Too Much Free Software

An anonymous reader writes "The plethora of Free Software applications available today, none working perfectly, is a problem which stands in the way of major adoption of Linux on the desktop. In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand united. Read the article on Freshmeat."

Comments

Re:Please.

[ahooton]

main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
exit(0);
}

Now you have seen it.

BZZZZZ! Wrong! Don, tell him what he could have won....

There are always ways programs are not perfect. For instance, the program above does not take in to account that stdout may not be available -- if that happens (it does, trust me), the program will either not give the intended result or it will die altogether (depending on the system it's built/run on).

The perfect program does not exists, not even yours...

Re:We do it for fun, don't we?

[arivanov]

Bollocks.

Depends what are you talking about.

If you are talking about a desktop editor - yes.

If you are talking abot a 1000000 dollar application that is to be used by 20-30 potential customers - no. ClearSales, SAP, telco level oice switching etc are a good example. They require up to 3-7 million per year worth of extensive fiddling with them to keep them working and useful for whoever bought them.

So stop seeing all software as a personal editor. It aint.

Re:Yeah but

[spinkham]

Film GIMP(now CinePaint) is NOTHING like Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is a non-linear video editor, CinePaint is a high dynamic range picture editor, basically just the Gimp with 64-bit RGBA color capability. Cinelerra is a non-linear editor, but not quite on par with Premiere IMHO. Kino and kdenlive are promising projects I have yet to use to do that same thing.

Re:one app, one desktop, one united front

[buffer-overflowed]

Okay, let's see if I can sum this up for you.

Let me first make the define libraries. Libraries are, sort of, predefined routines to save programmers time. The windows equivalent is the DLL file. Only under Linux drivers are either compiled into the OS or are modules that can be plugged in.

What most consider the Linux operating system consists of the Kernel, and the GNU tools at it's core. The entire system is exceptionally modular in nature.

The kernel handles everything from memory management, to task scheduling. It is the grand lord brain, translating everything from the plebian programs into action on the system. The kernel by itself would just sit there and do nothing, with no way to interact with the system.

The GNU tools are tools for interacting with the system, managing files, etc.

Everything else is stacked on top of this.

X is a series of libraries and programs that provide the core of the GUI for a linux system.

On top of this you stack various libraries which do various things within the X framework, GNOME and KDE are a set of tools and libraries that extend X and make it pretty.

Then you have programs that utilize all of the above.

So your typical program, like say OpenOffice has a series of dependancies on up the tree. Some of them require additional libraries.

This is why, with a little tweaking, you can have a BSD Kernel running a "Linux" program. Each part for the most part can be substituted for something else with a little work.

I hope I didn't ramble or was nonsensical there.