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Jamie Zawinski Switches to Mac OS X
iskander writes "After a disappointing experience with sound, Jamie Zawinski has finally given up on desktop Linux and switched to Mac OS X. The future of apps like xscreensaver and Gronk is now ``highly ambiguous''. He has already ditched a free/open platform before, but he seems a lot angrier this time. Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become."
and why should i care what OS he is running ?
maybe i should submit a story about what OS my neighbour runs, or perhaps his brother and wife
Okay, he has a preference. Why is this important? I use a lot of different OS for different purposes.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.
D'oh!
Join the Free Software Foundation
Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.
Mwah ha ha ha ha haaaa!
I hate to be a jerk, I loved all his negitive comments about Netscape/ Mozilla, and whatever else he works on, but it got old like 6 years ago.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
So someone is switching to OS-X? So what?? And this made the frontpage news? May I ask why? Is it happening so rarely that when one person makes the switch to OS-X it is a front page news?
This seems to me more like a desperate cry for attention in which Zawinski says he is switching platform in the hope that the Linux mob will cry "Don't leave us Jamie!" and he can then return in a blaze of glory. I really appreciate everything that he has done for OSS, and I hope others do too, but I can't condone something like this. Mod me troll you like, but he seems frighteningly cynical.
apterous.org
You got your LiveJournal linked on the front page of Slashdot. Now get your butt upstairs, Mom needs help with the dishes!
Is anyone sick of articles glorifying individuals who swap operating systems? This has got to be the most mundane non-news out there.
.. it DIDN'T go "beep beep beep".
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I suppose that explains CmdrTaco's subtitle "from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept."
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I also gave up and went for a Mac for exactly the same reason. It's unacceptable that in 2005 a Linux distribution (FC3, in my case) doesn't recognize a three-button+wheel USB mouse out-of-box or that setting up a TV card requires you to edit some config-files by hand.
The owls are not what they seem
..the artist formerly known as Essreenim now plays Duke Nukem Forever on GNU herd...
If some individuals would spend the time they do hunting down negative comments about Linux, to actually fix Linux, you wouldn't have to worry about people exposing how difficult Linux is for the average user. I'm all for bringing Linux to the mainstream and replacing Windows as the dominant OS, but that just won't happen until the average person can install their video games without calling tech support.
Slashdot lowers itself to new depths. Taco: you could've left this one.
Farewell, O ye of little faith.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Not JWZ, CmdrTaco for posting this.
The more you know, the less you understand.
Was suddenly pruned...
Come on, JWZ asked the people not to run to Slashdot about it, kindly honour his privacy request.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Mod parent up. This article is ridiculous! For the sake of Slashdot's credibility we shouldn't be seeing articles like this.
I have a Linux PC that I used to use for my source code editing. One night, I was writing some code on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole subroutine just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good screensaver! And it didn't even go beep beep beep because I couldn't get the sound card driver working. I had to cram and rewrite it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed screensaver wasn't nearly as good, and I blame that PC for that.
I'm happy to report I now run Apple OSX. It's a lot nicer to work on than my Linux PC was, it hasn't let me down once, and my grades have all been really good.
Thanks, Apple.
Jamie Zawinski
Mmm...we care about this guy, why? He sounds like a whiney brat (and I'm not even saying that 'cause of his views on Linux - I'm just saying it 'cause it's friggin' true).
Grow up, baby.
I think it is pretty telling that someone who has a lot of technical expertise has the same problems that a lot of us have had with desktop Linux. The problem is real, folks.
If Linux on the desktop is to survive, I really think there needs to be a major coordinated effort to get lots of things in line. Maybe some type of consortium that would facilitate dialog between different groups and/or state a common direction. It is really hard to build a solid desktop OS when you've got thousands of developers operating independently or in small groups. You might get a few good solid apps, but the OS itself is going to be a patchworked hodge-podge.
... you knew where to get the .torrent. :P
I'm fed up with the primative state of Linux sound, too.
1. Short timeout for writing passwords, what may make it difficult for some people to unlock the screen at all.
2. Stupid, delaying messages after entering the wrong password, as if the security delay by the authorization system was not enough.
3. Ugly, ugly, *ugly* logo.
4. Small, non-antialiased fonts in the password dialog, as if the screen space was so scarce when all other windows are hidden anyway.
Dear CNN: please don't report this. Screw you guys.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Why the fuck do we care?
1. Don't know.
2. Don't care.
So who is this guy and why should I care?
Also, he doesn't really care what the Linux crowd thinks, which is why he posted the remark about Slashdot.
Sigged!
No, he has NOT been twisted by the dark side, he has just been pissed off for the last time by Linux software which does not do the job.
We have a printer system that was developed for line printers and never matured.
We have a sound system that works most (but not all) of the time if you are lucky.
We have power management issues on laptops which Microsoft fixed in 1995.
And finally
I have a laptop running Red Hat 9 because Fedora 1, Fedora 2, Fedora 3 and SuSE 9.x all have so many major problems with their basic installation that the machine is unusable. My next laptop will be an Apple machine.
Instead of adding more features I for one would be grateful if the Linux software developers fixed existing software. Bug hunting is not sexy but it might avoid more incidents like this.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
Yes! And don't forget about those whose faith in the power of the open source is still weak. They might begin to falter in their faith if they see open source icon like Jamie openly discussing his loss of faith and subsequent defection to a non-free camp in public.
The owls are not what they seem
I've considered ditching my linux desktop for a mac box. Though I am not important or anything so me moving platforms would be moot. I don't have as much time to tinker as I used to, and these days I really want something that just works. And thats really what the mac desktop promises isnt it? It just works. But now that they are switching platforms, the idea of making the switch now seems like a bad idea. I like to keep machines way longer than I should, I still have a pentium 1 mmx running gentoo.. I fear that if I get a ppc mac that 6 years down the road I wont be able to find working applications for it.
bleh oh well. I guess I will consider switching again after they make the move to intel.
Because he asked them not to, you see! Oh blippety bloopity.
That's really too bad. Jamie is a smart guy, presumably has a good deal of money, and has a bit of a pulpit (as evidenced by this Slashdot article). I really wish he had taken the "fix it" approach rather than switch. That said, I can understand the frustration, personally I've had enough trouble with Linux that I'm forced to use Windows for my main operating system. But my solution is meant to be temporary, and hopefully JWZ's is too. It takes a long time to build an operating system, especially when you rely mainly on people working for free.
Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.
LOL.
If he didn't want people to know, that seems like an odd way to go about it.
Did you really think that Taco (or any of the other editors) actually bother to read the articles?
I am your neighbor's brother, you insenstive clod!
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
People come, and people go. He's made his contributions, but his time in the spotlight is now up. Younger people, such as those behind the Firefox project, have taken the limelight. Soon enough we'll be hearing about how they've switched OSes, and the cycle of open source celebrity popularity will continue.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I also wish I could unmount a CDROM by pressing the eject button.
I think the main culprit for little usability problems like this is lack of quality control by the distribution makers. Unfortunately these difficulties don't matter much to the large scale business installations they are targetting.
Still, this is definitely something that could be improved.
But all they get is grief everytime they make a change to make life easier for people. ie. Spatial nautilus one of those ideas that will improve life for the people using gnome, but 99% of linux blowhards reject the new paradigm saying it's just not right, they don't even try it, just bitch & moan until they figure out how to switch it back... But if they're going to keep their old bad habits then stop bitching about people trying to improve the desktop.
ALSA works great *if* you have a sound card that does hardware mixing. If you look at the ALSA soundcard matrix (search Google), all cards that have a "(3)" marked in the Notes column have ALSA support for hardware mixing. This means that you can send sound from multiple sources to the card, and the chip on the card can mix them into the combined output).
/dev/sound. And that's *if* the software even supports such a thing. A lot of the older stuff doesn't let you do this, so you end up having to start these old apps from the command line with a prefix like "dmixapp mpg123" (I forget the exact syntax -- there are 100 tutorials on the web if you really want to know).
Most of your low-end cards and almost all mobo-integrated sound chips do *not* support hardware mixing. They can only accept one sound source at a time. This means the software (OS+apps) must do the mixing ahead of time. If you remember the uproar about "winmodems" a few years ago, this is roughly the same thing -- sound card manufacturers are saving a few bucks by not putting hardware mixing on the card.
This is what happened to JWZ. He's got a chip that doesn't support hardware mixing, and so more than one app won't make noise at the same time. I'm in the exact same position. I used to have a sound card that supported hardware mixing, but then I upgraded to a machine with mobo sound that doesn't have hardware mixing. And it is truly a total PAIN-IN-THE-ASS to get it working in software. So much so that it is 100 times easier to just go buy a card that supports hardware mixing than to fight with ALSA and all the apps.
The real problem is that ASLA for some bizarre reason cannot just intercept all calls to the sound card, mix them, and send the combined output to the sound card. It *SHOULD* be able to handle this transparently, but it doesn't. In addition to fiddling with a nasty alsa config file (involves manually setting up a software mixer), you have to configure * every * freaking * app * on the system, one by one, to send sound to the mixer instead of just sending sound to
What's really painful is that that you go and look at Windows, and it handles this situation very gracefully. Somehow it just knows when you have a card installed that does not support hardware mixing, and it doesn't make you go and reconfigure all of your apps one-by-one to be able to play multiple sounds at once.
It is one of life's great mysteries why on earth you can't just tell ALSA in one place "do software mixing", and have it transparently intercepts all sound that would otherwise be routed to the card. Even native ALSA apps have to be explicitly told to use the software mixer. I agree with JWZ that this is really, really, really user-unfriendly and stupid. (However, I'm not switching to OSX over it.)
Zawinski's flames against the X11 window system have not helped the platform. Let him live with XCode, Objective-C, and Quartz for a while, and let the Macintosh community put up with him.
Actually, I think they did... "from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept."
I still don't understand if a lone soul switches from Linux to Mac OS X, why is there so much fuzz and buzz and hissing and screaming. Who cares what you run under your hood? If u do not like linux, it's not because it's bad but because u want it to look bad. Many cards are not supported in linux becasue manufactures don't open up the specs; Is that the fault of Linux? So, stop whinning and simply pass into oblivion.
Some of the same reasons that I'm switching away from Linux to OSX. Don't have the time to fight those battles anymore. *Don't* want to fight those battles anymore
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
We've had blogs, now *Livejournal* ?!
Can Slashdot get any lower than this?
It seemed logical to me. Synthetic oil has many advantages over dino oil. If you shop around, some retail outlets have store brand full synthetic which averages about $3 more for a 5qt bottle ($12 for 5 qt bottle). I've thought about using the synthetic blends but no one has any idea what % of each type of oil makes up the mix. I assume 1% synthetic could be considered a blend as well and the oil companies make no effort to make the exact %s known either. They consider this a trade secret, I consider it a potential scam. I had all of this on my blog but /. did not pick up on it.
This is the internet. If you put a message up on your journal, surely it's fair game to write about it?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Tell us bwy, what problems do you have with the Linux kernel?
It is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing the world's saddest song just for you JWZ you whinny little bitch. Instead of working with the community, you've chosen the path of blame Linux for your problems because obviously you are just a little baby.
The posts so for have missed the main point. That is, sound in Linux sucks. It just needs to be fixed.
- arts must die, and it will w/ KDE4
- esd must die
- every program should start using gstreamer
- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box.
Imagine my "pleasure" when I inadvertly caused a "beep" to emerge from my terminal window, and as a result had to wait a while (20 seconds? can't remember) before I could start playing a video with sound. Or how I had to do "killall -9 artsd" to start playing video in totem after listening to music on Amarok (which is superior to rhythmbox in most ways).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Many people that write code like the person in the article just dont get enough support from the open source users.
I've had it with these complicated operating systems. I've never gotten my printer to work correctly on Linux, my Mac is just a total pain in the ass and slug, and I spend hours upon hours trying to do the easiest things on Windows.
The hell with all of you. I just installed DOS on my box and all is well.
Slashdot, please don't post this. You guys are jerks and I'm going to tell my mommy about you.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
They may have thought about honoring his request had he not ended the sentence with "screw you guys". Stuff like that tends to irritate people which is probably exactly what he was trying to accomplish. If he didn't want it to be put on the likes of Slashdot, why even bring it up? No, his whole purpose was to rant and get it to as many people as possible and he succeeded. Seems kind of childish to me but so are many of the comments posted to the "story". Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Why do they refuse to "get" this?
Sound under linux requires a card that supports
hardware mixing of multiple audio streams
(SoundBlaster Live or newer is the only one that comes to mind and that I have (1 live, 1 audigy)).
Anything else is mostly unusable because of the lack of kernel (== always works) mixer.
User space mixers are a joke (or at least were last I tried them) because of incompatibility.
Why should I care what the quitter runs on his desktop?
dumbass.
privacy is something you do in private, where you have an expectation that the general public would not be aware of what you are doing.
posting on livejournal does not give you that expectation of privacy.
I, for one, am glad to see him go and hope he abandons xscreensaver. It's old and outdated and he refuses patches for useful features that people want. Now maybe someone who doesn't have his panties in such a bundle will take over.
What? I can't select an admin user to unlock a user's xscreensaver session? What year is it again?
Here's a flash of insight for you.
Not EVERY system is right for EVERY person.
Use whatever works for you.
By the same token, don't tell anyone that their choice is wrong or doesn't work or whatever.
Why? It's a computer OS. It's a tool. Linux works GREAT for me and I'm probably never going to switch. But I don't use my computer as a TV, stereo or game console. For someone who wants those specific features, then a Mac would probably be a better tool.
But it's just a tool. It isn't a threat. You using a Mac does NOT mean that I'm a bad person for using Linux. I run Ubuntu and no, the sound does not work and I'm not going to mess with it because it doesn't interest me.
