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Chinese Pirates Launch Ubuntu That Looks Like XP
An anonymous reader writes "Ylmf, famous for pirating Windows XP, have just released a version of Ubuntu that looks just like Windows XP. Really, really similar. Apparently because Microsoft were cracking down on the actual Windows XP pirating — though I think they will still suffer for ripping off the GUI exactly." Of course, if that's the sort of look you like for your desktop, you need not risk any download cooties or language barriers; a reader in the Ubuntu Forums suggests this instructional video for giving Gnome the XP treatment.
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The Year of the Linux on the Desktop?
When Microsoft was convicted of monopoly abuse, the judge should have forced Microsoft to release the source code of XP under the BSD license and thereby restore true competition to the operating system market.
It will *still* create intellectual property problems even though it's not Windows. Why not make it close enough to Windows to not be accused of cloning Windows. Use a different grass field in the background, for example. Shuffle a few things around so that they are find-able by Windows users but with a different placement and different-but-similar icons.
Table-ized A.I.
User: What a pretty GUI you have.
YImf: All the better to confuse you with, my dear.
U: And what strange fonts you have.
Y: All the better to break your layouts with, my dear.
U: And what a lack of app support you have.
Y: All the better to irritate you with, my dear.
U: And what terrible hardware support you have.
Y: All the better to eat up your time with, my dear!
Just then the hunter entered the house and cut the YImf right down the belly.
Turns out, the XP Theme is to ease the transition of Windows users into Ubuntu/Gnome. Not sure if Microsoft will retaliate regarding the Fisher-Price like UI XP uses. (Luna)
didn't Microsoft spend a whole decade defending themselves against Apple for engaging in exactly the same sort of conduct in displayed in TFA? If they sued Ylmf's developer over this, the irony would generate enough magnetism to launch another SGR 1806-20.
Finally Linux gets a decent GUI!!! [ducks head]
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Flame wars aside, I'm just getting used to KDE4, now I have to learn gnome? No thank you sir.
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
I don't read Chinese, and I'm not about to download that--but is the point supposed to be that pirating windows is illegal and repainting Ubuntu is not?
Here's the thing: based on the screenshots, it's virtually certain that they used the copyrighted graphics that come with Windows to make this. Depending on how thorough they are, they may have used a fair amount of copyrighted text, as well.
As such, they are still "pirates". Why not just keep pirating Windows? What does this accomplish for them, exactly?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Why would somebody spend this time to make a 2009 OS look like 1999 OS??
Why is Microsoft still pursuing Win XP cloning? Now that it has ended support for Win XP? Let them pirates be!
My Blog | Badsh
a cron job?
once people discover how well it works compared to their usual Windows experience.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Anyone here on Slashdot who knows me knows that I am not a big fan of copyright in general as a concept and certainly not the current US implementation which has been really skewed against the public since the Copyright Act of 1976 and followed with real gems like the Copyright Term Extension Act (a.k.a "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act"). However, having said that; doesn't Microsoft own the copyrights on the Windows XP icon set? It seems to me that they could still quash this in the United States because it appears that the icon files have been ripped verbatim from Windows XP.
Now that "real" pirates are back on the world stage, maybe we can get rid of this dumb use of the word pirate? I, at least, was pretty confused for a couple of seconds as to why pirates would do any sort of software trickery.
rooooar
The Linuxologist ran a story covering the video (and accompanying conversion script), mentioned by the OP, a while ago. Apparently there's an entire project for a gnome GUI conversion to make it look like XP.
I think it's pretty useful for convincing family members to make the switch to Ubuntu and cut down on personal Windows-related maintenance time.
its not complete without BSOD copy too.
Meh... I'd rather have it use the Windows 2000 UI.
Yes, it does make sense. Apparently the demand for Windows on-the-cheap is high in China, so in order to provide what the customer wants, at the price point they want, and without pirating XP, they came up with this. Everything is legit and everyone is happy (well, everyone except MS).
This is so perfect it isn't even funny. I can now replace the XP on my parent's computer with Linux and they won't know the difference. The "family support plan" just got a whole lot easier for me.
All the pro-China/anti-US comments. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....
All the paranoid merkin wankers 5,4, Oh.. Already here I see.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
The Russians already did this: http://www.linux-xp.com/desktop/2010-release-notes/
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
Blender, the animation system, is about to do this. All 3D animation systems are complex, but Blender has an unusually confused GUI, with changes in each release and out of sync documentation. So, in the next release, 2.5, Blender will support "themes", plus some scheme for custom Python code to rework the GUI. Now the developers can blame the user.
The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC. All the GUI gives you is success or failure. Errors are hidden in a text window with incredibly confusing blither from about six programs used to set up the connection, several of which produce error messages in normal operation.
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984, and it's still worth reading the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows", and "An alert box consists of a sentence explaining the problem, and a sentence suggesting what to do about it." The idea that you should never have to tell the computer something it already knows means that it's not acceptable to make the user copy information from one place to another. The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.
FVWM was a good enough Windows knockoff for us in my day and it should be good enough now. But no, you kids gotta have your fancy XP icons and wallpaper.
Now get off my lawn!
it's cue you fucking clueless cocksmoking buttfucker.
For the longest time while Microsoft was busy solidifying its monopoly position on the desktop, it did nothing short of encouraging copyright infringement by actually reporting "pirated copies" of its OS in its reported figures.
Once that mission was accomplished and any sort of competition was put behind them, they started using stronger means to protect their software. But perhaps the measures are too strong in today's "Linux curious" environment.
When a Linux desktop distro looks exactly like Windows XP, people already know how to use it. And with WINE being in a rather mature state, lots of software will run just fine... (including malware, I'm afraid...) It still will not be long before people realize they are not using Windows, but are quite able to use it... they will also realize that they CAN use it and may not need Windows after all. Perhaps this is something Microsoft doesn't want people to know.
Make WinXP look like KDE http://www.tech-atom.com/windows/ultimate-linux-transformation-pack-for-windows-xp.html
Make GNOME look like WinXP http://ubuntu.online02.com/xpgnome
Make WinXP look likeUbuntu http://pc-hacks.blogspot.com/2007/10/make-up-over-your-windows-look-like.html
Make WinXP look like Enlightenment http://www.litestep.net/
Make Linux look like Win95 http://fvwm.org/
It all makes my head hurt.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984
Funny you should say that, because my abiding memory of using Macs in the mid 1990s was "Application Hypercard has quit unexpectedly due to error #{error number}"
Blender's GUI is great, it has a learning curve because it's a complicated program, like most 3D applications and takes a while to get used to. But there is absolutely nothing terribly wrong with its GUI, in fact it is faster and more efficient than the Max or XSI's.
Why? Because artists made it, and they know how they want to use their own program for their own work more than you do.
Blender is getting customisation support only to make it more accessible to people that are too stupid or too lazy or don't have enough time to go from their favourite application to Blender, it's also a bit of a side effect of the updated core which is now a lot more organised.
Label this under obligatory Blender defending.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
"The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller. "
From what century are you writing this? 18-th or maybe 19-th, I wager?
Sorry but this is /. and a comment is flamebait if the reader with modpoints disagrees with it or if it criticises the US. Nothing to do with starting flame wars.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
you can translate the whole site http://www.ylmf.org/ using Chrome and translate addon.
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
Think of it as the linux version of the Mojave experiment.
People were told KDE4 was Windows 7
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Once you have reached a certain position in the market your GUI should no longer be allowed to find protection through copyright/patents (don't get me started on patents).
You have made you money. You've cashed in on your (trivial) ideas. Maybe, in general, it wouldn't be a bad idea to limit copyright after a certain profit has been made.
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
Don't you get it? In China, 2010 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
You are almost right, partly. :)
I have an EeePC and I know *precisely* what you are talking about. I agree it is bad, but I disagree with your solution entirely. This problem is amenable to a much simpler solution, there is no need for any drastic architectural changes. The basic architecture here is sound, there is no reason why the GUI-box should not just report success or failure and leave the actual diagnostic output to another box that the user only has cause to invoke if there is a problem. The real problem here is that errors are reported even when nothing is wrong. The best I can see this is due quite simply to the fact that no one is willing to pay one or two employees (they dont have to be highly skilled, just computer literate enough to track down scripts and edit them) to finish the job when they make a distribution. In this case, there are error on the EeePC that are normal all over the place, not just in this one box, but bloody everywhere. They are caused by using generic scripts, designed to work on an extraordinarily broad range of different installations, with no customisation. It is a relatively tiny amount of work to go through these scripts, figure out which lines are actually unneeded and inappropriate on *this* distribution, and remove them. Simple as that.
Now, when I fire up a newly installed white-box, I see a lot of similar spurious error messages scroll by. This is to be expected - I am using a general purpose distribution and it makes sense for the default scripts to have this result and to expect the person installing it to go ahead and take a few minutes to customise the scripts and get rid of the spurious commands, either by deletion or simply commenting them out. The only complaint I have in that setting is that it does, on occasion, seem unreasonably difficult to track down the scripts in question, as if the builders of the distro never even thought of anyone wanting to clean the thing up post-install. This attitude, or my perception of it, grates the nerves, it is just shoddy engineering. Error messages should NOT be normal, and an OS installation cannot be said to be complete until they are all cleaned up. When the user sees an error message they should be able to have confidence it is a real error. Instead they learn that it is 'normal' to have spurious error messages all over the place, they learn to ignore them, and then when there is a real error message that does need attention - it is ignored too.
On the EeePC, however, it is not excusable at all. This is a very specialised distribution created *specifically* for this hardware. There is no excuse whatsoever for these scripts not to have been cleaned up so that they produce no error messages on their intended hardware before the image was burned, period.
Another very annoying feature of that particular Operating System is that it does not support swap partitions. This really boils down to the same problem - the company producing it obviously couldnt be bothered to budget just a handful of hours with someone familiar with linux for this thing! More specifically, it appears that Asus was told by the manufacturer of the SSD used that it should absolutely never be used for virtual memory. This advice could only have come with someone that is familiar with Windows, but not with computers in general and certainly not with linux specifically. SSDs do have a limited number of read/write cycles, you see, and Windows WILL thrash virtual memory whenever given it, without rhyme or reason, it just insists on rewriting it fairly often. Allowing Windows to use an SSD for virtual memory is a very bad idea. But Linux does
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
At the screenshots.
It was an XP theme with a taskbar at the bottom and.
That's not impressive, they hadn't worked out the icons to look the same for instance.
So, well, not impressed.
But, yeah, sure, grandma and grandpa won't notice that it's not windows until they try to do anything out of the ordinary.
Also, it's never good enough to be almost as good, not even good enough to be as good.
You have to be better.
Therefore, this is a typically bad idea for linux in general, especially since it tells us "We can't do better than microsofts almost decade old OS".
all you get back is [...] a text stream. [...] could return structured results to the caller.
Parsers. 'Nuff said.
Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows"
I'd like to extrapolate that: you should never have to tell the computer the same thing twice. You should be able to make the computer act on general rules.
I really hate that with Network Manager, I can't tell it "whenever you see one of the essids [home, work], connect automatically". Why the hell do I have to spend my precious time clicking stuff when I already know what I'm going to click on?
(Linux lets me express general rules about what my computer should do, in the language of shell scripts etc.; for that, I love it. Thanks also to wpa_supplicant's roaming mode.)
Though I hear there are undenied allegations that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1991.
Are you kidding?
Criticis the US is a good way to +5 Insightful
.... just what I need to fool my clients into using Ubuntu instead of crappy Microsoft XP.
"This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream"
A text stream is not a bad thing. All you need to do is serialize and unserialize.
You forgot:
Make GNOME look like KDE
The other way around is built into Qt4 (Gtk theme).
Instead of -1 redundant... :)
this is different to now how exactly?
The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.
On this front, the Linux experience is worlds better than the Windows one. My biggest frustration when trying to sort out problems on other people's Windows boxes is the frequency with which one gets an error message which amounts to "Something went wrong, but we're not telling you what." The big mistake which the Windows developers make is hiding information from the user so even if you are capable of understanding the technical aspects of the problem, you're not allowed to see them.
It's true that the average user either ignores technical information in an error message, or goes into a panic when it appears, but there should always be *some* way of getting at it. Windows is dreadful in this respect.
If you really want an ugly XP look on top of Gnome, then just use the InstallXpGnome.sh script, as illustrated in this French video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FocT2fFBU50
Why do such a perverted thing to Ubuntu? To get it past the thought police at work, perhaps. Of course, they might wonder why your PC looks different on the network, and find out the truth when attempting to apply policies (like pushing updates to antivirus or windows) or other Microsoft domain masochistic practices.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
How does something look, "just like Windows XP" in one sentence and, "Really, really similar" in the next?
Bark less. Wag more.
... to make 2010 the year of the Linux desktop.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I do not know blender, but Linux distros and apps usually come with good default configurations of the GUI, but are flexible enough to make it look and work a bit differently.
