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Japan Subsidizes Linux Development, Considers Switch
TheAB writes "Japan is betting 50 million yen ($450k US) that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software. The money is to develop an 'operating system for consumer electronics goods'."
There are lots of browser choices, but there is no one reasonable default choice that can be made available to users. And many of the browsers have something wrong with them.
Konqueror is great - but it has had showstopping bugs in the last two major versions. 2.2.2 had a horrible bug which caused it to lock up sometimes when selecting any text in an input box. I set up Red Hat boxes for numerous friends and coworkers, and trying to explain why the primary browser locked up so often was quite difficult. I thought 3.0 would save us, but alas - it has an even worse bug whereby forms submit incorrectly about 1 time in 5, causing most functionality-oriented sites (including the TrustCommerce merchant admin site) to be completely unusable. My other major complaint with Konq is its jerky page updates: clicking a link will cause a big white box to suddenly obscure part of the current page - compare to Mozilla which updates the display very cleanly. 3.0 was significantly better on this front, but it's still enough of a problem to hurt the user experience. Finally, it's still slow when you have a lot of browser windows open. The worst is when you middle-click a link to a large PNG image (say, the screenshots on the GNOME site). I minimize the window while the image is loading, but in the meantime my other browser windows become _very_ unresponsive; trying to scroll is jerky and difficult. Very unpleasant.
Mozilla-based browsers are the best. They render most pages correctly and enjoy the support of being the basis for Netscape. However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant. Galeon is the best browser currently available, to my mind, but the lack of anti-aliased fonts keeps me going back to Konqueror. Opera is good but commercial, and suffers badly from the default fonts being ugly.
Solution? Browser developers need to focus on removing the remaining impediments to user-friendliness. Konq needs to be faster and smoother in its display, and stop shipping with major bugs that make it nearly unusable. Mozilla needs to get better desktop integration (such as letting you specify your mail client and ditching that lame file dialog for the default GTK dialog) and anti-aliased fonts for rendering. Whichever browser is the first to come to completeness on these points should then be chosen as the default by distributions. It's a tight race, and one that will no doubt be won in the next couple of months. Hopefully it will be a tie - having several 'best' browsers would be awesome!
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
If you accidentally cut the power to your desktop at the wrong moment, here's what happens. The system boots, tries to scan the filesystem, can't recover the journal, and panics. You are prompted to enter the root password, and then you're expected to type some cryptic commands like "fsck
Think it's better server-side? No: it's much, much worse. Now when a machine hardlocks (say, due to hardware that is overheating due to heavy load - a common scenario if you're using standard PC hardware and your webserver gets
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
For years I struggled with
Printer install should work like this. You run the printer install program, and it gives you two choices: "Set up a printer attached to my computer", and "Set up a printer from the network." The first choice looks in
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Most Linux distributions come with a ton of applications, development tools, and support for all sorts of fancy devices. But none of this is very obvious when you boot into KDE or GNOME for the first time. The menu contains a few apps but they are scattered about and don't have names that reveal what they do. The vast majority of tools on the system aren't even in the menus. We need to make it easy for a new user to find out how to do stuff with their shiny new OS, without having to do a web search to find out.
This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop. Windows comes with an email client, a crap browser, and Freecell. MacOS has the same, but iTunes in place of Freecell. You really can't do much with a default install of either OS. On the other hand, Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software. Let's make this obvious! Here's how.
There should be an "I want to..." dialog (though this can be turned off if you're an advanced user). It should be a large icon on the desktop which is very obvious to any user. Clicking it will open the dialog. At the top is written the text, "I want to..." and below are a long list of things that you can do with your system. These might need to be grouped by expandable categories, as the list could get very long. Here are a few things I suggest:
- Browse the web
- Read email
- Chat (IRC/AOL/Yahoo/Jabber/...)
- Burn a CD
- Install a printer
- Set up a modem
- Set up a DSL or cable modem
- Make my computer serve web pages
- Share my files with others on my local network (NFS)
- Access someone else's shared files (NFS)
- Download pictures from my digital camera (GPhoto)
- Paint a picture or touch up a photograph (Gimp)
ELX is the one distro I have seen that tries something like this, but it suffers from the same problem as the KDE & GNOME menus: it gives you a list of programs you can run, instead of tasks that you can do. People use computers to do things, not to run programs.5. Cleaner redraws.
This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it's a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. Even on a slower system, it still appears very "clean" - the window just takes a little while to appear. But you don't see any ugly drawing artifacts in the meantime. Mac OS X is great.
The latest version of Windows is not bad; mostly I think this is due to the fast speed of modern hardware coupled with the minimal eye candy that the OS offers. Things like the file explorer still don't update all at once, but it's a minor point; they've mostly got it right.
KDE, on the other hand, continues to flicker and pop. Here's a key example: click on the "home" icon in your menu bar. The window pops onscreen, but many of the drawing elements (the files themselves, but many widgets) are temporarily drawn as large white or grey boxes. A split second later the full images appear. Even on a high-end system it looks a little funny; on a slow system it looks terrible.
This is not a functionality issue, so in many ways its not that important. But it is a "user experience" issue; people coming from Mac OS X or even Windows will find their experience a little less pleasant, and that makes them less likely to come back.
6. Die stray processes, die!
In Linux when a process messes up you can exit X, drop to a console, and start running "killall kdeinit", "killall mozilla", etc, but this is lame and for non-technical users it boils down to the same thing. Possible solution: when in X, WM should keep track of processes and the windows they are attached to. When an app has no windows concat(or the main window is not open), the WM should attempt to kill them (first normally, then with -9). This functionality could be configured for debugging whereby instead of killing them, it attaches gdb to the process so that developers could figure out why there are stray processes.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Ideally a right-click on a directory and chose "share this directory". Be able to pull up a list of all folders you are sharing and change permissions or remove the sharing.
8. Sound support.
OSS was great a few years ago and continues to offer support for modern cards (including professional quality ones such as the Midiman Delta 1010, which is what I have) but it is commercial and it is showing its age. ALSA is a superior solution and has been rolled into the dev kernel. Once it makes its way into the stable kernel and distros start using it uniformly (Mandrake and SuSE have offered it for some time now) along with a good configuration tool, audio on Linux will rock.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it's one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution's message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I've tried - Kate, GEdit, and even vi - only support "hard wrapping", where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. Then when you insert more words into the paragraph later, the formatting gets all screwy.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This varies by distribution, but I the resolution issue is a common one. (The only distro I have seen that does it right was Corel 1.0. You could change your resolution from the KDE control panel. However, I believe this is because they were using the commercial X server Metro-X.) It boggles my mind that, after all these years, the best way to configure X is to run Xconfigurator from the console! This is perhaps the longest running embarrassment of the free software desktop.
We've actually ported Linux internally to the GameCube hardware, and it runs pretty well... but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it. Many of the functions of Linux, such as multiprocess management, memory protection and the like are not necessary on a game console. We've done performance metrics, and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go. Let the middleware companies such as NetImmerse and Intrinsic build on top of that.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Yeah and then what happens when someone hacks the code and the microwave blows up? I mean, personally I believe that's just evolution in action, but there are a lot of legal and social issues that will occur if all consumer electronics are using hackable open source software to run... It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
I read the fucking article. Go read it again, yourself. It mentioned the Japanese government was looking at Linux for digital consumer electronics, but the point I was referring to was the feasability study of switching the GOVERNMENT to an "Open source operating system".
Go fuck yourself.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai