer craze.
2. Your tabs get "ordered" in a hierarchy (I like CTRL+clicking on the slashdot stories I want to comment/lose time, they get opened as sub-nodes of the main slashdot page)
3. You can have more tabs opened and see the more of the title (about 30 on a 1024 veritcal res.)

I have found this extension quite useful. The only drawback is that you must get used to move the mouse to the *left* when looking for your tabs, I got used to that after about 1 week of usage.

Another one:
http://projects.gnome.org/rhythmbox/screenshots/rb-auto-playlist.png
Why do I have to click on the speaker icon to adjust the volume? This is GNOME with all their HIG and make everything simple arguments! I know if I had a wheel mouse I could hover over it and scroll BUT why should I have to? Perfectly fine example of not getting it - I mean this is a dedicated music player and one of the most important control elements is sort of hidden.

Definately innovating too much...

Gtk does for the most part comply with the Gnome Accessibility API, it just takes some extra tagging and some other extras listed there, certainly not entire re-writes in most cases. Have a look at Glade. While you have to look a little bit in the interface, the accessibility stuff is right there, and basically amounts to making sure everything is labeled for screen readers, etc. I realize Glade may not be what you want to work in, then just go with GTK+. Ok, that has drawbacks sure, but the accessibility part is mostly solved.

Gnome has a decent accessibility framework and apps. Orca is the screen reader and it's pretty decent, but it crashes too much. When it runs, it pretty much works as well or better than JAWS or WindoEyes (the other option on Windows) from what little I know, but doesn't sound quite as good. Sun contributed a ton of the work for bringing Gnome accessibility up to the level it is at, I doubt it would be anywhere near that good without them. I don't think KDE really has anything remotely at the same level.

There is no decent OCR software yet which is necessary for certain visual disabilities, but ocropus is progressing. There is definitely no decent speech recognition as far as I know.

So yes, there is a lot of work to do, part of the problem is that accessibility is a relatively niche problem, and open source really shines on apps and projects that have wide appeal and thus a larger chance of attracting many eyes to look at the code and to help improve it. I'd really love to have an computer that could entirely be controlled without a screen using the screen reader software, but Orca is not yet quite up to the challenge. But at least it doesn't cost $1,000 like JAWS and WindowEyes and it's getting there.

But the submitter's point is good, there does need to be more contribution to this type of thing because these technologies are incredibly liberating for people with disabilities. Even though Orca isn't perfect, you can sit a blind person down at a Linux computer with up to date Gnome setup with accessibility and show them how to use it and they can navigate web pages and interact with many apps that follow the Gnome accessibility API This just happens to be the area I know most about, the submitter, clearly is coming in from another area, but the benefits are similar.

Gnome has a decent accessibility framework and apps. Orca is the screen reader and it's pretty decent, but it crashes too much. When it runs, it pretty much works as well or better than JAWS or WindoEyes (the other option on Windows) from what little I know, but doesn't sound quite as good. Sun contributed a ton of the work for bringing Gnome accessibility up to the level it is at, I doubt it would be anywhere near that good without them. I don't think KDE really has anything remotely at the same level.

There is no decent OCR software yet which is necessary for certain visual disabilities, but ocropus is progressing. There is definitely no decent speech recognition as far as I know.

So yes, there is a lot of work to do, part of the problem is that accessibility is a relatively niche problem, and open source really shines on apps and projects that have wide appeal and thus a larger chance of attracting many eyes to look at the code and to help improve it. I'd really love to have an computer that could entirely be controlled without a screen using the screen reader software, but Orca is not yet quite up to the challenge. But at least it doesn't cost $1,000 like JAWS and WindowEyes and it's getting there.

But the submitter's point is good, there does need to be more contribution to this type of thing because these technologies are incredibly liberating for people with disabilities. Even though Orca isn't perfect, you can sit a blind person down at a Linux computer with up to date Gnome setup with accessibility and show them how to use it and they can navigate web pages and interact with many apps that follow the Gnome accessibility API This just happens to be the area I know most about, the submitter, clearly is coming in from another area, but the benefits are similar.

Gnome has a decent accessibility framework and apps. Orca is the screen reader and it's pretty decent, but it crashes too much. When it runs, it pretty much works as well or better than JAWS or WindoEyes (the other option on Windows) from what little I know, but doesn't sound quite as good. Sun contributed a ton of the work for bringing Gnome accessibility up to the level it is at, I doubt it would be anywhere near that good without them. I don't think KDE really has anything remotely at the same level.

There is no decent OCR software yet which is necessary for certain visual disabilities, but ocropus is progressing. There is definitely no decent speech recognition as far as I know.

