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How Would You Refocus Linux Development?
buddyglass writes "The majority of Slashdot readers are no doubt appreciative of Linux in the general sense, but I suspect we all have some application or aspect of the platform that we wish were more stable, performant, feature-rich, etc. So my question is: if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel, and were able to set the focus for those resources (stability, performance, new features, etc.), what application or kernel area would you attempt to improve, and what would aspect you focus on improving?"
Install Debian? Install anything that's been released within the last 2 years?
http://outcampaign.org/
While it has been said before, I believe 3D is the path. Please, please, provide support on par with Windows for any 3D graphics hardware, whether inside a computer or a console.
That is the path to success on the desktop. Today, I cannot even run OpenGL apps or any 3D apps on the lastest and greatest 3D graphics hardware from AMD (formerly ATI), the Radeon 2900XT. Why? There are no drivers. They have focused entirely on Windows, and consider Linux a niche market not worth the effort. Because of that, my family do not have a Linux only machine, which is also why I dual boot. The Radeon 2900XT support may well come to Linux, "when it is ready".
Please, take 3D support in Linux more seriously, whether you are hardware manufacturer or a software developer.
Granted, this is important to the Linux community, but when I hear Linux development, I think kernel, modules, and organization
Then you didn't read the summary very carefully:
if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel
In other words, something that improves KDE, Gnome, X, etc. is a perfectly fine answer to this question.
Why should we strive to beat MS at some ridiculous game someone else thought of?
Either there's a simple installer (no buttons for advanced mode) and it wipes partitions without asking, or there's a complex one that asks too many questions. This is why there are multiple distros - not every one needs to be installed onto a bare metal machine by a newb without instructions.
Besides, Linux has *far* exceeded every MS windows installer. Boot Knoppix and install Debian or RedHat on a partition, while browsing the web, SSHed into your servers, watching a movie, using the included development tools.
Windows on the other hand, if you don't get it pre-installed on the machine requires you to reboot, answer a bunch of questions without help available, makes your machine unusable until finished, requires you to go find the patches, requires multiple reboots or an admin to make a slipstreamed install CD, etc...
Besides, if your parents need a machine they can drool over, buy a Mac, or at least pre-installed Ubuntu. They've turned off the fancy stuff to keep people from hurting themselves.
You can have dependency problems is you just use RPM's however there are tools such as "app-get" and "yum" that reduce this issue to virtually zero although you do have to be careful of the repos you pick since they have to work with each other. Were people run into issues is having to many enabled repos.
To have all repos enabled and accepting all is just plain silly since you are going to have issues. What I do is to activate one repo at a time in a preferred order with the primary repo first. I never do an installation or an update without checking what I am getting and I will only answer "yes" when I am satisfied.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
As the current (fourth) maintainer of Dia, I'm all ears about what could be improved, but alas permanently short on time. I wish SVG was a better output format, but I have yet to see two renderers render text the same way. Writing an exporter for Dia is not hard, but real integration is a different beast. I had hopes that Bonobo would be the glue that could get diagrams to "live" in other documents, but it seems to have died with no replacement. As for ease of use of basic UI, there are several points we are working on as quickly as time with a full-time job allows.
-Lars
There is this thing called manpages, and the Gentoo wiki (a very exhaustive source of general Linux knowledge, not only Gentoo).
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Hmm, this is very insightful. I hope somebody figures this out. Oh wait...Linux distros have been doing this for years. How long have you been using Gentoo or LFS? If you had touched a modern Linux distro, you'd find that this is exactly what they do and have done for a number of years.
The Microsoft stuff is bad documentation that looks good. As the Wine and ReactOS projects perennially discover, it tends to lie a lot.
http://rocknerd.co.uk