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Linux Development Call To Arms
Hell O'World writes "This ZDNet Article points to the direction that Linux developers need to follow. Many people think that Linux needs an Office clone to gain acceptance, but the truth is that monolithic software is not the future. To get all of the functionality that anyone could possibly need in one place, the Office paradigm is to have everything there at once, and that takes a huge amount of resources to load, and years to learn. Linux will not gain converts by giving users the same thing, that they will then have to relearn. The power of UNIX is in connecting small, fleet-footed tools. What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work, and developers can easily add new functionality."
... if the approach was changed from RTFM to a little friendlier attack.
There's alot of stability under Linux, and for that I'm grateful, but when I have 50 collegues and 2 sets of grandparents that I have to keep in contact- it's MS WORD... or Excel... or Power Point.
But maybe a rallying point is all thats needed? I don't know- star Office wasn't too hot... write idea, wrong approach.
Basically, Apple's idea was to build small software components that could talk to each other and be loaded as necessary to accomplish specific tasks.
It was a great idea, and still is. I think the problem isn't so much the technology implementation as it is getting developers to see the benefits of such an approach.
Yes, developers. If you're running a software company, creating small components allows you less room to innovate on features. This in turn makes it more difficult to market your products.
I know your suggestion was that Linux adopt such a component-based approach for productivity apps, and it wouldn't seem that the limitations of the commercial world would apply. But the dominant paradigm in office computing is still the monolithic app, because that's what commercial developers are providing.
So for now at least, Linux developers will probably have to fight this fight alone. In order to convince users to make the shift away from MS Office, et. al., Linux apps have to offer a solution that's easier to use and faster by a factor of at least two. It's been shown time and time again that in order to overthrow a paradigm, the resulting benefits have to be not just incrementally better, but exponentially better.
Finally, is it even worth the effort? See the October issue of Wired, for an article by former Red Hatter Russ Mitchell, about why going after the desktop is a bad idea.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Two things to say about this. First of all, the "unix model" of streams of data is absurd when talking about interactive applications. Do I need to set up a filter to insert a table into my document? Now, I know that that there are those of you who use LaTeX with a stream model to spell-check, etc, but I'm sorry -- you are living a crude, stone-age world. I like having my mispelled words underlined. The green-screen luddites need to get a clue.
Second of all, apparently this guy has no clue how Office works. Office is not a monolithic application. It's a big collection of COM components. That's why you can embed a spreadsheet into Word, or the Equation editor anywhere, or a Visio sheet into Powerpoint.
I'm fundamentally a command-line guy. I use Unix streams all day long, and hardly ever use debuggers. But this is just stupid.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Microsoft's Universal Canvas
MS didn't have the balls to upgrade office with something that was revolutionary instead of evolutionary.
MS comes up with a lot of great ideas, but, as a publicly traded company, doesn't have the nuts to execute on them.
Small?
Fleet footed?
Try inserting 50 equations onto a page.
Watch your file size and memory usage.
I tried to write a CS report in word once, rather than TeX, just for kicks, and after 10 equations, the file size was multiple megabytes.
I call it the I Just Want to Type a Damn Letter test: can the user turn on the computer for the first time, understand the basics of how to operate in a few minutes, then get to work on things they want to do? If not, we'll meet with resistance at every step.
Soegaard provides some nice ideas on how to structure the back-end, but the front-end needs to Give the People What They Want: an interface to do word processing, another to do email, another for web browsing, and a few others for other less-common tasks. That is what is going to help open source win the battle of the desktop.
Miko O'Sullivan
Nah, just send them the document in its native form. If they complain that they can't open it, just tell them they will have to get OpenOffice.
It's what the Word users did to me for years. In college, I had to go to a computer lab to type my resume, instead of using ApplixWare, because dumb companies wanted it in Word format.
If that's acceptable behavior for MS Office users, it's acceptable behavior for you. Word format isn't the standard. Standards aren't owned.
That may be the case, but it seems to me that the way those skinned COM controls work isn't the way tools like "grep" and "sort" work. Word isn't an editor that calls up a spell-checker when needed, pipes things to a printing subsystem later, uses a word-counter-tool when needed, etc. It is a monolithic thing that (seemingly at least) runs all those tools at the same time. Something monolithic must be starting, otherwise why does Word take so long to load, even on the fastest machine?
/usr/bin such as grep which can be combined in different ways to do different things?
More to the point, why does everything need to be built into another layer of abstraction from the operating system? Why can't the spellchecker be used on a text file in notepad? Why can't Word highlight a piece of code automatically since I have Visual Studio on my computer?
Why, in fact, do we need "Yet another GUI" on top of the Desktop GUI that we already have?
Perhaps a real cool solution would be to stop treating the desktop as "Something that's there to be a host to other programs" and more as "something that's there to let me get my job done".
As an example, when you think of the command line, do you think of bash, or do you think of all of those useful utilities is
Well, this might be a little bit off topic.
I tend to think that to make people use Linux, an office application is not at the top of the list.
All they need is being able to install any application without the hassle of grabbing gazillion of obscure libraries and rpm's. Not to mention that most will have version number incompatible with the one used by your window manager/web browser/mail client.
They also want to use their usb digital camera without any command line tool.
Once you get that, and you manage to carry out all operations without opening a single shell and logging in as root, think of an office application as a priority.
Sorry, I consider myself as an advanced user, and I tried to use Linux on a daily basis. This is simply too inconvenient. Now I'm back to windows 2000.
came exnihilo, going back there soon