I don't know where you got that notion, but it is wrong. Right now, for example, my OS X system is playing music in iTunes, environmental sounds from World of Warcraft, and my terminal can beep, as can my email program when I receive a mail.
If the sound card does not have a hardware mixer, it does NOT make it a hardware problem. ALSA should be able to recognize that the soundcard is sub-standard and enable a software mix. Windows does this seemlessly, so please do not blame this on hardware, this is purely a fault with ALSA. It seems more like lazy programming than anything else.
I actually use both Windows and Linux at home and at work. The only issue i have in linux is when a manufacturer dont support linux and the specs for the hardware isnt avaliable to anyone to write a free driver. If you peel away the driver issue you will find Linux very plesant to work with.
The driver issue is beyond the OSS movements reach as loads of people without knowledge try to get hardware explicitly marked as "Windows XP only!" to work in linux. The focus should be on the crappy hardware manufacturers who dont support your OS of choice and you who buy hardware that dont work in your daily OS.
Sound support in linux is excellent in most distributions and just works without a single tweak.
Much is left to do but WE as the users can help a tremendous bit here by filing bug reports instead of just shouting and throwing things around.
HTTP/1.1 400
Under BeOS 5.0, with BOTH a Creative SB PCI and an ES1371 card I could play multiple stereo sounds at once. That was several MP3 and .wav files, a total of over a dozen players.
Cacophony? Yes. Did it work? Abso-fucking-lutely. No skipping, no setup, no problem.
I'm not saying you're bullshitting, but I think you subscribe to the "if it doesn't work under Linux, it's a hardware problem" dogma. Wake up.
Sigged!
I sympathize with his frustration over Linux drivers: if you pull a random desktop or laptop off the shelf, it can take some fiddling to make it work with Linux.
Out of frustration, I went down the Macintosh route myself (the grass is always greener...), and while audio drivers (and OpenGL!) work out of the box, discovered that the Macintosh has its very own set of frustrations, which in the end bothered me a lot more than the Linux hassles.
In the end, the real reason Macintosh hardware works is not that Apple is any smarter or better than Linux developers, it's that they have a limited hardware range and bundle their hardware and software together.
Well, guess what, there are plenty of hardware vendors that support Linux on their systems. If you don't want to mess around with drivers, just buy a system from them. That way, you don't have to give up Linux goodness, and your Linux machine just works.
With Linus using a Powermac for his development, you can't help but wonder if he secretly uses OS X now and then ... you know to run Photoshop and stuff. Now that jwz and all the cool kids are making the switch, it could only be a matter of time...
I gave up on Mac and switched to Linux. I am happily running Gentoo Linux now. Everyone has different preferences - so what?
If Linux is going to succeed on in gaining Desktop Market share. You should really listen to the rants of people who tried the platform and then ditched it. So except for calling the ditcher Dumb or a quitter. Look at the complaints. He wanted to get the sound card to work, or 2 sound cards to work and went threw the processes of RTFM and Asking for Help with no avail. So guess what they switched. And on the Mac it just worked. I think a lot of Linux Zealots and/or developers should use Macs for a while to get use to "Just works" and what it really means. I mean if this was 1990 sound cards were considered a speciality item on a PC like adding TV Tuner Card today. But every modern computer has a sound card. And for God sake Linux should support sound. Sound it no longer just for cutisy dings and for games. It is used for practical application such as VoIP and Watching DVD, Sound is now an integral component to the system and Linux should support it and support it well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Between (1) being a powerhouse programmer and software designer, and (2) owning a bithead-oriented nightclub, he can provide a setup to handle any Slashdotting.
No, he's just being bitter. I don't begrudge him that. But if he doesn't want Slashdot to pick up on his comment, he shouldn't post it where all the world can read it. He gets no sympathy from me.
you can easily play 2 sounds at once in OS X. i've never had a problem with 2 apps doing this. i often set a playlist in iTunes and play games (SCUMM VM recently) with their own music off, but effects on. i never needed to setup a dmix like i did in linux. i don't care if the mixing is hardware or software... in OS X "it just works". many things are like this and its why i moved too. life it to short to spend your life in /etc. now i am actually productive when emacs is open! (not tweaking)
your comments to this OSS giant are incredibly patronising. do you really think he doesn't understand these technical details? this guy is responsible for Netscape, Mozilla, XEmacs and XScreensaver. he is an ooberhacker!
and as to why you'd want to keep linux as your primary OS, i have no idea. fink exists which allows you to use any OSS program you want. when i made the switch i got to keep all my fav apps (even very specific scientific apps), but no need to worry about hardware. plus a ton of really well designed base apps like Terminal, Mail, Safari and iLife. add onto that the incredible advances apple make (take automator, expose, spotlight for example).
have you ever even used a recent version of Mac OS X?
Come on, JWZ asked the people not to run to Slashdot about it, kindly honour his privacy request.
The problem with this is that he mixed two very different topics in a single post. One, his new choice for a desktop (which honestly, I couldn't care less) but also, to inform every single Linux and BSD user out there that the future of his [almost] ubiquitous piece of software (xscreensaver) is "ambiguous".
Now, isn't it a bit "naïve" to release such news in a post you intend to keep private ? Can you seriously expect to keep it out of Slashdot when every single Linux or BSD project over the face of the Earth is concerned about it?
Hunting down articles doesn't require to you learn any programming language. Anyone can hunt down articles, very few people can program. So the two groups aren't coincident.
What "worry"? Linux is very easy to install and run
Now, if your "average user" does not use those features, then Linux is easier than Windows and on par with a Mac.
The "problem" is that most of the HOME user market DOES want those features. But the CORPORATE/GOVERNMENT desktop will NOT focus on those features.
So it all depends upon how you segment the market on whether this is an "issue" or a "critical problem".
Eh, whatever. It's a tool. You use whatever works best in each situation. The key point with Linux is that it CAN be modified to suit your requirements.
The home desktop market will be the LAST market segment that will fall to Linux.
First will be the servers - we're already seeing this happen.
Second will be the corporate/government desktops - this is just beginning.
Last will be the home market - there are just too many limited-run, proprietary hardware pieces out there that work "good enough" right now. In time I believe they will migrate to Linux. But focusing on the LAST segment and claiming that there's a problem when the OTHER segments are starting to migrate is just silly.
KDE is superior to GNOME in almost every way.
I personally don't really care about whether Jamie switches to Mac, Windows or a toaster. I believe the main issue here is that after oh so many years of dev being done, Linux still ain't ready for the desktop. Period.
As good as linux performs as a server, it more or less still gets trashed hands down by Mac/Windows. Don't quote me single cases where ur grandma/uncle/grand nephew is having a ball of a time with linux, for having to screw around with shady printer systems, plug and pray sound systems and mice that refused to work properly just because it has an extra button just ain't gonna cut it. Not to say that the solutions to actually correct these issues can be easily performed. These are the very problems that are stopping people from switching to(and staying on) Linux.
You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.
If Linux was only painful for things like sound cards or other expansion cards, I could live with it. But every time I try to set up a desktop Linux environment I run into dozens of tiny snags. Getting X Windows working with a scroll wheel, getting the correct default screen resolution preference set for desktop AND login screen, getting half the crap out of the Gnome menu (or KDE menu) that I don't want there, getting a printer setup, getting decent (non fugly) fonts/font rendering, etc. etc. etc.
Linux is still aimed at two groups: enthusiasts that enjoy messing around and sysadmins that are willing to build a tweaked internal version for their company. People in other groups (the elusive Grandmothers, as well as the group that just wants a machine that imposes the least hassle possible so they can get to work) are kind of put off by Linux.
Linux makes a whole lot of sense on the server, but not on (my) desktop (or laptop).
Just my $.02
How this qualifies as an important piece of news, I don't know. I'm assuming it's a "comedy" piece because he said "Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys." on one of the linked pages.
However, I myself have had problems with sound in linux, yes, but considering that (as someone who had only ever played about with TCP/IP in Linux and had never touched X or the Linux desktop until a few months ago) I have now switched from Windows to a Linux desktop and got sound working in all apps installed within a few days of switching. That was about four months ago and I still don't use Windows.
I had worked out everything he had worked out in less than two days of having a linux desktop. There are things that should be simpler (cups, sound, etc.) but none of them hindered me for very long and, once properly set up, work much better than my previous OS's incarnations. Yes, it's a pain having to "set things up", but it's hardly worth such a strop.
We all know arts, esd, etc. are a pain in the ass and, yes, we are all waiting for ALSA to "just work". Now that it's in the kernel, we finally have a standardised, working, maintained sound system that supports mixing on EVERY LINUX MACHINE. This should be the turning point.
If a program that plays sound doesn't have an ALSA-compatible option by now, it's not being maintained properly. If it does, it will just work with ALSA and any plugins you might use, e.g. dmix.
As soon as 2.6 distros become the standard, we can work on getting EVERY app to use the same damn sound systems.
I saw his entry on wikipedia and if he's such a great programmer who has made contributions to such important projects as, gosh, XScreensaver, it makes me wonder why the hell he:
a) didn't know this already (not a single XScreensaver that uses sound?).
b) can't work it out for himself.
c) throws a major strop because it's not point-and-click.
It occurs that he's just missed the point. You don't have a Linux desktop to say "I've got a Linux desktop". You don't have one to beat every other desktop into the ground with your technical superiority (real or percieved). You don't have one to complain that it's not like Windows. You don't have one to play iTunes (as he seems to value this as an important feature).
My desktop is Linux because it works, it's fast enough, it does what I want, it doesn't restrict me in any way, it's free, it's Free, it doesn't blue-screen, crash, corrupt and die every few months/years, I can leave it running overnight and not worry about if it'll crash before it finishes it's downloads, I can access it remotely (a good thing when you're working behind restrictive child-safe proxies all the time), and I can do things without wizards, dogs and paperclips jumping up to "help me find a file".
I can't help feeling that any decent programmer would have been able to overcome the same little roadhumps on the way without so much as a sigh. They might even have bothered to fix the troublesome programs themselves.
That's such a typical Linux users response. You say it's better and then when it's shown that it isn't you say "Oh well it's free so it's allowed to not work!" You're like the people who have endless betas so that they can't be given out to for having buggy code.
This guy are sick.
JWZ's plea to not be posted on slashdot was designed to make sure it *was* posted. And it worked.
Just about 8 out of 10 user support questions we get on rosegarden are actually sound setup problems. This isn't just a hardware support issue, the "final packaging" step on things like Alsa and JACK just isn't there. Yes, distribs should probably do it, but currently none does. No normal user can configure sound on linux as it is, beyond the basic 'play a .wav file'.
After all, you are also a UNIX Hater. What I can't figure out is why you guys still bother us UNIX and X11 users. Apple and Microsoft have answered your prayers: 95% of the market is using systems that, according to your criteria, are far superior to UNIX and X11. Just go play with your Windows PC or Macintosh, and leave us to do our own thing, OK?
Personally, I go through phases when I think like this guy, when I'm just about ready to give up on the whole Linux-distro-as-a-desktop thing. Two days into trying to make my laptop work in Linux was one such phase. Eventually, I see something like the progress in apps like Evince, Tomboy, Muine and GIMP and my faith is restored.
The main problem facing OSS on the desktop, as I see it, is reliability. Many desktop apps work great for light usage. But so many lack decent testing - try to do something out of the ordinary or complex and bugs start appearing left and right. I know it's impossible to control volunteers, but I would urge OSS developers to take 20% of the effort they put into new features and create a testing framework for their apps with it.
At present, I wouldn't recommend non-technical friends to switch to a Linux distro, because I know I'd spend so much time dealing with the bugs they found.
aaack shit. forgot to add html tags as you can tell.
STOP THE PRESSES NEW HEADLINE. Come on, this can't seriously be big news?
He posted it in a public forum. if I go out in my front yard and start yelling about stuff that irritates me, I have no reasonable expectation for those statements to be private. if he wanted privacy, he should have made an attempt to state this private. I'm thinking he just didn't want the bandwidth usage.
for sale-linux and "download and tweak for free" linux. The distros like xandros and linspire, etc are trying to make a user friendly distro,and have to charge cash for those efforts(they have to hire full time guys for this polish work obviously), but they are usually dumped on in this forum as "for noobs". Just reality. I grew up in the early muscle car years in dee-troit, saw the same exact thing, same sort of language, etc. There's people who want a car that just works,just looking for comfortable reliable transportation, then there's fanatical gearheads who want to tweak and tinker and don't mind if this or that works exceedingly well at the expense of something else being ignored and non functional. i.e. something like this -> if want the fastest streetrod you rip out the air conditioning, etc. and those guys are very quick to dump on "normal drivers" and call them names, etc. It's just normal human psychology and behavior near as I can see.
Get SuSE.
Get an SB Live! Value or an SB Audigy! Value.
Get an Nvidia Geforce(1/2/3/4) MX or not video card.
Use an ACX110/111 802.11g wireless card.
Done.
Hardware audio mixing, all the drivers will auto-install. An almost Mac OS X-like experience, and certainly much easier than Windows.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
It's untrue, as anyone with an OS X box can tell with a simple test.
So, when you use Linux in a task that Linux is good at, Linux rocks.
And when you use Linux in a task that Linux still needs to improve on, Linux sucks.
Which doesn't really match your original comment:
No one said it was NOT real.
Which means that if people do not follow your advice, Linux on the desktop will die.
I don't think so.
I think that Linux is following a very simple evolutionary route. Linux is GREAT on hardware that people have had time to hack or have Free access to the documentation.
Linux sucks on hardware that is proprietary that people haven't had sufficient time to hack yet.