You seem to be saying that it would be good to get rid of this flexibility. Why? People do not have to change themes if they do not want to. In my experience naive users do not have much of a problem using the defaults.
I have never seen a "one way GUI" such as you describe. Yes its bad, but it not common. I have not seen the problems you describe with alert boxes on Linux any more than on Windows.
So a friend who's working on the Incognito LiveCD project have got news from people being beaten and jailed by police in china. And how did they got discovered? Well, they used the LiveCD at a internet café and the owner realized that that's not windows and called the police.
Having linux looking like windows could be a privacy feature.
Finally, a good way of getting back at all those relatives who keep asking me to fix their PC.
I haven't had Windows on my main machine for a few years now, but WTF, judging by these screenshots, Ylmf OS UI bears only a mild resemblance to XP's.
Make XP look like 98 look like Ubuntu look like 95!
http://www.tenjou.net/
"That gives Microsoft a huge UNFAIR advantage." - by mrcaseyj (902945) on Monday December 28, @02:46AM (#30568994)
And a FREE/0-dollars pricetag for Linux doesn't give Linux an unfair advantage over Windows (in which the latter, in Windows, does co$t a user his or her monies)?
What gives Windows its advantage is that it ACTUALLY PAYS FOR DEVELOPMENT TO OCCUR ON IT (especially for hardware drivers & interfaces to said hardwares), & between this and the fact that Windows has more commercial application development occurring for & on it that produces more high quality wares for most any conceivable purpose there is from fun to line of business type apps!
THAT truly IS what keeps Windows "on top" basically. Monetary incentive is powerful, because it keeps "you & yours" fed, clothed, & sheltered (@ a minimum).
Plus, one HAS to account for the fact that MOST FOLKS grow up on, & use, Windows mostly (& MS Office too, hugely) daily @ home, on the job, & more for any possible purposes there are & on the most used hardware platform in x86 there is!
Thus, I.E.-> People are USED to Windows & thus, use it more.
This fact also means little to NO training time for employers.
That's ALL true from home/end user machines, up thru departmental workstations + servers, and, onwards and upwards into the Client-Server higher end mission critical application area in mission critical/enterprise class servers + mission critical applications... &, on 95++% or better of the systems out there, & especially since x86 rules that arena in personal computer based computing.
I've noted that BOTH the Penguin camp in Linux & Apple via MacOS X are attempting the old adage of "seize the youth & thus you seize the future" by putting their systems into academia HEAVILY the past 2-5++ yrs. now but, what will these same kids see in corporate america once they get out to work, mostly what will they see & use?
Windows.
Are they doing the aforementioned youth a service? Yes, & no. It's good to learn other things, but, it's also bad to split your time learning things you may never really use as well, pulling you away from what you WILL BE USING, vs. what you most likely, won't, because the "surface area"/"market penetration" is SO heavily in favor of Windows NT-based OS' out there mainly.
APK
P.S.=> In the end here, in summation from myself @ least, in reply to your points:
The zero cost of Linux is an "unfair advantage" to-the-max, that Linux has over Windows, period...
(Since anyone can download & burn an installable Linux distro for free basically + put it to installation media & have @ it for no dollars down whatsoever)
So, that "all said & aside": YOUR point? That goes BOTH ways here, & especially where it REALLY matters: A person's money! apk
Kill IT! Kill it with fire!!!!! Burn the Abomination!
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
1,590,000 hits when Googling "themes for windows vista"
2,450,000 hits for "themes for windows XP"
760,000 hits for "themes for windows 7"
Is a sign that there is a lot of people out there that like to tweak the GUI to their liking, what is so wrong with giving these people that possibility without having them resort to often very unstable and possibly malware ridden third party applications?
Win32 applications translated through WINE would appear a lot better if Gnome XP made it all look the same.
TWM is better than FVWM in that regard of efficiency, while FVWM and FVWM2 in another regard only put a taskbar and a reticle for programs to dock minimal icon status icons upon. FVWM/FVWM2 and TWM were from a cheap era that didn't utilize the root window of the X Server as a de jure Desktop-interaction canvas as originaly Microsoft GUI's worked. Yet in WIN.INI (or was it SYSTEM.INI), it was more efficient to change from Microsoft's Window and Desktop Management to something more useful like SALAMAND.EXE and this is all that would make the difference as a X Server Desktop in conjuction with such minimal Window manager. Linux gets the win in this regard for ease of portability, but Microsoft was first to actually implement all of this but in a usual inflexible way as it is seen today.
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
But in Open Source, allowing the community to create a working GUI is a valid idea.
The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX
Uh, what? The output from your programs can be as structured as you like. For one thing, there are multiple output streams available, error and output. For another, while the output from each needs to be human-readable, there's no reason it can't also be machine-readable. For example, in AIX, IBM includes unique codes with all error messages. Those codes mean little or nothing to a human, but can be looked up in a database. There's no reason why Unix programs which will be wrapped by other programs can't do this, and in fact they often do. Script intelligence is often sufficient to get rather complex GUI operation from the output of a simple utility.
In addition, most Unix applications seem to heavily leverage shared libraries, perhaps because the Free Software and Open Source communities which are very much more a part of Unix than Windows are better-able to make use of them so long as their licenses are compatible. And, given the Open nature of the programs we're talking about, their functions can be distilled as libraries. A poor screen-scraper is not a fault of the Unix system, but of the implementor. Most of the time, the libraries the original utility are based upon are available to the programmer, who can gain the benefit of code reuse without taking advantage of Unix's redirection.
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984, and it's still worth reading the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines.
Too bad Apple has forgotten almost everything they knew back then...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the output text window is not a substitute for the GUI and does not try to be, it displays the information that windows would be hiding somewhere in the event log. after dealing with a windows laptop with a horked up network driver, trust me i would rather have that information in front of me than have to go digging for it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And if you believe that is the problem then you've got your head in the sand. The complaints Windows people have about Linux have little to do with the look and feel and a great deal to do with the operation. I can give you a sample of some of the things that get noted, though this is by no means a comprehensive list:
1) Linux's love of the command line. Many things have only a command line solution, or at least only a good command line solution. Even the GUIs are sometimes just bad wrappers for CL tools. This is far more confusing and harder for users to work out. With a GUI you can look at all the options, you see what your choices are. With a command line, not the case. Adds a good deal of confusion to the user experience.
2) Kernel compiling. Users shouldn't ever have to mess with source code or a compiler if they don't want to, yet in Linux there are things that require a kernel recompile.