So yes, there is a lot of work to do, part of the problem is that accessibility is a relatively niche problem, and open source really shines on apps and projects that have wide appeal and thus a larger chance of attracting many eyes to look at the code and to help improve it. I'd really love to have an computer that could entirely be controlled without a screen using the screen reader software, but Orca is not yet quite up to the challenge. But at least it doesn't cost $1,000 like JAWS and WindowEyes and it's getting there.

But the submitter's point is good, there does need to be more contribution to this type of thing because these technologies are incredibly liberating for people with disabilities. Even though Orca isn't perfect, you can sit a blind person down at a Linux computer with up to date Gnome setup with accessibility and show them how to use it and they can navigate web pages and interact with many apps that follow the Gnome accessibility API This just happens to be the area I know most about, the submitter, clearly is coming in from another area, but the benefits are similar.

20 minutes? I downloaded the source tarball in 10 seconds.

Homes in rural areas of the United States[1] often can't get cable or DSL Internet. So a 10-second download would mean 40 KB, not the 6 MB of the current Tomboy 0.14.2 release found here.

[1] The United States is home of Slashdot and Software in the Public Interest. People who live in rural areas grow the food that you eat.

... and then they screw it all up anyway by insisting that a terminal window must have close buttons on every single tab.

"He acknowledged two concerns for smartbooks are the lack of native support for Adobe Flash on ARM and the fragmentation of Linux application environments. However, he said solutions to both issues are in the works." Emphasis in bold mine.

The notion of "fragmentation" being a negative attribute of open source software is idiotic. What you call fragmentation, I call freedom. If somebody doesn't like the window manager on their computer, they can change it to one they do like. Or, in the worst case, they can make their own. You simply can't do that (and many other things) effectively or efficiently on a proprietary system with One Blessed User Interface.

You can't have an open source ecosystem that isn't "fragmented" in the first place, so fighting it is pointless. Every person is going to have a different idea of how a particular line of code should be written, let alone how an entire project should be structured. They are going to arrive at different solutions and are going to prefer their own solutions to others'. It's competition and, in a way, rather like natural selection. The software that solves the problem the best, wins. If there is no clear winner, then at least there are multiple alternatives for users and developers to choose from. I will keep preaching this on Slashdot and everywhere else until it finally sinks in: If you don't want the freedom that open source offers, then don't use it. Really, you won't be hurting anyone's feelings by not jumping on the Linux buzzwagon.

Now, these are folks doing very serious work with Linux. Many Slashdoters have said the same things only to be branded as trolls. I can see a future for Android if Google continues to do a good job.

The difference between the trolls and Google is that Google is doing something about their complaints. Rather than bitching and doing, the trolls were just bitching, which is a very trollish thing to do hence they were correctly modded as such.

Also, doesn't it strike you as rather hypocritical that Google would bemoan the fragmentation of the "Linux application environments" and then sets out to create their own? I mean, if fragmentation were really that big an issue for them, then they should have taken an existing solution like Hildon, Moblin, or Maemo and improved or extended it to get the features they wanted. Creating Android only increased the fragmentation of the Linux's mobile interface offerings.

on the server front Linux is doing fine, but on the desktop side, it needs some work.

I hope this Gnome Shell stuff helps attract Desktop users.

Maybe it's just eye-candy for nerds.. I can't tell the difference anymore.

Qt is written in C++ with non-standard add-ons to the core of the language which is passed through moc, a pre-processor, that converts those non-standard elements into compliant C++ code that gcc can process.

I fail to see how this is any different from macro expansion. Other than the simple fact that macro expansion is defined in the C++ standard and moc is not.

The "special-purpose nonsense pre-compiling tools" are there to make building your program easier. Besides, GTK+ not only came up with "special-purpose nonsense pre-compiling tools," they came up with a whole language to ease the development with their toolkit.

I'm not going to bash GNOME people for doing what they feel is needed to increase the productivity of their programmers, I'd hope you'd be kind enough to do the same for the Qt people. ;-)

Finally, you're not required to use the Qt signal-slot system. You can use any callback system you like sigc++, boost, etc... Same case with GTK+.

GNOME has human interface guidelines and has had them since 1.0. If Ben Goodger is bitching about GTK+/GNOME not having consistent UI guidelines, it's because it's not consistent with whatever his vision is. In my opinion, GNOME is a heck of a lot more consistent than MacOSX's Steve-Jobs-whim-of-the-day, and-- let's not even get started on the Windows UI fustercluck. Of course, if he's talking about KDE... well, OK. KDE's interface is... odd.