Sound, video and wireless are the main "problems" with home desktops running Linux. That is because the chips change so fast and the vendors refuse to open their specs.
But that won't matter because Linux will start to take over the market segments where those issues are not as important (servers and corporate/government desktops). As Linux makes more progress in those, the hardware vendors will start to support it more. Getting sound to work right across 10,000 machines with a mix of sound chips and cards is a pain. Getting sound to work on government office with 10,000 similar machines is much easier. And it only takes a few like that before the hardware vendors start supporting Linux better.
There is no reason why Linux cannot operate on your home desktop as well as it operates on your servers. In time, it will. But the first steps will be the ones that yield the most results.
Zawinski's just this guy, you know?
just don't try porting x11 over in to it.
irapp_thread errors galore.
shitty.
So he worked on Netscape/Mozilla and then quit right before they started to really innovate again with Firefox because he didn't want the rewrite & bitched about how they weren't innovating.
He also did something with Emacs back in the day & does xscreensaver, which, let's all be honest here - isn't all that fucking spectacular.
So why do we care that he got his ass kicked by ALSA? Seriously, it's a pain in the ass, but "Man baffled by Linux sound; switches to Mac & says it's much easier!" doesn't exactly blow my skirt up as a story.
Look at the actual post:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 12, @10:00AM
from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept.
I'm shocked
Think on it.
Apple hardware is always running on "the safe path" not being extreme but, oh so usable. And all the friggin' stuff just works together.
From day dot, the OS was designed to insure that the number of cycles needed to shove the bytes through to their audio chips would be there. They made sure to carry that through when they went to Unix.
The number of things 'just working' in OS X is no accident. The number of things 'just working' in Linux is no accident either.
Its just that the __purpose__ of an OS dictates that somethings run more optimallly (you don't have streaming of dirty great big blocks of bytes when you need instant interruptability.)
Okay Apple came up with a chipset that includes something like DMA for audio and they can handle variable delays of feeding audio while the output is smooth as silk. Its got a variable length buffer that doesn't depend on getting fed bytes whenever the CPU can get around to it.
That's what is needed. It CAN'T be done without it. Unless Linux can come up with the Audio hardware, it's never going to be anything more than a hack.
Windows can 'almost' do it because it places a runtime priority on UI processes (Audio is UI) and the lag in processing is usually less than the response time.
I listen to iTunes on my iMac G5, my TiTanium G4 laptop, my wife's purple iMac G3 and the performance is always flawless.
I usually encounter some stutter at some point on my wife's old Dell box.
My Linux box has the speakers turned off because it sounds like shit (the selection is reminiscent of fart noises) even when it's working.
My SysAdmin friend is having 'issues' with the sound drivers. I tell him not to bother but he wants to 'get it working' on the box.
I haven't got the heart to tell him that the speakers are turned off because the sound is so bad that I can't even bear logging onto Gnome with the audio turned on. The selection, the selections and the selection of the selection are so poor that I just prefer to shut the audio off.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I personally don't really care about whether Jamie switches to Mac, Windows or a toaster. I believe the main issue here is that after oh so many years of dev being done, Linux still ain't ready for the desktop. Period.
Hey, I keep trying to install OS X on my AMD64, but audio just won't work. Obviously, OS X isn't ready for the desktop if something as simple as audio doesn't work on my PC.
Geez, get a clue.
About the sound - yeah, sound source mixing is still a problem for Linux desktop and should be addressed accordingly. AFAIK there are many projects already underway for this, also there is ALSA dmix and lot of other various stuff.
So - some criticism is corect in this case, but people working on that, so I guess it will be here quite soon - and will rock, as many thought over solutions in Linux desktop world.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I have absolutely no idea how you read that as me saying: "EVERY system is right for EVERY person".
The owls are not what they seem
For those who are interested, last year I started the SaverBeans screensaver pack, a set of screensavers implemented in Java. A small native layer is available for each platform (seeking a volunteer for MacOS) that bridges to the underlying OS. So you can write the screensaver once and run it on any supported platform.
There are currently 18 LGPL-licensed screen savers with 16 more about to be released shortly (this month). The SDK supports everything from simple screensavers to OpenGL. It's also a great platform for distributed computing.
I can't hope to amass a collection as grand as xscreensaver, but contributions are always welcome.
They'll change the chipset on a card, but keep the same card name/make and maybe model (or they'll change the final letter of the model).
So someone tells you to buy card X from vendor Y because it works without any setup and the card that you buy bears no relationship to the card that he has other than it has the same vendor and name.
And then people get upset when you ask them "what chipset is it" because they shouldn't have to know what chips they have, it should just work.
I'm looking at you, 3Com.
So instead of purchasing a $10 audio card (which will work on Linux) he gets an iMac.
There is a huge double-standard going on when it's about Linux and MacOSX:
Both Linux and MacOSX will run fine on supported hardware but Linux supports a lot more hardware. How exactly does that make MacOSX better?
Yah, no problem, except that the FUCKING SOUND CARD does not work.
Once I ran Linux rather aggressively, back some 10-15 years ago, in dual-boot configuration on my PC. Eventually the major and minor problems with Linux pushed me enough and the fact that Windows had improved "sufficiently" in terms of utilities and stability pulled me enough that I didn't boot into Linux anymore.
Then, one day, after at least five years wandering the wastelands of Windows, I realized that Apple had quitely, without any fuzz, finaly maed the dream of useable desktop-UNIX come true. I recently got a dual G5, a PS2 for games, and am phasing out my PCs for everyting except my bread-and-butter development business. Good riddance!
Sorry, Linux/BSD/Open Source guys - someone built a better mousetrap, one good enough that I wanted to pay several thousands of dollars to get it. "Selling out" on the freedom is balanced by not wasting my fucking time messing around inside the fucking hardware or the fucking configuration. I'm all grown up now, and while I know how to fix stuff, I don't get off doing it all the fucking time to save a few bucks or to show off my 133t skilllzzz anymore.
Apparently, both the newest Mandrake (Mandriva?), Fedora Core 4, and SuSE 9.3 feature dmix out of the box for soundcards that do not support hardware mixing.
So this is now a non-problem.
Survey says? Stop running Redhat 5. Old linux=PITA. Get a new user-friendly distro.
Oh, you don't want a dumbed-down OS? Than why are you switching to OS X?
Note: I have a powerbook G4, running Tiger, and two mac minis running Tiger. I also have several linux desktops and 2 linux servers. I've got plenty of experience with both platforms.
But SuSE is almost as easy as OS X, and I can run most of my Windows games on SuSE.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Use Windows. I'm serious--use Windows + TBird + FireFox + as much non-MS other software as you can. Use good virus scanner + spyware programs. Don't let Windows update itself unless you absolutely have to, or you're very sure the updates are safe.
I've been using various versions of Windows like this for years, with VERY few problems. Software works, add-on HW works. I never have to recompile anything or edit config files. The only configuration changes I make are all through a GUI, and probably 95% of them are in apps, not the OS.
I know, people here won't want to hear such heresy, but it's true: With just a little care and restraint, Windows works quite well. (And yes, Gates is a greedy, arrogant bastard, but that's another matter; I'm not about to put myself through desktop hell just to spite one billionaire.)
Snob switches OS.
who the fuck gives a shit about some sucker who fell prey to the gimmicky apple schtick?
The news article before this is about Mac OS X86 being leaked to the internet!
I don't think this really qualifies as news at all indeed.
Even if jwz is a recognized geek in the community, people should learn to get a life and not post this things into slashdot.
AFAIK we don't have daily posts about Rob's life, do we?
May the source be with you!
NO ONE CARES!
I can't help feeling that any decent programmer would have been able to overcome the same little roadhumps on the way without so much as a sigh. They might even have bothered to fix the troublesome programs themselves.
This sort of attitude is exactly what is going to keep Linux marginalized. Oh, if you're a "decent programmer," sure, you can overcome whatever obstacles Linux may throw in your way. Why, you could even fix the program yourself!
So, by that logic, Linux is really only for programmers. Congratulations, you just lost 99% of the other users out there.
Macs haven't been limited to playing one sound at a time since 1993 or so.
I disagree with those who say he's "missing the point" of Linux by switching or he must have been running Linux simply to say he had a Linux desktop.
At some point, most people become tired of jacking with something that doesn't work correctly... even if that thing is otherwise enjoyable. For example, I'd love to drive an old Ferrari to work every day. Eventually, though, I'd need to adjust valves, synchronize carbs, play with the ignition, etc. That would suck. The constant maintenance would get in the way of the enjoyment. I might enjoy working on a Ferrari as a hobby, but doing it to keep my primary method of transportation workable would become tiresome.
Same thing here... stupid, niggling problems tend to bother users until they get fed up and switch.
I didn't think there were people confused enough by the "Linux Desktop" debate to imagine that there was a Linux Desktop already.
There is no linux desktop already. It is a work in progress. It is a hobby, like collecting stamps or flying model rockets. Of course, there is a vague possibility that someday, our hobby will result in some engineering or design innovations so harrowing that we will create something an average person would want to use.
That day is far, far away, and nobody you should believe has promised you otherwise.
It doesn't matter if we succeed. It doesn't matter if we fail. It doesn't matter if we are still stuck editing text files 10 years from now (heaven forfend). We are not in it for the money. Everybody loves results, but we would not be doing this if it were just about the results.
Who knows? Maybe in a few years we will all ditch Unix and go work on some other crazy OS metaphor. That would be absolutely fine with me, as long as it is Free as in Speech, the fun never really stops. For someone who seems so finicky today, JWZ has endured and indeed invested his life heavily in what is by far a stunningly ancient and assinine OS design: Unix. Sadly, in my opinion, MacOSX, while a major improvement on Unix, is rather conservative in terms of pushing the envelope to make things faster, easier, and better organized. It may well be the best out there right now; I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying we could do much better than OSX.
You can't get confused between what Linux is and what it represents. If JWZ is the kind of guy who will run into Freedom issues (most good, _self-respecting_ engineers are, but who knows), he will get sick of Apple eventually, when they do something that really twists his nipple ring, and he can't do anything about it but beg and whine. Then he'll remember why everyone is putting all their time into a system that isn't ready yet. But hey, you have to do whatever makes you happy. I know being in the FS/OS world is not for everybody. There are times when trying to live and work with my hobby drives me pretty crazy too.
Just like Gecko got there without him, Linux, or whatever comes after it, will too. And he can be damn proud; he did more work to push it along than most dozens of us.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
is Sound.
Almost everything else is working quite nicely now, but there are still some pretty stupid restrictions and problems regarding sound. Especially the problem of having 2 different sounds play at the same time, which really should never be a problem and should have been the first thing bloody fixed years ago when sound was implemented in linux.
Sure, the graphics look good now, and people can generally use it for the WED style computing (Web, E-mail, Documents). But as soon as someone wants to have 2 sounds play at the same time, the system does not let them, in fact in many cases it gives them obscure errors that make Linux look that much more unstable.
As soon as this issue is resolved, I can tell you an entirely new market may open up to Linux.
~ kjrose
and should be modded as such.
Why is this ramble from a guy who has run linux desktop for a few months modded up? Moderators please fix this.
I don't get it. He has a SBLive!. Getting my SBLive! to work under Linux properly has always been literally plug and play. I've used it in several versions of Mandrake, and in Gentoo, with no problems at all.
Hell, I'm just a mechanical engineer, I don't have some list of computer related credentials a mile long.
I don't see why this is an important story though. Some guy threw a hissy fit. Big f'ing deal.
You bet your sweet bippy that was a troll. Do your worst, I've got karma to spare.
*NOW* is the time for Linux to get its collective head out of the sand and really reach out to the common users. You know how on a weekly basis we laugh at Microsoft for announcing yet another feature that will NOT be in Longhorn? Let me just put this one in bold:
Longhorn is going to suck. It's going to be the worst Windows since ME.
Microsoft has no plan for it. They know they have really taken Windows about as far as it can go, and any real changes are going to require years of work. But because of market pressures, they can't really take the time that would need - and yet, due to mismanagement, they're going to spend years wastefully. This is the PERFECT opportunity for Linux to finally rise to the forefront -- but only if the geeks get off their high horses and admit that a good OS has to be usable by common man. AND, right along side that, if they can come to understand criticism is NOT necessarily an attack. Reading responses on this thread, all I can think of is O'Reilly screaming 'Shup up! SHUT UP!' at anyone speaking facts he doesn't want to face.
I gave up on Linux for the same reasons as Zawinski. I want an OS that *works*. I don't want to tweak my sound drivers. I don't want to have my nVidia drivers FRICKING VANISH after a week of working right (after a week of work to get them running). I don't want to have to remember that completely ridiculous program names like "the GIMP" are actually usuable graphics applications and not, as the name would suggest to a normal human being, porn videos.
(yes, I know what the name stands for. That does not change the fact that Granny Average User would never in a million years click on something called a "gimp" looking for a way to take the redeye out of her pictures.)
The Linux community needs to get out of the 90s. There are modern solutions to every major problem with the OS, and within a year, two at max, they could make it REALLY user-friendly. The problem is that user-friendliness isn't sexy to Linux geeks. No one wants to spend time writing a new sound library that actually works when they can just look down their noses at anyone who doesn't know how to properly configure ALSA. And the only thing less sexy than THAT is not writing any actual code at all, but just going through the OS and making sure the user dialogues make some sort of sense to those who don't have PhDs and, as someone else mentioned, will actually fit on a screen resolution of less than 1024x768.
But you know what? Someone has to do it. Because if no one does, Linux will NEVER get past being a hobbyist OS, and whatever horrible things the next Windows introduces to the computing world, we'll be stuck with dealing with them. ('Cause god knows, I just *love* having mailboxes on Linux and Mac machines shut down because Windows-borne virii have filled them with spam. That helps my sense of superiority to no end.)
So this is truly put up and shut up time. There has never been a better opportunity for Linux to really make some inroads in the home market - but only if the contributors are willing to make some compromises and give the other 90% of users some reason to switch. So all I ask is, if you contribute to OSS, and you EVER spend any time online complaining about how Linux could be great if only it could get into the mainstream - use that time to tweak Linux's usability instead. Fixing bad error messages doesn't even require much programming skill at all. Make Linux usable for common people, and it can succeed. Period.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
- I never have to upgrade from one version to another. I'm always up to date! This is completely different from every other operating system out there. Whether it's Windows upgrading from XP to Longhorn, MacOS upgrading from 10.3 to 10.4, or Fedora upgrading from FC3 to FC4, most every OS out there requires a major upgrade every now and then. Gentoo does not.
- You have complete control over your programs. Don't like how a specific program works? Well, you can easily change the source and compile required libraries. Dependencies and required versions of libraries can be a nightmare in some distributions.
- Generally, everything just works. In my experience, I agree that it has absolutely been a chore to get some things working in Linux. Most of the time I don't mind it, but with Gentoo Linux I have definitely had to meddle with the system LESS than ever before. I have less programs crashing, even when I'm running all of the latest stuff.
I don't think I would have ever switched away from Linux, but Gentoo has certainly given Linux a new light that many Linux users just have not seen yet.I don't see why Apple would be leaking this release. If they wanted to let people try out OSX4Intel, they would just put together an official trial download, complete with registration. Which, actually, does seem like something they should do. Not now, but six months or a year from now, why not let anyone who owns a sufficiently zippy Intel box download and try OSX+iWork? I know, I know, it would kill the "only runs on Apple hardware" story. But they could, if they wanted to, still only sell and support the full release for their own boxes. And this could get OSX into the hands of tens of milions potential switchers.
Since when Apple and OS X is Dark Side? Did I miss something or is anything that Intel touches automatically Dark Side? Wait, Linux runs on Intel, so it can't be it. What is it then? That you have to pay money for the OS? Is /. RMS's outlet now?
Faith is for children and idiot religious types. Faith in software is no better than somebody who has faith that Jesus will save them or Santa Claus will come down their chimney. Faith is for people with very low IQ's.
Dark side?? Is it me or is this type of writing a bit childish what do you think??
Mmmm sounds appropriate for a story originating in sound-card hell (sorry).
Let us for a moment step back from the OS X vs Linux flamewar and listen to the what the guy actually has to say. He has switched from Linux to OS X because he is tired of messing around with manual configuration of devices for often dissapointing results.
That's it. The story in a nutshell. But what makes this important is this is a somewhat prominent figure in the open source world. He's one of us people!
To even bother to install Linux (whatever flavor) you have to be at least a driven pioneer of sorts otherwise Windows would do fine right? What this guy is saying is that he's tired of expending more effort to achieve the same or less results than he expects using another operating system.
In many ways Linux on X86 and Windows suffer the problem of the infinite permutations of hardware. At least the Windows guys have a chance because they can usually get vendors to play nicely. I admire the Linux device driver writes as heroes in the shadows of the Linux world but we are fighting to catch up and quite frankly the odds are stacked against us. The place where this hurts the most is Linux on the Laptop. Linux on the Desktop is actually about an order of magnitude better.
I swapped from Linux to Mac this month for exactly the same reasons. Admittedly I'm a Java programmer (yeah I do C++ and PHP before you language-facists warm up) so my choice of platform isn't as critical. Switching to OS X has been a total pleasure. Yes everything Just Works. Yes the GUI uses direct manipulation (Drag and Drop) better than anything else out. It's just inituitive and easy. Did I mention it was easy? Kinda takes me back to my Amiga days. Moving from a A1200 to a 486SX was a backwards step in overall system quality (OK except maybe performance). I feel like I'm finally back a place where stuff works as it should.
Anyone who points out that writing a stable, full-functional software stack for a minimal set of hardware options is much easier is obviously correct. This is the core difference - the cathedral and the bazaar. Remeber that? Some of us are realising that the Cathedral approach is building better systems. Contraversial? Yes. Totally accurate? No. But the difference is there to be experienced.
I will probably always keep a Linux development machine around. Maybe even using it as a dev server, running Postgresql, MySQL, Apache, JBoss, etc. Linux as a server is an excellent platform. My next desktop WILL be a Mac - whether it is running a PowerPC or an Intel chip is irrelevant.
I'll probably always have to keep a Windows machine lying around for similar reasons. I just may not ever connect it to the Internet.
But my new 12" PowerBook G4 does everything I need it to. My Dell running SuSE (from 8.0 to 9.2) didn't. Simple really.
Can the siutation be improved by the Linux community? Actually, I think not
Discuss.
Is that a ding I hear? GET BACK IN THE MAGIC HOUSE!!!
It all makes sense ...
He has a 0-day site and he was able to grab a copy of the newly-released OS X Intel version.
Pfft ... he's just part of the Apple marketing machine now...
-c
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
I'll grant that in the past he seems to have done some significant work (of course, if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have) but he's behaving like a petulant child.
So what if he had some trouble with sound on Linux. Big deal; acting like it's personally betrayed him because he "can't play two sounds at once" is childish. If it's so important to him to "play two sounds at once" I suggest he farts while whistling.
Ah, well, what can you do? Somebody else will pick up XScreensaver. That's the nice thing about open source. A developer can't REALLY say "screw you guys"...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
All of these suggestions to get "Get an SB Live! Value or an SB Audigy!" are useless for people such as myself. As someone who needs sound for creative purposes (i.e. "making music"), the SB cards are just awful. High latency, poor A/D converters, et cetera. Relying on gaming-oriented cards like SB's to make up for the shortcomings present in most Linux-based distros is not at all a decent solution. Meanwhile, my Powerbook comes with very low latency sound and decent converters right out of the box. And if I want to add a card, it is a piece of cake. CoreAudio is brilliant.
Everything is clear. As our prophet Dvorak just few weeks before predicted, open source warriors will turn to the dark side (that is OSX). And the process has now started.
Dvorak has hit two in a row, whata smart man. I should name my dog after him...
if you want a Linux like OS that works on multiple architectures and is relatively OSS..
". . .you have managed. . . on one."
KFG
You can do all the work you need to do with your home PC on an apple and probably even a on linux box, but that is not what people want when they go to buy a computer - they want something that will entertain them.
There are about 10x more games available for Windows than any other platform - that is drives the purchase of Windows now.
I know this is just one man's experience, but I had a much _easier_ time with sound on Ubuntu than on Windows.
On windows, I needed to use a CD that came with the motherboard (it was an on board sound), after the windows setup. I also needed that CD for the ethernet driver.
On ubuntu, it just worked.
The really annoying part was that if I hadn't found the CD, I would have been in trouble in Windows. After all, I couldn't really download the drivers, since I needed the ethernet drivers.
Anyway, for a distribution that just works, I've been really very impressed with Ubuntu.
Dave
"Because a lot of us don't have infinite amounts of time"
That implies that to use Linux its going to take vasts amounts of tweaking to make it useable. That of course is a bald faced lie of the highest order.
Buy a prebuilt linux box and be done with it. Your video,sound, keyboard,mouse, office suite, email, picture manager, web browser etc would all work perfectly out of the box. And then there would be none of this Linux is hard to configure bullshit. My mouse doesn't scroll...waaahhh.
I wish people who used Macs had to first figure out how to do it and get all of their hardware supportd via PearcPC. Then they would see how fucking stupid it is to complain that something you download mostly for Free and install yourself is hard to do versus just buying it preloaded like you do with a Mac or Dell.
Oh but no, you'll just download Slackware and try to install on your mismatched hardware that was built for XP or built for some other OS and then wonder why its hard to get working and why it "wastes time".
Oh and finally who the Fuck cares what jz thinks. I haven't pooped in two days, film at 11.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
There's still some disagreement on whether dmix is the way forward, but hopefully within a year or two software sound mixing will be like fonts are now - pretty much a solved problem.
When I built my latest PC, I had to migrate my old, 32 bit PCI sound card (which does not work or even fit in any other type of PCI slot) to the new PC simply because I refused to use esd or anything like it. The current software mixing options in Linux are the biggest pieces of shit ever thrust out of the bowels of the Linux software development community onto the chest of an unsuspecting userbase.
If I have to wait another two years for working software-mixing, I will be a Mac owner soon, too.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I can relate to Zawinski's frustration and many others do as well. I notice that it seems to effect those with more experience than those newer to computing.
When one first acquires a new tool, whether it is hardware, software or a woodworking plane, the very act of learning how use the tool itself works is highly engaging. Just futzing about figuring out how the new tool works is an end in itself.
However, after one has spent 20+ years learning the ends and out of each season's new tools the joy fades. One becomes progressively less interested in the tools itself and more interested in product you want to use the tool to make. The time spent futzing with the tool is not engaging but frustrating and wasteful. You want to get the primary work done not spend all your time adjusting your tools.
How many times over the years has Zawinski wrestled with a problem similar to his Linux sound issue? The thrill of solving such a problem is long gone, baby.
The Linux community is dominated by people who enjoy the process of learning and using the tool itself. They are the kind of people who take the toaster apart to see how it works. The vast majority of desktop users, however, just want to make toast.
People like Zawinski, who have taken apart their fair share of toasters, also now just want to make toast. At present, Linux doesn't let him do that.
I liked XScreensaver from the day I saw it, and a native OSX version of it would probably become the defacto standard for OSX screensavers (although I have never seen the default OSX screensver, so Idk....)
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
... do you remember where you were when you first heard the news?
They'll nod solemnly, and in reverent tones, tell with precise detail where they were when they learned that Jamie Zawinski had switched to OS X.
The point: Nobody knows who the fsck this Jamie Zawinski is. Nobody cares what OS he runs. That software title from the box of slop may as well be called "Where in the Universe is Jamie Zawinski? (And Who Cares?)"
I learned a long time ago from my Windows NT days before switching to Mac-I'd rather just get work done than spend hours trying to configure something like a sound card or trying to figure out why installing windows NT 4.0 SP_WTF? wiped out my hard drive 27 times in 14 days-what a waste of time. Welcome to the club...
However, I do belive you may have the same problems with MacOS X -- you can't play two sounds at once.
Where in the world did you get that idea? Have you even used a mac since OSX came out? Since OS 8 came out? You do realize the Macs are the darlings of the media production industry, right? I mean honestly....
Honestly...
I have hereby removed Linux from my hard drive and have replaced it with FreeBSD. That is all.
This must mean that the average IQ of the developer pool of both platforms just increased.
However, I do belive you may have the same problems with MacOS X -- you can't play two sounds at once.
.sid file .nsf file
I know this is beating a dead horse by now, but...
I just tried on my iBook G4, running 10.3.9:
iTunes - playing mp3
QuickTime - playing another mp3 (okay, these are both using QuickTime libraries, so it's maybe not a good point...)
SIDPLAYER - playing
Audio Overload - playing a
mplayer - playing a ogg vorbis file
everything goes smoothly. Of course, it's a horrible cacophonic mess, but it works very fine.
Network Audio System (NAS) was around for a while before these other audio projects sprung up. Just as every Linux distribution uses the fully standard X windows as a networked video server, every Linux distribution should have used, from the outset, the existing fully networked audio server, NAS.
How all these Linux distros and desktops got themselves into so many fragmented half baked audio schemes is beyond me.
this post said it succintly enough.
You are wrong.
Sigged!
Well...as a FreeBSD user, I'm considering seriously to try Darwin (The OpenSource/Free part of Mac OSX). I'm sure next year, when the Intel support will surely be improved will be a fine time to try it.
JWZ has always hated Linux. He hated Linux back when he was working at Netscape. Instead, he was using an SGI with IRIX because you plugged it in, turned it on, and it *worked*. No tinkering for days with stupid hardware-related bullshit. He had work to do, and needed to get it done in a certain timeframe. It's just that OS X is the latest incarnation of Unix that works out of the box and makes a good desktop. And way cheaper than an SGI box too.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
is this news?
all i see is a grown person crying like a baby because he got exactly what he deserved.
if you use a poorly supported peice of hardware you will get very bad results, no matter what operating system you use.
i have seen windows xp bitch and moan on SiS chipsets. i have heard horror storys of macs that come right of the box with half the hardware non-functioning because os-x doesn't support them(e.x. power books that can't use the dvd drive cause os-x doesn't support it)
"We have a printer system that was developed for line printers and never matured."
;)
You better not switch so fast. Why don't you just try ubuntu and use zeroconf with Linux first.
When will the hemorrhaging stop?
I have moderated in this thread so I have to post anonymously... but, I can listen to songs through XMMS and watch movies in mplayer at the same time all while hearing various beeps and other noises from my gnome window manager. honestly, a linux system may be a pain to set up, but once it is set up, it is far more useful and powerful than any other system out there. for myself, while i do curse at how difficult some things can be to set up, i do NOT bitch at the wonderful people who made their code available to me for free. they owe me NOTHING.
oh, and yes, you are completely correct. i can play multiple sounds on my Mac OS X Powerbook as well.
strike
There needs to be another "moderation" lable added to the list of "Funny", "Insightful", "Flamebait", etc.
"Linux Bigot".
As the carping and kvetching in this thread has so graphically proved.
"You've got to config it. And then you have to write some shell scripts. Update your RPMs. You have to partition your drives. And patch your kernel. Compile your binaries. Check your version dependencies. Probably do that once or twice.
It's just so easy. And so simple. I don't know why everyone doesn't run Linux."