3) Tons of distros. "Linux" isn't well defined form a user's viewpoint as their are so many, and some of them are very different. What's more, you'll get different ones recommended for different things. In the event you want to do multiple things some people will seriously suggest you run multiple distros on your computer, massively complicating things.
4) Dependency hell. DLLs, the Windows version of dependencies more or less, have become a thing most users aren't even aware of anymore. Programs ship with the ones they need and Windows makes sure they don't step on each other. In Linux dependencies get extremely confusing and there are more than a few poorly programmed apps out there that don't understand what dependencies they need and require debugging to make work.
I could go on, but really if you are interested you can dig around on the net. What it comes down to largely is Linux seems to think you should be a programmer. You ought to be comfortable with make files and peeking at source. Fiddling with things ought to be no big deal. Ya well, that's not true of the average desktop user. Most of them know NOTHING about programming and have no desire to learn. As such Linux is hard for them simply because of how it is.
Also there's the big problem of app compatibility. This isn't really anything Linux can be changed to do, since the apps aren't written for it, but it is a major issue none the less. No matter how awesome the OS, if the apps a user needs don't run, it isn't useful. A computer is just a tool to most people, and its function is to run the apps they need. If it can't, it isn't a useful tool.
It'd be news if it looked like Windows 8 (yes, eight).
Yeah, but how do I make my DOS screen look like this new fangled WinUbuntuXPLinux thingy?
Enlightenment isn't designed to look like NeXTSTEP (although it might be possible to customize it to do that), which is what litestep (which based on that screenshot only adds a dock to a basic Win95 look) and just about every other *step tries to do.
I have yet to see a single OEM windows install boot up with dozens of error messages because it is just trying to load drivers for every piece of hardware in the windows driver database for instance.
I've restored factory images on Lenovo laptops and found devices with no driver installed.
As for the issue about erroneous error messages, the coders are either lazy or incompetent. Period. Every bit of information displayed should be both useful and correct. There used to be a paradigm in Unix that no information should be displayed unless necessary. For example, when I type 'rm foo', no feedback is returned unless the operation fails. It would be unnecessary to report success, and completely f*cked to report an error if none occurred. For an example of things done right, try OpenBSD.
Linux's GUI is great, it has a learning curve because it's a complicated program, like most OSes and takes a while to get used to. But there is absolutely nothing terribly wrong with its GUI, in fact it is faster and more efficient than the Macs or Windows's.
Why? Because enthusiasts made it, and they know how they want to use their own OS for their own work more than you do.
Linux is getting customisation support only to make it more accessible to people that are too stupid or too lazy or don't have enough time to go from their favourite OS to Linux, it's also a bit of a side effect of the updated core which is now a lot more organised.
Label this under obligatory Linux defending.
You argument gave me a strong sense of deja vu so for fun, I replaced every instance of "Blender" with "Linux" and every instance of "program" or "application" with "OS". Good times.
As a windows user with little knowledge of Linux I decided what better way to get acquainted than installing a chinese distro? Of course I don't speak any Chinese but it was easy enough to click my way through the install, probably because it's just Ubuntu 9 with different icons etc. Very exciting.
a lot of the comments about how peole are panicked by a new GUI reflect, I think, the experience of people now in the 40s or older.
when i look at my kids, who are teens, and not at all computer people (geeks ina + sense0 they are really comfortable with computers and diff GUIs - when they start buying computers on their own, it may be the year of linux on teh desktop
netsh interface ip set address "Connection Name" static 192.168.1.100
Chinese are nortious for stealing others people's source code and trying to sell it under various guises.
.. that it would STILL be better than Windows..
Insert
It appears that the screenshot was taken from the real Windows XP, and Ylmf OS does not look much like XP, but rather exactly like Gnome.
Here's a screenshot taken from someone who installed the ISO in VMWare and changed the locale to English: http://i50.tinypic.com/2lar9s0.jpg
The EeePC's Linux distribution has all kinds of other problems.
The basic problem is that Asus had no idea what they were doing. They started off with a custom build of Xandros, which is one of the least standard / typical Linux distributions around. They then stripped out pretty much everything except for the Xandros file manager, including stuff like the window manager, the network configuration system, and pretty much everything else that would have made Xandros worth choosing. The only plausible reason to do this is to reclaim disk space, which they didn't do - the default installation contains a complete copy of KDE 3, but it's disabled by default, and requires some hacking to get at it.
The main problem is that they wrote their own replacements for the removed Xandros pieces. So we have their abomination of a network manager, which basically just doesn't work properly. They could have installed NetworkManager, or WICD (which actually worked better than NetworkManager at the time), but they didn't.
Even more bizarre - Xandros is fundamentally based on KDE 3, yet nearly all of the applications are GTK applications. In fact, the only KDE application still present in the default setup is Xandros file manager (which is a horrible file manager - even Nautilus works better), and a couple of Asus's utilities like the aforementioned network manager.
This isn't something that's unique to Linux systems either. Hardware manufacturers in particular frequently replace Windows functionality with their own, for absolutely no good reason. I've seen plenty of laptops shipping with some horrible wireless network manager, replacing (or sometimes interfering with) the built-in Windows one, and not working nearly as well. Same deal with sound cards (particularly Creative Labs, and Realtek), video cards (Intel particularly, but ATI and nVidia used to do this too).
Basically, most hardware manufacturers could not write decent software to save their lives. The OS on the EeePC was written by a company that primarily does hardware, and it shows.
Asus should have done what Dell later did. Pick a standard, popular Linux distribution, and install that. Do the same kind of stuff that you'd usually do with an OEM Windows install - install and set up the appropriate drivers, add / remove whatever software you need, customize the thing a little bit (keeping compatibility with the base OS), and ship that. The shipped OS should be better than you could get by just installing another distribution, not worse.
I agree. Messages like : ERROR IN 8372JFIIRK92328894-324438756780 dont have any value to end users or that stupid MS error reporting crap. Does anyone know if MS have ever fixed a specific problem via the error reporting?
I actually use blender and maya and 3ds, dont compare them like that, you're making the same mistake, blender's gui is still evolving, just for dinosaurs like you that dont want to try even the slightest change. I use blender more because it's heavy on the keyboard shortcuts, with the others I need frequent breaks to rest my hand because everything is dont by point and click, simple? yes! fast? no.
Err, Blender GUI created by artists? That sure explains it, how about let the developers do it instead or the people that specialize in it.
(Fact: The end user doesn't know what he/she wants, the marketing guys do.)
