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Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development
jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"
'...is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?'
Good luck.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Linux has GUI toolkits.....loads of them!
Choice, many times becomes really fast synonym of fragmentation and lack of standard. And this is just a bright example. The situation described is 100% conforming to reality, as far as UI kits and sound infrastructure.
Well it was a few years ago. Hope ubuntu has enough weight it can set standards.
Where's the link to this developer's comments? Would be nice to read all of what he has to say rather than just what you want us to read.
Joshua Purcell
GTK isn't as nice as everyone makes it out to be. Basically what everyone has been doing is talking red hat, and suse and making their product work on that. You can't "standardize" Linux because the 7 or so distro can't agree.
They argue, and I would not say that they are wrong, that GTK+ even so does not give the necessary functionality to allow all the Chrome features.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why not just use Qt instead? It's LGPL....why people still using GTK?
with a standardized HIG. After all, graphical interfaces are not exactly the new kid on the block. There are common standards (use radio buttons for this, checkboxes for that, put your menu HERE). And while Linux does not necessarily have to conform to OS X or Windows standards, it could certainly have a standard of its own. This would help developers a lot. In my experience, many developers, while good coders, are not good interface designers. Without a comprehensive guide, they just plain get it wrong.
I don't much give a damn about Adobe being skittish, though. Are they paying Linux core developers?
How is that even a problem if there web engine works then make it for several ui toolkits or just pick one. All the work is done it would just be a matter of how its shown. Id rather have something that possibly changes the way its displayed in the future than have nothing and sit around bitching.
Yes!
(Seriously, linux needs a standard base to work off. The current mess is completely untenable)
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
Well, I'm sorta serious... in the original thread, Ben mentions that the Windows APIs are "kinda impoverished" and they wound up doing a lot of work that the higher-level widget toolkits (like GTK+, Qt, MFC or .NET) would do. Maybe they should have just used Xlib/Xt instead and duplicated everything they did for Windows, especially if they want a completely consistent cross-platform look and feel, BUT don't want to be hamstrung by any single UI library's way of doing things.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
Yes, but I doubt it's going to happen.
Without some sort of standards how would a helpdesk worker even know where the "start button" is on a caller's "Linux Desktop"? Or what it even looks like, or if it's even there?
Remember the helpdesk worker might not be working for the same company as the user. For example: if Mr XYZ goes to a hotel and has problems with "hotel internet", they might be calling the "hotel internet helpdesk". Same for other stuff e.g. bank and financial sites.
BTW Microsoft has created a similar problem for themselves by changing things immensely with Vista (and Office 2007). Lucky for them, they're in a different market position but even they are having problems with market adoption, so go figure.
Because GTK+ comes with a HIG included... not.
I guess the guy that used to be the lead developer of Firefox may know better than you and me.
Anyways, by reading the article you'd have known they are using GTK+. That doesn't make the drawbacks disappear though.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
This reminds me of something that I read a while ago, when world of goo was released for linux, the developers had some trouble as well, but that time the culprit was pulse audio.
Should've started on the osx version instead!
*impatient*
Maybe that's why there are so few "I can to everything" applications and so many "I can just do this one thing". Especially when it comes to creative work with multi-media.
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
with having a standard in Linux at all. It doesn't have to be a just about GTK and QT either. They're both widget kits. Great. The standard has to start in the file system. Red Hat, for instance, worries about being backwards compatible with each update, as it should, but that means it broke the FSH to begin with. So migrating from RH to another Linux distro that may follow the FSH is difficult. Also, it makes installing things a pain sometimes. A few times I've had to edit a config file because it points to a web server in /srv/www but in reality my system may use /var/www/ or what have you. Just because open source is about choice, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a standard set.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Really?
and I thought Google Chrome was going out of its way to feel as foreign as possible on windows...
If Linux wants to have substantial even ubiquitous marketshare it is going to have to mature. This is going to require the majority of backend developers choosing one API/toolkit/etc to add features to, test for bugs and release on a predictable schedule. Yes, Gnome or KDE may whither or die, too bad. If we do not these steps now, Linux will continue receiving ports of projects developed on other platforms and not real development time.
If you build it they will come.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And drop some legacy systems (X comes to mind) along the way.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yeah, that and the lack of a "unified and comprehensive HIG" seems a little dishonest for a company that created a windows browser that looks NOTHING like any other piece of windows software, follows its own interface methods, and generally throws off the look and feel of the browsing experince. While i'm aware that a HIG should cover more than just the look and feel, it feels like google bends the rules when it comes to interface guidelines.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Let's face it, one of the things all Linux evangelists like to emphasise is the opportunity to use whatever you want and even build it yourself if you want to. But it's maddening for developers to create something that will work on every kind of linux desktop in existence. From political choices of free vs. non-free, to preferred distribution, version numbers, favourite window manager and a host of other choices, no two desktops will be the same. Linux isn't an operating system, it's an operating eco-system. Taking Google as an example, today I tried to install Google Earth on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop to no avail, despite it having installed without a hitch on my Xubuntu 7.04 Pentium III plaything in my room back in my parent's house. The exact same version of the program with dramatic differences depending on where you try it, that quickly becomes a support nightmare.
Now for the dedicated GNOME/KDE/xfce/whatever volunteer this does not pose much of a problem because your target audience has broadly the same machine makeup as you do, but for a commercial developer looking for a good ROI it quickly becomes untenable. Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.
I agree that the only way Linux can make itself more attractive to commercial desktop program developers is with a mighty amount of consolidation, but the problem is that I don't think it will happen. The great OS wars that went before the dominance of Windows had winners and losers because they were systems of a closed nature, and so if you held with a losing team they closed down because it wasn't economically viable and you had to move to something more mainstream, thus consolidating the market. With Linux a project will never close down as long as someone like it more than something else.
On another point nearby somebody else, will mention that an OS is nothing without proper applications.
And somebody else in an attempt to consolidate ideas from both sides will mention that if everybody do their jobs properly that there would be no problem.
Unfortunately somebody will pick from there and people will start compare OS X and Linux. We all know the result of this particular argument...
If it is a bad day some poor M$ programmer/user/whatever will try to tell something, probably irrelevant, about M$ craps sold as OS, and everybody will smash poor guy, even before reading his full post. Strangely, they would be right; even if that post was something interesting to read, M$ OSs suckiness factor is above the strongest Black Holes...
If it is really a bad day we also see BSD kernel mentioned...
Well another day in Slahsdot...
Follow the discussion, and you'll find it's not about complaints at all, at all, at all. Google is trying to figure out the best way to do Chrome for Linux, while making it something that Linux users will actually like, and that means more choices. That's all. No, it's not about needing to standardize, so could someone at Slashdot quit with that FUD? GNU/Linux is about choice, and it always will be.
Well, then, make a standard that doesn't suck. That is what I was saying.
What they are talking about (HIG) is only a "guideline" for programmers to follow. You know, for programmers who would otherwise get it wrong (using dropdowns when radio buttons would be more appropriate, using editable textboxes just for displaying information, etc.). It is not supposed to be a concrete "thou shalt do it this way or else" document.
Otherwise, you are not leaving the "user experience up to the users" anyway... you are leaving the user experience to programmers who don't know how to do interfaces.
IMO QT is much better but who cares, its not like if they used the "wrong one" nobody would have been able to use it, qt comes with a gtk theme and qt-gtk-engine (or some such app), im typing this from firefox (gtk) on kde4 (qt). webkit already works well with both, so its just the "chrome" of chrome that needs to be tied to a specific one anyway.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
GNOME has an HIG. What they meant by wanting an HIG they meant they want one flexible enough that Chrome on Linux could look just like Chrome on Windows, which is not going to happen unless they use Microsoft's HIG...
Here is the great thing about having dozens of GUI toolkits, multiple libc, and several audio APIs. You only have to choose 1! Every time somebody complains about the "mess" of GUI toolkits, it just comes off as senseless whining. Where are the downsides? There are only 2 major ones, and if you don't have experience in either, just pick one.
The only downside I can think of is that end-users need several GUI toolkits installed, for their multiple programs that use different toolkits, but a) Linux still has a better features/size ratio than any other major OS, and b) Windows and Mac have the same problem (SDL, GTK+, etc, and the dlls have to be included with the binary downloads because Windows/Mac don't have an easy to use package manager).
On Widows XP, Chrome makes an extensive use of the standard Windows XP GUI toolkit and its associated HIG. Yeah, right.
I'd like to see a Goo/Linux distro. In my experience as a user of several of their products, google really does a good job with user interfaces. I bet if they put some effort into a google desktop environment, it'd be pretty darn good.
It could be related to Android, or not, whatever makes sense.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
and I don't understand what's wrong with that.
It's like saying "There are so many different operating systems for so many different types of hardware that the computer market is too fragmented - so we won't produce any software"
It's silly. If you want those users then you make the software, if you don't then you don't. simple.
BTW, I'm in the throws of switching to Vista after being an Ubuntu user for many years. They don't like my bugs but Microsoft actually seems to care.
Because GTK+ comes with a HIG included... not.
GNOME, on the other hand, does have an HIG.
Meh, everything is a trade-off. Qt is way easier than Gtk and has a huge API for doing all sorts of cross-platform stuff. Plus it's truly cross-platform whereas Gtk is pretty crappy on anything other that systems running X Windows.
The trade-off is that Qt is C++ and Gtk is C. This actually matters a lot when you need to interface to other C-only applications and libraries or whatever. C++-to-C is easy but using it the other way around is problematic and annoying. Then you have the issue of how clean the code is in each language (depends on your point of view as to which is better).
There also used to be the issue of Qt forcing the GPL down your throat but that is no longer an issue because both Gtk and Qt use LGPL.
Personally I have been using Qt for everything recently. Since the switch to LGPL it's the obvious choice even though I'm a C purist at heart. I hate the fact that it's so big though. Since it's LGPL you can't statically link only the stuff you use so your application installs tend to be larger than they really should be...
Trade-offs... Everything... So annoying, makes it hard to develop truly high quality software.
GTK isn't as nice as everyone makes it out to be. Basically what everyone has been doing is talking red hat, and suse and making their product work on that. You can't "standardize" Linux because the 700 or so distros can't agree.
Fixed that for you.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Speaking of Desktop Environments (not just toolkits), yes, and KDE does too. And probably that's the point. Having more than one HIG is just slightly better than having none.
Chrome should have been built on top of Qt from day 1. You'd have tight integration with Webkit, a great toolkit, and cross-platform from day 1 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris.
Google opted for VERY Windows-centric design which made porting hard, and then the man tasked with porting to Linux choose a poor toolkit and then blamed the Linux platform for two bad decisions in a row made by Google.
I have zero sympathy.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I've been using Kubuntu since December 2006, and it's been my opinion this whole time that the reason Linux isn't catching on is the lack of standards. There are simply too many choices. Granted, choice is good sometimes, but Linux just has too much. It gets confusing. For a new user who doesn't know Linux, simply choosing a distro is overwhelming. That doesn't make Linux very open or friendly to the average person. Not to mention the mess with installing programs. If I want a program that isn't in my repositories, I have to go to the site and hope they have a .deb package that's for my distro, which isn't always the case. At which point I either have to learn how to install from source, attempt to convert an RPM (which isn't always provided, either), or give up and find an alternative.
Every Windows OS has one GUI and one installer/executable format that every Windows program uses. Same with Mac. But Linux gives you at least three GUIs and four or more installer formats, and it's up to you to figure out which one suits you best.
I like Linux. But if it's going to become a serious alternative to Windows or Mac, it needs unified standards. Especially in the desktop environment and package manager. But I just don't see that happening.
Meh, does Chrome even follow Microsoft HIG? The tabs being almost part of the title bar, and the lack of an actual window title in the title bar, as well as the random Google logo next to the buttons, all seem to be completely contrary to what I expect on Windows. As do the Vista style buttons even on XP, but then Microsoft did that too with Windows Media Player in some version.
All your base are belong to Wii.
My Mac currently has several apps in three different toolkits open; several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions. The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there (Win32, MFC, .NET, ...), plus dozens of third party ones. And UI conventions are violated constantly.
The real problem Windows programmers have with Linux is... that it isn't Windows. They start writing some big, ugly, messy Windows application (hello, Firefox), and then they moan and groan when porting it to Linux and usually do a piss-poor job at it too.
At one point, serious computers ran Unix. PCs were just toys, not useful for doing real work with.
But Unix fragmented. You had AIX, HPUX, and around a dozen other different kinds. They all behaved differently, stored things in different places in the filesystem, had different desktop environments.
Windows came along with a single environment and suddenly *that* was the attractive place to develop software.
Fast forward a few decades, and to a 0th order approximation, all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop. Ok, there are a handful of slashdotters using Linux in their basements, but from a desktop perspective it essentially doesn't exist. And the software people need to run for real productivity purposes - Autocad, Photoshop, things like that - are all for Windows.
The only way Linux can hope to succeed is to present a unified environment to developers *and* users. Period. Yes, that means the over-complex KDE will have to die. Yes, that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update. Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
I'm sure I'll get modded as a troll, but the fact remains that Windows *owns* the desktop, and normal users are happy with it.
Riiiight, an Ubuntu user who's written many articles for the Windows-only .NET platform.
Silly Astroturfer.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I guess the guy that used to be the lead developer of Firefox may know better than you and me.
Perhaps the problem is that the lead developer of Firefox ignored that HIG in making Firefox. From Wikipedia: "Mozilla Firefox's user interface, for example, goes against the GNOME project's HIG, which is one of the main arguments for including Epiphany instead of Firefox in the GNOME distribution." No doubt there were reasons for the choice taken in Firefox development, but the consequences include a lot of bloat and reinvented square wheels.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Let's not forget about Kubuntu. I have just tried it and looks impressive. I already have around 100 Ubuntu PCs deployed at work. I'm seriously thinking of Kubuntu as a replacement.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Just use Qt, it is LGPL and works beautifully.
Is that there's so many to choose from.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Linux does not exist for Google's pleasure and ease.
It also doesn't exist for my pleasure and ease. That's probably why I don't use it as my desktop OS.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
What is really going on is that they have wrapped a new layout engine ("views") and other tools around the "impoverished" (their words) Windows toolkits. Then, they started depending on their wrapper for features they added to Chrome. Now, when porting to Linux, they are suddenly discovering that, geez, both Gtk+ and Qt already does what "views" is doing, they just do it differently and in a way that doesn't connect well with the rest of Chrome. That's what they are complaining about.
Ben Goodger, here's a hint: pick Gtk+ or Qt as your toolkit, Linux users really don't care that much. And both of them are much better toolkits than what Windows offers. I'm sorry that the completeness of Linux GUI toolkits inconveniences you, but, well, too bad.
Or, if you like, don't port to Linux; we don't really care all that much, since there are several great browsers on Linux already that pretty much do what Chrome does.
Should have used Qt instead of GTK for Google Chrome. Just sayin'... :) somecanuckchick
somecanuckchick dot com
If Google with all it's resources want's to help standardize the FOSS tools then they should invest in making whatever tools they have issues with to make them the best. It seems painfully obvious to me because if any given tool in the FOSS arena works best most distos will use that one.
That will make the big tools of importance to Google, and others, 'standardized' in effect. There still would be obscure distros or people who might use forked and or alternative versions of major parts of the OS but that would be fine too.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
First they create a browser that works with their applications. What's next? An operating system where they can run their browser on?
Try openSUSE and the latest KDE before jumping over to Vista.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Who cares? We have the app sphere and we have the desktop environment. Of course one program, one toolkit. But honestly, no one cares beyond. that is an invention of the GTK toolkit nazis. Use Oxygen Icons on Gnome and it looks as convenient as KDE.
there is something else. Desktop environments have to concentrate on the Unix philosophie, do one thing and do it right and make sure components can talk to each other. Currently we find the approach e.g. with LXDE. And with LXDE I can then launch all the applications I want and I don't care what toolkit is used. Or does the Windows user care that VLC uses QT etc? The Desktop enviroment is just for the desktop, no one needs integration clutter.
So let me ask you this, if Chrome treated each Linux distribution as an OS, would you be happy when Chrome was ported to Ubuntu and not Fedora or SUSE?
Personally I think the whole situation is fubar. There should be three distributions, different-enough to be treated as independent OSes: GNOME, KDE, "Other/Build Your Own".
No, nobody gives a shit what the kernel is-- the OS is the UI, and the UI is the OS. (Think about it: if Apple ported OS X to run on the NT Kernel, would it still be OS X or would it magically turn into Windows?)
Comment of the year
They're two very different things. One is the open source PART of the chrome browser, the other is a browser binary, built in part on the Chromium source, that reports usage information back to Google, one subset of this being non-optional. Please don't get these two confused, no matter how much clueless reporting there is on the relationship between the two. The latter is, in my opinion, a privacy leakage too far.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Meh, everything is a trade-off. Qt is way easier than Gtk and has a huge API for doing all sorts of cross-platform stuff. Plus it's truly cross-platform whereas Gtk is pretty crappy on anything other that systems running X Windows.
The trade-off is that Qt is C++ and Gtk is C.
Well, considering that Chrome is based on freaking fork of KHTML (Webkit), both of which are written in --- you guessed it --- C++, interfacing to C++ is hardly an issue. Chrome is most likely written in C++ --- or at least, this is indicated by Wikipedia. A more likely reason was that when Google started on their (closed-sourced?) browser, Qt was still only available for money or GPL, and they preferred the cheaper GTK option.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
That part in the summary amused me:
It was time ten years ago when Linux was first gaining real momentum in that area. I remember posting Slashdot comments about it and getting told Linux was about "choice" and that if I didn't like it, I should contribute code. Ten years later, even Google is bashing Linux for it. I bet nothing will change even now.
Linux is a server OS, only used on the desktop by enthusiasts. Accept it, because the kind of standardized APIs that are needed are not going to happen with the attitudes that this community has.
While i'm aware that a HIG should cover more than just the look and feel, it feels like google bends the rules when it comes to interface guidelines.
No two browsers look alike. I happen to like Google Chrome's look and feel. To me, it's way superior to IE's.
While Google Chrome has a unique look, it does not have a totally unique behviour. The X button is still in the corner of the screen, making it easy to find an click. (Aren't you annoyed by apps with no X button or titlebar?)
It accepts all the standard hotkeys. I don't care if an app looks Win32, if it doesn't let me use the hotkeys I've gotten used to.
