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Songbird Drops Linux Support
An anonymous reader writes "The Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a shocking announcement, as Songbird has its roots in open source. Songbird will, however, continue to be available for Windows and Mac."
In their blog post on the subject, the developers said, "We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team."
Not once in TFA or the summary does it say what Songbird does.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I've tried Songbird for Ubuntu each time a new release came out and frankly, it was a horrible experience.
I loved the layout of the software, but having to wait damn near a half hour (or more) each time I'd start it up to reindex all my music was annoying, to say the least.
I've ended up just sticking with Rhythmbox, which is OK,but I really did prefer the Songbird layout.
Rhythmbox, amarok, xmms.
So long, Songbird. You won't be missed.
There's a housing development not far from where I live that has draconian rules about "community involvement". In order to own property there, it is necessary to spend time on the board or doing board-approved activities. They have immaculate lawns.
I own my own property here, and I have no connection to any third party except the bank and the government. My lawn is a mess, but I welcome anyone who would like to mow it.
Isn't the spirit of Free Software about everyone pitching in and helping each other freely? Or did I misunderstand freedom to mean freedom for others to do work for me for free?
I see nothing in Songbird's announcement that is negative in any way.
Linux is open source. Open source is not Linux.
Its not really that shocking.
So far on Linux desktop there have been three excelent iTunes like media players - Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok (last one mostly after features not gui). All three players excels in different ways, but what's important - they just work and I doubt we need more iTunes type clones in ui and functionality for Linux platform.
I know that Songbird guys are those positively mad people who did huge piece of dirty work to port Gstreamer to Windows and OS X and it shows what's their main priorities are. And that's fine, because Windows and Mac need a nice open source music player too (and ported Gstreamer framework of course).
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
As an act of righteous anger I uninstalled it upon reading this.
To be honest though, Songbird is nothing to miss. Any platform has a more than adequate substitute and this whole browser-integration-into-the-media-player deal is just ridiculous.
so many of the old school unix types like me having migrated to OS-X
Troll harder.
Not long before the Windows and Mac development stops, too. This software failed to gain traction.
If there was ever a music player on Linux that was worse than the worst versions of Amarok, it's Songbird. Nice ideas, but it never ever did work correctly for me, and it wasn't for lack of memory or processing power. I kept installing it and removing it from time to time to see how it was going.
It's like they never tried getting it to perform correctly on Linux. Oh well.
Maybe it works better on Windows, but I'll never know since I never use that unless I absolutely have to.
--
BMO
Songbird was far from perfect, but overall it was my favorite media player. Guess I'll just be sticking to VLC and loose the media library functionality.
Especially with so many of the old school unix types like me having migrated to OS-X
I call Shenanigans! A real old school Unix user would have:
a) Capitalized the 'U' merely out of respect
b) Waxed nostalgically about Unix (at least 3 full paragraphs)
c) Included "rm -SCO" or "sudo fuck SCO" in their post
As for me, an old school Unix user, I switched to Mac because it was the best computer I could steal. The old lady I took it from still thinks her toaster is the slowest screen saver ever.
Old school Unix? MacOS? You must be joking?
I say that as an old SunOS user that ignores his mini that sits under the desk.
I might want to steal some Mac apps but that's about it. Really, I would be more interested in stealing some Win apps.
MacOS is for grannies that can't be trusted not to browse sites they've been told to stay away from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In my opinion Songbird became irrelevant anyway the moment it dropped ipod support. I don't know how they think they can gain any semblance of marketshare, or cred for that matter, by dropping key features from it's codebase. It ran like crap anyway. Who builds a music player on top of mozilla?
"You disturb me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now." - The Sprockets
Neckbeards... Songbird...
Obligatory Family Guy reference.
Out of curiosity I dowloaded songbird just now and tried to install on my Windows 7 machine. Got a nice dialog saying "We don't support this OS. You can try, but things may not work properly." So you don't support Linux, and you don't support the latest version of Windows (or, I'm willing to bet, Vista)... Why not just call yourself a Mac product and be done with it?
I like the idea of it, but I don't really use the big music organizing programs.
I don't care about your karma, I don't care about what's hip. --Weird Al
Really? I browse slashdot every day and have for the past 10 years and I don't recall hearing anything about "Songbird". I find it implausible that it's been widely heralded as the Linux iTunes alternative.