I have an old GTK book somewhere that says that the developers based their HIG on the original Macintosh HIG (that the MacOS now no longer follows), which was actually based on user-feedback and also based in part on the Xerox Star. That's a pretty long lineage when it comes to GUI.

The complaint about Mozilla having a functionless 511MB executable after switching to GTK+ has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ is not exactly lightweight, but it ain't exactly a bloated beast either.

Complaints about audio are well-founded, though. Audio in Linux still sucks.

GNOME has human interface guidelines and has had them since 1.0. If Ben Goodger is bitching about GTK+/GNOME not having consistent UI guidelines, it's because it's not consistent with whatever his vision is. In my opinion, GNOME is a heck of a lot more consistent than MacOSX's Steve-Jobs-whim-of-the-day, and-- let's not even get started on the Windows UI fustercluck. Of course, if he's talking about KDE... well, OK. KDE's interface is... odd.

I have an old GTK book somewhere that says that the developers based their HIG on the original Macintosh HIG (that the MacOS now no longer follows), which was actually based on user-feedback and also based in part on the Xerox Star. That's a pretty long lineage when it comes to GUI.

The complaint about Mozilla having a functionless 511MB executable after switching to GTK+ has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ is not exactly lightweight, but it ain't exactly a bloated beast either.

Complaints about audio are well-founded, though. Audio in Linux still sucks.

I guess the guy that used to be the lead developer of Firefox may know better than you and me.

Perhaps the problem is that the lead developer of Firefox ignored that HIG in making Firefox. From Wikipedia: "Mozilla Firefox's user interface, for example, goes against the GNOME project's HIG, which is one of the main arguments for including Epiphany instead of Firefox in the GNOME distribution." No doubt there were reasons for the choice taken in Firefox development, but the consequences include a lot of bloat and reinvented square wheels.

Because GTK+ comes with a HIG included... not.

GNOME, on the other hand, does have an HIG.

Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.

- First as you said yourself in your follow-up : KOffice is part of the KDE software that can be installed on Windows with their package manager.

- OpenOffice.org
Installs on Windows with a very standard installer.
The only minor problem in my opinion is getting the plugins. It uses the kind of plugin manager as the older versions of FireFox (you can't directly search and browse the installable plugins from there, you have to go to a website first). Also the plugin manager doesn't help you to restart the "quicklaunch" if a restart is needed.
It cool be great if I could install LanguageTool with a simple click from within the manager, the same way as AdBlock+ in recent versions of Firefox. But I'm nit-picking. Back to the subject.

- Gnome Office :
It's not an actual suite, its a lose collection of separate software that cover the needs of an Office suit. All use the same library underneath (GTK+) which has been ported to windows since ages (back at the begining of the GIMP on Windows port). As such you can find installers for :
- AbiWord (word processing)
- Gnumeric (spreadsheet whose accurate statistic formula are done in collaboration with R projet)
(and probably other GTK stuff if you need them).
In fact, as they are small separate software with a very small footprint (compared to behemoths like OO.o), they are quite popular and often recommended for people wanting to build for free small lightweight Windows installation on underpowered hardware.

- For the VI vs. Emacs flamewar combatant out there (the kind who'll immediately scream that they don't need an actual office suite as every needed function and even more is available in some Emacs mode/Vim plugin), both softwares are also available for Windows, if that's your kick. (And yes, I'm not sarcastic. I'm definitely sure that here on /. you'll find at least a dozen of people who can be more productive with a complex emacs-based stack).

So as we can see, the three major players of Linux/BSD's office suites (and the two editors behind most holy wars) are installable on Windows (and on Mac OS X for that matters too).
Yes they are indeed cross-platform.

KOffice was more of a problem until recently the whole KDE switched to Qt4 during is 4.x branch and took opportunity of the major overhaul to be rebuilt with cross-platfrom portability in mind.

Not exactly, they all use goffice libs which links them together and if You check http://live.gnome.org/GnomeOffice You will see that it's not just abiword and gnumeric. And why do You expect all the "office suites" to be just like M$ counterpart ?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Anjuta yet. I've tried it a couple of years back and found it quite usable. It may not be as sophisticated as MSVS or Eclipse, but is somewhat like dev-cpp, which has been mentioned. The latter being for Windows, I wonder what platform /. posters actually use/develop for !

It's an interesting point you make.
Currently it's worth avoiding netbooks that have the following hardware:

1. Intel GMA500 aka Poulsbo graphics chipsets. There is no FOSS driver for these. That's because there's a PowerVR core in them. The Fedora Project's Adam Williamson seems to have found some partial drivers hidden away in a quiet little Ubuntu repository where they were dumped by the Intel team. But success seems partial. So for now avoid anything with GMA500.