All in all, I'd say the unique interface isn't disruptive. It might even be intuitive, to anyone that's used lots of Windows programs.
Chrome/Chromium is OSS, right? Can't someone else do what Google should have done and make a Qt port?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
While i'm aware that a HIG should cover more than just the look and feel, it feels like google bends the rules when it comes to interface guidelines.
While the GUI for Chrome is different from many other browsers it is very similar to what Microsoft has done with the new office interface and is just a new direction in which GUIs are going.
Linux Standard Base (LSB)
Since no one so far cared to provide a link to the actual Chromium Linux builds, here it is:
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/
google apps are on the web, why not build a nice javascript gui ? oh wait...
Sincerly, it seems I have been in a time machine for all these years. ./'tter. Some 8-9 years ago. We had lots of FUD, Flood and Flame around here.
Quite long ago I was an active
And you know what is the most strinkgly thing I see now. Entered time machine. BRRRRRRR. Zero... I'm exactly in the same place at the very same time I left.
Back then, there were already tons of people claiming the Hell and the Tartarus for the way Linux is built. Well, apart of remarking that Linux is JUST a kernel, let me mention a few things. Just as 9 years ago.
1. GTK, KDE and alikes are probably not ideal code. But they are two standards well fixed and working on Linux environment. Don't like them, push for YOUR standard. Don't like anything at all, gather your team and MAKE your standard. I AM a KDE fan, I LIKE KDE and have been using it since it was a raw alpha stuff. Now my friends at one work, where I was the all-power BOfH LOVED GTK/Gnome and could not see KDE by 2 thousand miles. And that's what is GREAT on Linux - there is a CHOICE!
2. I use KDE on most of my desktops. But on my Eee PC I use Enlightenment as it is much more economic and has all the resources I need there. I have also a Zaurus (Linux, of course) and a server without graphical BLOAT on it. I also have a router with Linux on it. Now., are you telling me that all this hardware will work perfectly under a "standard"? Aren't you telling me that if I will have ONE desktop, then every dumb programmer will demand that the graphic system shall be EVERYWHERE? Look, I know what programmers are and how many of them think, specially the IDE crowd. If this thing goes this way, I am pretty sure that we end in a all-embedded, full-featured, completely geekish MONOLITH. And then, problems will not be only compatibility. It will be price... And probably my Zaurus will have a few kilos more... Besides, what will be the difference from Windows?
3. Frankly, only a dodo doesn't know that problems exist on the development of many libraries. But, what is a community for? People this stuff works and it will work while there is a community. It is not just a question of volunteerism but self-discipline. While I have been pretty inactive for these last years, still, when something was real wrong, I would knock the bugtrackers and developers. And without this, there is NO Linux. There is a product. Want to use it? Great, consume it. But then, don't blame for the bloat, monolitics and managers believing they are masters of the Universe. If you want to turn Linux systems into pure consumer products, you will have to be bound into what the seller thinks is best for you, not the contrary. You have only two choices - you either accept it or not. Considering what happened in the past, with IBM, Apple and Microsoft, I believe that such environment on Linux will be pretty damaging. And, frankly, it makes me wonder why the whinning is coming from Google.
People, don't give your freedoms. I know it is quite spicy for me to say this, I am in no way an american patriot, but the America's Founding Fathers had some true words about "giving up Freedom".
Yeah, I'm surprised to read about bitching from somebody at Google. However, I suspect this moron is used to programming for that 20th Century OS known as Windows. The concept of actually using a GUI toolkit that's not a POS is too advanced for him, and maybe Google should fire him, or at least hire somebody else that doesn't have a mental defection when it comes to reasonable programming. What's especially sad is that this alpha is missing even the most basic of things, such as Preferences, because apparently GTK+ is too fucking advanced for mental defectives.
Firefox doesn't use native widgets. Goodger was formerly lead dev on Firefox. How can he complain about lack of standards on Linux when his track record is not to follow them.
And then of course there is Chrome's installer which does per user installations of program files into the user's local profile. Just what standard does that follow?
Being an "Ubuntu user" doesn't make you a GNU user, it makes you a Windows user temporarily using something different either because you thought it would make you cool or because you got mad at your beloved Microsoft and threw a hissy fit.
And people wonder why Linux's desktop share is as small as it is....
Thank fuck the Ubuntu community forums aren't full of arseholes like you. Maybe that's why its market share of Linux pisses over other distros.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Ah yes, because having to write something twice just to have it work is always better than doing it once, isn't it?
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
They certainly did break the windows HIG. Then again, I'm a big fan of standards, and yet I've deliberately broken HIGs when I knew they didn't apply well to a new kind of application. I feel justified in doing that, since I've been around since the basically the dawn of GUIs and been able to slowly watch the standardisation process of most widget types. None of that means that I want to start from scratch on a platform though, without any standard HIG already in place. It's one thing breaking the HIG when necessary. It's quite another if no one has bothered to agree on the HIG necessary for even the most typical apps.
Anyway... google are quite right here, I think. When are Linux standards people going to wake up and realise that ANY good, standardised library is better than two that are both great? Especially in open source, the fact that it's a standard allows people to focus on improving it. The whole point of an API is to have something to target your software to. It's also a standard which can be evolved later, even if the next version is as different as Qt is from GTK+. I don't give a crap if the standard is Qt or GTK+ --- whichever is chosen will eventually gain the features necessary for modern apps --- but SOME standard needs to be set.
I think the picture is like this:
none < 2 < 1
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Linux does not exist for Google's pleasure and ease.
I guess that explains why Linux managed to go from 100% of market share in netbooks to just 4% in 18 months, a sector it had all to itself.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
And yet Debian Gtk chose to recently arbitrarily rename the glib package, breaking binary compatibility. Why? Who knows? Will they ever fix it? Who knows?
Why does this Linux community have such a deep and abiding hatred of backwards compatibility? Library versions, device drivers, audio systems, hot-plugging, device naming, anything even remotely related to multimedia. This list goes on and on.
Until the Linux community decides to settle on some standards, it will never be ready for the end-user desktop.
GNOME has human interface guidelines and has had them since 1.0. If Ben Goodger is bitching about GTK+/GNOME not having consistent UI guidelines, it's because it's not consistent with whatever his vision is. In my opinion, GNOME is a heck of a lot more consistent than MacOSX's Steve-Jobs-whim-of-the-day, and-- let's not even get started on the Windows UI fustercluck. Of course, if he's talking about KDE... well, OK. KDE's interface is... odd.
I have an old GTK book somewhere that says that the developers based their HIG on the original Macintosh HIG (that the MacOS now no longer follows), which was actually based on user-feedback and also based in part on the Xerox Star. That's a pretty long lineage when it comes to GUI.
The complaint about Mozilla having a functionless 511MB executable after switching to GTK+ has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ is not exactly lightweight, but it ain't exactly a bloated beast either.
Complaints about audio are well-founded, though. Audio in Linux still sucks.
And now it's time for Google to embrace the future..
..and release a Windows 2000 compatible version!
..I kid. The real question is when will this come out of alpha? :-P
All the choice inherent in Linux -- meaning the choice for developers to go their own way -- increases the difficulty of achieving the level of standardization that allows any software platform to play well with others.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
What they meant by wanting an HIG they meant they want one flexible enough that Chrome on Linux could look just like Chrome on Windows, which is not going to happen unless they use Microsoft's HIG...
Does the Microsoft one include the tab bar in the window title?
There is no universal standard GUI toolkit on Windows either. Firefox and Opera use their own. OpenOffice.org uses its own. Even Microsoft Office uses its own. On the Mac, there is even more GUI dissonance. Current Macs make the typical Linux environment look downright uniform.
Why is this always considered a problem on Linux but not on Windows or on the Mac?
If the Chrome developers feel too constrained by GTK, they should have chosen a better toolkit, such as Qt (which, incidentally, is also popular on Windows). They can't blame their own bad choices on Linux. Their gripe sounds like the standard "how dare Linux be different from Windows and make us have to learn something new" whining.
these are the guys who were trying to make a portable browser, so they used all the windows apis, and then they went "now we just port it to the other platforms.. no big deal, you just have to change this "compilor" thingy and press the "build" button again, right?"
of course they'll have trouble with a new platform, they don't know what they're doing.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Yeah, I'd love to see a Google UI, too. I can't wait for context-sensitive ads about shirt buttons when I'm trying to click a button :^P
To all of these people who are bitching about the UI in Linux-- are you actually using Linux? Maybe I'm an old-timer, but Ubuntu 9.04 looks a lot nicer to me than my Windows box at work. The MacOS is pretty slick, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it is "consistent" or "intuitive". And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
I think you're wrong. Ubuntu FTMFW. Everyone else is just trying to look cool...
Google CEO: "Do no Evil"
someLinuxDev: "If you wont, we will, and blame it all on you"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Three excellent paragraphs.
It would magically turn into Windows. Sorry, you're wrong.
Can you please submit the patch upstream so we don't all have to fix it ourselves on our own copies. Thanks.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I've got no idea about him but I've written several white papers for various platforms in my job including .NET and I use Windows daily at work and even in a VM at home sometimes. I also use Ubuntu and OS X primarily for my personal stuff. It's not an either/or religion for all of us who don't have the last name Stallman. I very much value open source products but there are things they don't do or don't do well or because of other cultural reasons such as de facto standards just are positioned properly in the market to do.
If you want it to be either/or us versus them then you have to make a product that meets ALL of my needs and currently no one does so I use Ubuntu (and previously FreeBSD, Suse, Gentoo, Slackware, or Redhat) when I feel it meets my needs and OSX or Win when they do.
Apparently, the crappy dev team of Chrome strike back. Mac is still waiting (oh well, not that one does not sleep at night) a port. And linux does not seem to live much better. Yet another masterpiece...
"Does the Microsoft one include the tab bar in the window title?"
Err... the Windows Chrome does, if that's what you meant. As does Safari4 (difference being that Saf4 divides the titlebar up evenly between tabs, and Chrome has fixed width tabs)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
So if I put Darwin on my HP, I have a Mac?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
There are basically 3 toolkits that come up for Linux GUI development:
- GTK+
- QT
- wxWidgets
and all have their own little flaws. GTK is nice and mature, but not overly flexible. QT is on the way of maturing, but it is still quite far from complete or usable (e.g. it takes some settings of my GNOME desktop and then plays with them so much that it ends with the correct colour scheme and for normal controls font size 24.. bold). Also only by looking at the syntax conventions of QT I get RSI in my fingers. wxWidgets is admittedly a horrible mess, but probably a good place to start writing a consolidation framework without forcing everyone to do the same. Probably the best choice would be to fix and clean up the internal mess of wx, add QT support and build a software development kit around it (sound, video, whatever). But mesmerising about it is quite useless. Unless someone takes one of the GUI frameworks and puts together a workable development kit on his own, there will be no good answer to the question.
To make it short: everybody is scratching their own itch, so either find some folks with the same itch or just develop it yourself and stop moaning about it.
I really think distros using different GUI toolkits should be considered different platforms, it has been long since an OS was just a kernel, really.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"No two browsers look alike"
Default installs of Chrome and Safari4 are close to indistinguishable! But I've ended up stickin with Safari4; is fast like Chrome, but has the features of IE8 (javascript profiling very important app development, but obviously not so important if you're just a surfer and don't develop js stuff)... oh, and you get option to turn on menubar. (I've not tried chrome 2 yet tho)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I have to agree with you.
Gnome came in existence because the purity police didnt like the non-free Qt widget toolkit. (how ironic is it that its founder Icaza is now on the other side and being attacked for his hardon for mono in the same way? Poetic justice.)
It seems that even though QT is now under a free software license, a lot of the old bias still exists.
I like the fact that we now have the best of both worlds with QT, both a free software license and
that the phone leader Nokia bought Trolltech because it wants to use QT for cross-platform software for mobile devices as well as desktop applications,..
You can use Qt on platform like X Window Systems,
Mac OS 10, Java, Windows and CE, embedded platforms like smartphones.
Just looking at my sytem quickly, here are few apps that are using QT: Skype, VLC, Opera, Virtualbox, Scribus, Avidemux, Mythtv, Google Earth, Xconfig and Launchy.
Its all a question of taste, opinion and choice.
I might not agree with your versions of the first two but the third one is the reason why i work develop free software on my own dime/time.
There are half a dozen versions of Windows in common use, more if you count the different editions. Microsoft alone has several major and radically different GUI APIs, and there are several common third party ones in addition to that. The notion that Windows is more "consistent" or simpler to target is a joke.
When NeXT went from NextStep to OpenStep, they had versions which ran on other OSes -- including Solaris (you can still dig up a (sparc only) beta package from Sun), HPUX, and ... Windows NT. OS X (as of 10.5) still includes image resources for Windows and NextStep.
See here for more information.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions
Not following interface guidelines in itself is quite common on both Windows and OS X, but that usually has nothing to do with the lack of a unified platform UI.
The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there
You're confusing the shell's control library with the stack used to access it. On Windows when you write a .NET, WTL, MFC or plain Win32 application, you're still targeting the Windows shell native controls.
Chrome would also need to use Cairo for custom controls (pretty much just the tab controls).
I believe you can set window manager hints not to draw a border or titlebar (things like splash screens), though of course the window manager can ignore that. From the screenshots on the Ars Technica link, they simply haven't bothered to do that yet.
I've been back and forth between Windows and Linux for the last decade. Then, like now, QT and GTK were the main two competing GUI kits, Gnome and KDE were the two competing desktops. At the time, OSS was the standard audio API, though ALSA was the new kid on the block that was supposed to standardize Linux audio. There were multiple apps for organizing my music, watching videos, writings docs and spreadsheets, browsing the web, etc. None of the apps was as good as its best counterpart on Windows/Mac.
We all knew there were problems with having multiple GUI kits, desktops, audio APIs, and applications that provided the same functionality. This was acceptable, at the time, because we believed that evolution would eventually win, the strong would survive, the weak would die, and Linux would eventually have one standard GUI toolkit, one top-notch desktop manager, one audio API, and at least one great app for each needed function. At the time, we ignored all the complaints and deficiencies because we knew that this process would not happen overnight; we were sure that, in the end, all the competing apps and apis would innovate until a clear winner became dominant. Then, we assured ourselves, Linux would finally take over the desktop.
We believed the same economic BS the neo-cons have been chanting since the 80's. Leave the market alone, and economic prosperity will take care of itself.
Now, same as the neo-cons facing the reality of their collapsed businesses, we see that Linux has failed to standardize. Ubuntu has been forked into at least three semi-popular versions, one for each of the far-from-perfect desktops/GUI kits, contains yet another Audio api, and has a huge repository that allows one to download dozens of audio managers, video players, browsers, word processors, etc - none of which is as good as its best counterpart on Windows/Mac OSX. Ten years of waiting for evolution to fix Linux on its own, both Microsoft and Mac OSX have made major improvements, such that OSX and Windows XP (both pushing many years old, now) are unarguably more polished and stable than the comparable Linux desktop distros.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is time for us (along with the major vendors - RH, Suse, Ubuntu), to start making the tough choices. One desktop/GUI kit, one audio api, one good app for each needed function. That software that depends on the other toolkits, apis, etc. is deprecated. Period.
You know, I have to agree. I just never did get the zealotry either. While at home and work my main OS is Windows 2K/XP/XP64, when I am called out to fix a network that some bonehead had let God knows what loose on? You bet I'm bringing my laptop with the Xandros Business partition fired up. It lets me access the Ad and Exchange, while having enough of a familiar interface I can hand it over to an employee that has a deadline to get their work done on. Use the right tool for the job, I always say.
That said, why do you Linux guys seem to hate standards so much, hmmm? I'm not talking to you specifically fooslacker, but Linux in general. I mean y'all got, what? Three different sound systems now? Would it really be so hard for all the major players to sit down and choose a basic standard, one that will hopefully be rock solid stable with minimal changes and a focus on backwards compatibility, so that writing drivers and programs for the entire Linux ecosystem would be easy and thus attract more companies?
I mean if I am a hardware manufacturer it takes just three drivers if I want to support Windows past, present, and future with a binary driver. Four if I want to cover the niches. I just have my developers write a Win98/ME, A win2k/XP, and a Vista/Win7. I add a WinXP64/Vista64 and since Win7 can use Vista drivers I have everything from 1998-2014 completely covered with just four binary drivers and no more out of pocket. There just ain't a way to do that in Linux. Same with programs, there really isn't a way to...say make a game, and be assured that it will work on Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Xandros, PCLOS,etc right now, much less have the same thing work out of the box five years from now so I can continue selling it without constant tweaks.
Look, nobody is asking you to become Windows or OSX. Nobody is asking you to give up the bazillion different distros out there. Just have a common, stable, and backwards compatible undercarriage that software developers and hardware manufacturers can target so that it doesn't matter if I use Xandros and you use CentOS and the guy down the street is running Gentoo, that any company can release a program or driver and know that for now and the long term across the board it will "just work", that's all. I bet if you had a stable and solid undercarriage that worked across the board that a lot more companies would seriously consider releasing their products and drivers for Linux. And that is good for everybody, right?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yep. I use kde-desktop, but don't really consider myself a kubuntu user. That's because I install ubuntu, then kde-desktop. When I tried a straight kubuntu install, it was a disaster. No big deal, since I want both kde and gnome anyway. They're largely compatible and it gives you access to apps for both families. It seems kind of stupid to limit yourself to one or the other when you can have both.
Loose lips lose spit.
They have only token support for Linux anyway. Where's the Creative Suite?
you had me at #!
There ARE advantages to monopolies. They are more than happy to standardize things and make life easier. Of course, in the end, it is what is easiest, and most profitable in the long run, for the monopoly, not the other companies. So yes. Google will find it MUCH easier to develop on MS. Of course, so did AOL, Stacker, Netscape, Word Perfect, etc.....
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I love me some Linux, all my server boxes run it and I do do app and gui work on it, but the last time I tried to port a game to it I just gave up in disgust after hitting the sound stuff. And it wasn't just the sound, it was getting the mouse input, getting gamepad input, and a bunch of other things you don't even think about normally but have to work right to get a game running.
This is why my desktop runs Win7 - I like my games. The Direct X family (including Direct Sound, Direct Input, etc) was possibly the smartest thing Microsoft ever did. Yes, you can get it all working under Linux with enough work, but why bother except as a work of love? I write cross-platform stuff using PyGame now, which works pretty well, but since it's using SDL there are sound issues on Linux (the sound nightmare again).