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Has he ever heard of a sound daemon? Like esd or arts? The likes that are set up as defaults in Red Hat or SUSE?
Ohmygod. OK, go use yer Mac. I for one will stay with my desktop Linux (12+ years now, and still satisfied).
And while we're at it - when I'm hearing music, I don't want every second friggin' web page with a Flash to spoil my hearing experience.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I see both sides of this one. The common problem in Linux is that you try to do something fairly common and obvious and it doesn't work. The answer is to install this or upgrade that - something completely non-obvious. When you get that answer, especially if it took a lot of tries and research, there's a certain irritation. You tend to think, "Apparently this state of affairs is just fine with everyone, right?" Simple stuff, obvious stuff, doesn't work, and you have to spend time digging up secret recipes. How much time is wasted by thousands of people digging up this info in parallel?
The problem is not with the software; it's more with the distro packaging. There's a total lack of ownership. Nobody seems to have looked at the whole distro and made sure it worked for even the most common cases.
Case in point: on Red Hat, lynx tries to use xli to display images. Xli is not included in Red Hat (as far as I can tell) so this causes an error message until you fix it. This is not lynx's fault - it's Red Hat's fault.
I love using Linux, but I hate configuring it. Those are completely wasted hours I could have used to develop something new and interesting.
And is throwing his toys out of the pram because he's just not getting everything his way. Don't worry nothing is ever perfect for these guys, OS X won't be able to satisfy his demand that the world be made perfect for him either.
Guess what all you Prima Donnas, (and yes there are a *lot* of Prima Donnas out there). You will never ever get everything you want, something will always be wrong because the problem is not with the world at large, it's with your personality.
HTH
Deleted
I think even the Mac 512k had 4 sound channels to use... it was like 11mhz 8-bit sound, but they were there. I have no clue whether these were hardware channels, or software channels...
Heck, my Commodore 64 had like 3 sound channels, and it was a Commodore 64.
Comment of the year
The main package he's maintaining is xscreensaver. I don't think xscreensaver can work on the Mac - it's not just an X application (those do work on the Mac) but a framework that plugs rather intimately into X to take over the display and run a screensaver. It only works on desktop Unix running X.
Jamie apparently plans to have headless Linux boxes, but without a desktop X workstation there is no place to use or test xscreensaver, and probably no interest in doing so.
The majority of the "hacks" - that is actual screensavers - were written by others. Jamie is primarily responsible for the magic that lets these programs work as screensavers.
Honestly, I've run SuSE for a couple of years now and I can say I haven't had a problem like that with sound in a long time. I'm using the onboard sound on this Asus a7n8x-e with no problems and have also used a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz...with no problems. Both soundcards were detected and ran perfectly out of the box. For that matter, so did my Winfast 2000XP tv card.
So, if he was using a distro to make him feel all elite...guess what...you don't look so elite anymore.
Check my posting history. Am I a troll?
Nothing in my post is accuses others of saying anything wrong. It was only for my system. It is 100% true.
About 1x a week, I'm asked to moderate myself. In general, I mark posts UP and leave the bad ones to flounder. Please consider doing the same and reserve 'troll' and other down moderations to folks who deserve it.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I have a laptop running Red Hat 9 because Fedora 1, Fedora 2, Fedora 3 and SuSE 9.x all have so many major problems with their basic installation that the machine is unusable. My next laptop will be an Apple machine.
Obviously, you're free to do whatever you want and I don't know if there's any particular reason for you to keep using Red Hat-based distros. But if you just want to use Linux in your laptop I seriously recommend Ubuntu. For what I've seen, it's the best distro for laptops and actually, one of their next release (Oct. 2005) main priorities is to support every single laptop in the market made by Dell, HP, Toshiba and IBM (I don't know what you are using). You can get more details here.
Good luck.
but I had decided the same thing last month. My time is (now) too valuable to spend hours each week trying to get my Linux setup to be "perfect". Or maybe I just don't care anymore... I just want it to work.
How about everybody who used MacOS 1.0-9.2.2? That's a pretty big group of people who seemed to like spatial file browsers...
It would be nice if the Slashdot community stopped the whole "spatial = Windows 95" comparison... the Windows 95 implementation was botched terribly. It's not a good example of a spatial interface, it's a TERRIBLE example.
Comment of the year
There are tons of solutions to the problem, but they all miss the boat because they're done at the wrong level, and hence they're not transparent. The last thing we need are more sound demons. (I use NAS and it works fine, but it's the wrong solution too.)
All sound drivers without exception should work like they do currently on FIRST OPEN, but on second and subsequent opens they should automatically hook in a mixer and mix all inputs together.
The code to do it already exists, but it's just not being structured sensibly as above. It's no surprise that newbies find the one-at-a-time behaviour unhelpful, because it is. This is a multi-user O/S fer crissakes, single-open in sound drivers is just dumb!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What hardware do you have?
From day dot, the OS was designed to insure that the number of cycles needed to shove the bytes through to their audio chips would be there. They made sure to carry that through when they went to Unix.
Huh? There should be no need to have cycles to pump audio. This is why the buffer is there. You fill it, and it plays. Even if your program is not currently runnable. This is why most sound cards have something like 64 hardware buffers, 4 seconds each, and the driver knows how to fill them up, one per request. This means that on these cards, a program needs to be not switched to for four seconds (or not run long enough for the buffer to fill), before the audio becomes choppy.
Okay Apple came up with a chipset that includes something like DMA for audio and they can handle variable delays of feeding audio while the output is smooth as silk. Its got a variable length buffer that doesn't depend on getting fed bytes whenever the CPU can get around to it.
Huh? Are you saying there is a kernel task to pump audio into the buffer. Or are you saying that dumping the pcm into the sound buffer from memory is DMAd that makes a Mac that special. Here is a clue: I remeber DMA being in sound cards in 1993. You had to manually configure it for SB16 cards. And no, unless you are playing raw PCM sound from hard drives, you still need the CPU to decompress it, and therefore you need the CPU to at least issue the DMA instruction. Which means that if your program did not run in the time it takes to empty the buffer, it will skip.
That's what is needed. It CAN'T be done without it. Unless Linux can come up with the Audio hardware, it's never going to be anything more than a hack.
It is already done. Many soundcards do not have working drivers though. Get a real soundcard and then compare.
Its just that the __purpose__ of an OS dictates that somethings run more optimallly (you don't have streaming of dirty great big blocks of bytes when you need instant interruptability.)
Huh? All hardware implementations have an instant, stop playing instruction. If the sound does not stop instantly, then that means your driver sucks, or you are using a sound server. In the case of the sound server, you should not use it unless you need networked sound. There is no reason for you you to use a high latency software mixer.
I listen to iTunes on my iMac G5, my TiTanium G4 laptop, my wife's purple iMac G3 and the performance is always flawless.
Just run a process that uses a 100% cpu time, without renicing. Then run a process that reads random bytes from the hard drive. The more seeks the better. Then run your player. I bet it will not even be able to fill the sound cards buffer, unless OSX also gives the player real time priority (includion IO priiority).
My Linux box has the speakers turned off because it sounds like shit (the selection is reminiscent of fart noises) even when it's working.
Sounds like a speaker problem to me. Although a really crappy soundcard can do that to (especially if you crank up the volume). Compared to a proper audio system, apple sound like shit too. Even with their "we look better than we sound" Harmon-Kadron speakers.
My SysAdmin friend is having 'issues' with the sound drivers. I tell him not to bother but he wants to 'get it working' on the box.
Not a bad advice. I would recommend getting a more supported sound card. Live! is not a good sound card, but it is very well supported, never ever did I have a problem with it. Most distros autodetect it, and works perfectly, even with hardware mixing.
The selection, the selections and the selection of the selection are so poor that I just prefer to shut the audio off.
Alright. This part I really do not get. Either you should get a better collection of music, or I may have been trolled.
badness 10000
he sells beer now ....
it's better to use a mac for that - why waste time?
-- JWZ
If mozilla.org is an example of a failed project, than I won't mind Linux being a failed project, either.
I love the Mac, and I have several Mac systems. I love Linux, and I have several SuSE systems.
JWZ is an intelligent person who has contributed a greal deal to opensource, but he is also an emotional hothead who has little patience, and he rarely looks outside of the box.
He's dropped linux because of the difficulty of setting up software sound mixing. Hilariously, there are several distributions that have this *built-in*.
Talk about not doing your homework. I'm not trying to belittle this man, but this is not news; he's tired of there not being one perfect Linux OS. Well, thats the way it works. If you can't use a 'mainstream' linux like SuSE, Mandriva, or Fedora Core, don't go out an insult hardworking developers that have *already* solved the problems you're bitching about on your blog.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Mmkay, just one quick showcase. My logitech usb mouse has a windows driver, which needs restart when installed, then I tweak its settings.
Yeah, so does mine, but it was a month before I decided to install it for the extra functionality. The first time I just plugged it in and it worked. This on Win2K and OSX. I'd hope that the same would be true on *bsd/linux/etc.
And when you said "tweak its settings", I bet you didn't mean by hand. And you didn't mean you had to guess or look up the right magic online.
As for the "and I had to reboot the machine" bullshit -- nobody gives a fuck. If you are in a situation where it's bad for you to reboot your machine, and you don't have redundant servers, you're just an ass. If you're not in that situation, WTF do we care?
On related news Jamie changed his coffee from Folgers to Maxwell. He's now happy that the Maxwell coffee cans are easier to open and make less noise.
You, ah, might want to retake some critical reading courses or something. His post as a whole didn't say anything like you argue against. Even the quote you pulled to back up your argument doesn't.
He does correctly point out that the elitist bullshit is exactly that, but he doesn't say that there is only ONE TRUE OS.
Maybe his comments just hit too close to home?
The man maintanes XScreensaver package, going all the way back and perhaps beyond 1998! The package itself has been tailored by KDE and Gnome over the years. I learned all I need to know about Linux, way back in year 1999 (IIRC), when I was tempted to a manual Linux From Scratch kernel 2.4 and glibc 2.1.3 build and was untarred (not emerged :D) victorious on a Dual Pentium Pro 200MHz system in no more than 40 strait hours! Har, I had no hair on me chest then, but by jumpin Jehova it grew in me pits -- confounded!
without prejudice
Do you have a link to an image of the old logo?
Hehe.
Linux switched to a Powermac, and boots Linux on it.
Now Apple is switch to Intel. Will a Powermac x86 running Linux be different from a commodity box running Linux?
I'm skeptical.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Here it is.
Oh, the shame to host clay porn sculptures -- but he's forgiven, because he's from San Francisco: the homosexual Mecca that God will surely pulverize with salt and brimstone. From Bob Zambinski's HAPPYPENGUIN.ORG website, I stab at thee!
He's right.
We should be able to plug a mouse into a port on a Linux machine and expect it to work. We shouldn't need to troll the net looking for guidance on how to configure the damn thing. If it needs a driver and it needs to be configured, we deserve a GUI that handles the congifuring. A mouse is a tool that's used to manipulate a GUI; it's lame and lazy to build a driver and then slump off the configuration into an X ASCII config file.
Ditto sound. Linux doesn't do it right. And, what's with that stupid business of distributions shipping muted ALSA drivers? That makes no sense at all. Can anyone even imgaine Microsoft or Apple doing something so gratuitously user hostile as shipping boxes with the sound turned off by default?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In fact Windows 95 did not have spatial interface at all. Opening each folder in separate window does not a spatial interface make!
For someone who is obviously a proud contributor to the FOSS community, it's pretty sad to see him blasting the very work he was a large part of. I usually hate the: "If you don't like it, create a patch" attitude, but for someone that's done so much FOSS coding, I think this motto applies. I use OS X at work and it's great.. but this is just mob mentaility at it's finest. I'm tired of hearing about how much better OS X is than Linux. It's only better on the desktop and it SHOULD be. It's perfomance sucks compared to Linux. It's memory management sucks compared to Linux. It's threading capability sucks compared to Linux. Try running OS X as a server and you will be underwelmed. All Apple does is try to make something that's pretty, usable, and works. Apple would really be doing a piss poor job if it wasn't better at these things.
Linux is better in so many ways. So your stupid sound card doesn't multiplex. Cry some more. If it's so bad, help fix the problem. He obviously has the skillset. This guy just seems to like to b*tch.
He must not have been using Ubuntu/Debian. My 3D Card, Sound, and Wireless worked without any tweaking.
You couldn't be more wrong about OS X.
As a Mac user, the idea of a computer being unable to play an essentially unlimited number of simultaneous sounds is just foreign to me. I don't even think about it. I expect that I can leave iTunes playing music while playing a game that makes all sorts of noises and still hear alerts from iChat when I get an IM. There's nothing to configure, it just plain works.
The only time I've been amazed by sound on OS X was when I first played with Soundtrack. This program lets you create professional-quality music by mixing up to 99 tracks of layered audio. Not only does it mix them in realtime, but it can apply advanced audio effects in realtime as well.
Not once in the process do you have to care about audio hardware setup. Whatever you have plugged in -- analog speakers, USB speakers, S/PDIF -- the appropriate audio comes out of it.
Meanwhile, you need to spend an afternoon to get open-source UNIX to reliably make a sine-wave beep.
Perhaps you might want to review Apple's overview of OS X 10.4's Core Audio functionality?
Honestly, why does this justify a front page Slashdot story? Why does JWZ's opinion matter more than anyone else's? Time after time he's shown himself to be a whiny prima donna who is past his prime. His now-famous "nomo zilla" rant probably set the Mozilla project back by a year or more, and why? Because it wasn't his Netscape anymore. Now he's doing the same thing with an entire operating system. To JWZ I say: good riddance. What the open source community needs is constructive criticism, not whining.
We complain about people like John Dvorak all the time, but are we any better if we give the spotlight to the likes of JWZ?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Buy supported hardware.
//really// good.
That's what Mac users do. That's what Windows users do. Now it's true that you're not going to be able to pick up a box and read "Supports Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 3, etc." BUT any veteran Linux user can in 30 seconds run off for you a list of supported components that will be automatically detected and supported tweak-free by any of these, or at worst by running a driver install (i.e. Nvidia).
And anyone who responds now with "but the Nvidia driver isn't open source" or complains about another vendor driver that installs and works equally well is comparing apples to goats. Most Mac and all Windows drivers are non-open-source. You can't complain on the one hand that Linux drivers are harder to use than Windows drivers and on the other hand say that you won't use vendor drivers because they're closed source and that's a requirement for Linux even though it isn't for Windows.
I have a loaded system that I recently built: dual Athlon, hardware RAID, Geforce4, excellent audio, trackball w/scroll wheel, 17" LCD display, wireless net. I bought supported hardware, and as a result, after a vanilla install of Fedora Core 3 and two vendor driver installs that were as easy as download, set permission to execute, and double-click on icon from the root account, I have a running system with all devices supported, no tweaks needed. It screams, it's stable, and it makes Linux look
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
JWZ is annoyed about the sound system in Linux. Well he is right about that. ALSA/OSS can have strange setups. And sometimes it refuses to work at all. But this only happens when using handmade kernels, distributions (gentoo) or certain releases of debian sarge and sid. On the other hand. I've installed Linux the past couple of years on various machines without a problem. I'vs used SuSE Linux, Knoppix, ubuntu and debian. All of these distributions had never a problem to detect the 3 button-wheelmouse. And even when changing the device with another mouse. Everything worked fine. The monitor setup was good (using the suse stuff it was perfect => better default than windowsXP/NT/98 on the same machine). The sound worked on all machines out of the box by auto detection (except from my desktop machine, which uses a non-PNP ISA SB16). So you can see, I cannot follow the argument. ALSA or OSS don't work. They might not work on all hardware. Or maybe some distributions are not that good in setting up ALSA correctly. But that makes not Linux (the kernel) a bad thing at all. Another point is: MacOS X work fine (almost). Except the network printing over ipp. It generates the worng URI for the printer. Because it assumes that the correct URI is: http://host:631/ipp/PRINTER-NAME or ipp://HOST/ipp/PRINTER-NAME Well, on most installations of cups. The correct path would be ipp://HOST/printers/PRINTER-NAME Even on other MacOS X machines. So this is a serious bug in Mac OS X. But you can fix it. And to be honest, iCal is really cool. And the other nifty things are cool too. e.g. iPhoto which is just easier to use then gthumb or the KDE equivialent. So I can see, that someone might just get a Mac so he or she can work a little more efficient than on Linux or Windows. No problem. But I really don't know why it is so important that jwz is stopped using Linux as desktop-OS. Is he some sort of prophet of the Linux-Religion? Or is he a fallen angle? Nope. He is just a man. And if he stopped using certain open source software. Well why should we care?
Seems to be that JWZ's gripe is that Linux requires an one to have at least some skill as a *System Administrator* to well, *administer* a machine. Mice features aren't plug and play (I am assuming he refers to the fact that a scroll mouse still needs to be configured before the scroll wheel must be used -- USB mice *are* essentially plug and play with most all recent versions of Xorg), is that really a bad thing on a *UNIX* machine? Of course you are supposed to configure your system software (and X11 certain counts as such), not the system for you -- on a professionally oriented OS like Linux or BSD?
:-)
It is precisely this desire to accomodate a user who is wants to a) admin a full featured UNIX machine b) not have any system administration skill that is has ruined most *all* Linux distributions (note: all Gentoo fanboys replying to this will be deported to Siberia) -- and which is why I use FreeBSD wherever I can (the only reason I wouldn't use FreeBSD is a specific application or hardware support -- such as on amd64 machines, at least for now).
There's also nothing wrong with OS X and before that Irix -- which JWZ *does* seem to be fond off -- for gearing themselves to developers/designers rather than system administrators, that should be encourage -- and users who wish to use a Linux machine *without* being willing to read documentation should be more than encouraged to switch. OS X is an excellent system for that user -- they still have the power of a UNIX shell, etc...
Yet, people will remember how insecure IRIX is out of the box (and to all the IRIX bashers -- it *can* be made secure) -- and especially how expensive and hard to obtain the OS is! -- those are all prices you pay for being able to plug and play *AND* have a "cool" UNIX shell.
So essentially, to JWZ and the rest of the crowd -- the same people for whom garbage like GNOME/KDE/linuxconf was created -- don't let the door kick you on the way out.
[On a side note, what esd (enlightenment sound daemon -- which is still used by GNOME junk afaik) has been doing what jwz was trying to do since *at least* 1999; It amazes me how such talented developers can't do even the simplest administration tasks, I've worked with people holding M.S. and Ph.D degrees in computer science (or math or EE, but you get the idea), who couldn't use vi and used *TELNET OVER WIFI*; I also know *many* graduates of the famed Berkeley EECS program, some of them now in graduate schools, who can't manage to write a makefile or extract a tar file]
This is only a semi-"arrogant UNIXoid rant" -- I don't see anything wrong with OS X (or IRIX), it's just that users *shouldn't* demand mainstream Linux distributions (and BSD flavors) act like it.I also find it entirely acceptable for people to be developers and *not* be system administrators -- indeed, this is how I get jobs
What software Jamie Zawinski chooses isn't terribly interesting, but far more interesting debates center on the ethics of keeping users from sharing and modifying software (proprietors are often, and rightly, noted as harmful to those who want to maintain their software freedom). There's a lot of important and interesting discussion on how the pursuit of software freedom ties into building and maintaining a society where people retain their freedom to communicate. These discussions often involve pointing out that computers and software play a role in answering the most important question we can ask--how should we treat other people?
Even along the narrow confines of the argument Zawinski presents, where convenience trumps everything else, his argument doesn't include socially relevant issues with serious consequences for all of us. We shouldn't accept everyone's choices nor should we only consider computer use as a selfish endeavor--do what's right for you. That selfishness may mean wielding power over other users.
It's particularly ironic that this topic concerns Apple and multimedia because Apple is an exemplar of wielding this power: Apple apparently refuses to distribute any codecs to make or play older free software-compatible and unencumbered formats out of the box (e.g., Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, and Theora, to name a few). Through subsequent "upgrades" to the software downloaded and installed through the software upgrade program, Cory Doctorow says that the popular iPod portable digital audio player has become less capable over time. He has documented numerous downgrades on his blog. So not only does Apple not want to support multimedia well enough that QuickTime becomes a one-stop-shop for media, but Apple doesn't even want to make it easy for you to choose to encode your own copyrighted works with free and unencumbered codecs.
Digital Citizen
I cannot wait for him to return and start coding once this fruitful excursion is over..
The MacOS has always been able to do this. OS X does one better than just mixing live audio through one audio input and actually allows you to direct the audio output of different applications to different devices. The OS supports this but there is very little GUI to control it. The application Detour will give you a more complete GUI for it.
You guys really must speak up when I've got the music blaring out of my Linux box.
Can't hear a word you're saying!
(And for extra irony, if you were using osx, you'd get handy inline spellchecking in all your applications!)
I have been using linux for the past year and a half on the desktop and since I first tried Red Hat 9 to now that I use Ubuntu its come a long way.
Ubuntu *Just Worked* on a Dell C600 I got on ebay. I didn't have to configure anything. I bought a wireless pc card, netgear wg511 which JUST WORKED - didnt even have to install a driver since prism54 is built in.
That said I bought an Imac G5 because my hands hurt from typing and I heard it had the best speech recognition in town. It is pretty slick and the GUI effects are nice HOWEVER I have had to google for answer and EDIT TEXT FILES to get keyboard behavior to work right in firefox and now camino.
Keyboard navigation SUCKS ASS on tiger. The tab key doesnt work the way it should.
Also I have to spend money to get simple utilities, Linux has mac beat hands down in the software arena.
The repository package management system is way better also, and thats because of free software.
OS X has a lot of nice features and is pretty and slick - These features should be open sourced and incorporated into linux.
Mac could still make elegant hardware with FREE software and make a nice model line that just works right out of the box.
I'm planning on dual booting Tiger and Ubuntu on this beautiful Mac machine.
I too have gotten to the age where I just want to use an OS that works. But I'm mad at Apple for switching to Intel chips (the biggest reason to buy Apple hardware is that it is SUPERIOR hardware) and Windows' propensity for viruses, malware and spyware makes me itch. So I took a risk some time ago and dropped in an operating system whos family I've worked professionally with for years, but which I have never tried as a home workstation. And I've never been happier with an operating system. FreeBSD 5.4 Release. It's a little bit like Linux, except that it actually works.
All sound cards and integrated sound chipsets have had hardware mixing for the last 10 years.
It's just the frigging sound drivers that refuse to use the mixer when the driver is opened a second time, and subsequent times.
The blame here lies squarely with driver writers, who have encouraged the spread of incompatible sound demons and non-transparent mixing by failing to provide default mix-on-multi-open driver functionality. The complaints are accurate.
If you're willing part with your money for an expensive Mac why not pay someone to fix those "unsexy" bugs instead? I'm sure some cash would make some bugs sound really sexy if there was some bounty attached to it. The AROS-community does this with success and would gladly donate money to the KDE/FBSD-community to fix/implement bugs/features that would make my life easier.
The question is, what do you expect from at system made by mostly volunteers who is fumbling in the dark because HW-makers aren't willing to tell the FOSS-community how their HW works? Don't expect FOSS to work on the latest and greatest HW.
JWZ wasn't much into software since he made some jack from Netscape, more power to him.
So basically, some moron saw that in jwz's post, submitted it to Slashdot to spite him, and the editors stupidy ran with it. Look at the "dept." line--Taco posted this specifically to direct hate at jwz. Looks like it worked! Taco is weird like that and doesn't take kindly to criticism.
Oh, and it's OS X, not "OS/X" or "OS-X." Almost as bad as the people who use "MAC" instead of Mac. If only ignorance was painful. I'm gonna start spelling Linux as "Lunix" or "Linix" from now on. I guarantee vast threads correcting my spelling.
"Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys."
I was hoping Slashdot would actually honor this (when I read it before it hit Slashdot). Does Slashdot actually have any policies about how to keep a page from being listed? Google (and other automated systems) for example list ways that you can keep your pages out.
Uh, Linux still doesn't Get It with regard to many desktop features, of which sound is certainly a good example.
I have Mandrake (aka Old Man Driva) 10.1 and SimplyMEPIS on my machine. Sound doesn't work out-of-the-box on either. I have a plain vanilla Sound Blaster Live! Basic. Supported. Right?
Well, there's a catch. My motherboard has VIA sound on it. That's supported too. And it worked. But the hardware MIDI port on the motherboard was pathological, so I plugged in the Blaster in order to use its MIDI port -- the slightly better audio was a bonus. I turned off motherboard audio in the BIOS. Windows was happy. It saw the new card and everything went there.
The Linux kernel, though, insists on probing the mobo and discovering the VIA audio even though it's turned off. So it assigns the applications to that. Some applications bypass ALSA or whatever it is in KDE and allow me to specify a different audio device. But that's whacking a mole one at a time, and basic sound functions still don't work. I got Mandrake to work once by building a custom kernel from which I had carefully extirpated every vestige of VIA audio support, so it *had* to go to the Blaster. But that's a kludge.
Just another example of Linux' failures on the desktop. My heart's with Linux, and I couldn't imagine using Windows servers for much, but the preponderance of my computer time is spent on Windows 2000, which is reasonably stable.
And yes, linux is harder than having dedicated hardware and OS intergration - it's also cheaper. But more importantly, that's the price of freedom.
Just wait till Intel based Macs come out. Linux will work a lot better then. I've said this a million times now, but their standard hardware will make support a breeze.
Remember, they only said that "Macintosh" won't run elsewhere - they never said that you can't run other things on a "Mac". In fact, Jobs said you *could* run Windows on a new Intel Mac, but doubts you want to do it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I remember another article on slashdot, perhaps a year that said there was a surprisingly new kind of Mac fan: hardcore hackers.
Why?
They did not have to spend their time futzing with mundane issues, but they had all the goodies of unix to hack(futz) with on things that interested them.
A Gronk replacment is already available. It's called Grind. I use it all the time. (I should, since I wrote it.)
Hear that? (crickets chirping) That's the sound of nobody giving a damn what that "club dna" poseur in his mid-thirties thinks.
I'm so sick and tired of people who see an opinion or personal experience that differs from their own, and they slap the label of "FUD" on it.
"Stop spreading FUD!" "You're just spreading FUD." "Okay, I don't know why this FUD got modded up."
I swear, people here are the most closed-minded zealots I've ever seen. EVERYTHING they don't like is called FUD. Please. Stop. Could it be that, maybe, someone is spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt but is instead simply offering their personal experience or opinion?
I respect JWZ but geez as stupid as I am, I know that if I want to have a decent Linux desktop I FIRST need to check the hardware compatibility for cryin' out loud. Just because I am an uber programmer doesn't mean I am an uber hardware geek [which i confess i am NOT].
Wait until he wants to do some really cool networking toy playing with his shiney new Mac and he will soon see the shortcomings of the Mac as well. You still must jump through a few hoops to get it to work.
It all depends on what you need to do to make a living. I too am sick of ppl expecting Linux to be desktop ready right now. For the most part it is. I still use windows, i still use *BSD, I still use Macs I mean there are no 'One size fits all' desktops out there. They all have shortcomings.
