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Fontconfig 2.0 Released
david_g writes "Keith Packard released version 2.0 of Fontconfig. Fontconfig is "a library for configuring and customizing font access". It can "discover new fonts when installed automatically, removing a common source of configuration problems", among other nifty functionalities. It comes with Xft2, and there are patches for GTK, Mozilla, and QT3 being readied. Another small step towards world domination..."
World Domination?! Is that was this is all about? I thought it was the ticket line for LotR: Two Towers... damn, now I have to find the real line and start all over again!
Nosce te Ipsum
every font problem stems from one simple problem... People and programs throw fonts anywhere and everywhere...
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/ or wherever the Xfree86 people say then the problem is solved.. the font server can easily look for new fonts.
if you forced everyone to put fonts in
Linux and X suffer from the fact that too many people are allowed to do it their way... it's time to start forcing things to make simple things like fonts easier.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hardly... You forgot a strong equivalent to DirectX to give games a place to migrate to (sorry, a mix of OpenGL + some sound library doesn't equate to DirectX).
Then there's _one_ unified sound standard (I think Linux has four or five now), because a sound card cannot serve two masters. Single standards for the clipboard, adding/removing menu items from the desktop "Start" menu, mime type associations, adding of control panels, event sounds, display of notification icons in the desktop toolbar, registration of keyboard shortcuts that cut across all applications (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+I means "get the next instant message" and it will get back to the right program no matter if I'm in OpenOffice right now or Mozilla). And all of those standards have to be agreed upon and fully supported by both KDE and Gnome so I can know that all my applications will cooperate nicely with one another and my choice of desktop doesn't equal choice of application interoperability.
Desktop success for Linux is not impossible, far from it, but few people are paying attention to the mounds of things that are _really_ important to giving a typical end user a choice other than Windows vs. Mac OS X (a battle that we already know who wins 95% of the time).
Sigs are for people who started using the net _after_ '86.