I'm not sure I have a solution here, just whining. Really, you need a unified API for /everything/ involved in making a game that doesn't care what mouse or sound card or sound drivers or gamepad or video card you're using. And I realize that's a big 'Good Luck With That' with open source. There are cases where a benevolent dictator is better than democracy - as long as they stay benevolent, which is another 'Good Luck'.
"511MB executable that brings up an empty window."
Hmm, is that a new OS?
the root of the issue is necessity. The point of linux is the definition of what linux is. If you run software on a Linux kernel, its Linux. That's why no one standardizes anything more than that. now if you thought standardizing anything in userspace is necessary, join the LSB, otherwise, stop bellyaching and pick one. If you can't choose, you're thinking about it. My primary example is that somebody has already made chrome for linux.
I used linux (open suse with kde) for the first time recently, installing it on a machine that had previously been running the win 7 beta. Apart from the fact that I found it totally impossible to get sound from it despite spending almost 2 hours installing drivers (which are near impossible to find for linux) I just found it to be less useable overall (than any of the windows systems or mac osx). I had been considering giving it to my parents to replace their windows machine, but I quickly realised that they would be unable to use it. I think that considering there is such a good community behind all of the linux distros the effort would be much better used on creating a single more customizable distro. It would be far easier on the software devs as well. At the moment they cant be bothered realeasing software for such a small percentage of users and it is damaging the image of linux.
As they explained multiple times, they choose GTK because that's what the team doing the Linux "port" is familiar with. However their architecture allows to easily use different toolkits and they are willing to accept patches to support Qt or whatever else. They just don't have the resources necessary to support more than one toolkit.
Mada mada dane.
And people wonder why Linux's desktop share is as small as it is.... Thank fuck the Ubuntu community forums aren't full of arseholes like you. Maybe that's why its market share of Linux pisses over other distros.
Well, I've always found Gentoo forums very helpful indeed. But there is the ease of use Gentoo was not really meant for. ;)
Ignore this signature. By order.
Developers != Managers.
Sure, they're different, but you're forgetting that Linux is made by developers paid (or not paid) by big companies. Managers don't usually draw their battle lines within the many sides of Linux, their battle lines are along corporate lines.
Tell me, why should I stick to only one toolkit when a specific job can be done so much better with products developed with another toolkit? It doesn't make sense from any point of view, except for someone who just wants do draw lines in the sand for the sake of picking a fight.
Google isn't porting to Ubuntu, they're porting to Linux. It's the kindness of a single developer that makes it so we can apt-get it at all. If you want more than what's currently available, then either stop complaining and wait or contribute.
What if you used Linux with a BSD kernel? Is it still Linux? The OS is -not- the UI, it is a foundation for the software that runs the UI. What UI's are available depends on the connecting software (GTK+ and QT for Windows do exist, did you know that?)
Thank you for modding the parent funny, because sometimes that's all you can do!
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
Maybe it's time to standardize. Maybe. I mean, why do we bitch so much about Microsoft? They fail to follow established standards, making it difficult for honest people to compete with them - most notably in Internet Explorer, not to mention their office suite.
So, why can't Linux establish standards? I mean, yeah, we can have choices out the wazoo, but why not a STANDARD? As Adobe points out, audio is a jungle. A set of standards for desktop audio would simplify life for MOST new users. It would simplify life for most developers. And, the standard would detract from NO ONE'S experience, since so many choices exist anyway. If ALSA becomes "the standard", and I really want to use OSS, well, OSS is still there to use.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Hehe... Someone's thinking about Java?
Frankly, I demand BeOS be supported.
Agreed. However, Windows allows you to break the HIG fairly easily. You can't do it so easily in Linux (try having Compiz or Metacity or KWin agree on a way to cleanly extend those tabs into the title bar).
I remember that Windows has been able to do that since the Windows 3.1. I forget exactly which piece of software I saw do it first, but the functionality was there. It's probably legacy code that MS drew up to support changing a UI that they weren't completely sure about.
And as we all know, Microsoft rarely dumps legacy software, unless you're talking about the OS underpinnings. I'd imagine that Google just put this to good use while designing Chrome.
I personally do not know if the functionality to do the same exists within GTK+ or QT4. According to other posts, it does; although I'd venture to guess that it's not very clean code.
Chromium is making progress though!
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
Seriously, I have been a heavy Linux user since 1995 and I have even attended and spoken at a few conferences... and I have been saying this for years. You know what it is met with every time? "Blah, blah, chaos, blah" or "blah, blah, choice, blah" or "blah, blah, STFU nub!1, blah" every time. I describe it as trying to build a mansion on a shifting and incomplete foundation... Linux NEEDS to be more than a kernel. It needs to be the entire basic framework (foundation) and it needs to include ONE of each basic app that is standardized in UI, look, and feel. Then you can still tweak, add, subtract, etc. from it and have your customized distros and apps... but we have 40 half-assed apps in one area in all manner of development and disarray with no cohesive vision or goal. it is destined for failure.
As it stands Asus (was, not now) or Ubuntu or some other corporation is the only hope of packaging a solid base system that is re-thought from the ground up. Everyone can keep fighting it for another 15 years and still be nowhere much further than we are now, or we could get our collective heads out of our asses and finally make it happen. OSX has beaten Linux in almost every area in short order due to a single, solid, vision... and it is time Linus steps up and takes some sort of control and direction back.
There's a reason the kernel is not handled like the rest of Linux, but why we are all so stubborn to insist that everything else does not apply. FFS hopefully Google is the voice that finally gets shit on the track again, mine surely hasn't despite my efforts.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Great discussion going on! Some good remarks, some so-so.
Let me note one thing to everyone. This is mostly a reflection on History and how it can apply to what we have here.
Ancient Greeks had the knowledge of the steam machine. Yes, we can say that they played with it as a toy and so on... But the problem is that they had not only the steam machine! They had all the basics to build machines, besides they were pretty advanced on using them as we know now. Not so long ago a very complicated machine was found that amazingly modelled the solar system. They were toys, but pretty elaborated toys.
Now we perfectly know that steam machines came up into life only in the XVII century. More, all the machinery stuff was mostly reinvented! We didn't know Greeks went that far until recent time.
Why?
Some people say that they, and Romans afterward, stuck to their "way of things" - slaves do the work, why we shall do something serious out of these machines? Why we need to substitute them for something... Better? Or worser? Or just different?
Now, they kept their society. Where is that society now, we perfectly know.
Is no one afraid, that sticking into the "way of things", we will just build our own doom? Yes, I know that it is hard to see the Future and probably no one of us will see the Avenge of Linux. Most probably there will never be such an avenge but someone will reinvent Linux on its basics. But, sincerly, I would prefer that even the basis for such things will never come into life! Because, if this happens, that will mean that we have choosen the most stupid historical path - no-way street.
Now I leave two questions for everyone here -
On trying to make a wholescale standard on Linux, aren't we burning bridges?
What do you prefer - an imperfect world and a future of Chance, or a perfect system and one-way to nowhere?
Then use QT. It's much nicer.
Problem is, they think they want to make a "Linux" app, but they really want to make a Gnome app or a KDE app. Mainstream projects need to pick a mainstream desktop and design for that.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
There's nothing stopping someone from setting up a "standards body" and trying to dictate what libs should and should not be used. All they have to do is get a few major distros on board, and convince people that's the way to go. Simple.
/usr/games/fortune
The freedom (free as in liberty) aspect of Linux make that sort of standardization somewhere between extremely difficult and absolutely impossible. Freedom and autonomy are the enemies of standards.
What's more likely: Standardization (which involves Microsoft working in cooperation with apple and Linux developers) or North Korea just saying "oh sorry, my bad, here's the nukes". Not too sure where I'd vote!!
Try openSUSE and the latest KDE before jumping over to Vista.
I was going to say that if someone actually wants to switch to Vista (Vista! Not XP, not 7, not OS X, but Vista of all things!), they're a lost cause and can't be reasoned with.
But I have to say, suggesting someone like that try KDE has a certain kind of logic to it...
You obviously don't know jack shit about Operating Systems.
The UI is a layer of abstractions on top of the OS. Once a UI is ported to an OS, the differences between OSes are (hopefully) concealed from the end user. They are still there though. If you use GIMP or Pidgin on Windows, did your computer become Linux because you now have GTK libs? No. And a ton of effort (years in fact) went into making GTK work on Windows seamlessly. VLC moved from GTK to Qt, did the OS change any at all? No... because the UI is not the OS.
And this is the problem, multiple OSes using multiple toolkits, witch each element having it's own quirks. For each platform you have to work around differences in the OS, differences in the toolkit, and differences in the toolkit for each OS because of their workarounds.
It would still be in beta.
So why didn't they just use Xlib? Sounds like it would have solved a lot of the problems they had... maybe it was not new and sexy enough?
Myself I use Kubuntu and Firefox as a browser. While the GTK look and feel of Firefox does not blend well with KDE, it offers compelling functionality (free software, addons, browser history, spell checking, ...).
In my opinion they should use Ruby or Python and the corresponding Qt- and GTK-bindings. By leveraging the power of a scripting language, it should be possible to efficiently develop customised GUIs for each desktop and platform. I currently use Ruby and Qt4-QtRuby and I must say that I can work much faster than with C++ and Qt4 as I did previously.
As they explained multiple times, they choose GTK because that's what the team doing the Linux "port" is familiar with. However their architecture allows to easily use different toolkits and they are willing to accept patches to support Qt or whatever else. They just don't have the resources necessary to support more than one toolkit.
For laughing out loud. Just like SWT supports any toolkit, I presume. What they did was to shove an abstract API mirroring the one of the windows toolkits. Of course, you can make that work on any toolkit, but it is not always going to be easy, nor a perfect match. And who needs another browser? Chrome offers very little new, being essentially Yet Another Konqueror Fork. (Maybe we can just label them all YAKF :o) )
But I merely replied because of the stupidness spouted about C++ re Qt.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
GTK isn't as nice as everyone makes it out to be.
Everyone doesn't make it out to be nice. Many people consider it awful-looking, inconsistent junk. So do I and believe that the Qt licensing change is the beginning of the end of GTK and I can't wait until it's buried. I'm also curious to see what sort of spasms Ubuntu will have since no matter what, it will affect the entire Linux community for obvious reasons. On the one hand it uses Gnome but on the other, it tries to bring Linux to the masses and that goal benefits greatly from standardization. So if standardization based on Qt would be within reach, if Ubuntu made the change too, what should and could they do? If Gnome switched to Qt, it is quite likely that it would at first be just as buggy (and poorly redesigned) as KDE 4 compared to KDE 3.5 and by then KDE 4 will probably suck slightly less than it does now. Thus Ubuntu would risk losing a lot of users to Kubuntu. I certainly wouldn't mind that since I use it myself but think that Ubuntu will face a great dilemma.
That would be GNU/kFreeBSD ;-)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Linux has had two leading sound systems. It used to be OSS (many years ago) and has been ALSA for quite some time. If you require anything else, you are probably going to have trouble in some distributions. Now, ALSA may be considered a crappy API, but then again, so was WinMM and it didn't stop people from using it.
Qt's fugly slot mechanism and nonsensical object hierarchy were pretty annoying. I found the GTK+ library (C) to be more object oriented than Qt (C++) itself, what, with their 'moc' compiler crud.
Qt is indeed more cross-platform and has a richer API than GTK+. That by itself, plus the fact it is LGPLed now, makes it interesting for writing applications regardless of how well written the API is.
We hear complaints from Google but where's the
resources?
Certainly Google could provide some direction
to one or more of the UI toolkits in Linux
by either joining or helping to set up a standards
consortium.
The only way software can be designed is by setting down
requirements, guiding the development with solid standards,
and actively participating in all levels of the process.
Standing back and saying "Whoa! Linux is a mess there are no standards...etc"
is a bit if a lark. When we recall all the workarounds we still have to do
with other operating systems simply because they don't follow standards,
or disregard them to control the marketplace, there is no difference
in the level of additional work that is required.
So, I spend money using/learning QT or build my own GUI toolkit, or use something stable
and homely like lestif. On the other hand I spend my money on licenses for build tools
on some other operating system. Either way I have to spend time and/or money
to get the job done.
I get the feeling that Google has been hiring too many Microsoft campus
programmers who just can't get their heads around anything outside
directX.
Qt also uses WebKit (they're on of the major contributors). Chrome uses their own fork, of course. Chrome is mostly open source, and the linux port is failry recent, so the license doesn't seem like the issue.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It is always time to standardize in the Linux domain. However, it is impossible to implement a standard as long as people have different opinions on a subject. What these company guys do not understand is the free nature of Open Source. Free means everyone can do what they want. And as long as not a significant group wants a particular standard, it will not be a standard.
yes it would be great if we could agree on one toolkit. And yes it would be cool if it would be cross platform, easy to use, and available for all programming languages (because we want that freedom). And yes GTK is very old school in design. It inherits features from Motif. It would be nice to have a Swing like composition model (e.g. GroupLayout) without the speed problems of Swing.
But I find it interesting what he finds so problematic with audio systems. He could use Phonon when he is writing with QT or gstreamer with GTK and QT. As it looks like he is using GTK gstreamer would be fine. It also work in KDE. And there is a HIG available especially for Gnome applications. Yes KDE does not have something similar. So instead of wining, he should encourage the KDE team to adopt the Gnome HIG or support a unifying HIG for both platforms.
The problem for Adobe can easily be fixed. Release the source code. This would allow us to fix the other issues the flash-plugin has.
There's no logical argument that can be made for rejecting running Windows but advocating a standardized API for all Linux platforms.
Then allow me to proprose an illogical one: The superiority of open source software.
Seriously, the fact that Linux has a thousand ways to do everything is a major problem. It not only affects the users, but it also affects developers who simply want to make a nice piece of software, but find it obscenely difficult due to everything else they have to deal with. Simplifying the OS will make it better for both users and developers, and making it better for developers will make it double better for users since they'll have more software that works better.
The Mac is just awful in my opinion, but it is a great example of how difficult it is to write software for Linux. I've used Linux for more than ten years, and in all of that time I've never written a single GUI program, despite having written lots of graphical stuff for DOS before I switched to Linux. One day I bought a Mac, hoping for a platform which was easier to program for, and indeed it was, as I wrote several graphical programs in the month it took me to realize the Mac was hopelessly stupid. Even so, Linux is such a pain that I probably would have stuck with the Mac were it not for its mouse acceleration problem.
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design. Seriously, your post was asinine. GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's? I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either. After so many years, most software needs reworking. The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary. If people didn't protest, this kind of reworking would never happen have happened. The original plan for the gnome folks was to have the 2.xx series continue indefinitely.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I wonder if this is typical situation, when you start your development on MS-Windows with all the restricting consequences that this odd platform offers and the weird style of coding it forces develepers to use.
On my opinion, when you start on MS-Windows, it's always wrong, because you get some unportable crap. The only way to make this right, is to choose the right toolkit that is portable to all platforms at once, if you don't want to build a toolkit by yourself.
When I look at Google's statement (that I would like to interpret this way)... "Why doesn't Linux have an UI toolkit like MS-Windows?", it reminds me of the old weird comment from NVidia on FreeBSD/amd64 "Make FreeBSD behave more like Linux, then we give you drivers."... Have the people who say such things really understood what they demand?
This thread has quickly veered into the inevitable realm of comparing the Linux environment to Windows and OSX, which with a few reasonable exceptions, has yielded the usual complaints about each in comparison to the others. As I see it, Microsoft and Apple are in the business of selling an environment for the casual computer user, and with some effort do their best to hide the underlying complexity from people who have no interest in computers beyond listening to music, browsing, checking their email, or using whatever applications they need to do their job.
Of course, Linux can do most of these things as well, but makes less effort to hide the complexity underneath, and can quickly becoming confusing to someone who has only used Windows or OSX. This is evidenced by the large number complaints on various Linux forums by new users who are asked to perform some task at the command line or edit a configuration file instead of using their more familiar GUI environment. I see no reason for argument as people use computers for different reasons, and come from different backgrounds and as such, they should use whatever suits them best. There are plenty of intelligent and reasonable people who have no need or interest in learning more about computers than how to operate the applications they use to accomplish a specific task.
Linux can do many of these things, but these people will almost always find the underlying environment getting in their way because they don't care to understand it, or because the Linux equivalent is not what they are accustomed to.
And this is fine.
As others have mentioned, Linux is simply a kernel around which have grown a large body of specialized applications, frameworks and toolkits, and as such can be used to design a variety of systems for a variety of purposes. Almost by definition it is primarily for those of a technical inclination, who do not mind or even enjoy learning about computers, and what it is possible to do with them. There is little reason to recommend Linux to the more casual computer user, especially as it is almost always done with no care for what they actually want, and is largely out of the personal bias of those recommending it.
Linux is based on a community of developers largely working in their own time and on projects they have personal use for or interest in and they cannot be forced to design or agree upon "a single API" as some have suggested. Of course, there is nothing stopping a team from creating a Linux distribution targeted for the casual user, but then what is the compelling reason to switch, given that there are at least two separate and well-funded environments with this purpose already in mind? Such an environment would, by necessity have to leave out many of the compelling benefits of Linux that I and many others have come to enjoy.
I do not particularly care if Chrome is ever ported to a particular Linux distribution, and if they do adhere to their pretence of open standards, there is nothing preventing someone so inclined in creating a substitute for us as well.
We always whine about the windows monoculture, but when it comes to Linux, there are always those pseudo-experts (similar to pundits), who still think everything has to be unified.
They would love to live in a world with only one desktop environment, one library per technology (eg audio), one userland, and one unpatchable kernel with a fixed config. In other words: They want it to become Windows.
No thank you. I love my freedom more than anything in the world. I want many, many concurring libraries, kernels, desktop environments, and even "standards". I want to be able to choose and support my favorite one.
When Linux becomes a monoculture, Linux will be dead.
Luckily, that will never happen. Because we are no company, and do not walk in lockstep. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts. People who run Ubuntu should do so because that's what they like. People who run Mac OS X should do so because that's what they like. People who run Windows should do so because that's what they like. If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Computers are useful because of applications. The OS is just there to make it easy for apps to interface with the hardware, such as video cards and hard drives. The OS also supports the applications with APIs such as DirectX. The user doesn't and shouldn't have to care about the OS.