Blender is quite counter-intuitive with an awesomely buggy interface. Sure I'm all for another direction than the traditional window menu GUIs in use, but when you create a GUI consisting exclusively of buttons you've gone too far in the button direction. An userfriendly interface does NOT have a learning curve, it's simply logical and well organized (customization is not a criteria). :) , I had zero problem of finding the properties I was looking for, not talking about font color. Best of all it takes up very little space, in comparison to Blender.
Take MS Office ribbon, I never really use that suite but first time I did a few months ago
But since the key-feature in Blender is keyboard input (from the unix console fanboys side) I doubt they'll deviate from their principles effectively leaving the application in the amateur corner despite the extensive plugin support.
When I read this post I saw the words "pirates" and assumed that there was something illicit about what was being done here.
From what I can see, this looks like an excellent, and legitimate redesign of the OS -- which may ultimately help Linux adoption.
The question is -- how far does the cloning go? The desktop is one thing, but does it extend to the entire OS?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If I could only care. "It's a Linux OS that looks like a Windows OS!!!". It must be Christmas time because Slashdot is trying to give a its slashkiddies something to wet their beds about again *yawn*
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those that know Binary and those who don't.
Windows User:
I want do change my ip address (for whatever reason).
Where do I start? Oh, Start button.
I want to control something. Oh, control panel.
IP Address is something about networking, so Networking.
Connecting things? Ah, TCP/IP contains that magic IP thing I'm looking for.
No settings I see here, what else can I do? Is there a place for Advanced users?
Aha, advanced, here it is. Enter info, click OK a bunch of times.
Linux user:
I want do change my ip address (for whatever reason).
Where do I start?
$ip
ip: command not found
$network
network: command not found
$help network
help: (insert usage text)
$sod off you monkey licker
sod: command not found
OK, back into the windows of Linux. Where's the web browser? Something that says WEB or INTERNET or something? Oh screw it, let's just borrow Jeff's copy of XP and install it.
Why don't you actually put the software to use, and click that "Help" button?
Except the system behind that help button isn't perfect. How would you deal with the following follow-up questions?
First off, you're blaming some stupid knockoff EEEPC vendor's mistakes on your omnipresent "Linux community?" Keep beating them until they're dead - nobody likes those guys.
But you still keep ranting past that about Blender and other apps who allow customization. Sounds like someone doesn't under the concept of "opinion," or even the phrase "we value things differently around here." Linux is an OS that is designed for advanced users first. That's its target audience. Only recently has their been a push to make it easier for other to use, and with Ubuntu and its ilk, it's been very, very successful at doing so (to the point that you never need to use a CLI). So of course you're still going to get apps that cater to the avdanced user. Since when has Blender been an application that advertised a user friendly GUI that even your old mum could use?
A good default is good, but it will never, ever replace the chance to alter said defaults to your taste.
going to reply to a rather obvious troll but
1 KDE GNOME both have "control panel" type things you can use (and in fact the path is very similar)
2 since internet paths and UNIX type paths are the same you could just blindly type an address into a command line and get punted over to the "native" web browser (same trick works in Windows btw since it just makes sense)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
We all knew what he meant anyway - damn savages, can't even spell colour correctly and they want to spellcheck the net.
Spell it as in Latin or Spanish (color) or as in French (couleur), not in between. To use your "spelling nazi" analogy, "colour" is like trying to be a Nazi Jew: you can't have it both ways.
Apart from the skin/theme...
I mean, it’s got: ...)
- A task bar, exactly like Windows
- A start menu, exactly like Windows
- A area with icons, right next to the clock, exactly like Windows
- Windows with a icon, a title, a minimize, a maximize and close button, exactly like Windows
- A trash can and a “my computer icon, exactly like Windows
- The same shortcuts as Windows
- The same hardware-detection mechanisms (e.g. a stupid windows popping up when you insert a CD)
- All Windows window manager mechanisms (drag, resize,
- File open and save dialogs with the same functionality
- A file manager that tries to imitate Windows Explorer, even with the giant icons and new windows opening when you click on one, and the fake structure with “my computer” on top, instead of “/” or $HOME.
- Desktop search.
- Etc, etc, etc.
Add a theme, and it’s Windows.
P.S.: Hey fanboys: I love Linux. But I hate how the desktop environments threw all its philosophies out of the window, in favor of the crappy Windows concepts. Just to get the pat on the back from some stupid Windows retards who can’t even grasp something new and innovative, when it hits them right in the head. Stop running behind the acceptance of others! Because that won’t ever get you accepted. Do your own thing! Then you get what you want. Because that’s what it means to lead: To lead the way! This is serious critique. On all Linux desktop environments, and most window managers. For imitating instead of innovating.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The word "start"?
Or copyright the idea of a wastepaper basket to hold deleted files until you are really ready to delete them? I don't think MS wants to claim that, Apple would want to collect a few billion from a previous case were MS argued AGAINST your idea.
This gui is nothing new, there are lots of skins available for various linux desktops including every well known interface out there. So far nobody has taken this to court and I think because nobody wants to say to a judge "Copying an element from a gui is bad" because that is what everyone does.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
it's virtually certain that they used the copyrighted graphics that come with Windows to make this. Depending on how thorough they are, they may have used a fair amount of copyrighted text, as well.
I don't know about Chinese copyright law, but in the United States, menu text is not copyrightable (Lotus v. Borland); nor are simple geometric shapes such as the minimize, maximize, and close controls. And even though scalable fonts are copyrighted computer programs for generating glyphs, the resulting glyphs aren't copyrightable, even when collected in a bitmap font. But I draw the line at that four-color flag.
Your method leaves much to be desired if your actual job is software support but can be improved quite easily
1 if said person is still at their desk then open the Help for them and suggest that they read same (bonus if you can show them the correct article)
2 if they are not at their desk but in your sanctuary (why is this??) then do 1 and have them return to their desk
3 for those users that like to read suggest they obtain a copy of the correct volume by the WinSaint Woody Leonhard and read this before they ask you minor questions (update 1 with page numbers as required)
4 for those that need further help get a roll of cheap carpet and a drum of quicklime and have these items in your car at all times. Begin the process of hitting the user with the correct WinSaint volume until they become enlightened.
in short help them navigate the help or find a quiet place to meditate
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
No, "Ninjaed" means you hear about an announced feature of a competing product and scramble to implement it in your own product (features aren't copyrightable), and then you get your product out the door first.
I visited the website and saw no apparent link to the source. After all, Ubuntu is based on GPL license, which requires its derivative work to comply as well. This time again is another instance of prirate.
What happens when you click the Internet Explorer icon? Does it open Firefox? What happens when you click on the Windows Media Player Icon? Does it open VLC?
I'm confused...