2. Broadcom wireless. Again avoid these Broadcom 4322 like the fscking plague. Dan Williams (again a Red Hat / Fedora person) has a fairly scathing take on them based on his experiences of trying to get suspend/resume and wireless to work consistently.

3. Elantech touchpads. Bastien Nocera (what is it with all those Red Hat people, don't they like closed-source binary drivers?) may have had some success at wringing some code out of Ubuntu and Intel people to share with the rest of us, but it still seems uncertain.

4. CPU. The Intel Z-series draw less power than the N-series apparently.

5. RAM expansion. Lots of the netbooks have a single, soldered slot. So if you like being stuck with 1GB of RAM while you try to run OpenOffice.org-3 then go ahead, have fun.

So, the bottom line is that the Dell Mini 10v might be OK as regards the graphics (it's GMA950) which in turn means that it doesn't do HDMI and has an unfortunately lower vertical resolution than the Mini10v, but the wireless sucks and the touchpad probably sucks, the RAM is fixed too low.

Looking at the HP Mini 1000s its difficult to tell what wireless they use. Graphics are GMA950 unlike the older HP2133 which used Chrome9 graphics chipsets for which VIA has failed to release FOSS drivers.

Seems like a lot of the netbook producers (even those such as Intel, Dell and Ubuntu that pay lipservice to "Open Source") are having a hard time being honest and straightforward with us.

I have to agree that there are still maturity-problems. I have been using Ubuntu since "edgy", and each version since then has contained at least one annoying bug - a bug that would not be fixed until the next version.

For example, with "jaunty" I have at least three bugs related to pulseaudio that shows up on a daily basis. And a new notification-system that is so far from being ready that I would not even consider it as beta. These things were working fine in "intrepid"

With "intrepid", Evolution was more or less unusable due to some cache-bug (deleting the cache-folder resolved it for about a week at a time). Not a problem in "hardy" and fixed in "jaunty". This version also made Java-applications with a GTK interface so slow they became unusable (I used a few on a regular basis). This is still not fixed.

Before that, i experienced regressions with windows that would move on restart, windows that would refuse to open om my second screen, crashing media players, crackling sound and a few other annoyances - everything stuff that were working in the previous version.

And not to forget, this frequently requested feature has not been fixed in over six years!

But in my opinion, the sum of the pains are about the same with Windows and Ubuntu - so I'm sticking with Ubuntu and buy some beer to relax with for the money I save.

Sounds like you might be interested in SuSE's patterns. Supposedly PackageKit will be doing this stuff in the near future too.

I think you might be able to solve that problem with YUM by defining your own groups in a comp file for your own repository (or spin of Fedora) (see this link and also search "man yum.conf" for group_package_types) and choosing to make your hypothetical standard library a "Default" package type.

Not quite as simple as .deb Suggests, Enhances and Recommends but still do-able and PackageKit "bundles" will supposedly be even simpler and address exactly your hypothetical example

Not going to happen. But the gnome-panel thing is in line for overhaul. cf. GnomeShell.

"Other thing I love is how the 3G support is amazing. No more messing around with ppp or weird vodafone apps, just plug the dongle in, pick your network and go. Really smooth."

Brought to you mostly by the fine Dan Williams of Red Hat: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/ , http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/log/ .

(disclaimer: I work at RH too).

I haven't used foxit very much but of the pdf readers I've tried (evince, kpdf, epdfview, xpdf), evince evince seems to behave closest to what I would expect a pdf/document reader to behave.

I did eventually get my Linux to connect to the ISP, but the compression engine/accelerator refuses to run, which makes everything extremely slow (50k versus ~500k).

Toonel.net seems to be a cross-platform web accelerator. May be worth a try.

Another problem happened when I changed my resolution to 1024x800 - when I tried to change it back to 1280x1024 the dialog box was too big, and I couldn't access the OK button since it was offscreen. I'm still stuck at the wrong resolution.

This is different in different window managers, but there is usually a key you can hold down to move windows more easily. Try holding down alt, grabbing the window near the bottom and dragging it until the button is visible.

Or just change it from the terminal, by typing: xrandr --mode 1024x800

(With Windows pressing the enter button auto-selects OK, but not with Linux.)

This derives from IBM's Common User Access standard. GNOME's interface guidelines (which should apply to the Ubuntu program you're running) also mention this, but don't explicitly stress always setting the OK button as default. So it's probably a bug.

So I think I'm going to use the WinXP Restore CD to wipe Linux off my laptop. From what I can see, XP and Mac OS are both more user-friendly than Ubuntu.