Now if you meant to say that application developers should be enthusiastic about the OS, then I would agree.
No two browsers look alike. I happen to like Google Chrome's look and feel. To me, it's way superior to IE's.
If a horse ate some hay, stumbled into an oven and pooped a brick, then that brick was hit by a garbage truck it would still look nicer than IE.
Google has paid. They paid for WINE development. Most of their "Linux" ports are Win32 apps recompiled with WINE. With android, they ditched X/GTK/QT and did their own thing.
Their direction is: KDE/GNOME/Wt/GTK suck.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
KDE and Gnome are desktop environments. Qt and GTK+ are GUI toolkits. KDE is built on top of Qt. Gnome is built on top of GTK+. GTK+ is not responsible for Gnome developer decisions, and Qt is not responsible for KDE developer decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME
YES! Linux needs standardization, without it no-one wants to develop for it and it will forever remain as an experimental OS.
Why don't we have a standard (maybe like the LSB but better) with distros that follow it? Perhaps it could be modeled after a popular distro such as Ubuntu? Other disros would be free to deviate, but major software manufacturers (Adobe, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) would only be expected to produce software for the standards. If a distro didn't follow the standards it would be up to the maintainers to make it work if they wanted the software.
First of all, those "harsh words" are somehow pulled out from context to prove that "Linux sucks". I don't know what you guys are trying to prove but:
1) There are two, serious, commercially used toolkits GTK+ and Qt. As far as I know it is much less than several tens of toolkits which rules Windows world. I prefer GTK+ and quite happy how Qt/KDE fanbois are pushed compete;
2) "inconsistencies across applications" - news at eleven. Are you talking about applications as general? Because it is kinda rule of numb;
3) "the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG" - again, there are two toolkits and two HIGs. Actually there is no Microsoft or Windows HIG, only different ones for each application group in Windows. Same as for OS X. Maybe it indicates that such unified HIG is kinda impossible?
4) " GTK not being a very compelling toolkit" - bug reports with patches or whishes are welcome. Linus did it and his suggestions with patches were accepted in two weeks time;
Other parts of article indicates that Google guy has very strong anti Linux bias. For example: "Committing to any single toolkit could potentially marginalize other segments of the community, so it's not a decision that can be made easily."
What a heck? If they really think so, how Skype manages to be ran by thousands of casual Ubuntu users? It uses qt and it is not installed by default. Uhhh ohhh, dependencies man. Compile package with sane version of qt libs and you are set to go. Several years ago yes, there were kinda alien feeling running Qt app in GTK+ environment and vice versa. But now it's non-issue.
""First of all let me generally comment that this entire situation is a clusterf*ck. I am not happy with the technical constraints imposed by Linux and its assorted UIs on Chrome's UI and feature set," he wrote. "There isn't dominant consensus around toolkit and HIG, there seems to be variance in commonly used software as to how it's constructed and what it matches, and I've not heard anyone glow about how they can create the coolest looking UIs with GTK."
For those who are unaware, Ben Goodger is a former employee of Mozilla and used to be the lead developer of the Firefox project."
Wow hang on here. Isn't that the same Firefox which was for a moment developed for Windows only and Linux was just fucking afterthought? How they screwed everything under the sun doing FF 2 with GTK+? Ohhh, I see. Real answer is "I couldn't master it, because I tried to use toolkit to do as I want - instead of following HIG and toolkit coding practice.". And using nice terms and phrases like "clusterfuck", and "dominant consensus around toolkit and HIG" (Ben, let's be honest, everyone standardizes around GTK+. You don't like it, end of story.) indicates that there is something else going on here than honest evaluation of things.
So more or less - article or more concretely, Ben is a flamebat. And comments "Why not to use Qt instead?" and "Phono is so nice to use" from Slashdot crowd today indicates that it clearly works nothing such retribution magnet for KDE fanbois who loose their impact to market with each day. And that's what harsh.
Sorry for putting myself under karma flamethrower, but it was too much.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Win32 is the Windows API. MFC is a library consisting of shortcut functions to do larger things with the Windows API. .NET is a framework for languages like C# and Visual Basic that ultimately translates everything to the Windows API.
Hence there's still one standard: the Windows API. Everything else just builds on top of it.
First, the article says nothing of the sort. As usual, the summary is completely off the point.
But to address the summary and the other comments, rather than the article:
The Free OS world (whether you call yours Linux, GNU, GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, etc etc) does NOT suffer from a lack of standardization. I've been hearing this for 13 years (people who are in the community longer than me have been hearing it for longer) and I'm sick of it. It wasn't true then and it wasn't true now. We have lots of standards, maybe more than I would prefer. We have standards for a lot of things that other OSes don't.
And we also have a lot of people who choose not to follow them. It's a freedom we have and it's one of the things that makes it so great.
Standard UI toolkit? We had one in the 90s, and it sucked. So people decided to write Qt and GTK+ and we're much better off now. Standard HIG? KDE has one, GNOME has one, and XFCE has one, take your pick. Standards for binary compatibility? Yes we can, and as another commenter mentioned, Skype uses it rather effectively for their crapware.
Now, does all that choice pose a minor problem to proprietary vendors who want to offer non-free, closed-source software in our platform(s)? Yes, it does. However, I don't care. They have a very simple solution: give us the source, and if the product is good, the people who care will help you port. You can provide one, bare-bones port, and the GNOME/XFCE/KDE/portable/etc people will work out the customisation and integration for you. Don't want to give us the source? Then I'm sorry, it's going to be your problem.
Incidentally, this is exactly Google's solution, well, almost exactly. I doubt there's going to be, say, a XFCE port of Chrome, but chances are there will be a XFCE-integration version of Chromium (or an add-on that does it). Everybody wins, nothing to bitch about.
The issue at hand is that there is a jungle of toolkits, each having a different focus. So, to keep all those toolkits but eliminate the differences between them a toolkit which basically is a wrapper around the most popular toolkits is needed.
I mean if I am a hardware manufacturer it takes just three drivers if I want to support Windows past, present, and future with a binary driver. Four if I want to cover the niches. I just have my developers write a Win98/ME, A win2k/XP, and a Vista/Win7. I add a WinXP64/Vista64 and since Win7 can use Vista drivers I have everything from 1998-2014 completely covered with just four binary drivers and no more out of pocket. There just ain't a way to do that in Linux.
There's a much easier way. Send a message to the kernel list saying, "I am a hardware manufacturer. Here are the docs for my hardware under NDA, and here's some samples." Ta-da! You get drivers written for free (or significantly reduced), and every subsequent distro release will support your hardware by default.
Pirate Party UK
And 650 of those distros are just Ubuntu with non-brown wallpaper.
The OS is not the UI, at least not for the average Linux user. We like tweaking little things, like the exact package management, or in what way the system detects hardware if you want it to do so automatically at all.
The solution is NOT to merge distros, but there needs to be some rigorous standards for how different implementations can communicate with each other. The KDE people get this and have been working like hell to standardize hardware management (especially audio), but all they get is whining about the UI and bugs. It needs a lot of work, but the foundation is there, and it needs to reach a level of maturity and adoption across distros/WMs so that developers can focus on developing.
The next thing we need is a standardized install method for packages that are obtained manually by the user. I know it is not as simple as just providing a tar.bz2 with source and machine readable dependency instructions, but it should be possible to make compilation automatic across the board if the major distros come together and put some work into it.
PS. Don't know why the paragraphs are not separated. Very weird. DS
Seriously Google how hard can it be? Just use GTK, its light, useful and even a weekend coder can use it.
I think you are getting modded flamebait on this one because fans of any other toolkit can say the same thing about their favorite toolkit--of course that isn't really flamebait, but I'm not metamoderating here.
More to the point, Linux UI suffers not from lack of good toolkits but for a lack of standardized metaphors for user actions. I'll give an example of the worst form of lack of standardization: the installation file. There is no standard installation file format in Linux similar to say, for example, the .pkg files of OS X or simply a self installing executable in Windows as one might create with inno setup. To create such a file would take windows manager specific knowledge (e.g. gnome, kde, etc.) and knowledge of myriad other parameters relating to the configuration of the end-user's box.
The multi-Linux distro answer becomes that one must create a behemoth batteries-included executable that makes no assumptions about the end-user's configuration. Installation instructions become: "put this in a bin in your path", and it is further up to the end-user to create a button on the tool bar.
Actually, I feel a rant coming on, so I'll stop for now.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I am sick to death of hearing developers bitch about "native look and feel". Grow up! Get a fucking life! I couldn't care less how the goddamn app looks COMPARED TO OTHER APPS as long as the look enables the FUNCTIONALITY to be performed correctly.
What matters is that the program does it's job - not that the widgets look the same as some other app on the system.
Christ, what a fucking waste of millions of man hours farting around with bullshit cosmetic issues! Fucking programmers think they're goddamn "artistes" when they can't even get their shit to RUN PROPERLY, NOT CRASH, BE FUCKING USABLE, and BE SECURE!
Shut the fuck up about look and feel and concentrate on making the thing fucking usable, reliable, and secure.
You want to be Picasso, get a fucking paintbrush!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You get drivers written for free (or significantly reduced), and every subsequent distro release will support your hardware by default.
I forgot to add that if your hardware is popular enough, people will even volunteer to backport the drivers to older versions of Linux!
Pirate Party UK
I have no idea what people mean when they write things like this.
WTF can you not do in Gnome that you want to? What?
Personally, I've absolutely mutilated the interface and re-built it to my liking, and 99% of what I did was accomplished using options in menus. None of it was done in their stupid registry-like thing--in fact, I've only ever used it once, and that was back when they first started using it.
Is there some amazing set of things people can do in other DEs that I'm missing out on?
They are full of them, and they're full of tossers who believe that Ubuntu's 'market share' amounts to a hill of beans.
They start writing some big, ugly, messy Windows application (hello, Firefox), and then they moan and groan when porting it to Linux
Mosaic was originally designed for UNIX / X Windows. Mosaic Netscape (->) Netscape Navigator -> Mozilla -> Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox.
It's been cross platform for a very, very long time, and it definitely didn't start as a "big, ugly, messy Windows application".
Is this the guy who gave us a whole bunch of reasons as to why they weren't going to use a working cross-platform toolkit in Qt for a cross-platform browser and why they were going to use the, now inferior, GTK for Linux? Somehow 'I told you so' just doesn't quite say it.
We're all aware of how sound standardisation is a mess. Broken compatibility with other Unixes, layers upon layers, high latency, bugginess, etc. THE SOLUTION IS YOU SWITCH TO OSSv4! It actually works! Please, people, for the sake of the developers and the users who have to scratch their heads wondering how to get their alsa/esound/pulseaudio/whatever to play nice. Just use ossv4!
Well, tough. Calling for "standardization", uniform GUI and what not is not going to help - different companies would like the standard to match what *they* need and nobody would be happy anyway. Furthermore, I do not see why Linux should change to match the (terrible) development practices on Windows.
The solution is to try to release as much code as open source as possible and let the distro packagers do the integration work for you. Or, if you must keep it proprietary, work with the major distros at least. Their developers will be happy to help - unless one is providing the OS as well, the user will likely need an OS to run the super-proprietary application anyway and it is a win-win situation for both sides. This works a lot better than whining about how terrible Linux is ...
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you. I can as well say that standard way of using a computer means using Windows, making your argument completely irrelevant (number-wise, the Windows desktops dwarfs all Linux installs combined ..). Make yourself a bit better informed next time - Ubuntu is far from standard, it just happens to be popular in US. Not so much in Europe and elsewhere.
such as eschewing a menubar and consolidating the commands in Page and Tool dropdown buttons.
Incidentally, Slashdotters bashed MS for doing this in IE7, but were silent about Google doing the same thing in Chrome. Which reminds me that slashdotters also bashed Microsoft for merging the Back/Forward navigation stack into a single dropdown control in IE7, but said nothing when Firefox 3 copied that idea. I only point out these things to show that slashdotters aren't the most objective analysts when it comes to judging UI.
That said, I agree with you that Chrome's UI is better than IE's, and I think Chrome's UI is the best of all browsers.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular? /. has been trumpeting The Year Of Linux On The Desktop for as long as I've been a user - before, no doubt.
You want it to happen? Like, actually happen? Do that.
Consolidate, standardize, document. Choice is a fantastic thing to have and will always be there for those who need it - but it confuses the hell out of most grandmothers. Linux might be paradise for server-side and web developers (I heart my debian box) but it's a mess on the desktop. It's come a long way from the early days of Red Hat, to be sure - but Desktop Linux still suffers from Tinkering Required for some applications, and massive, massive bloat. X-windows toolkits, for example - Windows and the Mac have one UI toolkit. Linux (rather, X-Windows) has as many as it has IRC clients, and while GTK has gained a lot of marketshare, it's not A Standard in the sense that, say.... Cocoa is. Cocoa's just there OS X. Compare to GTK - your distro might have it, it might not... and if it does, what version? If it doesn't, how easy is it to get? Do you have to compile?
My grandmother doesn't know how to compile. She shouldn't have to.
I know, I know... making Linux truly Grandmother Friendly goes completely against the natural instincts of the developer community. That doesn't mean we can't have GrandmotherOS with a linux kernel and a set of rock-solid featureful APIs that make ISVs drool.... and then backport it to the distros we use on our LCIIIs, toasters, SGIs, sparcs, Apollos and DECs.
It {...} has been ALSA for quite some time. If you require anything else, you are probably going to have trouble in some distributions.
Well, the problem is ALSA is only direct access to the sound hardware (in most common installation. Of course, one could build custom ALSA configurations to pipe the sound through a software mixer). That means that, unless there's hardware support mixing in the sound card (most Soundblasters have it), one application can greedily keep all sound output for itself (happens a lot of time with flash).
Unless doing full screen games or something other that usually requires exclusive access to the sound card, it would be best if sound enabled applications used API of sound-mixing deamons/abstractions such as ESD & Artd (on old Gnome and KDE) or PulseAudio and Phonon (on more recent Gnome and KDE installations).
Specially because there are lots of libraries offering plug-ins for several systems and for ALSA (in case no server or abstraction library is there). Such libraries include SDL, GStreamer, lib-AO, etc... and are available on most distros.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Perhaps if Sun was less stupid it would actually work.
You're doing it wrong if the typical user encounters cause to realize the name of the OS they're using.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Nobody would switch to it because it'd be in "beta."
Is that most people who use computers are NOT going to be enthusiasts. They use computers because the computer is a tool. They have something they want done, maybe it is e-mail, maybe it is watching video, maybe it is playing games, maybe it is staring at hampsterdance.com all day, doesn't matter. They have something they wish to do and the computer is the tool to allow them to do it. Thus their concern is getting the variety of tool that allows them to do this with minimal fuss. They aren't interested in technical merits, they aren't interested in becoming "fans". They want the shit to work and get out of the way.
Normal users are not OS "enthusiasts" any more than normal people are hammer "enthusiasts". I really don't give a shit about hammers. I don't are how they are made, I don't care about their design, I don't care about their merits. What I care about is their ability to pound a nail in to what I want. So I'm going to get a hammer that does that well for me. In my case, it is a standard claw hammer, about 1 foot long. I'm not interested in technical arguments as to why I ought to like a sledge hammer better. Yes, there are things a sledge hammer can do mine can't. I don't give a shit, I don't do those things and a sledge hammer is rather heavy and unwieldy. I have the hammer I want, and that's all I want. I'm not an "enthusiast" I'm a user.
So for most people, this is how computers are. For technical people, sure the computer itself can be fun. The process of running the system can be as interesting as anything you might do with it. However technical people aren't most people. Most people just want to d various tasks with the computer, and they want to the computer to not cause them grief as they do said tasks.
That's one self-serving assumption he has there. I use Ubuntu on my home PC, Windows 7 on my media center PC, Gentoo on my servers, and at work, here I have no choice, I use Windows XP.
Ubuntu on my home PC, because it was easy to install and has a big support forum. Although I'm no stranger with linux, I have a stranger to debian-based systems way of doing things. Ubuntu is easy to use; if I don't want to touch a command line, most of the time I don't have to. That doesn't mean I don't like the command line; I do, but sometimes I just like to be able to use nothing but the mouse. I could use Gentoo, but it takes a lot of work to get things right on it (with a GUI).
Gentoo on my servers, because I can start with the most very basic system. No services installed by default. Do I want to use syslog-ng, syslog, or metalog for my log management -- I always choose syslog-ng and install logrotate, mainly because it has a good track record, and I haven't found a program yet that is standardized to use metalog's method of login. Someimes metalog on PCs, just because it's simple but still effective. How about cron? There's vixie-cron and anacron. I'm familiar with vixie-cron, so I stick with that, but Ubuntu uses anacron.
Since '05, I've setup Gentoo probably over 2 dozen times. I'm sure I've installed windows quite many more times. I've installed Mac OS X a few times; Freebsd, CentOS, Red Hat, Fedora Core, BeOS, the list goes on. the list goes on.
I'm sure I could get on my high horse like the GP, but I don't see any reason for that. As someone else has already said, I use the best tool for the job.
But linux gets preference. I just can't do with out that awesome command line.
Since Google is using Webkit for the rendering engine, using QT for the linux version makes sense (especially now that its LGPL)
If you want a better UI toolkit, write one yourself. Otherwise use wx or Qt. But it's OK, everyone knows you're just making lame excuses for not supporting Linux properly despite having enough resources for it easily (even the Mozilla Project can do it and it doesn't earn billions every year).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Maybe they should have just used Xlib/Xt instead and duplicated everything they did for Windows, especially if they want a completely consistent cross-platform look and feel, BUT don't want to be hamstrung by any single UI library's way of doing things.
Specially since this has already worked.
- Early versions of OpenOffice.org used to have their own toolkit (now they have something that is partly collaborating with either GTK or KDE's Qt).
- Firefox has it own widget abstraction (XUL) running on top of GTK2.
It has worked for these, so Google could achieve something similar.
Except that then, people trying to build micro distribution for limited hardware will complain about the memory foot-print of yet another tool-kit.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?" Yes. Yes it is.
Darwin and Aqua, then yeah, that's OS X. Why you would put just Darwin is beyond me. It's a terrible Unix system.
You sir, are a moron.
You may not care about the kernel, but many of us do. Which is why we run Linux (or BSD as the case may be).