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I really hate that with Network Manager, I can't tell it "whenever you see one of the essids [home, work], connect automatically".
The Network Manager in Ubuntu Hardy through Karmic has no problem automatically reconnecting to the SSIDs it sees often. It just needs to ask for a password to get at the keyring where it stores the WEP key.
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
While a poor default for a general populace is bad, giving the user the control to theme is hardly an admission of failure. By that measure, the fact that third-party themes/skins are hacked into MS and Apple products mean they fail too. The fact I can buy different color siding for my house suggests failure in creating my house appearance. Being able to buy a sports car in multiple colors would represent admitting failure. Simple fact is that humanity has a varying set of tastes and inclinations, enabling people to tailor something to their needs is not a bad thing.
I can't speak to Blender specifically, but I have heard it compared to vi vs. gedit/notepad. If that is the case I can respect Blender for their UI design catering to experts at the expense of an easy learning curve. Sometimes it's impossible to do both in a single project, so you leave one (possibly more popular) paradigm to competitors while you focus on delivering on your own interface paradigm with its adherents.
This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller.
This is a total mischaracterization. I have seen the UIs you describe and it is about laziness rather than failure of the wrapped CLI. Windows and OSX has these too (not first party, but one particular *commercial* OSX app I can think of just is a wrapper for ffmpeg CLI utility that acts like this). Don't blame Unix for simplified exit codes (seeing as how any C program falls into that for 'exit', which is not crippling). Besides, OSX is a Unix too The problem is that the GUI designer opts not to think about the meaning of output and just dumps it to user. If they had a theoretical argc/argv structure passed back, they'd just dump that too, with no extra effort. The simple fact is that there are three free-form streams to communicate with an external program (stdin, stdout, stderr) which can encode arbitrary complex structures for CLI wrapping. A good CLI frontend can do a lot with this facility if they so choose, but the typical thing to do for a more 'integrated' experience is to select a backend with functions exported via API rather than wrapping a CLI. This is the same regardless of platform or project, and as my example points out above, this is *not* any more strange or different in Linux than OSX or Windows.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC.
I can't speak to the EeePC experience first hand, but I had heard that the platform was full of amateurish hacks relative to other efforts out there. Linux has no barrier to entry, allowing even the most amateur efforts to potentially get rolled out in a high-profile scenario, which is risky from a 'marketing' perspective to the 'Linux' platform. This may be a good reason to refer to a platform as 'WebOS', 'Android', 'SuSE', 'RedHat', 'Ubuntu', or whatever first and 'Linux' a relatively distant second when dealing with a less familiar audience. A Gentoo Box is markedly distinct in end-user experience from a Palm WebOS device, so blanket statements about how Linux overall 'doesn't get it' (or 'does get it') are not possible to feasibly back (except maybe talking about low-level details of exceedingly common components like the kernel/glibc or vague commentary on the philosophy, but that's rarely the subject of discussion). It's like saying OSX 'doesn't get it' because you tried a random guy's weeked XCode project and it was a simple piece of crap.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Either set Linux and GNOME to look like XP yourself or use ReactOS instead as an alternative to Windows XP.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
(Fact: The end user doesn't know what he/she wants, the marketing guys do.)
Depends on your user. Some users are clueless and marketing types can figure it out better than they can. Some users know very damn well what they want and marketing driven design actually hurts them. One commonly emphasised application development philosophy is rapid prototyping to users for feedback and adjusting design. No one can shorten that cycle like a community who knows how to write code and actually uses the product.
An userfriendly interface does NOT have a learning curve, it's simply logical and well organized (customization is not a criteria).
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100, I can do a regex in vi using :s/\(\S*\s*\S*\s*\)\S*\(.*\)/\1\2/. It is always at hand and immediately accessible, but no way in hell someone knows to do that 'intuitively' without learning and any 'intuitive' interface would have to bury a feature like this so deep that it would be a royal pain to access when needed once you understand how to use it. Also, though customization is not a criteria for your 'userfriendly', it is a criteria that is independently important for many users, so it cannot be discounted.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think they do, but only in aggregate. I think I recall reading various cases in Windows 7 when enough users reported X error, they fixed it in the next version, but that can sometimes be 2 years later.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've written some audio decoder libraries and I'm amazed at how most users just ignore the errors returned, or treat them as pass/fail, even though this is extremely unhelpful to the user. The user wants to solve the problem, but needs to know the difference between "out of memory", "disk full", "insufficient file permissions", "corrupt file", and "unsupported feature". The user can often guess, but if he's wrong, he'll waste time applying useless solutions, and perhaps finally, via trial-and-error, determine the real problem.
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100,
In the world of good UIs, that text file doesn't exist and should never exist for any reason. The only reason you'd ever have to do an operation like that is if you're interfacing to an device with an absolutely shitty UI.
In a holistically-usable environment, there's no way the example you cite would ever come up. You're demonstrating a point, but I don't think it's the one you intended.
Comment of the year
I have never seen a "one way GUI" such as you describe.
Handbrake on Windows (and presumably Linux and OS X) have one. It's a complete pain in the ass, especially compared to the older Handbrake version which had great usability.
Now you configure your video ripping, and a fucking CMD box pops up to do the actual work!
"Oh I want to play a video game, let me pause transcoding"... can't do it, you can't interactively communicate with a CLI process! Sucks to be you! Either you cancel it (only possible by closing the CMD box and *killing* the process), or you suck it up and let it finish.
Ugh. I miss the old Handbrake, before it was taken over by people with no clue how to make a decent UI. It's rare to see a product actually go *backwards* that much.
Comment of the year
All the pro-China/anti-US comments. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....
All the paranoid merkin wankers 5,4, Oh.. Already here I see.
And you just proved his point. Good work!
This space for rent!
And it's exactly this kind of hostile inability to understand our users that would lead to a free platform not being popularly embraced.
People right now have 3 main choices in platform: Apple and Microsoft's offerings, which focus on usability first, then technology and then various Linux offerings, which focus on technology first, then usability.
Quack, quack.
King S said 10:06PM on 12-27-2009
The problem is that Linux can't run games. If Linux is such an awesome OS, then why can't someone develop an application that can run ALL windows games. FYI, no one is going to develop games for Linux, and to expect game companies to waste time doing so is b***s***. Until Linux can run games, Linux is still 2nd best...after Windows.