JWZ, get one of your beers you sell, sit down, and quit trying to be that 'Last Angry Man!'
Jamie Zawinski was one of the first few employees at Netscape. He was a major reason the Mozilla project was made open. Without him, there might be no Firefox today.
He's apparently gotten too old and tired to learn new things---he used Linux when it was much, much less user-friendly, and switched to OSX over, apparently, some sort of driver bug which ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back... but at least give him the benefit of "well, he was damned important once".
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
who...exactly?
It looks like we found our leak.
What?
I don't think it's right to credit Mac OSX for sound that works out-of-the-box. Sound is a hardware problem that Apple solved by refusing to license Mac OSX to other computer manufacturers that could make clones that would suck even more than Slackware at hardware autodetection. At work I used to work with an "expandable" Mac, i.e. one with PCI slots. Infected by Mac zealotry that things should just work, I decided that I could just pop in a USB card to add USB 2.0 support to the Mac. My little experiment was a total failure. With GNU/Linux on x86 hardware, the hardware would at least get recognized as an alien artifact. In contrast, the soundcard doesn't even appear in the system profile of my (admittedly fairly ancient) office Mac. One unfair comparison deserves another.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Yeah, jwz "didn't you used to be somebody" zawinski. The man who liked to insult RMS. He's a good guy. Once. Or not.
Your mother thinks I show her a LOT of fucking respect, bitch.
Yeah, call him names! That'll make his points and arguments mean less.
but he wanted USB sound and Bluetooth to work **out of the box**
:-)
And Linux is just not ready hahahaha
This guy was a developer contributing to open source projects which started out on linux and all you guys can do is hurl insults and belittle his contributions.
The biggest problem with linux on the desktop is not a technical one. The zealots will be the undoing of linux. Linux has become the dark side of the force.
Remember how the nerds on windows scoffed at user's issues? Remember how windows nerds had no interest in supporting cross-platform compatibility? Remember how windows mavins had no interest in standards? Remember how windows developers could not think outside the box?
Sound familiar?
The OSS movement held such promise but it has now been bogged down by zealots, rhetoric, politics and dogma. The words of RMS have practically achieved religious proportions.
Oh, and creating your own pet distro does not count in my book.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That's just the way it is; we all have opinions.
Anyone who claims to be objective is a fraud, but Jamie Zawinski has opinions, and he's entitled to them. Anyone who doesn't have an opinion needs to decide what he/she really believes.
Nietsche was also very opinionated, but still worth reading.
Oh, and I think that his Dali clock is worthy of a place in history, if nothing else.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
I own a Mac mini too. There is no "BUY ITUNES MUSIC" or "BUY GARAGEBAND ACCESSORIES" option in any menu. Anywhere.
You're making it up and using caps-lock as hyperbole.
At most, when I started iTunes for the very first time, it ran me through a few steps, and at the end asked me if I wanted to start up in my music library or at the iTunes Music Store (reasonable, since someone might want to start purchasing music right away).
As for Garageband add-ons, I have never seen a single nag screen to buy any Garageband add-ons anywhere, and I've used Garageband a lot. In fact, Garageband comes with a ton of built-in instruments and I don't feel I need to buy any add-ons since so much was already included (including software pianos, multiple software drunkits, etc.).
Also, since you have an anti-iPod link in your sig, it's reasonable to assume that though your opinion is valid, it is also biased against Apple. However, your portrayal of OS X as being packed full of nag screens and ads is completely, 100% wrong. The only exception would be Quicktime 7 Pro, and they even removed the nag screen for that.
I want SGI hardware - and I dig that minimalist eye-pleasing look of Irix (just don't wa$te it as a web server :-D). But no SGI workstation ever made Irix look through a database of 6 thousand sound cards, autodetect and set up all support in the kernel and user space. Neither did it for:
....
... is Apple planning on supporting the same range of hardware supported by XP or Linux/FreeBSD?? Or will they be promoting an open source approach to unix/darwin/bsd drivers for hardware on the Intel platform?
- bluetooth
- 60,000 usb devices
etc. In fact when SGI adopted NT (almost poisoning itself in the process) they made it clear that **even NT** was only supported a limited set of "official hardware. Having a limited choice makes it pretty easy to have "well supported hardware".
This should be the next move for OSS on the desktop driven by IBM / HP / RedHat / Ubuntu / Sun/ Gnome / KDE... et al. Pick 4-5 platforms to support **really really well** (i64 i368/Intel, AMD, Sparc, PPC) along with a half dozen good quality hardware devices for each and publicize the hell out of the officially supported hardware. Sure, list the 5000 and one sound,video and ethernet cards that are supported but focus on several.
WHEN THESE DEVICES ARE DETECTED IN A NEW INSTALLATION AUTOMATICALLY CREATE AND SEND 3 EMAILS TO THE MANUFACTURER (with user approval of course). 1 to marketing, 1 to engineering, and 1 each to the VP/CEO etc. and an anonymous e-mail to the Linux hardware database. Set up a site that track the number of linux installations using specific supported hardware. CREATE market incentives for manufacturers to support Linux.
In actual fact if you look at the breadth of hardware supported Irix and OS/X have terrible hardware support compared to windows - their support (out of the box in the kernel) for various types of hardware is *worse* than that of Linux. Hwoever for the hardware they do support there or good user applications (for bluetooth etc.)
Linux has astounding coverage of hardware for sound, bluetooth etc. second only in quantitty to Windows and in quality of user applications to OS/X (but only barely). We'll see how wide Apple/Darwin support for all the great hardware out there in Intel land is after they make the switch away from PPC's
Sounds like JWZ jumped ship just when things were starting to get interesting. Though I totally understand the need to make toast why trash Linux (or Mozilla or Emacs) just because you switch platforms.
JWZ is getting close to 40 years old - you'd think he'd be focussing more on hist music and beer selling biz and less on computer platforms.
Even despite those limitations, I would have switched to Linux on My main machine -no, make that ANY machine long ago if just two things were functional; a firewall that works like ATGuard or Outpost (NO Connection Unless Specifically Allowed Previously Or Just This Once)... and a decent CAD program. It just kills Me when I hear the stadard cry of "Linux has ports of all the Major Apps!" How about AutoCAD? Or ANYTHING even remotely close. I mean, bloody hell, My preferred low-end/low-resource app is a Visual Basic construct. How difficult could it be to port an older version to Linux?
And please, no comments from the 'What A L00ser, Just Type In (insert insanely long string of utter gobbledygook here) To Config The Firewall'. I was a DOS proponent for many years before I was forced to switch to 'Doze (Linux not being that common in the Corporate environment then). NOBODY wants to type in long combinations of letters, numbers, and switches to do something.
People switched to 'Doze from DOs (or Unix) because it was much easier. I have heard for years how Linux was Ready To Replace Windows. Wake up, people. If you can not even get 'Nix to perform the most basic of functions that 'Doze does automatically (Sound Configuration for one), then Linux/BSD will continue to be relagated to exist as a mere fraction of the marketplace.
If I can get my Vortex based card to play music. Anyone can get a card to work. It's not that hard really. And because jwz isn't developing xscreensaver it goes away somehow????
you got a hatrick on slashdot. Now get your butt upstairs, your mom needs help with the dishes!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
You guys at /. really do suck.
When someone has something that is ACTUALLY newsworthy, and wants it posted, you guys don't give a rat's ass, and you kick them to the curb.
But when someone says "don't post this" you do it.
Slashdot is scum.
When you've been using UNIX for 20 years, start a family, and actually find other hobbies than sitting in front of the ol' cancer machine, you'll get sick of stuff like:
- learn yet another new config format
- having to constantly recompile a kernel or a kmod
- compile anything
Just to get a camera hooked to your PC or try out some new piece of software.
It just gets really fucking old, eventually.
This is why I see OS X as a bigger threat to Linux than Windows. A lot of Windows users actually LIKE Windows; the way its laid out, the interface design, etc. They usually don't like OS X's interface.
Its a good thing he didn't try to copy and paste any meaningful information between apps (or even on the same app) on Linux - then he'd be really pissed.
You're assuming that people who used MacOS did so because they liked the spatial interface.
I think you'll find most of them are now using OS X without complaint, spatial or not.
No. I'm pretty sure he put it in because he didn't want a bunch of uninformed morons speculating about it. That's the best reason I can speculate, anyway. :-)
I run a 1000 node Linux HPC at my company for research purposes we have had a lot of the scientists running Linux on the desktop for roughly 250 Linux desktops. After feeling the same pain...i.e. having to tweak every little last thing and lack of any real good desktop management platform out there ( tried nsh, suse, redhat, novell, sun mgm apps ) nothing worked well. Switched them all the G5's as of May and life has been so much easier since. Gotta say at this point I had linux on the desktop.
He didn't put any *people* down.
Anyone who takes offense to his post is pretty fucking fragile, and has serious self esteem issues, imho.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Dark Side of the Source... that's a great one!
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
I think the There are serious problems in Linux people are probably with 10x as much as the suck it up people.
I don't hope you die though, well not yet.
You guys are like that because you can't solve the linux problems of your family let alone your close friends or random aquaintances and no amount of looking at the source is gonna help.
The spirit that built command line Liux has dried up with the "We don't give a crap" linux doesn't need to be user friendly apologists.
You didn't so much accuse anybody of anything you just seem to not be following the MEE TOO thread - get with the program. Facts or reality will not save you here!
Multimedia installation: Install these applications in this order, using an automated installer such as yum, apt-get (preferably with synaptic GUI), or the urpmi mandrake installer: mplayer + components.
USE AN AUTOMATED INSTALLER, DON'T INSTALL FROM RPMS UNLESS YOU ENJOY DEPENDENCY HELL.
- mplayer
- mplayer-plugin
- skins
- w32codecs
- xine
- xine-lib-devel
- realplayer
- flash
Start playing things back and enjoy. For Fedora Core 2, follow the procedure in my article Painless Multimedia For Linux, but use the yum.conf file posted in Build a Linux Appliance, Part 2--The Extras, not the one that's posted as part of the multimedia article. (the multimedia article should be updated to refer people to the "appliance article" URL, I need to contact the editor about this)Tech Public Policy stuff
"Yes, there's still issues with Linux audio. But whining and running off to another OS isn't going to fix them."
And yet we have the influx of ex-Windows users to Linux.
Google is your friend, google on:
installerprogramname problempackagename repository (make the appropriate substitutions.)
Tech Public Policy stuff
There you go. Personally I am ok using Linux for a desktop, but that is because I am a system administrator and am willing to go through the tasks of that. I use Linux on the desktop, FreeBSD on the laptop and am quite as happy.
I am very happy that OS X exists and is a viable alternative for people to use who don't wish to be system administrators. I think the problem is indeed is that Linux evangelists have over-evangelized Linux to users who simply aren't willing to do what is needed to maintain a Linux machine. Luckily that doesn't happen with FreeBSD -- since it is over hyped. As a result, community spends a dispropritionate amount of time categoring to the new influx of (likely temprorary) desktop user, rather than fixing bugs and improving features which far more relevant to the fields where Linux/BSD are far more likely to suceed -- in the server field, as well as in computer science education (or any other place where a set of workstations that are *centrally administered* are use).
Solution? IBM or one of other big players buys licenses that allow w32codec to be packaged with the free distros.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"Maybe but he inherited a bunch of others. No OS is perfect, every one has it's share of problems. I expect JWZ to start whining about OSX any day now. The guy is a pathalogical complainer, nothing will make him happy. Expect to see another article about how he switched to windows in a couple of years."
WAAA! But the code isn't free! Waaa! Oh right. Only Jamie constantly complains. Buncha myopic hypocrites.
You can find all my Linux how-to pieces here. They're more or less FC2 specific, but the procedures I should describe should work on just about anything, with minor distro-specific mods (like apt-get instead of yum, for instance)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Alsa is incredibly powerful, sophisticated, and has some really high-level audio engineers working on software that uses it to the exclusion of other not as good solutions. It is AMAZING what is going on with Linux sound right now. Just take a look at a system like Ardour w/Jack using Alsa and then tell me that this is a "fragmented half baked audio scheme." You are confused.
And for God sake Linux should support sound.
Just because some notorious whiner can't get a soundcard working on a variant of Linux, but succeeds in getting it to work on a variant of FreeBSD, doesn't mean Linux doesn't support sound.
In fact, if he really wants compatibility, as other posters have already suggested, there's always Windows.
Here's a quote (I'm surprised he still has this link) about quitting Netscape:
Now, granted he has some good points and good effort, but sometimes teams don't get anywhere with naysayers like jws. Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop of Auntie Smith, but no doubt, like Mozilla/Firebird, Linux can and will be used on the desktop.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: You can type more than that for your comment.
I was talking about people ragging on Jamie Zawinski for his decision to switch to the mac.
Does this decision all of a sudden make his past contributions less valuable? Ingrates, the lot of you.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The Windows logo doesn't do much, except maybe give Microsoft as few extra bucks.
I've had Fiber card drivers, professional video card drivers, and all sorts of other "expensive hardware" drivers crash systems on me, and they've all had the Microsoft Certified driver logo.
While I'm sure that potentially the Windows logo certification might help iron out a bug or two, it doesn't end up making much difference in the end.
However, I do agree that many problems with Windows are the drivers and non-OS software that's installed. While I've had trouble with server-type hardware drivers, I've had countless fewer issues then I've had with desktops. Some of it is probably due to lower-quality hardware (although most "server" hardware comes out of the machines right next to the consumer hardware) but a lot more of it is the quality, testing, and QA of the drivers and related software.
Not to mention, the mish-mash of software installed on a desktop PC makes you wonder how it works at all.