N.B. I am a Windows 7 user and it did say when I installed that Windows 7 was not supported.
I dropped iTunes out of my home setup a while back and thought I've give Songbird a go. I've been running it for about 4 months now and I have to say, in IMO, it is one aweful piece of software which I rarely use now. Barring the crashes (ack. NB above) its usability is pretty poor.
I hope others have hade better experiences with it.
...but I tried Songbird and it was slow, prone to crashes, and generally not very useful. Compared to Banshee, it just didn't work well enough. I don't like to see any company stop supporting their software on Linux, but I'm hardpressed to find anyone I know who uses Songbird anyway.
This is a sad thing at the general level of Linux software, but so far as usefulness goes, not that big of a deal to me.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Why won't they support it on Linux? What exactly is OS-specific? Hopefully HTML5 audio and video support will help further abstract the songbird layer over firefox/gecko so that it doesn't rely on any OS-specific APIs at all and can be truly portable.
LOL, good job.
According to the songbird wiki, it is licenced GPL. Even so, they can certainly stop development for Linux and continue it for MS-Win/Mac. They're perfectly entitled to decide where they put their development efforts. (And with bloat, they need it) But they'll have to release the source from these developments to whomever gets binaries and allow them (or others) to port the changes to Linux.
It will be interesting if they try to keep anything secret. If they have taken in any community code/patches, the code is no longer theirs to relicence. Even if they have not, users have adopted Songbird partly on the basis of it being GPL, this gives them standing to sue that derivative works also must get source released. Which Songbird has primised anyways.
I've been using linux for around 4+ years and Slashdot for much much longer. I've never even heard of Songbird before.
It's true, kid. Get over it.
No, he's telling the truth. If you worked in the Unix development biz, you'd know that too.
Well, I do recall http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/25/1632244, amongst others...
I am so sick and tired of these april fools posts.
Been running Linux for about 8 yrs, I have tried loads of distros and for some reason I have never installed/user songbird. I'm pretty damn happy with amarok now.
I think the unix philosophy says that life's complex tasks should be accomplished by a collection of independent utilities that interact well together. In particular, the library and player functionality must be separated. In fact, you want the same basic library tools managing all your big file sets, ala ebooks, pictures, music, movies, porn, etc., albeit using different column sets.
How can one best achieve this? Do we even have a good separate file library system that'll track diverse file attributes? ReiserFS was perhaps one good underlying "data base". Otoh, iTunes doesn't even use the Mac filesystem's metadata facility. How about specialized MySQL storage engines?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
From the actual blog post, I'd wager that the issue they're having is building out things that need OS-specific bits for each of the majors OSes. They don't have the resources to do all 3, so they are dropping the OS that has the least profit (the OS of least interest to other hardware and software partners because it has the smallest market share): Linux. Which makes sense. They'll still develop it out and include and test the OS-specific bits for Win and Mac, but either not develop them for Linux (in which case said feature will be disabled or hidden in the Linux build) or develop them and not test them (hence the unsupported build warning). As the source will still be available, anybody is free to build out those Linux-specific bits if it interests them.
None of that requires anything secret or anything close to a violation of the GPL.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
While Linux doesn't have a player I like as much as Winamp, it has many which are adequate. I tried Songbird on Linux, and cannot remember what I thought of it or why I didn't continue using it, so I guess I have nothing to regret if they drop Linux (where I mainly use gmusicbrowser now).
Songbird is mainly useful on Macs, where iTunes doesn't support Flac or many other formats, and there is not a lot of choice of music players as there is on Windows or Linux.
checklist:
1) Tar..... check!
2) Feather.... check!
3) Pitchfork...check!
4) Torch.......check!
I am ready......
Goodbye lusers! And from the comments you managed to piss of most of your user base... GOOD MOVE!
EPIC FAILURE!
Next!
1311393600 - Back to Black
How the fuck is this interesting? There is absolutely nothing that would suggest this.
I can see why Songbird wants to get away from Linux support.. sound architecture on Linux is continually evolving... which is surprising because that's been the state of Linux audio for about 15 years. Every other Linux distro release features a completely new audio backend (admittedly, with benefits) but this breaks audio support in a lot of applications. That was one of the final straws for me on Fedora (now I use Ubuntu which suffers the same problem, but hasn't created as much work for me to have to fix things... a unified repository for desktop contrib modules is something Fedora hasn't learned yet).
