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Kernel 2.6.31 To Speed Up Linux Desktop
Dan Jones writes "As the Linux community looks forward to another kernel release, the kernel hackers have been working on improving the memory management so that the X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. The result is an improved desktop experience. Benchmarks on memory-tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. Another improvement coming with 2.6.31 is kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards, enabling faster user switching and a more seamless startup experience. Peripheral developments that will also improve the Linux desktop experience include support for the new USB 3.0 specification and a new Firewire stack. Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!"
Doesn't this just mean that users will discover more quickly that OpenOffice b0rks at anything beyond basic Excel macros and that there's no extremely decent open source equivalent to Outlook?
Nice as faster-this-and-that may be, how many have actually heard a potential Windows convert saying "it's all well and good, but the desktop seems a tad slow?"
Don't get me wrong, but I put this in the category of: Nice to have, but not necessarily a deal-maker.
AT&ROFLMAO
If choosing Linux means I have to buy rare and expensive hardware, how can we call it free software ? "Free with a catch" is not actually free. I'm willing to spend the money if the end result is more reliable or better performing, but that's ignoring the people who stand to benefit from free software the most, those with tight budgets, also known as the majority of the goddamned world. For Linux-based systems to gain traction, we need to get those millions of not-so-wealthy folks on board, and for that, we need to support the cheap hardware they can afford.
WinModems were only named as such because Linux hackers couldn't be bothered to make them work. A more appropriate term would be "Software-driven modem", but then you can't make the oh-so-trendy us vs them pun, and that rivalry is, in my not-so-humble opinion, everything that's wrong with the Linux ecosystem. Too much infighting, too much whining, too much "I hate Alan Cox, therefore your distro sucks" bullshit. That's not what it was about, and frankly I think the key people in this scene are taking too much bad example from Linus' elitism.
We should be getting all that nice cheap hardware to work on Linux, because cheap hardware + free software is a winning combination; that much should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If the open source community had been innovative enough to come up with something like Flash back before Flash existed, then the open source community could make the call whether to open-up the file format or not.
The solution to your issue is to *anticipate* software that is needed, and have it ready *before* it's popular. Instead of just waiting to see what Microsoft and Adobe do, then come up with a crappy clone of same.
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It's like saying a compiler is broken because of a problem with an IDE dialog box: why would you rewrite the compiler?
You wouldn't, don't be purposefully dense. There's no way you're that stupid.
But if the compiler was poor because the UI tools that interface with it are poor, then you certainly re-write those UI tools. Duh.
What I'm saying is that software should be considered holistically. If the UI to X is broken, then X is broken. Period.
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