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Ubuntu To Pay for Upgrades To the Free Software User Experience
jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, is using his millions to improve the Linux user experience, hiring people to work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE. He had doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth's millions, it might be happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux's future is starting to look brighter."
If you can get Adobe to open source Flash, I'm sure that can be arranged.
In the mean time, the best you can do is to tell web developers to not use Flash, but open alternatives.
A lot of us watch YouTube and other flash video. Heck, some of us even play the odd flash game until a download is finished. If Adobe open sourced Flash, you could make decent cross-platform web applications in a matter of minutes all the while blocking Flash ads.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Red Hat has invested a lot of money to improve the Linux desktop experience as well. They've made great strides, but still - they still have a ways to go, at least in the opinion of this user of both OSes. So spending more money does not guarantee they'll reach the goal.
I think, in order for Linux to really break through here, they probably need to have teams of actual designers rather than have the coders do most of the design themselves. They also probably need to "think different" and come up with their own usability/interface ideas, rather than keep mimicking Apple's (which Gnome seems to frequently do, if discussions on the developer email lists are any indication).
In any case this is a good thing, and I hope Linux continues to push forward thanks to this new investment.
#DeleteChrome
I had to do that same thing the other day. I'm a Mac user, and I just used Audacity because I know it can do the job and it's free.
What's the official Mac way? Probably QuickTime Pro (which you have to pay for, which has always annoyed me). Or a third party piece of software. Actually I think you can cut bits out with QT (non-pro) but it's a bit unintuitive. I considered using Garage Band (which I'm sure could do it) but that would be overkill.
I've got to say, it was the first time I'd used Audacity in maybe two years. It was just as ugly as ever, unfortunately. It looks almost EXACTLY like the program that came with my SB16 in the Windows 3.1 days. It works, but could really use a little interface TLC, especially on the Mac (where the Linux/Windows style interface just looks even more out of place).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I disagree enormously. I think what they have in gnome is so perfect for Ubuntu it's almost scary. They're trying to make it so that the end user isn't overwhelmed with options and customizations, and that it just works. They've succeeded phenomenally. My only beef with it right now is that upgrading to the next release is awful, breaks my desktop about half the time, and that flash doesn't work very well. If those two things were fixed, I would never use anything else for a desktop ever again.
Thats right.
Ubuntu works fine.
Firefox works fine.
Gnome/X works fine.
Compiz works fine.
Pretty much every app works fine.
Bugs are addressed quickly on ubuntu's website.
ADOBE makes a crap version of Flash for Linux.
It's Ubuntu's fault Flash crashes. Nuh-huh
Try: The proprietary software dealer.
A life without entertainment isn't worth living.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
We can fix the open source stuff if it was at fault.
We could even fix Flash if it was Open Source.
But the cold hard truth is Flash is closed source and proprietary means ONLY the creator can make changes that would increase stability. That's also the same reason why kernel debuggers wont touch a listing from a tainted kernel.
Amen to everyone who bashes alsa here, I agree wholeheartly.
I think it's high time for a rewrite, maybe they get it right the third time...
It's really amazing how thoroughly they managed to screw up something so relatively simple (when compared to other areas of the kernel).
Every time my box decides to re-shuffle the order of my soundcards (re-promoting the onboard sound to default), or decides to remain silent for the rest of the session after I plugged/unplugged my USB headset, or requires me to play trial&error with barely documented and obscure config files (asoundrc/openalrc) to *maybe* get sound in a game working it reminds me of why 2008 is probably still not the year of linux on the desktop...
To be fair, yes ALSA "works" most of the time and even out of the box. The distro-hackers managed to beat the hardware-detection into submission so that pretty much any liveCD will give you sound (at least on one of your cards...) right away. Just never try to get fancy, like going beyond adjusting the Master-volume. You're in for a world of pain.
That isn't entirely true. Both GTK and QT have various language bindings which allow you write in a variety of languages.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
There are, what, a few thousand programmers who understand Linux systems programming well enough to debug GUI programs and post patches? It's not trivial for those programmers to fix Flash because Adobe won't let them see the source code. How is that Ubuntu's fault?
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