The OS is NOT the UI, that's why they are two different terms with COMPLETELY different definitions.
... everyone would scramble to support it. Do you see what the real issue is now? Companies (and individuals) feel it costs them too much for too little profit/reward. That's all there is to it and that's why certain companies should think really hard about why they are in the position to benefit from Free (Beer) Software all the time. It's because someone else put a lot of effort into it despite the lack of profit/reward. Who's evil now, eh?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
There are issues any time you make a choice. As an example, take audio on Windows which is in a vastly better state, and something I understand quite well. Windows itself provides APIs for audio you can use. Any soundcard with a Windows driver will by definition support these. However Windows allows for other APIs to be installed. There are two major ones you'll run across:
1) OpenAL. This was developed by Creative Labs because they wanted better support for hardware sound acceleration, which is something that few companies do.
2) ASIO. This was developed by Steinberg for professional audio to provide a multi-channel, low latency, cross platform interface.
Now, suppose you like one of those formats and want to use them in your app. Ok, great, but your app will suddenly not work on a whole bunch of systems. Most soundcards don't support OpenAL or ASIO. They support MME, DS, and WDM/KS because those are the Windows formats and by having a Windows drier you'll support them, but they don't support the others. In fact the Creative Labs X-Fi are the only series of cards I'm aware of that support both OpenAL and ASIO. You can find other cards that support one or the other but not both.
So then what to do? Well you can go for the software shim idea. This is usually what OpenAL games do. They have an openal32.dll in their directory that performs conversion from OpenAL to one of the Windows formats (DirectSound usually). However this has numerous problems in that you lose functionality, it takes more resources, is another area for problems, etc. If you sniff around online you can find all kinds of problems related to this with games and various hack solutions form gamers for it.
In the case of ASIO there is a very nice 3rd party program, ASIO4ALL that does a good job of translating from ASIO to WDM/KS. Works in almost all cases, it's grade A stuff and is free. However, you lose any special features ASIO would get you. You are interfacing with a soundcard in KS mode effectively if you do that. So why not just have your program support that anyhow?
Now take that mess, and then go the Linux route where there isn't a guaranteed standard. It is a whole bunch of different shit and you don't know what you will and won't have on any given system or piece of hardware. There's isn't the "MME" option like in Windows that is universally supported.
These multiple, competing and sometimes conflicting standards really do make shit hard. I'm not saying that it should be a situation of "There is only one way to do things, everything else is banned." No that's not the case even on Windows. However there needs to be a default that ALL Linux distros support. Everything can use the default, and then you can have support for others as well if you like.
Then Microsoft has been fucking up for decades with that loading screen.
Big cluestick: we are not your employees, we do not do your bidding.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
KDE Boot splash?
Yeah why doesn't Google reimplement GNU?
What a stupid post! What an idiot you must be! Clearly you've never programmed before, as your oh-so-light-on-substance first sentance 'GTK isn't as nice as everyone makes it out to be' has absolutely nothing to do with your 2nd assertion 'Basically what everyone has been doing is talking red hat, and suse and making their product work on that' which also appears to be remove from your arse without any sanitising.
I have written applications and libraries ( http://entropy.homelinux.org/ ) that 'just work' on Windows, Linux and OSX using Gtk+, and I've not any any issues you are attempting to allude to.
But Unix fragmented. You had AIX, HPUX, and around a dozen other different kinds. They all behaved differently, stored things in different places in the filesystem, had different desktop environments.
And above all weren't opensource.
Linux distribution are opensource, almost from the top to the bottom. Kernel, UI Toolkits, Applications.
That means that maker of Linux distributions have all the necessary material needed to adapt Applications to the specifics of their distribution.
Thus you can find Firefox on almost any distribution, and the distributions maker has taken the effort to compile Firefox's source against the distribution's special mix of libraries. In the process more bugs are discovered, leading to more patch sent upstream to application developers.
The only way Linux can hope to succeed is to present a unified environment to developers *and* users. Period. Yes, that means the over-complex KDE will have to die. Yes, that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update. Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
The lack of uniform environment poses only major problems to binary closed source software. Which has to be designed in a way which work whichever distro it is thrown against. That is hard.
For the rest of us, our open-source applications all work pretty well, thank you very much (thanks to the massive effort put by both applications and distributions developers)
Currently Google is complaining that it's hard for them to get a Linux port.
Meanwhile, both the major browser Firefox and Konqueror (and probably a dozen of other minor less-known browsers) are very well ported on virtually any linux distribution AND on Windows and Mac OS X too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
..It's a kernel. The different distributions are operative systems. Here's a list of distros: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions
Yes, that is a lot of distros, and the very reason why simply reaching consensus on which APIs to use won't work and is against the whole point with the Linux kernel in the first place. Because there is not even a potential lowest common denominator for all of them. The only one thing Linux distros have in common is a version of the kernel. That is a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Again, this is one of Linux strengths, not weaknesses. Anyone can start their own distro, given enough persistency and time. Making client software which supports all the different distros is hard if not downright impossible, and not worth the hassle in my opinion.
Doing what a lot of people do here and ask for a streamlined API across distros limits people's freedom, and misunderstands what Linux is. If you want to support "Linux", go for the big ones, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Redhat. If you want to support the more obscure ones, then don't complain about too much choice, it makes you look like an idiot.
Who ever complained that Mac and Windows have different ABIs, APIs and kernels?
What I mean by that is most of the QT apps I've seen are ones where the UI is completely and totally non-standard. They have their own idea of how things should look and work that has zero to do with how things on the system look and work.
A good example that I mess with would be EastWest's Play sampler. It's QT, though they don't seem to advertise the fact (I noticed it installing the QT DLLs). It also looks more like an old school piece of audio hardware than a computer application. It's interface actually has a number of rather confusing and suboptimal controls, as do many audio apps. For example its settings are controlled by "dials". They look just like physical twist knobs from old audio hardware. Ok but I'm not twisting them with my fingers, I'm using a mouse. So how do they work? Well they actually work as vertical sliders. You click on the knob to take control, and move the mouse up to increase it, down to decrease it. The knob turns in a circle as you do this. If you try to move the mouse as the knob moves, you won't get the result you were looking for.
So I mean it works "fine" in that the app runs and it displays and such, but nobody is going to confuse that for good interface design. Also nobody is going to confuse it for a native Windows (or Mac, runs on there too and looks the same) interface. Qt let them do the cross platform UI easier, and perhaps helped make it look shiny, but did so at the expense of good UI integration. Personally, I'd much rather that it looked and felt like a Windows app. Would make it much easier to work with.
If it is to easy, then you are doing something wrong.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
So far, Ubuntu has the fewest questions, without sacrificing any flexibility.
The only time I use Windows is when I have no other choice.
Hey PeterBrett, rewrite your comment after reading your sig.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
damn I didn't think this one got submitted.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Or was he just bitching?
How does Wine development qualify as GUI development/support for linux?
Wine is a MS Windows API for using Windows applications on linux.
That's like saying, "Geeze! they paid for a PS2 emulator. What do you want *blood*?".
Google can well afford to throw some bucks at a standards based
consortium for the linux user interface.
So corporations are complaining that the software that they get for free and use to make truck loads of money isnt exactly what they want.
Ive got an idea, WRITE YOUR OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE, or maybe participate constructively in the community. Dont just complain, do some work yourself on the same terms as the work you received.
"Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned?" - Edward Thurlow
Sure, Sun may be doing something stupid, but why is the system even allowing them to break sound for other applications?
whoaa
I didn't know GTK+ was a subproject of GNOME.
The last time I looked at GTK+ there was this issue about GNOME people trying to tell GTK people what to do. Back then, GNOME was, you know, just one of many projects using The GIMP ToolKit.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
In that case, Linux is doomed. There's gotta be some way to compromise freedom and standardization.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu.
Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Basically, a century-old rip off of Apple's HIG.
Do you really want to start the rip off game? If so, go back and check out where Apple got the mouse and windowing system from.
Sure, there is genuinely a problem on the Linux desktop and that problem is that there are two major toolkits, two major desktops, two looks and feels (despite the KDE/Qt community's attempts to unify them, note that the GTK/GNOME community have done absolutely NOTHING in this regard). However, this problem is ENTIRELY the making of the GNOME community, who came into existence purely as a reaction to KDE and who frankly have been the fly in the ointment ever since. I appreciate their commitment to choice and the (now irrelevant) commitment to the Free Software Ideals but anyone with half a brain has been able to see for about a decade now that the division this has created has made the Linux desktop as a whole suffer overall enormously. To then see someone choose GTK as their toolkit (for a C++ app no less!) and then complain that there is no standardisation is so rich as to make me feel unwell. It's your fault in the first place, and now you are perpetutating it. Grow up, stop whinging, and next time don't make a bum choice and then whinge about it as if it was somehow not your fault.
Send a message to the kernel list saying, "I am a hardware manufacturer. Here are the docs for my hardware under NDA, and here's some samples."
Uh, you do realize that a NDA is an agreement that you have to get, well, agreement on?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
original thread
No, nobody gives a shit what the kernel is-- the OS is the UI, and the UI is the OS. (Think about it: if Apple ported OS X to run on the NT Kernel, would it still be OS X or would it magically turn into Windows?)
So by your reasoning, if you put KDE on Windows, it becomes Linux? Have fun trying to find a usable terminal.. or any stability.
After reading through the discussion between Ben, some other Google people and various Linux users, it's apparent to me that Ben is whining too much. One one hand, there all the bitching about the weakness of GTK and the fractured APIs of Linux but when it's suggested that they use QT instead, the answer is that they don't want to choose one toolkit over another and potentially alienate some of the userbase (!). No technical reason is given for not using QT and, from the various comments, it's clear that what they needed on Windows wasn't all baked into Win32 - they had to make some of it from scratch. Some advice for Ben - if you want to get the Linux port out, use QT, ship it and write a note saying that you choose the best tool you had available and if anyone wants to port it to GTK+, well good luck to them and here are a list of stumbling blocks they'll encounter. There was really no need to start a flame war and I imagine the opensource community should be relieved that he's not the lead dev for Chrome.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
If only i had modpoints to give! I feel your pain
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Bullshit.
That freedom and diversity is why Microsoft can't simply attack and destroy a single competing vendor the way they have so many others.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
And it's probably best that way.. a uniculture of anything is very vulnerable to subversion and extermination, because there is an Achilles-heel, an easy point of attack. But as long as there are many different forks and new things shooting up everywhere, like fresh grass over a cleared field, well, that's what's called life finds a way to keep going, if there is a way.
Another thing that annoys me is the diversity of animals and plants on Earth. It makes it so hard to study them all. Isn't it time to concentrate on the consolidation and standardisation living species in general?
There are two parts to WINE. One part is running Windows binaries in Linux. The other part is compiling code written for the win32 api as a native linux application.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The guy though well experienced sounds like a crybaby. I can't imagine how a programmer can't learn to make it work. Come on, he's got the tools, they are free.
Is this weak abled programmer not capable of making programs for various platforms? Is he telling us that they haven't *ever* done a real program under Linux? He's telling us this is new? He's telling the hundreds of thousands of programmers world-wide that they are doing what he can't because they are less experienced and know no better?
Come on. This guy is under pressure and he's caving. He's making excuses and pulling a henny penny.
Get with it and make it happen. We are tired of your excuses. This isn't rocket science. Use your brain you google employee.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The original political bullshit over the Qt licence was pretty well irrelevant to anyone that actually read the trolltech licences (which got more and more like the GPL every time). The gnome people (the competant ones that stayed on instead of the political ones that left early and left us horrors like gconf) really just wanted their own environment that looked and behaved differently to KDE in ways they thought were better. When Qt went GPL years ago that didn't change so gnome continued. By then gnome had progressed from a horror show that did little but break gimp every week to a stable multiplatform environment with very few flaws.
Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu. Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.
I run KDE 4 on Jaunty. It is perfectly usable. Indeed there are some rough spots, but there are also compelling improvements. For example, in Kate, the programmer's editor I prefer, you can now change the order of documents in the edit list by drag and drop. A small improvement I use a lot, and now find the lack of it in earlier, tried and true versions, more than a little irritating.
My general impression is, KDE 4 is a few bug reports away from a very slick offering. On the whole, I am productive and happy with it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
That's the worst thing that could happen to open source. Open source allows fast evolution and forcing standards done by someone else isn't a solid solution.
His solution, the google employee, is to rise above it and get it working. He's a complainer. He can't do hard work without complaining first, in the middle, and at the end.
There are enough standards that he can do everything he needs and to make it a real Linux program. Sounds to me like they really messed up the internals and the interface that they can only prove they have little to no knowledge of how to write a real program under linux. You know, like the 100s of thousands of programs already available.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I can't believe no one else noticed this. The summary is wrong. The article is about Chromium, not Chrome. Chrome is based on Chromium, and open-source project. There is no official Google Chrome for linux. There's Chromium, then there's crossover Chrome (or Chrome run through wine), but no Google Chrome for linux.
And, an alpha version of Chromium has been out for more than a month now. It has just recently become somewhat usable (tabs started working a couple of weeks ago). The options menu isn't populated, although the framework appears to be there. Rather annoyingly, it doesn't remember the size of the window when it was closed.
Running it on Ubuntu 9.04.
Maybe Ballmer was right? It's all about developers, developers, developers, developers.
Every time a conversation about programming on Linux comes up, I try to follow it. But honestly, it's just easier programming on Windows machines. There are maybe 4 versions to worry about ME/2000/XP/Vista. And you can probably forget about ME/2000. Even if you don't, it's a few lines of difference (between them and XP, they're prerrt to identical to program for). And you can leave them in when you program for XP/Vista.
Meanwhile, if you use the best practices that MS recommended for XP back when they released it, there's no difference between XP/Vista programming (unless you're trying to extend windows explorer.)
It just works, and it's easy.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Goobuntu.
That said, why do you Linux guys seem to hate standards so much, hmmm?
I'd fell I should complain about your use of the word standard here but that seems to be quibbling over semantics so I'll leave you to think about what you've done in it's misuse and in the meantime I'll accept your word for the purpose of discussion. ;)
You make a good point from the marketability standpoint. This is one of the reasons it's so hard to get good uptake for Linux with the general public. That said, from an evolution of technology standpoint it's the strength of an open system that I'm not forced to accept a crappy "standard" that no one is allowed to improve on and the owner isn't interested in. At the end of the day it's a double edged sword.
The freedom (free as in liberty) aspect of Linux make that sort of standardization somewhere between extremely difficult and absolutely impossible. Freedom and autonomy are the enemies of standards.
I disagree. A good standard is about enabling and informing so that different groups/technologies/interfaces can communicate effectively, not about restricting choice. Unfortunately many organizations don't realize this. All that said the nature of an open system does make it harder than simply declaring a "standard" by fiat but standards will evolve as obvious best practices win out. I think it's slower in the case of Linux for a number of reasons.
1. Some subsystems are immature
2. The user base is restricted so there isn't a monetary driver isn't there to accelerate development of various standards
3. The user base is relatively sophisticated so they put up with a less polished interface that requires tweaking and hacking
4. The broken Patent system (I still don't get how patenting an abstract concept or math makes any sense) blocks some standards and creates barriers to evolution of technology by closing off some paths of competition.
There are probably many more reasons that I haven't thought of but in general my point is I don't think "standards" for Linux are impossible they just aren't subject to immediate drivers and as such they aren't currently a priority (and may never be) but there isn't anything fundamental to an open system that says standards aren't welcome.
It's been cross platform for a very, very long time, and it definitely didn't start as a "big, ugly, messy Windows application".
Firefox has always had Windows as its primary GUI and target platform, with Linux added as an afterthought.
The fact that Mosaic had a different GUI at some point is pretty much irrelevant since that was ripped out long before Firefox.
Won't happen, because either some free software believer will "leak" the docs to some place like wikileaks, or you will see half the software developers scream in true RMS style "NDAs are the devil! Information wants to be free!" or some such rot. Most companies are NOT going to give their specs and docs to anyone outside the company-period-full stop. If that is what it takes to have a driver for Linux? Then you simply won't have drivers. Kinda like now.
What they WILL do is be quite happy to write you a binary driver if they know they can "write once use forever" like they can with Windows. The last all in one I picked up had a Win98 driver, as well as 2K,XP, and Vista. looking at the dates on the Win98 driver they are from 2001. Hell the XP drivers are from 2003. Can anybody here even imagine a device driver circa 2003 working without ANY need for tweaks, hacks, updating, or recompile in Linux?
And THAT right there is the problem in a nutshell. It isn't the big bad MSFT, who boned themselves real good with fucking up backwards compatibility in Vista, it isn't the OEMs like Asus who are dropping Linux, it ain't the mom & pop shops like me that would be happy to carry Linux boxes if it wasn't a support nightmare from hell. it is the fact that the margins on all those little devices that everybody seems to have sucks, and spending money constantly having to have developers tweak or recompile them for Linux isn't money well spent. If they only support Windows they can have developers only write four drivers and then put them on other projects while selling that device for years. With Linux everything from the kernel up is in a constant state of flux and things are getting broken pretty much constantly. Just go to the Ubuntu forums after a release and see how many "The update totally broke device Foo" posts there are.
So to me it seems pretty simple. The Linux users and developers need to get together and ask themselves a single question: do you WANT to have decent marketshare? If the answer is yes then you HAVE to support all those doodads being sold out of Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, etc. You can't write all those yourselves, it would be too costly. you NEED the hardware manufacturers to support your OS. And they will never do so until they can have a "write once, use forever" driver model like they enjoy on Windows. So get together and decide on a stable, backwards compatible undercarriage that anybody can write a binary to and be done with it. Do that and you'll have OEMs and mom & pop shops like mine selling Ubuntu boxes right next to the Windows ones. But without those manufacturers on your side you will never get any marketshare, and right now writing drivers for Linux is like trying to hit a dartboard with a live bumblebee. Is it any wonder why guys like Asus have stopped trying to sell Linux to home users?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
we're talking about standards, not vendors. the whole point of this is that there aren't very many vendors because the sheer amount of competing standards makes trying to support linux an unattractive choice for companies that are in it for the most money and the least effort possible.
also, microsoft is hardly the only company that follows that type of business practice - businesses are usually made to make money, not to make people feel all warm inside by playing nice with competing products.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
I am only a semi-professional developer, writing and numerical software for research (which influences some things). My perspective on this is simple, and has not changed much since Java 1.2 came out. At that time my personal focus shifted completely to writing applications which are as portable as possible. Before that i was extremely annoyed over having to choose between the different platforms for UNIX (motif, X, gtk, qt), which where at that time either not free or not running well on windows. There are actually not many toolkits stable on both platforms. i would suppose that i would stick nowadays to qt if somebody would force me to write C.