It was sleek, usable, rock-solid and ran on most computers that could run 98se. It came on a single CD-ROM...that's right, CD, not DVD. It installed in 30 minutes. Then MS had to go throw on all the eyecandy and craptacularness of XP, and suddenly things started slowing down. Then we had the Vista debacle. If 7 is as sleek and slim as 2K I'd be all over it. But apparently 7 is still suffering bloat and eyecandy obsession. I miss 2K. If it wasn't so risky to run I'd still run it. Too many vulnerabilities that are unpatched in 2K.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
How is this informative? Interesting/Insightful may be, for people who already know what is being referred; but for ignorant people like me - where is the "information"?
You want the fantasy that Windows works?
No, this will only help point out the reality that Linux doesn't work nearly as well as it should, which is why we have not yet seen the year of Linux on the desktop.
Ever have to spend to three hours trying to get Ubuntu to recognize a silly little USB key? Ever try to use Gimp instead of Photoshop? Ever had to do anything on Linux that didn't take several hours longer than it should because it doesn't natively support your hardware so, you have to hunt around the internet for hacked together drivers that may/may not work? 'Scuze me for not being a computer nerd but, I have tried to do these things, because I am too cheap to pay for anyone else to do it for me. I'm getting tired of having to spend so much time fucking around trying to get stuff done, rather than actually getting stuff done.
Believe me, I'd prefer to get off of Micro$oft brand heroin. I sure am trying, but Linux just isn't getting me high, yet.
Now, all you anti-M$ drones can now mod me a troll, since I don't seem to agree with the popular opinion around here but, at least I am smart enough to recognize the truth.
Technically, the classic OS had a CLI inasmuch as it had a debug switch on the box and it would throw you into a CLI window.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The flaws described by the grandparent are, basically, nonexisting right now.
First of all, you can write GUI frontends for text applications to use bi-directional input/output, pipes fully support it. And you can pass complex structures using this IO.
The classic example here is gdb - frontends for it use a rich protocol over pipes/sockets.
Moreover, right now a lot of services use D-BUS which is built around complex structured messages. For example, NetworkManager applet (which is used in most Linuxes) has a D-BUS backend and a GUI front-end.
And I have a different opinion about themes, but I'm too lazy to write about it.
Actually MS is also moving to this direction. With Server 2008 R2 when you do some things with a GUI, it runs a PowerShell script to make the changes.
The truth or interpretation..
While intensive computer users may appreciate the flexibility and power of the CLI, the average user doesn't and never will. The average user wants things to work and isn't interested or capable of fixing them if they don't. /. is of course rife with OS enthusiasts, who are knowledgeable about their OS and configuring it, programming etc. We are not the best sample audience for really determining what the average person wants.
I think the average user wants an OS with the reliability of their toaster for the most part: simple interface, predictable results, and it doesn't get in the way of doing what they want it to do.
I can see this POV now. I run OS/X and for the most part I never think about the UI itself, I focus on what I am using my computer to do. When I ran MS OSes (from DOS up through XP/2000) I spent a lot more time configuring things and fixing problems. When I ran linux, it was the same only the difficulty of fixing problems was greater - although the problems themselves were a lot less common. I never got to the point where I said "Fuckit, I will write my own driver" though, as a few here have no doubt done.
Linux is IMHO the way of the future, but it won't get there until we have a version that never requires the average user to access the CLI unless they want to. And it must support Windows games of course, because that is the driving limitation on adoption I think.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It just needs to ask for a password to get at the keyring where it stores the WPA2 key.
Last I checked (at or after Hardy), when I walked through my university halls for a few minutes, then opened my laptop and wanted to go to slashdot, I still had my home IP. There's no encryption on the network.
What did I do different/wrong?
Also, use WPA2. From what I hear, WEP is broken (dead horse). So is WPA (dying horse, if not dead yet). Use WPA2. I want to encourage people to use WPA2 as the canonical arbitrary, "random" wifi encryption scheme, when they just need a name to throw around.
Use WPA2.
And carry a Wi-Fi-to-Wi-Fi bridge for every device I own, especially devices other than PCs, that is too old to support WPA2 and not available in a newer version that supports WPA2?
The parent poster gave an example of editing a text file and you responded that the text file shouldn't exist. Given that the text file was specifically his example, why shouldn't it exist?
Chinese have a lot of free time to waste
Now you configure your video ripping, and a fucking CMD box pops up to do the actual work!
The blame for that lies in the hands of the people who wrote the encoding applications. They only provide a command-line client, with no nicely packaged library that could be used by other applications. (Or if they do, then the licenses aren't compatible.)
StaxRip does the same thing when encoding to x264, although it does manage to hide the command window, it's still simply passing arguments to a command line program.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Sounds like the XPde http://www.xpde.com/index.php
They should go easy on Microsoft trademarked/copyright images, but other than that, I don't see a problem with making an Ubuntu that looks "really similar" to Windows XP. It will make many users feel more comfortable, and many users really couldn't care less whether they are running Ubuntu or XP, as long as they get a web browser and a good office suite. If anything, they'll find Ubuntu menus and the Ubuntu GUI more streamlined and easier to use than XP.
The other way around is built into Qt4 (Gtk theme).
Does that also get rid of all the extra buttons and options that I don't like in KDE?
Oh that's right, because Linux is so much better in this regard...
http://i.imgur.com/Y56vJ.png
You are correct about free GUIs being generally bad (the explanation is simple - good usability design is expensive and thus often incompatible with "free").
However your generalization about the "Unix design flaw" is frankly completely ridiculous. Unix and POSIX may have many design flaws, but lack of IPC mechanisms isn't one of them.
Parsers are an unnecessary added layer of complexity.
What should happen is that the application returns a machine readable responses which is is then output by either a command line display algorithm or a GUI display algorithm.
I question whether the old unix concept of input and output streams has kept up with our user interface standards. I'm not saying they're a bad idea, I just think they could use a little expansion today especially how to set them up. I also think if we should have a packet oriented interface standard layered on top of the stream interface. Unix actually does this, but not for binary streams, only text streams delimited by carriage returns (see AWK).
Alas, Unix will continue to be unix long after we mere mortals are all dust.
>I really hate that with Network Manager, I can't tell it "whenever you see one of the essids [home, work], connect automatically"
Why can I do exactly that? Every network has a "Connect automatically" checkbox. Besides, dispatcher.d scripts allow me to define rules for each connection (e.g. starting vpnc when I connect to my university's network).
Besides, dispatcher.d scripts allow me to define rules for each connection
Ah, I see you've read some of the non-existing manual ;-) Or did you read some documentation which does exist? If so, where?
Thanks :)
THANK YOU. Oh praise Jebus somebody finally gets it!!! I'm not kidding, I've have been saying this for years only to get tons of hate thrown my way simply because I work with consumers and can speak to what they want!