Yes, this is the problem with trying to build a copy of the Windows GUI: the small differences put people off. But if you want to assemble a more customized environment out of different components, Linux can be much nicer environment.

I just switched from a Mac to a system running Arch Linux with Window Maker as the window manager (no GNOME or KDE). It's a bit fiddlier to set up than the Mac, but much cleaner and lighter.

Have you tried GnomeOffice? AbiWord and Gnumeric are pretty good.

The only reason I keep OO.o is for MS Office files that don't get rendered properly.

That does sound slow. On my Ubuntu 8.10 machine (2.7GHz Opteron) FileChooser shows /usr/bin (2,500 files) for the first time in about 4s. This time is mostly (I think) to load the icons for all the files. Subsequent visits are very quick (under a second?). Logging out and in again makes it slower for the first visit again.

A lot of work went into filechooser performance, mostly by the wonderful Federico. He has an interesting technical blog here:

http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news.html

Both KDE and GNOME follow the same basic cycle: large dramatic changes in infrastructure and layout are followed by years of relatively small, incrememental changes. How many years did KDE go between 2.0 and 4.0? (KDE 3.0 was a break in ABI but the infrastructure and layout were largely the same.) And how many years have there between GNOME 2.0 and the planned GNOME 3.0 next year?

The big difference right now is that KDE made their big change last year and are now incrementally fixing, improving things. GNOME, on the other hand, are working on their big change, which will land next year. The cycle is the same, but the two projects are on different parts of this cycle right now.

There are a couple smaller differences, as well. First, as I understand it, KDE developed many parts of their new infrastructure for a couple years, and this infrastructure landed for use at KDE 4.0. GNOME seems to be inserting many pieces of its new infrastructure in the GNOME 2.x cycle before putting all the new pieces together in GNOME 3.0. On the one hand, this means that the various pieces will (hopefully) get more testing, and thus more bugfixing, before 3.0. On the other hand, 3.0 becomes a little bit less exciting because piece x and piece y are not exactly new. The second difference is that Qt underwent a big overhaul for its 4.x series, which forms the basis of KDE 4.0, whereas GTK 3.0 will be cleaned up, rather than radically changed.

This does not mean that big new technologies are not going to be in GNOME 3.0. Clutter, gjs, seed, and gnome introspection, to take a few examples, are separate libraries that will form the backbone of GNOME 3.0. It seems to me that tech journalists hear the news about GTK+ 3.0 and decide that GNOME 3.0 will have no changes. That should not be the case at all: next generation GNOME shell.

But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems.

GNOME replaces legacy sub-systems, too. For example Bonobo with D-Bus, GnomeVFS with GIO, libglade with GtkBuilder, etc. The GIO port is almost done: http://live.gnome.org/GioPort I don't see why supporting a subsystem until it is fully replaced by another drags down development.

Wrong, with the sole exception of those xscreensaver hacks that display the window and hence could display sensitive information.

The FAQ gives the developer's justification for denying the user all configurability. It's worth a look.

Wrong.

That was done because the old way is a security risk.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316654

There are already open source projects for this kind of functionality.

PackageKit already have a basic start for something like this.

The web frontend for PackageKit can be further developed. The web software developers should be encouraged to develop simple web based configuration for their applications.

Easy to configure web based applications with PackageKit based package management have a lot of positive aspects.
PackageKit - Main Page
PackageKit - Screenshots

Installing public web pages from tarballs has always been a major potential security problem. It makes total sense to use the distros packages and security maintenance for web applications.

We use the MIME type of the file which is determined by sniffing the content.

When IE does it, the press calls it risky. Besides, you don't always sniff the content: this page describes MIME information files and the glob element in the shared-mime-info namespace, both of which go based on (yup) extensions. And this page on file sniffers appears not to describe how to handle files that are identified by a string of bytes at the end, rather than at the beginning.

And what happens when an app creates a file type that your sniffer doesn't know about? I looked at what it takes to register a new application, and it appears that Windows and Mac OS (even since Mac OS 1) do a lot of these things automatically by sniffing the executable.

We use the MIME type of the file which is determined by sniffing the content.

When IE does it, the press calls it risky. Besides, you don't always sniff the content: this page describes MIME information files and the glob element in the shared-mime-info namespace, both of which go based on (yup) extensions. And this page on file sniffers appears not to describe how to handle files that are identified by a string of bytes at the end, rather than at the beginning.

And what happens when an app creates a file type that your sniffer doesn't know about? I looked at what it takes to register a new application, and it appears that Windows and Mac OS (even since Mac OS 1) do a lot of these things automatically by sniffing the executable.