With Java it became obvious that i can trade of performance for development time and having something running on all platforms. Yes, i am aware that AWT was never perfect, but it was, for a long time it was the tool providing the best abstraction of your OS while maintaining performance (please spare me the "java is slow" generalization here. i know the drawbacks, but i had a quite complex DAQ application in java running on a P120 with 96MB of RAM). Best in terms of not having to learn much and getting programs which still run well. The other option i am following is tcl/tk. I am impressed on the stability and maturity of tk in everyday life, even if it *definitely* not my favourite Toolkit. Nowadays, using Swing is the obvious way to go for multi-platform.
So, if you want to save development effort (and that is what i guess this is about), bind your native renderer to Java and use Swing as an GUI. You wont event have to maintain different versions. If you are keen on having it native on all platforms, how about QT? But i think we are getting closer to the problem here. So, google, instead of taking one of the options available and using it, insists on a windows-like philosophy that this should be part of the OS. We should ask for the motivation here. Google recently released android. It seems to be flourishing. I think this is nothing bad, i enjoy that after many progressive small companies who have been pushe out of the market when trying to make free phones, google creates one strong pole of development. But, IMHO, this time would be exactly the right time for google to tell to the FOSS community: "look we have this google-backed platform; Netbooks, mobiles, pdas - linux will conquer the world" and "oh BTW did you notice a standardized platform is utterly lacking for Linux?". So i appreciate a certain consolidation of toolkits in use on linux, be it just to make copy and paste working finally. On the other hand, i think, seeing that Java is GPLed now, doomsday predictions for Linux on the Desktop due to this reasons are highly exaggerated and developer opinions from companies who have an interest in establishing their own platform (which i appreciate. I can't wait to use an android phone when these are mature) should be taken with a grain of salt.
You're confusing the shell's control library with the stack used to access it. On Windows when you write a .NET, WTL, MFC or plain Win32 application, you're still targeting the Windows shell native controls.
You make it sound like these toolkits are merely bindings to a common set of widgets, but that's not true. There are some common Win32 APIs that all of these call, but there is also a lot of functionality that each of them implements separately. As a result, a developer on Windows faces the same problem as a developer on Linux: they have a bunch of different APIs with all sort of tradeoffs between them.
And the Chrome developers apparently couldn't find a single suitable Windows API that gave them reasonable widget layout, which is why they re-wrote part of the toolkit. And that's what's causing all their problems.
So by your reasoning, if you put KDE on Windows, it becomes Linux? Have fun trying to find a usable terminal.. or any stability.
Yes, because the NT kernel is functionally identical to the Linux kernel. If anything, it's more advanced in some areas. For instance, the kernel used in Vista can relaunch video drivers on-the-fly.
For all practical purposes, KDE on Windows is indistinguishable from KDE on Linux. Notice that word: "practical".
You can make snide remarks about NT not being stable all you want, but people who have actually used NT know that you're full of crap. (Or perhaps delusional.)
Comment of the year
Hence there's still one standard: the Windows API. Everything else just builds on top of it.
Hey, there is only one standard on Linux then: the Linux and X11 APIs. Everything else just builds on top of them.
And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
Do you mean Expose or Spaces? Expose isn't a workspace switcher at all, it's just a weirdo visual effect to let you shrink all the windows on your current workspace down and switch between them. Spaces is, well, a bog-standard workspace switcher. Press a function key to see all the workspaces and drag windows between them, use ^1-^4 to switch between the spaces immediately (I only have 4 set, but you can set more if you're so inclined), click and hold on a window title and press the workspace control key to move the window directly there, add a dropdown for switching between spaces to your menu bar with optional names for the spaces, even "assign" applications to open in specific spaces by default.
I find the OS X interface to be mostly consistent and intuitive, but the last Ubuntu I used (8.04, I think) seemed to pretty much have its act together, and to be fair I think Windows Vista/7 does a pretty decent job. OS X is notably less consistent than OS 9 is, but I'd rather stab myself in the hand repeatedly with a fondue fork than use OS 9 for any length of time, so I think it's a fair tradeoff.
[snip] All that said the nature of an open system does make it harder than simply declaring a "standard" by fiat but standards will evolve as obvious best practices win out. I think it's slower in the case of Linux for a number of reasons.
1. Some subsystems are immature
You mean MOST subsystems. And after 15 years, too. Impressive.
2. The user base is restricted so there isn't a monetary driver isn't there to accelerate development of various standards
Every OS has that "chicken and egg" problem. At first. See "15 years", above.
3. The user base is relatively sophisticated so they put up with a less polished interface that requires tweaking and hacking."
You actually mean "The user base is insanely stubborn so they continually make excuses for a 15 year old OS that STILL has a less polished interface that STILL, AFTER 15 YEARS, requires tweaking and hacking."
4. The broken Patent system (I still don't get how patenting an abstract concept or math makes any sense) blocks some standards and creates barriers to evolution of technology by closing off some paths of competition.
Citation, please? Sounds like a piss-poor excuse to me, actually.
They are full of them, and they're full of tossers who believe that Ubuntu's 'market share' amounts to a hill of beans.
Whoa! Slow down there Sparky. Didn't you see the netcraft survey last week? We just hit 9 beans!
There's no place like
Think about it: if Apple ported OS X to run on the NT Kernel, would it still be OS X or would it magically turn into Windows?
No, I'm pretty sure the universe would spontaneously combust destroying all life as we know it. Either that or it would be treated by the compiler as one great big syntax error.
Consider yourself spoken to.
You sir need to do more research. There are numerous standards in Linux/GNU software.
Consider yourself spoken to.
I installed OSS on an AXi some years ago. It wedged the box, and after I reset, sound never worked again, despite removing OSS and running an OS upgrade. I can't imagine this ALSA is any worse.
Good old X code...sheesh.
On a more serious note however, I seriosly feel their pain. It is a mess.
Unless you are writing code to run in batch mode and user interactivity is not on your list of requrinments, you are fine.
The minute you say I need to add a button, or a window, you are presented with the questions :
1) QT or GTK
2) Maybe I should just drop both and build the GUI in Java, so I do not have to get screwed across distributions and glibc updates.
3) Nah, java is limiting, I will use Python, but it looks ugly..
Been there, and its a mess, specially if you try to get into such a conversation with mangment.
As for the audio, dont get me started.
The lunatic is in my head
IE doesn't follow Microsoft HIG, either.
None of Microsoft products does. Every one of them has a different UI.
Office, IE, explorer.exe, Windows Media Player, Live Messenger, regedit.exe, etc...
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Except is memory hog and lacks multi-process architecture.
Chrome 2 still lacks a menubar. But no loss, I don't need a menubar in my browser.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Qt also uses WebKit (they're on of the major contributors). Chrome uses their own fork, of course. Chrome is mostly open source, and the linux port is failry recent, so the license doesn't seem like the issue.
Nice to know Qt contributes to WebKit.. they have some excellent coders there. I cringed last time I saw some of Google's code.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
This is true, but when Google is complaining about lack of HIG standards across Linux, it doesn't really make much sense if they're not going to follow it in the first place.
All your base are belong to Wii.
What I find kind of funny about the whole situation is that absolutely nobody is complaining about making software for Linux, except people who want to make money with their software.
Don't forget that for instance Fedora has thousands of very useful software packages in their repositories, ready to install with a quick 'yum install blah'.
Now comes around Adobe, Google and other bigshots and what do they do? Complain.
I still understand that it might be difficult for them, but I'm just saying.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I mean if I am a hardware manufacturer it takes just three drivers if I want to support Windows past, present, and future with a binary driver. Four if I want to cover the niches. I just have my developers write a Win98/ME, A win2k/XP, and a Vista/Win7. I add a WinXP64/Vista64 and since Win7 can use Vista drivers I have everything from 1998-2014 completely covered with just four binary drivers and no more out of pocket. There just ain't a way to do that in Linux.
What horseshit. Let me tell you how we "do that in Linux." You release one driver. Just one open driver, and we'll take care of the rest, forever. Not just til 2014 or whatever arbitrary date you're throwing around. Forever. You never have to write another line again.
What's that? You don't want to release an open driver? You want to play the "follow the binary blob" game? Well then go fuck yourself.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I don't understand this. There's a reasonably clear HIG document in GNOME which is continuously updated. The strict packing rules make the resulting interface flexible in regards to RTL languages and reasonably consistent with other applications. GTK+ has widgets for just about every purpose. Since the introduction of Cairo it is trivial to draw custom widgets, especially using the gtkmm and cairomm C++ bindings: the custom tab bar could be done in a day. With those bindings it is even quite easy to modify the behaviour of existing widgets by overloading their signal handlers, Murray Cumming and the others working on those have invested a great deal of effort to truly (and easily) expose the object system via C++.
http://0install.net/tests/Chromium.xml
Tested on Ubuntu/Jaunty so far, but let me know if it doesn't work on other distributions.
Don't call it GNU/Linux, you got to give credit to all!!
It is GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv.
That said, why do you Linux guys seem to hate standards so much, hmmm? I'm not talking to you specifically fooslacker, but Linux in general. I mean y'all got, what? Three different sound systems now? Would it really be so hard for all the major players to sit down and choose a basic standard, one that will hopefully be rock solid stable with minimal changes and a focus on backwards compatibility, so that writing drivers and programs for the entire Linux ecosystem would be easy and thus attract more companies?
Its comments exactly like that one that make Zealots. The stupidity of such a comment is hard to quantify and universally obvious to anyone who understands what a standard is and what microsoft have done to them. First of all to mix linux, gnome (or any X desktop) and distributions up into one comment that states lack of standards is ridiculous.
But lets look at what MS have done. Starting with TCP/IP, microsoft's answer? "we dont like tcp, here's netbuei and netbios" (they weren't the only ones doing it, but thankfully it failed). Then (closed) smb came next (despite several already open standards for network file systems), and thus everyone else is forced to reverse engineer it (not once, but several times because MS just change it at a whim due to lack of standards). Next Java, do I really have to explain how MS tried to screw java by breaking the one thing it was supposed to be (i.e. cross platform?). Then document formats - finally sun come out with an open standard for a document format, and do MS do, they produce OOXML (and on top of that, their own office product doesnt support it properly). Then to make sure everyones screwed, they produce an ODF plugin for 2007 that breaks everyones implementation. Then theres .NET - supposedly a competitor to java yet lacks the one thing it needs, cross-platform support. Sure, they opened the c# spec, but thats useless without the API being open.
Thats only a couple of examples, HTML, HTTP, MAPI. Kerberos, Active directory, the list of standards MS has polluted (and tried to break) is endless
Who gets screwed in all this? The linux desktop and server OS's out there struggling to build on REAL standards that already exist, and they get angry (anyone who understands the fights would think rightly so) because people say things like "well linux doesn't follow a standard because this thing over here works on windows and doesn't on linux". Well the truth is that linux has fought very very hard to follow the standards, then it has to fight again to reverse engineer broken implementations of the standard that mainly come from MS themselves.
Ultimately "linux" as you put it wears the blame and still it doesn't give up, it continues to reverse engineer and make its products compatible.
Of course when i say linux here it means people like Sun who wrote java and open office (and are forced to reverse engineer the MS document format and code OO to the same lack of standard)
Now lets talk about the desktop, so which desktop standard are you referring to here? The Microsoft standard? Exactly what standard is that? As far as I know the only "Desktop" standards that actually exist (i.e. documented ones) are X + gnome or KDE/Qt - these are documented standards. As for audio, well there is none (unless you mean the undocumented and randomly changed direct sound API from MS). That has been a bad problem on linux in reality since it was born and part of that is inability to produce drivers, then 2 interfaces were born. Now we also have pulse audio (which isnt a linux interface by the way).
So we now have a "culture" of linux desktop environments (lets just look at fedora, redhat and ubuntu), in one corner you have redhat (RHEL) which uses older and more stable/developed interfaces which they stick to between major versions. 5.x has kernel 2.6.18 (and always will) along with a specific version of everything else (gnome, kde, qt, etc), they are all static in version 5.x of RHEL. Fedora is the exact
Linus shpuld put the Linux kernel under Affero GPLv3 license, and force those big corporations to give back to the community a decent share of his wealth. Period.
What's in a sig?
It's funny that you say so... I study CS on a university where we work a lot in groups... In the last project we wrote a ray tracer in C++ with SDL, libnetpbm and pthreads...
:)
As the others in my groups were novice developers, I decided to use codeblocks on Linux/Ubuntu... The windows users in our project ran VS...
Now using pkg-config and sdl-config, I could easily enable codeblocks to build under different distros... It even used relatives paths for source files, so I could check the project file into svn...
The windows users on the other hand had to enter absolute paths for libraries and couldn't share project file... And they had a hassle finding the libraries, whereas the linux users, me included, just got them from the package manager...
Now it's very likely that I didn't care to help the windows users making stuff run smoothly... and it's very possible that the windows users could have fixed the issue... Not that I know of any reasonable approaches... Nevertheless, at the end of the project, everybody agreed that development under Linux was a lot easier...
Firefox has always had Windows as its primary GUI and target platform, with Linux added as an afterthought
Firefox is Phoenix, which has always been cross-platform, being a stripped-down version of Mozilla.
From the Phoenix 0.1 release notes:
Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform.
Multiprocess is great if one of them crashes, but in other cases (browser crashes I find to be pretty rare) I don't think it makes much difference; threads still get scheduled to run in basically the same way on the processor, memory can be made private or shared between threads and processes just the same, so it's really not /that/ much of a big deal.
Menubar - yeah perhaps you don't, the way I use it, esp for development stuff, the extra features are most important, and menubar provides a consistent interface to features that speeds up interaction with it.
And memory - I've many test cases where Chrome's memory usage is higher than Safari's, but mostly yeah Safari's is higher, often only by 10% or so, but... it's more featureful, so this is really no surprise.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I have to agree with this violently.
Hey, I can think of only one reason why it would take more than a year to port Chrome to any other platform besides Windows. They only thing I can think of is logic intertwined with UI code.
Without nice logic and UI separation they can b*tch about Linux all they want, but any programmer worth his/her money wouldn't take a year to slap a UI on something as simple as a fscking web browser.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Errrm... because sometimes you really do want direct access to the sound hardware at the lowest level possible? I think it may be possible to do the equivalent on Windows, and that'll break sound for everyone too. (How exactly to do this depends on which Windows version you're using - Vista introduces a new API for direct hardware access and forces all the old APIs through the software mixer.)
Of course, at least pre-Vista, Windows didn't even have a sound API good enough for pro-audio work. Everyone used expensive soundcards with special drivers that bypassed the Windows sound support. (And yes, this broke sound for other apps, which was actually a good thing.)
Firefox is Phoenix, which has always been cross-platform, being a stripped-down version of Mozilla.
Yes, and that so-called "cross-platform GUI" is primarily oriented towards Windows, with a low quality adaptation to Linux.
(Java is the same way: nominally, it's cross-platform, but the GUI is poor quality on Linux and OS X.)
Actually, the biggest problem (apart from historical peeves) I have with Qt is that it's not C++. When I use gtkmm, I have a full C++ experience. With Qt is a bizarre trip, because the toolkit uses Trolltech's own, non-standard C++ dialect which doesn't really add anything of value.
Yes, because the NT kernel is functionally identical to the Linux kernel. If anything, it's more advanced in some areas. For instance, the kernel used in Vista can relaunch video drivers on-the-fly.
Vista is not just the kernel - the kernel is tightly tied in to the user space code. For example, the video driver relaunching? That's not the kernel... the bit of the video driver being relaunched is a user-mode program, communicating with another program that does the graphics rendering, window management, etc. (This is the main difference from Linux - it can restart the video card driver if it crashes, but it takes down the desktop and all the apps you have running on it too.)
Sure, the Vista kernel may be quite nice... but there's no way of using it without dragging along the entire Vista userland and GUI. (I'd call the Vista/XP/NT kernel overdesigned rather than good, myself. Lots of unnecessary complexity.)
For all practical purposes, KDE on Windows is indistinguishable from KDE on Linux. Notice that word: "practical".
Nope. KDE on Linux has the KDE window manager (with different window management behaviour, title bars, effects, etc) and the KDE desktop. KDE on Windows uses the Windows window management and desktop.
Do you realize where you just made a mistake? Where your plan bit the dust? Hmmm? Here, I'll point it out to you-"Just one open driver,and we'll take care of the rest, forever." Do you see the problem now? This points out the second problem that is forcing Linux to stay a tiny niche, even though I honestly believe that with these two problems fixed it would be an excellent OS for those that simply surf and watch Youtube.
But you see, here is the problem- You expect everybody in the world to play your game. And they are NOT going to do it. If you wait around for 100 million years, they are NOT going to release their specs. As another user pointed out Linux has been out for 15 YEARS now. if it was going to happen it frankly would have done so by now. The world doesn't play by the GPL. You will NEVER get Lexmark and all the other bazillion hardware manufacturers to release their specs to you, or give you open GPL drivers to where you can hack away. It is NOT going to happen. Ever.
Accept it. Accept the fact that the hardware manufacturers will give you a binary blob or you get nothing at all. Accept that you will never get Adobe to release Photoshop under the GPL, you will never see Quickbooks, or the software that just came with your digital camera, or any of the bazillion other pieces of software that the customers consider "mission critical" and will not accept your OS if it doesn't work, released under GPL. Ever.
What all these companies and manufacturers of all the hardware that the world uses WILL do is meet you halfway. If you design a set of standard underpinnings that are the same across the Linux landscape, and that stay backwards compatible so that they can "write once, use forever" like they do on Windows they WILL release binary blob drivers and binary applications that support your OS. Because all businesses like making money and like having lots of customers. if all they have to do is add a "Linux 32/64" folder to the Windows ones to add you as a customer? or simply make a SINGLE version of Photoshop and know that this version will work until they are ready to release version 5 or whatever? They WILL support you.