And may I say that you most insightfully hit the nail 110% on the head! Home users do NOT want to learn CLI, or how to do complex or difficult commands, or even learn how everything really works, they just want it to work, that's all. Just the other day my GF, who is a "Sally Secretary" type of home user, just walked into my apartment and said 'I llooove yooou' and gave me a big hug. To which I replied "thanks, and is this a general I love you, or did I do something that bears repeating?" the reason she was so happy? Her PC died! Yes that's right, she was happy the PC she got from Rent a ripoff before meeting me died and I gave her a customized replacement. She said "I have never had it so easy!" everything just takes care of itself, all I have to do is log onto my Facebook and read my emails and everything always just works! Thanks honey!"
All I did was add the right combo of freeware, payware, and settings to minimize interaction. Her PC autoupdates, auto cleans, auto defrags, cleans its own registry, etc and all with absolutely ZERO interaction from her. That way she has what you basically describe as a "toaster" that just does what SHE wants, which is lets her go to Facebook and transfer pics from her cameraphone with as little input as possible.
And that is what Linux needs if it really is gonna have a chance at conquering the consumer market. They don't want CLI, or man pages, or trawling forums for "fixes" they just want to be able to do what THEY want, install what THEY want, and be happy. Now I'll admit it is far easier for me because I'm "in the trenches" so I can talk one on one with the consumer and install the software that they require, but it is still doable. Perhaps more specialization? A "home theater" Linux, a "gamer" Linux, a "social user" Linux, etc along with making a stable ABI so retailers like me can sell and service your OS like we do the other two. Unfortunately as it is now it just isn't a winning proposition, thanks to paperweight roulette and too much IT heavy CLI junk. All these guys talk about how "easy" it is to walk someone through CLI, but have they actually done it? I have, and I'll take a GUI ANY DAY of the week! Why? Because there is less of a chance of serious borkage, that's why! No autocomplete and spell check in terminal equals big pile o' danger for fumble fingered home users.
Just accept that your OS isn't ready for the "home toaster" crowd, okay? Accept it, look at WHY it isn't ready for them, and fix it! It is either that or stick to the server and embedded space where Linux has CS grads to manage it. Because user education will NEVER work, they will NEVER use CLI, and those "fixes" that are all over the Google just scare the living hell out of them. After nearly 15 years of dealing with consumers I think I know of which I speak.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream.
This is not a design flaw. Seriously. Read up on how UNIX was designed.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC. All the GUI gives you is success or failure. Errors are hidden in a text window with incredibly confusing blither from about six programs used to set up the connection, several of which produce error messages in normal operation.
The default EeePC Linux install is bloody awful, but I see what you are getting at. The thing is *I* find the "confusing blither" extremely helpful - at the very least you have something you can google.
The Mac interface guidelines have some useful suggestions, but is as much about style as anything else.
Well, from man NetworkManager: /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d" :)
"NetworkManager will execute scripts in the
Afterwards I have just googled for some examples
Why do you have a problem with Network Manager? With me in the options dialog there is a checkbox with "connect automatically" written next to it. If this is checked then I automatically get connected to the network when available. I am using Ubuntu 9.10.
If linux were as common as windows, the internet would soon be covered with linux-only viruses and exploits.
Linux computers are treasure troves for black hats, because a Linux machine is likely to be a server - a really important one. One that might have massive databases full of credit card numbers, host major websites, run expensive scientific equipment, and contain other delicious corporate and even military goodies. Linux computers around the globe are each hit with many hours of ssh brute force attempts every day, because a weak password is the biggest vulnerability on a Linux machine next to physical access. There is no lack of interest in breaking into Linux machines.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Thanks! That was informative. I had forgotten about D-BUS altogether.
If in a holistically-usable environment there is no cause to manipulate text at all, how the hell did you enter your comment, which is itself in text? If a user complains that they have this text data they want to manipulate (not because their app demanded it, but because a friend sent it or who knows what else), the correct response is that capable text editing doesn't belong in a 'usable' environment and therefore applications offering advanced capability have no place in the world?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Becoming sick of being tech support for my in-laws, I reloaded their Dell desktop with Ubuntu 9.10 and threw an XP theme on it about a month ago. The tech support calls have reduced, and they are happy-go-lucky reading emails and surfing the internet.
the lspci command [is] not automatically installed in Karmic, BTW
Yes, it is. Speaking truth? You fail it.
As you do communicating. Fail is fail. (*)
Recycled from the next top-level comment over three hours earlier.
Well... not always
Hard mounted NFS (or any disk, but I normally see if with NFS) can stay stuck. Do an ls on a hard mount disk, it is unkillable (at least by any means I've tried).
Spawned child processes can get stuck waiting for parent to acknowledge (AKA zombie processes)
Recycled
Independently invented, and not exactly equal in meaning due to my comment having a richer context.
Why am I so certain you've read Atlas Shrugged in the last three years.
Don't worry: when you regain the capability for independent thought, you'll realize the world is not black and white, and not everyone who doesn't want to give free reign to manipulative, anti-competitive, privacy-intruding, innovation-stifling, cartelizing corporations (Pt. 2, 3) wants to steal your soul. They may be looking to fix our problems, too, you know.
(Don't despair if it's been longer than three years. You can always hope for a lightning strike to work its magic.)
If it doesn't matter on the net (where 90% of us consume 90% of their total), then where does it matter? Where could it have more self-aggravating effect?
(Also, I'm inclined to believe he's spelled Shakespeare pretty much everywhere.)
Isn't that kind of obvious? They want users to abandon XP. They're already cutting critical security updates because they're "not feasible", whatever that means, thereby violating their own sales promise and legislated minimum warranty period in the EU. If they can't kill XP any other way, you can bet my ass they'll FUD their own product soon.
People seem rather ok with XP, and many are reluctant to get burned by new Windows versions yet again, while Microsoft has a strong interest in getting everyone to use their new systems (and incidentally into "Trusted" Computing to enforce DRM on a hardware level for their new best friends).
If you value control over your own PC, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with free systems now.
I could also be wrong.
Mmmh, you make reading comments sound so much like drinking wine I can't help trusting you on this. <3
~100% of everything is redundant.
To send my files to my friends and family, I use a file sharing website called Spider Send. It won't matter if you're one Windows Machine, Linux or Mac. You can easily send big files to any one. Check it out and enjoy their fast and secure service.
Whether you're on windows or linux, you can use a file sharing website called Spider Send to transfer your files. It's a website like yousendit or zshare.
You can use it to send big files to any one. Their file transfer service is fast and secure.