I don't believe that Windows (2000, XP, 2003) are unstable operating systems. Security related problems aside, on their own these systems are very stable now a days.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Open source UNIX-alikes already have a larger market share than Macintosh.
/. just matter-of-factly randomly claim things with no sources to back them up. Macs have 3% market share and a 16% install base. I'm willing to bet Linux has less than 1% on the desktop, and that its area is in replacing old UNIX servers. In fact, Google's Zeitgeist used to reflect exactly that.
/. editors have embraced Apple now. There is no operating system out there like OS X Tiger, especially not in the OSS world. Many people have dumped Linux and are tired of waiting every year for the great UNIX desktop from the OSS community to arrive.
Uh, numbers please? I love the way people on
Hell, I still remember a hopeful Slashdot article over a year ago saying Linux market share would double that of Macs. Never happened. Even the
Run X11, shut up.
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
"I could make a massive list of complaints about desktop Linux regarding the very same subjects you described here, but I guarantee the solutions wouldn't be as easy."
Would you be so kind? I'm looking for some new projects, and I'm always in for these sorts of self-contained problems. Perhaps you could put them on a website as a set of challenges? I'm puzzled at your tone, btw, you sound very defensive.
You're wrong about sleep, there is no straightforward (perhaps no) way to program sleep to not occur during downloads, but sleep after that. On linux, on the other hand it is quite straightforward to add the rule to powermgmt.
MacOS X runs on a closed hardware platform. There is no way an OS running on generic hardware will ever get as many "little thing" right as an OS where the developer controls the hardware.
If you want to compare desktop Linux with MacOS X in any meaningful way, you must compare MacOS X with Linux running on a PC specially build by professionals for a particular Linux distribution.
> Because downgrading all of my hardware is worth it just to run Linux?
Jamie downgraded all his hardware just to not run Linux.
I like it.
At first there was silence.
Then a company called 4Front came along. They wanted to create a common sound API standard for all those UNIX systems that lacked sound support, like Linux, BSD, etc. Hence OSS (Open Sound System) was born. A simple API to cover a simple need: get sound. Cool.
But then they decided to charge people for their drivers. Now who hell would pay for a fucking sound driver? Hence the OSS/Free project was born. Its mission: create free OSS-compatible drivers.
But most OSS/Free drivers sucked. Buggy, lacked basic features, etc. And they still suck as of now. But since sound manufacturers often don't reveal specs, you can't really blame the OSS/Free guys for this.
Also, OSS was nice and all, but lacked advanced audio features needed for pro work, and >2 speaker support requires having multiple sound device nodes, which is an ugly hack. Also, some people didn't like its ioctl() interface, saying a library would be superior. Hence the ALSA project was born. Its mission: create a modern sound API for Linux (yes, only Linux), along with free drivers that don't suck.
But ALSA has many problems. First, its library-based API broke binary and source compatibility many times. Second, it has a powerful infrastructure, capable of doing pro work stuff such as routing sound from a card to another, or use plugins, however ALSA can only be configured to do those things through confusing plaintext config files that are barely documented, and hard to understand. Thirdly, it's a bitch to have working. ALSA is very modularized, which is normally a good thing, however it tends to make it break up more than the plain one module way of OSS.
Oh, and let's not forget that since OSS is an established standard, ALSA needs backwards OSS compatibility. Hence the ALSA people made OSS emulation standard in ALSA. Which brings up the same chicken and egg problem we have seen with OS/2 and its Win 3.1 support: since ALSA has OSS API support, why should we care about the native ALSA API? So, even today, many apps have not taken the plunge to ALSA because OSS "just works". Well, most of the times at least. OSS emulation is not perfect (gasp!).
Oh, another thing: since the ALSA libs are LGPL and have broken backwards compat quite often, closed-source projects tend to forget about bothering to support ALSA, prefering the simple ioctl() API of OSS.
And of course most ALSA drivers are very buggy, for the same reason as the free OSS ones. Which brought up some interesting situations: sometimes when an application supports both the OSS and ALSA APIs, some ALSA drivers actually work better with the OSS API!! Another blow to the native ALSA API.
But one of the biggest problems of ALSA is that its devs refuse to believe that having more than one app playing sound at the same is a major problem, which continues to piss off lots of people to this day. Indeed, very few sound cards can actually play more than one stream directly in hardware, so the mixing must be done in software, preferably at the driver level so that the operation is transparent and (this is very important) latency-less. Windows has done this for a long time now. The ALSA people came up with "dmix", a userspace plugin that does the transparent mixing we needed so much. However, being a userspace plugin, it needs to be configured, so again the ugly ALSA config files are to be used. After being configured, dmix works quite nice, HOWEVER for some reason some apps just crap out when using dmix. Apparently dmix is not transparent enough. It's clear now that software mixing must be done at a lower level, however no work is done on that front. Arguments against it say "this shouldn't be in kernelspace, bla bla". which is funny, because the commercial OSS drivers do support hardware mixing inside their kernel drivers. And it always work fine.
For a long time people have tried to solve the more-than-one-app problem through things called sound servers. The idea is simple enough: have one program open the sound
It's not quite the same. Using Macs, you get both your hardware, your OS and many applications from the same vendor.
There are several vendors of Linux machines that give you the hardware, software, expansion hardware, and software upgrades all from a single source. And they work.
You know your wifi-card is going to work with your updated OS without you having to find an upgrade for the driver. You know your internal bluetooth is going to work. You know the OS will support your keyboard's backlight or your PowerBook's motion sensor out of the box.
Well, at least that's what Apple promises...
There's no custom hardware that needs special support. Every piece of hardware a Mac contains when you buy it just works without you having to find drivers, even if you format your disk and install the OS from scratch.
Yes, and you get exactly the same behavior when you buy a Linux or Windows machine from a vendor that provides updates for their systems.
The point is that people don't need high level audio engineers making their sound systems. They want one that just works. They want a simple standard that takes input from all the programs that want to play a sound and just plays them, regardless of their audio hardware.
All of those mac fan slashdoters just forget one thing : just imagine Lindows starts shipping computers with lindows preinstalled and was specifying a small amount of authorized hardware (on pair with apple). This distro would run smoothly since everything was preconfigured to work smoothly.
Still, everybody would say that it stinks, because it is kinda proprietary.
Please try to compare thing that can be compared. Compatibility would be much easier for any distro if they could restrict the hardware that you can install. But that is against your religion. So please stop crying.
I really don't know what hardware people are running - but ever since Linux got SB support in the early 90s, I've *never* had a problem with sound. Of course, on desktop machines I use a distro designed for the desktop.
The thing is with Apple, they have control over the hardware so it's very easy for them to get everything working straight out of the box. Linux has to deal with parts bin machines. I bought my PowerBook precisely because it WASN'T a parts bin machine and everything would work out of the box.
Given a hardware selection solely made up of well supported stuff, I can have a Fedora Core or CentOS system work right out of the box, too.
Windows XP on the other hand - even on our HPaq machines at work - doesn't detect *any* hardware - not the chipset, the extremely common Intel onboard graphics, the extremely common onboard Intel NIC - instead I have to grope around the HPaq site to find the drivers. CentOS or FC3? Within half an hour of putting the first CD in, I can have a working machine with all hardware fully operating and a complete office suite.
So what we have here:
Apple - everything works out the box, but then again, OS X hardly supports any hardware because Apple only ships a very limited range of hardware.
Windows - Most things are not supported out the box but vendors all make Windows drivers.
Linux - OSS drivers for a vast range of hardware, but almost non-existent vendor support.
i.e. Linux cannot win. Microsoft, with all their financial might, doesn't need to bother writing drivers because the hardware makers all write the drivers for them. RedHat with a tiny fraction of the wealth of Microsoft has to make it all fit together themselves because the manufacturers won't lift a finger to help. Apple solves the problem by merely supporting a tiny amount of hardware and then controlling the hardware that goes into Apple computers.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I knew there was a reason I didn't bother with trying to get sound working on my Linux boxes. They do a fine job of running my server stuff. When I want to watch movies, I use the PC or the Mac.
1) Develop software 2) Distribute free software, free as in beer. 3) Get out of software biz. 4) Distribute free beer; free as in speech @ the DNA Lounge. (http://www.dnalounge.com/) 5) Profit!!
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps. - Benjamin Disraeli
Everyone is saying "he must not be that smart/great" if he can't get a sound card working in Linux.. My take on it is "maybe he is to busy working on useful things to waste his time getting a sound card working in linux". As someone who gets shit done at home and work, I find that you have to focus on the problem and work on it rather than being distracted by everything around you. Spending 6 hours getting proper audio support in linux is 6 hours lost that could have been spent working on your project. Today it's 6 hours on the soundcard tomorrow its three weeks figuring out why the throughput in your application is 1/10th of what it should be (my current problem) because some idiot linux kernel 'hacker' broke part of the disk subsystem in the last 10 revisions of the kernel.
A few years ago I decided to switch my desktop back to windows 2k and exceed, and I'm significantly more productive than I ever was running linux, and wasting 3 hours trying to figure out how to remap my goto-line key in the most recent version of emacs, after the developers decided to use the key for something else.
This stuff should be part of everybody's default distro installation, and that would solve the problem. However, nobody's stepping forward to buy the licenses.
Another way to do this is put together an automatic download/install package that could be run via point-and-click, say a script telling an automated installer, and that's probably the best answer for the free distros.
The difficult part is finding out what has to be installed, and that literally took me weeks of research. (about 3,IIRC) I did this for publication so the rest of us wouldn't have to.
The tedious part is simply installing a bunch of packages. But... by and large, it's on the order of:
yum install mplayer - y at the prompt
(lather, rinse, repeat until you get to a package that actually has to be manually installed
Probably an hour or two if you've got broadband, and one or two of the packages takes a long time at somewhere around 90% CPU load to fix the dependencies, so go out for coffee when that happens.
Tech Public Policy stuff
BTW, have you actually tried this and did it work?
Wondering because gentoo is something I have zero experience with.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I wasn't ready to set up my own shiny LFS system, so I paid for somebody else to do a reasonable job of setting it up for me. SuSE is solid and reliable, and only a little bit bloated with all the options that come installed. I'm thinking about moving back to Gnome, though, because although I haven't played with it yet, it looks a lot more logically implemented, and it's come a long way. Especially on SuSE.
Yes, linux has issues. If you want to see the integration done, choose a good distro. If you want to see it done for free or for freedom, then maybe Ubuntu is the right direction.
I hate detest lame ass coders who dont put enough error messages, I dont care how cool or tight or smart your algo is, if it can fail in 50 points with only a -1 return it still SUCKS.
.gz file and learn to use gzread()
Things can and will fail, so please add support for lots and lots of status logs/histories and drop out error messages written in english not "im half asleep at 3am coding this POS so ill make a shitty error msg"
Now the mac isnt perfect either, it still has lame stupid ass -2343 error messages. Its not like its short on HD space to store any, if your short, then get a clue, store the error.msg.xml file as a
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
That was not the point of your
running via manual installation, write it up and find a Linux site to publish it on. Please send me the URL when it's up, I'll admit to being extremely curious.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Another SF homo. Gay is as gay does. Fagolator.
CUPS isn't what ships on your Linux? I thought MacOS X got it from the Lin folks ... CUPS works great on macs :-)
In linux swsusp is actually a software implementation, that also uses your swap partition, so you do not have to waste space on a special suspend partition that your bios understands.
/var/vm/ so I would think reading data out of this to repopulate RAM would be something of a time eater on a relatively busy / -- assuming there was even room.
Um, is this an x86 issue generally?
Apple hasn't written RAM to disk during sleep since some version of MacOS 9, and I expect that Apple sleep would lose its apparent performance if this were the case after the x86 transition. Apple's swap by default is to a file at
Is this really where MacOS X is headed?
Take care.
Let me think a sec. Last I checked, Linux was a project to make a Unix-workalike kernel. The project had just ditched (or been ditched by) its code management tool, and created "git" to replace it, so one could argue the Linux project does have an application to offer. However, X11 isn't a Linux project, most of the "modern" apps with nice friendly GUIs depend not only on x11 but on particular window managers, and these projects have developers which come from wildly different backgrounds and motivations primarily because the projects themselves solve problems which attract completely different support. Users and developers of Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby exist on multiple platforms and have uses ranging from the novice/hobbyist to the specialist/professional. PostgreSQL, MySQL, and what have you solve problems for people with different focuses, hence their different feature sets, development priorities, and sources of support.
To say there is a "Linux development model" with respect to anything but the Kernel strikes me as a bit odd. Some distros might have a cognizable development model, but their collections of code are amalgamations of so many other projects that their capacity to offer a solution is heavily impacted by the development models of all the incorporated projects.
Projects by people in their spare time to provide something they plan to use for fun, projects by people hired by businesses to solve an economic concern, and everything in between comprise the code base that is drawn on to provide various distributions. Projects have internal organization wildly variant from one another, and they vary markedly in funding, pace of development, and in the measurements they take to determine how development is going and in the means used to establish development priorities.
I don't think that one can say of the broader code in operating system distributions which use a Linux kernel that there is a "development model" that offers any particular feature or demerit; the variation is too great to so characterize.
Fully agreed. Hardware has been behind the panics I've seen on MacOS X, and I've not seen one on Tiger. And I use piles of apps at the same time, many creating sound ... and I run the Terminal while running the software updater. If you manage to starve an app for resources (e.g., it's trying to do more than it can do with the resources allotted by the kernel, and the kernel is workign to prevent the app from creating a local DOS), and that app gets a spinning ball, and your other apps do just fine, thank you. You can cure app hang in MacOS X just like you can anywhere else in BSD-land. You most certainly didn't crash the OS if you were seeing a spinning beach ball, buster.