But you have to meet them halfway. You can NOT demand "open specs!" on everything, because you can see where that has gotten you. As a retailer I can tell you there is a REASON why ASUS is phasing out all Linux products. it is because their primary market is home users and none of the devices in Walmart or Staples or Best Buy work in your OS. And you can NOT do it alone. You need those companies to write the drivers for you, or you will simply fail. There is simply too much hardware out there, with more coming every single day. But if you refuse to bend, if you refuse to accept binary blobs, then you are doomed to stay a teeny tiny niche. I'm sorry, but that is just reality.
And I apologize for the length, but as a retailer who has put Linux through its paces I truly believe that with application and driver support Linux has a real shot. I can foresee Linux easily taking a good chunk of those that use their PC for browsing and running a few applications. But if they can't shop at Walmart without research? If they can't print or run Quickbooks or get their new Wifi USB stick to work without jumping through CLI hoops? Then all the GPL freedom in the world ain't gonna matter, because they will never use your OS. They will take it back and get a box with Windows on it. Sorry, but that is just the way it is. I don't make the rules, I just support the customers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
a) Decide once and for all; client or server? If client, (which is what the desktop is) embrace that completely. Tell anyone who wants UNIX that they need to move to *BSD.
b) For sound, return to OSS. v4 is under the GPL now, so there's no reason not to. ALSA is over-engineered, unstable garbage. Get rid of it.
c) Standardise around GNOME. For my money it's the least bloated of the big two. In terms of features, truthfully I probably like KDE more, but it needs to lose weight before I'd advocate it.
d) Stop standardising around Debian, and stop listening to whoever keeps telling everyone to do so. Debian/Ubuntu are the two most poorly designed Linux distributions in existence. If fanboys want to respond to that, fine, but if I list my issues with Debian, I expect you to respond to me on those issues specifically, without simply resorting to the old standby of telling me that I'm ignorant.
e) Standardise around pkgsrc for package management. It's portable, it's solid, it has a lot of features, and it's written by people who, unlike many Linux developers, both care about design quality AND can actually code their way out of a wet paper bag. Do not listen to Debian fanboys who attempt to say otherwise.
f) Stop caring AT ALL about what the FSF thinks. If nVidia only distribute binary drivers, people are going to want them, period; and are going to use them, irrespective of what the cult decrees. I also don't want to hear from FSF cultists in response to this, either. I don't agree with you now, I'm not going to in the future, I think your organisation is a disease, and is the single worst thing about Linux, and I'd be much happier if it didn't exist, putting it bluntly; so don't bother.
g) If money is what it takes to cause FOSS developers to get serious, then so be it. Relicense under more commercially friendly licenses, (like the BSD license, for instance) and form companies around the relevant applications.
h) If the desktop is where the Linux community has decided it wants to go, Linus needs to be brought into line with that vision. At the moment, he is primarily concerned about big iron, because that is what the corporate hands that feed him primarily care about. If you want the i386 client desktop, that is where you need to put the entirety of your focus. Forget portability, forget the server, and focus purely on being an i386 client desktop. You're not going to get there any other way.
Unless doing full screen games
Why does a full-screen game require exclusive access to the sound card?
Latency. The more layers you put between your game engine and the speaker, the more latency you add.
It's perfectly acceptable if the sound chimes signaling new e-mail is half a second late. Not the same with in game sound. Games need to have at least one option giving as close as possible access to the hardware. Note that VoIP conversations too would benefit from the lowest latency possible.
(That's probably one of the reasons why most VoIP application let you pick a different sound configuration for sound alerts and for actual calls).
it would be best if sound enabled applications used API of sound-mixing deamons/abstractions such as ESD & Artd {...} or PulseAudio and Phonon
That's four already, and there are plenty more.
3 remarks.
- Backward compatibility :
Pulseaudio has compatibility layers for programs written for ESD or ARTSD.
- That's the four major that most people are likely to have. Of course there's Jack (which is actually kind of interesting for gamers and VoIP users due to its emphasis on low latency) and much more.
- As I said, there are plenty of libraries which feature plugins for several backends.
GStream, SDL, etc...
Most are so popular that you're bound to find them installed on most modern distributions.
The best part ? As they are almost standard in distributions, the distribution maker pay special attention to make sure that their local installation of SDL,etc. plays nicely with the latest sound-mixing daemon-du-jour.
So don't keep reinventing the wheel. Just pick one of the libraries, and let its plugins do the necessary interfacing with sound mixers.
If I were a software developer I too would concentrate on an OS that had industrial-grade (ie. standard, maintainable, guaranteed) interfaces.
Oh, you mean like DirectSound ? The API that got hosed in Windows Vista even though 99% of games counted on it to get low-level access to hardware and environmental sound processing technologies such as EAX ?
Yeah ! That's a nice idea !
Well, at least in consolation, DirectSound was droped in favour of the much more open and wide standard, OpenAL.
Every single solution out there gets replaced from time to time. The only difference is that for Microsoft, the last couple of major iteration where so much apart that people just forgot that even on Windows, some API gets deprecated in favour of others.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Look, nobody is asking you to become Windows or OSX. Nobody is asking you to give up the bazillion different distros out there. Just have a common, stable, and backwards compatible undercarriage that software developers and hardware manufacturers can target so that it doesn't matter if I use Xandros and you use CentOS and the guy down the street is running Gentoo, that any company can release a program or driver and know that for now and the long term across the board it will "just work", that's all. I bet if you had a stable and solid undercarriage that worked across the board that a lot more companies would seriously consider releasing their products and drivers for Linux. And that is good for everybody, right?
Linux has a stable and solid undercarriage that works across the board. The problem is that software companies want to distribute binaries to end users, but that's not how Linux works. In Linux, you distribute source code to distributors, and distributors give binaries to end users. Any experience Linux user knows this gives you a better system than Windows. It's more consistent and easier to use than Windows insofar as end-user administration is concerned: almost all the software on my computer is installed and updated in one consistent way, so I don't need to care about that. It also eliminates the brandname obsession so you don't get six million different icons in that system tray and more brandnames than the US PTO database in the Programs menu.
Source code is excellently future proof. Release your drivers under the GPL2 and if they're good enough they'll get put into the source code and no-one will ever need to worry again. The evidence that this is how it works is all the drivers in Linux and the packages included in the distribution of your choice. The secret to a good Linux experience is to write code that Debian and Red Hat and SuSE are happy to include and let them deal with the distribution-specific parts. They really, really do want to.
There's no advantage to Linux's users to make it more helpful to corporations who want to go outside the standard behavior patterns. So why would they help make it do that? Linux's way is more user-friendly and with Ubuntu so well recognised it's becoming more and more popular amongst non-geeks. Windows will dominate the future for some time to come, but companies not used to Linux will have to adapt or give up a growing market of younger consumers.
(But audio on Linux is probably about as good as Windows 3.1. It's so complex and ancient and well I hate it. Of course, of the three problems which annoy me wrt sound [Skype, Flash, Praat], two are binary blobs.)
Look out!
Vista is not just the kernel - the kernel is tightly tied in to the user space code. For example, the video driver relaunching? That's not the kernel... the bit of the video driver being relaunched is a user-mode program, communicating with another program that does the graphics rendering, window management, etc.
Trifles. Writing KDE software to handle those situations would be easy, since the kernel has support for them. And if you didn't, you just wouldn't have that particular feature.
Nope. KDE on Linux has the KDE window manager (with different window management behaviour, title bars, effects, etc) and the KDE desktop. KDE on Windows uses the Windows window management and desktop.
Yes, but it doesn't *have* to.
Comment of the year
Most applications don't use the full range of features with any toolkit, and generally use a small, shared subset of features. Why is there no uniform abstraction layer for, say, Qt and GTK, a library that takes genericized commands and then implements them in whatever environment the app is built for? If you needed something only available in one toolkit, you could include those separately, which would lead to a nice segregation between genericized and toolkit-specific stuff in your code. You'd be able to cut down substantially on code because instead of having separate functions and objects for each toolkit, you just have one that works with all.
You sir, are a moron.
Thank you for being so respectful of my opinions. I can see you're interested in a polite, rational, discussion of the topic.
You may not care about the kernel, but many of us do. Which is why we run Linux (or BSD as the case may be).
And yet, there's nothing the Linux kernel does that other kernels do not do. So while you might be picky about it, the choice really does not matter, in practical terms.
The OS is NOT the UI, that's why they are two different terms with COMPLETELY different definitions.
God forbid I try to use a little hyperbole to get my point across. Obviously I know they're different terms. I forgot how literal-minded everybody on this site is.
Comment of the year
That's the exact problem:
The solution is NOT to merge distros, but there needs to be some rigorous standards for how different implementations can communicate with each other.
You can't write a standard, no matter how rigorous, that allows applications to follow *both* KDE and GNOME's UI guidelines. (As a simple example, button order in dialogs.)
No more than you can write a standard that allows a native Windows look-and-feel on OS X and vice-versa. (For one thing, text boxes behave in many mutually-exclusive ways.)
The best solution is to think of KDE as an OS, and GNOME as a different OS, and then develop towards one or the other. The downside is that your application probably won't run (well at least) on some high percentage of Linux desktops, but the alternative is writing more UI front-ends for Linux than for every other OS combined.
It sounds like this is basically what Chrome is doing. And really, how can the Linux community fault it, considering how things are?
Comment of the year
The UI is a layer of abstractions on top of the OS. Once a UI is ported to an OS, the differences between OSes are (hopefully) concealed from the end user.
That's the point. When I turn on my computer, everything I'm looking at, every piece of software I'm running, and every task I do, it's all the UI. I never see the kernel. I don't care what the kernel is. Not even slightly.
And why should I?
They are still there though. If you use GIMP or Pidgin on Windows, did your computer become Linux because you now have GTK libs? No.
Actually yes, GTK sucks ass on Windows. It doesn't even look close to Windows applications. Even the Open dialog is wrong.
I stopped using Pidgin because it had no support for Windows' tablet features, or voice control features.
And this is the problem, multiple OSes using multiple toolkits, witch each element having it's own quirks.
But none of that code is in the kernel. The kernel's interface is lower than the level your problem's at.
Comment of the year
Alternatively, is Linux was so easy to code for that porting your software for that 5% of users was only 5% of the software development effort, you'd see companies scrambling to create Linux software.
That's something the open source community actually controls.
Comment of the year
[snip] All that said the nature of an open system does make it harder than simply declaring a "standard" by fiat but standards will evolve as obvious best practices win out. I think it's slower in the case of Linux for a number of reasons. 1. Some subsystems are immature
You mean MOST subsystems. And after 15 years, too. Impressive.
2. The user base is restricted so there isn't a monetary driver isn't there to accelerate development of various standards
Every OS has that "chicken and egg" problem. At first. See "15 years", above.
As to your two I'm angry Linux sucks comments about 15 years I'm not arguing it is good or bad just saying that that's what I think has hindered standards. If you think it's too immature for use then don't use it. I will say about your "chicken and egg" crack that it appears you're missing my argument which was that there isn't an artificial monetary driver (i.e. a corporation) behind it to help it skip over the chicken and egg phase and go straight to a tipping point where it is profitable. As a result it caters to it's user base not it's marketability to the masses at large. As a result growing the user base is not a priority and takes longer.
3. The user base is relatively sophisticated so they put up with a less polished interface that requires tweaking and hacking."
You actually mean "The user base is insanely stubborn so they continually make excuses for a 15 year old OS that STILL has a less polished interface that STILL, AFTER 15 YEARS, requires tweaking and hacking."
No I meant they put up with things that normal users won't. It's not good or ill it just is. I also don't think normal users should be chastised for not putting up with it.
4. The broken Patent system (I still don't get how patenting an abstract concept or math makes any sense) blocks some standards and creates barriers to evolution of technology by closing off some paths of competition.
Citation, please? Sounds like a piss-poor excuse to me, actually.
As to your request for a citation, what part of "disagree" and "think" didn't you understand? My citation for an opinion would be the fact that I wrote it. Despite the fact that I really want to end my comment here and inform you that there is no citation policy and that opinions aren't subject to scientific review I won't.
If you'd like an example of why I think that then things like the LZW compression patent in GIF back in the day would be a good one. Without all that crap going on GIF would have been the de facto image standard sooner. And to be clear I'm not even saying GIF is a good image standard just that the patent issue delayed universal acceptance. Also, the patent doesn't kill the approach but it does slow it down IMO. As a result an open system that eschews the use of patents is at a disadvantage if we consider standards a desirable thing (which at least the de facto variety I do). The same sort of thing plays out all throughout technology spaces and I think it slows down de facto standards adoption. I personally think the current system is broken and in effect regulates out competition and makes the whole evolution of technology slower and more artificial.
What claim are you challenging? That you can patent math? That patenting something grants exclusive rights to produce it?
No I was saying you SHOULDN'T be able to patent math or other descriptions of abstract processes not that you can't. In fact you definitely can which is what i think is badly broken.
To me that's the equivalent of a group of kindergardeners trying to draw turkeys for thanksgiving and one saying "I traced my hand to make my turkey first so no one else can do that. if you want a hand turkey you have to pay me for the right to trace your own hand." I do think that the innovative kindergardener should be able to keep people from xeroxing his hand tracing and using that as a base if he chooses but forbidding others to use the same process is what breaks the system. The protection against copying of the actual tracing would represent a copyright not a patent.
I also think copyright law and the enforcement and transferability is busted but I don't have the same issues since I fundamentally agree with the fact that a creator of work should be able to decide what gets done with his/her actual work. I don't think they should be able to stop others from doing different work in the same manner however.
I wonder if the "lots of tiny indistinguishable blue icons" clause has finally been removed from the KDE HIG?
Seriously. I want to love KDE. However, their blatant disregard for UI design makes it incredibly difficult for me to do so. Less than 1/3 of Amarok's screen space actually relates to the primary functionality of the application, and it looks like most other KDE apps have followed suit
Similarly, we could use some more good open-source typefaces. The fact that KDE 4 decided to set many on-screen textual elements to huge font sizes has underscored this need.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How many sound APIs does Windows have? There is WinMM, DirectSound, Media Foundation. I have seen games use OpenAL, FMod, Miles Sound System. Windows Vista's MIDI subsystem is incompatible with that of Windows XP, and means I get substandard MIDI sound. Talk about some feature regression.
It's true, but when all is said and done, I don't recall the last time when two Windows applications couldn't play sound at the same time (regardless of the APIs they use)....
I forgot to add that if your hardware is popular enough, people will even volunteer to backport the drivers to older versions of Linux!
And if it's not, then the driver will be abandoned soon enough, and will be dropped from the kernel for the lack of support.
If you design a set of standard underpinnings that are the same across the Linux landscape, and that stay backwards compatible so that they can "write once, use forever" like they do on Windows they WILL release binary blob drivers and binary applications that support your OS. Because all businesses like making money and like having lots of customers. if all they have to do is add a "Linux 32/64" folder to the Windows ones to add you as a customer? or simply make a SINGLE version of Photoshop and know that this version will work until they are ready to release version 5 or whatever? They WILL support you.
Backward compatibility is not something that comes without effort. Your OS will have bugs, and applications will depend on these bugs even if it's not part of the spec. Being backward compatible means keeping those bugs, designing things around them, and - the most important - testing a lot of existing applications prior to making a new release.
That thing does not scale well.Even Microsoft is starting to treat it with less priority than before, because it would take them another 6 or more years to release next OS version (NOT counting Windows 7 which is Vista re-launched) otherwise.
For a volunteer project where testers are the most scarce resource (finding/submitting/re-checking bugs is a tedious and not rewarding job) long-term backward compatibility is not an option. It'll transform it into an inflexible piece of software that is not fun to develop or even maintain. As someone said, "People paint for free. People do not tend to clean toilets for free".
That is why I think that FOSS software will always remain a niche for those who want to trade knowledge for ease of use.
Coding etudes
But you see, here is the problem- You expect everybody in the world to play your game. And they are NOT going to do it.
No, I expect those that won't play ball to fuck straight off and ultimately fail.
Accept the fact that the hardware manufacturers will give you a binary blob or you get nothing at all.
Intel, HP, and a host of other manufacturers say you're full of it.
Accept that you will never get Adobe to release Photoshop under the GPL
Can we stay on point, please?
You can NOT demand "open specs!" on everything, because you can see where that has gotten you.
Like hell I can't. And I'll tell you where it's gotten us: damn far.
But if you refuse to bend, if you refuse to accept binary blobs, then you are doomed to stay a teeny tiny niche. I'm sorry, but that is just reality.
One more time: You're wrong. You've been proven wrong time and again. And again. We'll prove you wrong again tomorrow.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
All the good ones were abandoned 10-15 years ago. All that is left is GTK+ and QT and a handful of trivial non-players.
GTK+ is the toolkit for Linux, it is the standard. and if you don't like it, then program for Microsoft COM for a while. Stuff like .NET is probably going to eliminate Linux from the GUI front.
If you don't like GTK+ or QT on Linux, then use switch to Java Swing. I'll continue programming in Motif and XView, along with the 3 other like-minded hobbyist still alive.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Hence there's still one standard: the Windows API. Everything else just builds on top of it.
That used to be the case, but GP forgot to list yet another "official UI API" newcomer, which is WPF.
And that thing does not use Win32 UI API. It draws native-looking widgets, yes (though it fails utterly because of font rendering differences - something that will only be fixed in .NET 4.0), but it draws them itself, just like Qt does.
Now now, you have the wrong idea. He never said, (no one ever said, not a soul on the planet said) that win32 is easier. In fact, I've programmed with it and it is a far far cry from being easy.
There are hundreds of thousands of programs and millions of programmers world-wide programming in Linux.
The guy at Google was crying for more programmers. Someone to do the job for him. Seriously, that's all he was saying. He's saying he's a wimp and can't figure the stuff out on his own and he's having problems leading his programming team, and he is essentially complaining to get help.
Seriously, Linux is open source. It means he can add what he wants, he can change virtually anything. He can go in and fork and create what is necessary to accomplish his work. Yet, rather than do that he just complains.
The diversity of toolkits brings competition for features.
He's not an open source programmer, one can tell or he'd understand those two points.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If that is the way you and the majority of Linux users feel Risen, then i support your decision. But if you are going to stick by that decision then you need to face reality and stop spreading BS.
To say that "Linux is ready for the average home desktop" is JUST as much bullshit as MSFT with their "get the facts" bullshit, okay? So don't lie, it just makes Linux look bad when they try it and it doesn't work. And for those that will say "Is too!" I can give you undeniable proof. I call this the "hairyfeet challenge". open up your browser to three websites. Go to Bestbuy.com, Staples.com, and Walmart.com. Now before you do this you must agree to the rules, and NO CHEATING! From this moment until the end of the challenge you are a home consumer. Home consumers NEVER do research on anything that costs less than a car. They just walk into a store and go "Oooh...Sale!" and they buy. Expecting them to do research just to use your OS is a waste of time and you are deluding yourself if you think they will. Ready to take the challenge? Here goes-place these three items in your basket in each store-a Wifi USB stick, an all in one printer, and a USB TV Tuner. Buy the cheapest if you want to be more accurate in your simulation, as most consumers buy on price. Now go to Ubuntu forums and see how many of the nine items you have actually have plug and play support in Linux, or even any support at all. Go on, I'll wait......
They don't work, do they? I'll venture a guess and say without research beforehand you are looking at maybe three, if you are lucky four working AT ALL. This is the reason why "Linux is ready for the home user" is bullshit. because as you just saw a home user would have been burnt by two out of three purchases, if not all three.
And the companies you listed Risen? HP, Intel, IBM, etc? They have two things in common. All have a pretty significant presence in the server and enterprise markets, and they all have defense patent warchests so they can drop lawyers like a swarm of killer bees on any patent trolls that try to hit them. They also have the money to back those lawyers up. If I am a hardware manufacturer, and I release my code to you, are you going to sign that you will take all risks and pay all lawyer fees if a patent troll files on me in Texas? Didn't think so.
I repeat-You have had 15 years. pretty much all the major corps that are gonna release their items as open specs would have done so by now. If you will do your research, you will find that EVERY single company of any size that has released their hardware specs has a presence in the server and enterprise markets. For the home manufacturers there is simply no incentive but much risk of patent trolls. Just look at the list you gave-Intel-Xeon and enterprise hardware. HP-servers and enterprise gear. IBM? Same. ATI? GPGPU which is HPC, which is a stripped down Linux kernel to free resources for computations.
So please, if you want to stick to being hardcore about the GPL and GNU, go right ahead. It is a free country after all. But just don't bullshit us. Don't bullshit us by saying that Linux is ready for the average Joe when ten percent or less of the items in the above stores will even work in your OS. if you want marketshare? You need those items to work. That means compromise. Refuse to compromise? Then please don't say "Linux is ready for the home users" until the above items work. Maybe in another 15 years. But until I can hand a Kubuntu PC to my customer and have at least an 80% chance that whatever he picks up in Walmart will work, or that he can do simple things like changing resolution on his new monitor or run a program as an administrator without needing to go CLI and put in arcane Unix commands or Sudo his way to some config file he'll have to edit, then your "free as in beer and freedom" OS simply doesn't work for him and the millions of other desktop consumers. To them it is "free as in worthless" because none of their new gear actually works. As I said, I don't make reality, I just support my customers. And ATM that means Windows.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Trifles. Writing KDE software to handle those situations would be easy, since the kernel has support for them. And if you didn't, you just wouldn't have that particular feature.
Not trifles. You'd effectively be reimplementing a large chunk of Windows. Without any documentation. Then you'd have to redo it every release, since (unlike under Linux) the userland-kernel APIs aren't fixed.
Nope. KDE on Linux has the KDE window manager (with different window management behaviour, title bars, effects, etc) and the KDE desktop. KDE on Windows uses the Windows window management and desktop.
Yes, but it doesn't *have* to.
No, it does. The APIs required to replace just the Windows desktop and taskbar are undocumented and version-dependent (though I think the KDE developers are making progress on this). The APIs required to replace the window manager doesn't even exist. Even just retheming application title bars requires unstable hacks that break many applications. Actually changing window management behaviour is impossible.
Good point on Android. We don't see the rate of development on it as we thought. Can they say why?
And double karma for the points about the kernel and Gnome & Kde
For every present, there is a past
I fail to see where Google has a problem.
Gnome is the default DE of the three main distros, Ubuntu, Suse and RH/Fedora, so - and that's what they did - it's quite logical to do the port on Gnome.
Now Chrome is open source, so if anybody want to port Chrome to QT/KDE, well, they can.
As to why Google wants to port Chrome to Linux, well, they need to show goodwill to the open source community to beef up the Android Market.
And finally, I think we'll see the Gnome/KDE duality for a long, long time, simply because some people prefer C and others C++ and we're talking about free software.
This is one of the reasons that Java should have been used for the UI instead of GTK, but Linux zealots are too rabidly anti Java to make what would have been an eminently sensible choice. Great triumph of zealotry over common sense.
Why does a windows driver written on 2003 still work in windows xp? Because windows XP has not fundamentally changed in that time. Now will that 2003 driver work in windows 7?
If you are still using Ubuntu 6.10 I bet those old drivers will still work. Some distro's even keep security patches up for 5+ years. If you want the latest and greatest, even in windows, stuff breaks.
Most end users don't need to buy USB wifi sticks. Case in point I recently got ATT home internet service. The tech came out and gave me 3 usb wireless devices. I plugged them into 3 different machines, a windows machine, a mac, and a ubuntu 8.04 linux machine. All 3 worked with zero, yes zero configuration. Just a simple little USB 2wire device.
I also got a printer free with the purchase of a cannon camera. It was usb only so I plugged it into my airport extreme (which I bought because it looked pretty and I wanted wireless N) My mac, my windows machine, and my linux box all just worked.
TV tuner? Never had a need for that, after all I have ATT and they give me the ability to record and pause live TV. Why would I want to watch TV on a measly little 24 inch monitor?
Like it or not, hardware companies are coming around. And at the same speed, linux hackers are covering the ground for those who don't want to come around.
I'm not a linux user anymore, i've fallen for mac, but my last linux machine is still in use. I don't care if things work on it. I care about my mac. By and large I find more things work on my linux computer then my mac. Apple doesn't want GPLed drivers, or open sourced applications. Interesting.
I really like the look of KDE, but I prefer ubuntu as my desktop. I just wish kubuntu would put the effort into KDE that ubuntu puts into making gnome such a success.
To me it feels like kubuntu is a red headed step child. So many things just feel tacked on and half assed. Other KDE distros feel a lot more put together, but unfortunately I love and know ubuntu.
lol, allow me to call you out on your wishful thinking. The Germanic tribes were huge. Period.
You just got troll'd!
Google and Canonical should merge and release that to the public at a quarter year offset from the traditional Ubuntu.
Goobuntu 10.01 "Gooey Gnu" beta.
I don't therefore I'm not.
If this is true, I don't think it's a case of cause and effect. Google as a company cares very much about end-user experience, as do a lot of for-profit companies. Adobe probably does too, even though they suck at it. The things that annoy developers like these are the things that annoy regular users, too. If a user can't use your product, then you're not going to make money off of them using your product, so it's in your best incentive to fix it. Non-commercial developers don't have to fix these things unless they want to, and they don't complain as much (or at least they don't get as much attention when they do). Remember, the people doing the complaining are not Windows/Mac zealots -- do you think Google can't afford to hire Linux people? The people who work on these projects, who run into these very real obstacles, know what they're doing, way better than you do. However, they're getting paid for it, have deadlines to meet, have usability guidelines to adhere to, and are accountable to other human beings, which you are not. Just saying.
That would make sense if it weren't for the software these complainers are making available: stuff given-away (Flash, Earth, etc.) that aren't their means for getting bread and bacon: that stuff is just a necessity for the stuff they make money from, and it's not in their interest to deploy the money-makers on linux, just the freebies, (e.g. Adobe needs to be able to say they have a lot of installs--nobody else supports flash well; Google is pretty much giving-away G Earth, so different story); and who gives a dang about the free stuff in the repositories, minus codecs and the media players: nobody that matters in software space is switching to GNU money managers any time soon: it's Quickbooks and other, you know, useful tools: stuff people use as tools they're willing to pay for to have as tools to get their work for money done.
A guy like me is fine: I can tweak xubuntu into working, to nudge it into usefulness and into a state I can have bliss and stop fiddling; most people can't get past the initial install problems, and even I'm constantly peeved that I can't use Skype without wanting to shoot the Linux geeks for their idiocy about just getting basic things to work, and have to resort to more bloat by going with Skype static, and for other wares do other hacks.
The whole situation is intractable, however, because FOSS seems to be an entirely unrealistic, fanatical, zealotrous, delusional, unreasonable, mob of idealists and software worshipers who can't step-back and take some criticism, and come to understand what wiser, experience, real-life people are talking about; I know of certain CEOs (from business school lectures) who made mention they try to identify OSS lovers just so they won't have to hire and deal with them: not because they hate the work, or feel it's a threat (only FOSS zealots really buy into that, whereas the commercial world laughs at those geeky nerds who can't get anything together, much less submit to some authority to get organized for more than a week before the pissy one decides to fork).
Stuff like Linux Haters blog would be so funny if it weren't so true, and if the Linux crowd actually paid attention rather than (a) getting angry and ignoring it or (b) laughing at it, then proceeding just as they were, unphased. : (
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Am I the only one to notice here that Microsoft is one of the more liberating companies out there? They provide sure standards on a documented platform; if something's about to break you can quickly fix things from the new info made available on MSDN; unlike iPods, anyone can push their software onto any phone with an install of Windows Mobile with little (actually no) worry of censorship or prevention; unlike FOSS-infected code (I'm not talking OSS, but FOSS, i.e., the FSF-type stuff), Microsoft lets developers incorporate their database, various system libs, and all sorts of goodies into software, even completely free software; and even when they deprecate old features/libs/etc., they maintain backwards compatibility. In a real sense Microsoft is totally superior in all respects of the FSF's goals, because it's not only possible to run a bunch of free software (more free software is available to the Windows platform by far), but coders can use so many provided Microsoft components with no fear of license infection, demands, etc., they can give freely or request payment without constraint; with backwards compatibility, average Joe also has no worries that his free (or paid) software is just going to quit, and with the myriad choices crappy interfaces or fugly wares die fast--unlike in the FOSS world, where stuff lives out of necessity. : (
With Windows, totally unlike Linux, things are documented; more than that, they're documented well; more than that, there's standards; more than that, when things change, it's all documented so things can be fixed; more than that, despite changes, and though there are exceptions, software is usually backwards compatible; more than that, even when a software maker doesn't update software broken by updates, Microsoft itself has entire departments dedicated to making software on their platform work.
Oh yeah, and it doesn't all look amateurish: that's a big plus. And don't take this too personally: I'm typing from FF on Xub; I like that it's lightweight for my lil' lappy, but I'm not going to kid myself that it'll overtake the world any time soon, not in the hands of FOSS programmers and advocates; on top of all that, the GPL keeps programs from interacting with essential desktop components: on Windows any program, propriety or otherwise, can call Media Player: on Linux that's a forced GPL re-licensing or a violation for almost any player; that's just one example of too many that need to be made known; on top of it all, the Linux ecosystem isn't legal: the kernel is GPL, the desktops LGPL: the only reason they're allowed to interact is Linus, the major figurehead for being the initial kernel author and most authoritative decision-maker regarding copyright and license enforcement of that kernel says it's okay to drop non-GPL stuff on top of it: but the license makers (and the rest of us) say and know better, but can't enforce the license with regards the kernel (which they'd do in heartbeat) because he, the pragmatic not zealotous, one and not they, is the copyright holder, and the other interested developers practically follow his lead. If I were him I'd ask the FSF for a GPL exception and move to CDDL or something better (like happened with Wikipedia) and request the FSF finish-up getting TURD (sorry, I mean HURD) out the door. Heck, why even ask? First try getting the other (documented) contributors to re-license, re-license one's own share, and move on.
And I don't want to impart the impression of being totally dismissive or cynical, just really try to be stark and hit home here; perhaps get a few more people to be more realistic, considerate, and self-examining, even if it is just with regards to some silly code.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Their only real competition are vendors with their own standards; they could easily patent them to death in court, nearly any current linux vendor (that leaves, hmm...Red Hat and Xandros, for the most part) that matters; the rest are (that I know of, I realize I'm limited here) free and unprofitable: volunteer efforts and such. Microsoft can't kill Debian because the code is open and everywhere; but nobody worries about Debian overtaking Microsoft in the Office Space: despite the praise for it with a bajillion packages, those are loosely integrate (if at all) packages nonetheless; they're supported in the hope someone might, maybe, possible, hopefully, start towards getting them fluidly interoperable: and with no standards...yeah right.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
You do realise that *loads* of drivers currently in the Linux kernel were written by developers working under NDAs from manufacturers, right?
Well, yes. On Linux platform, there are usually choices. And it's not uncommon that the choices are unclear, no straight winner, ...
But being and application developer and targeting Linux then one has responsibility or privilege - depending on how you look at the problem.
If I'm a user, its really quite hard or nearly impossible to choose say sound system. OSS? Pusle Audio? ALSA? ...? After all, I just want to hear something from my machine without hickups or any other distortions.
But if I'm application developer for say some sound oriented application? Well, I'm already on totally different level when it comes to competency to choose a sound system: I'm not only able to simply listen to what I hear from the machine, I'm also a programmer with some knowledge about this and that.
So as developer, I have to (and should) choose which sound system to target thus helping end users to decide which one to choose.
Of course, in short term it leads to some conflicts - you get the machine and one sound application wants OSS, another Pulse, ... But after some time (i.e. few iterations later) we will have a winner. Because:
Thus, best susbsytem(s) will win. Because the best app. choose them and drive/help them. Because users want the best apps.
So, Google (and any other developer) should investigate options available and decide, which one to support based on what is best suited for the needs for their users and also best suited to be used for development. In that way, some options will get eliminated (by simple lack of attention), others get pushed up (additional attention will help them become better), some options will merge (and either strenghten or vanish).
So please, make a choice.
hany
I developed my game Mystic Mine on Kubuntu using nothing but Open Source tools: python/pygame, gVim, blender, the gimp, inkscape and audacity. I had no trouble getting it to work on any Linux (32-64bit), Windows and Mac OS X intel and ppc (installer packages included). Sound, graphics, ... no problem! I honestly don't know what they are complaining about, but they are probably doing something wrong or using the wrong tools.
i respectfully disagree, this aspect merely changes what the useful definition of "standarts" is in respect to that os...
That would make sense if it weren't for the software these complainers are making available: stuff given-away (Flash, Earth, etc.) that aren't their means for getting bread and bacon: that stuff is just a necessity for the stuff they make money from
That still does not explain why they resort to complaining instead of going with the flow, and doing what free software developers have been doing for ages.
who gives a dang about the free stuff in the repositories, minus codecs and the media players
Maybe you don't give a dang but I can't work without it. Basically the stuff I use everyday is important for me; the web browser, mail client, CD burning app, anti-RSI app, graphics program, chat program, editor, FTP client, man I could go on and on.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
But if you are going to stick by that decision then you need to face reality and stop spreading BS.
First of all, there's no need for that. We can be civil here. Yes, I used some derogatory phrases in my post too, but none of them were directed at you.
I call this the "hairyfeet challenge".
This is an interesting idea. I didn't actually do it, but I found the premise intriguing (although I found your choice of peripherals to be slanted at best, I don't know anybody with a TV tuner in their machine and I do this for a living too).
But to cover the bases... USB wireless sticks: Five years ago you would have been right. There were no devices with open drivers, and even getting binary blobs (or god help you, ndiswrapper) was hit or miss in the extreme. It's not like that at all anymore. I mean, come on, even Broadcom is opening up. This fight's all but over. And what won it was sticking to our guns. If companies want our money, they have to play ball. Turns out they wanted our money.
Printers: I've never once had a problem. Not once in nearly a decade. Hardly even heard of it. Frankly I don't know what you're talking about.
But ultimately it's irrelevant, and I'll tell you why. Because when you buy something that doesn't work, you go get your money back and buy a different brand. You can try to paint this as a "Linux is broken" debate, but it's really "this wireless card is broken." Isn't that what you would do if it didn't work on Windows? (This ties back in to "if the manufacturer wants our money..." This is how we win.)
I repeat-You have had 15 years.
Which ain't that long, all things considered. And really, it's only been any kind of serious force to be reckoned with for maybe half that long. I think we've been kicking ass and taking names, myself.
pretty much all the major corps that are gonna release their items as open specs would have done so by now.
This is totally false. See the wireless driver situation. It's improving every day, steadily for years. You lose a lot of credibility with me if you can't see that. And again, how did it happen? It wasn't by accepting table scraps. We stuck to our guns and won. Again and again.
But until I can hand a Kubuntu PC to my customer and have at least an 80% chance that whatever he picks up in Walmart will work
If 80% is your line (and I think that's reasonable) I'd say we're there. Okay, not with Kubuntu, but Kubuntu's a mess. But yes, go buy a printer or a monitor or a video card or a USB powered cup warmer. It works with no bullshit at least 80% of the time. I think 80% is probably low.
As I said, I don't make reality, I just support my customers.
Me too. And for me that means Linux.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
No, because porting is only one part of the effort required to support Linux. The other is actual tech support, keeping your programmers, sales people and support personnell up-to-date with Linux etc. ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I actually must agree.. 8.04 ran my R40 laptop like it was fresh and fun.... 9.04 (i think its .04) freshly installed makes it feel about 30% as fast as it was before I did the install.... uggghh...
Push API standards to help with program communication and integration, but still allow differences of course. Some Linux users think of "standardization" as taking away freedoms and conforming, when it does just the opposite. It allows for more competition and differences, because it allows you do try very different paths without causing headaches for community in general.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
No, it's BSD.
You can't "use Linux with a BSD kernel", because it's not Linux if it's not Linux.
Now, if you ask "If I replace Debian's Linux kernel with with s BSD kernel, is it still Debian?", the answer is, "Yes.".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Oh! why can't the mighty Google do something that Mozilla and Opera have been doing for so long. Maybe this guys aren't as bright as they want you to believe.
Anyway, you want standards? maybe we should just start with the browser, and not only on Linux, but also on your beloved, closed source Windows. Yeeee! MSIE for everyone bitches!
Sorry, yes, I meant Spaces. But Spaces has some annoying bugs. Try binding an application to a space. Now go to a different space, and try to switch back to the application by clicking on the application's Dock icon. It doesn't always work. Instead, I use a keyboard shortcut that is a lot like GNOME's, but for me, Fluxbox's virtual desktop handling is ideal. I wish Spaces were more like that.
Solution: Stick with RedHat.