I tried Songbird, and it's OK but it wasn't unique enough to sway me from Amarok.
By the way, for the Windows and GNOME users listening... /do not/ skip trying out Amarok simply because it depends on KDE libraries -- you'll be missing out. Amarok is by far my favorite Linux desktop application (and it's been my favorite for years), and I am quite attached to GNOME desktop also. Amarok does a lot more for organizing your song library compared to Songbird or RhythmBox. Not everyone else would care, but for me the #1 Amarok feature is the MySQL backend. This can't be understated - once you've FIXED all the bad MP3 tags in your collection, the advanced query manager is pretty cool at building playlists. Amarok provides a nice normalized song database in MySQL, and you can tap into that with your own custom modules or shell scripts. Finding duplicate songs is much easier.
The only downside to Amarok I guess would be if you're really attached to other programs, or use programs that only do "one thing" (play, tag, etc).
Truthfully, I've more often found out about software releases (particularly for Ubuntu) through places like Lifehacker.
Really, Slashdot tends to follow other sites when it comes to news these days.
I installed it when Amarok's UI got buggy and stuck with it since then. It crashes when attempting to read in my SID collection and I can't for some reason push any part of its window outside the borders of the screen (like on an Amiga) -- but other than that it's good enough.
The way it presents the music library made me listen to full albums again instead of constantly cobbling together impromptu playlists of isolated favourites-of-the-moment.
Too bad. But of course I can keep using it.
It is perfectly understandable for a business to avoid spending a lot of money building a Linux-specific version.
However - what they should do is add Wine as one of their officially supported "windows" platforms. For example, they can guarantee that a stock Ubuntu 10.04 desktop will be able to load their software with just one pre-requisite: apt-get install wine.
Mark
How can a company "remain loyal to open source" if it is dropping support for Linux? Sounds like more coporate "non-speak." Well, there are other good choices out there.
Depends on what kind of old school UNIX you're coming from. You say SunOS, so I'd imagine you're talking about the BSD-derived OS, rather than the more SysV-derived Solaris, in which case you'd find the userland on OS X quite familiar. If you used Solaris 7 with xdps and OpenStep then you'd find a lot more of OS X, including the developer tools and high-level APIs invoke a feeling of deja vu.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh well, at least I actually tried it. So I can say that it works. It is one of the better music players out there, but I don't like it, since I cannot collapse the song title column which makes my 20,000 plus song archive hard to use.
Most music players fal over if you have a really large number of titles. So my fallback is to use the file manager and a double click to launch XMMS.
Oh well.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Not only nothing indicates the inclusion of DRM, has the sibling post has mentioned, but implementing DRM in an OSS application is even more pointless than with a binary-only app.
If Songbird implements DRM, anyone can simply take the source, disable the DRM, recompile and distribute.
Dilbert RSS feed
Don't forget Juk.
It's not a joke.
OS X has great projects like fink to install and manage GNU software. I have a stable and consistent UI and all of the power of GNU tools from the command line.
I saw this story on OSNews and had to search for a bit to find out what Songbird was and why I should care. I thought it was the calendar component of the Mozilla suite, but apparently that's Sunbird. The first Linux I used was RedHat 4.2 and I've been reading /. on and off since about 2001. I wouldn't say iTunes sucks. Version 4 did pretty much everything that I want an app like that to do, and did it well. Every newer version has been a step backwards. I think other players passed it a while back, not by improving as much as by standing still while iTunes got progressively worse.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is exactly what we need. Tracker can handle all these file attributes. Your e-book reader, photo manager, music manager, and media center would just query Tracker and link to a library like GStreamer or libeview. Your application becomes just a "pipe" between parts that do one specific thing, and do it well.
https://sites.google.com/a/ibeentoubuntu.com/gng/Home -- take a look down at "Developer."
KB? SI units are meant to be computationally convenient, not arbitrarily assigned.
In all honesty, I don't know what to make of your .sig . So are you for kB or kiB? Powers of 2 are computationally convenient in this context, while a power of 10 would be arbitrary, whereas outside the context of bits, the reverse would be true.
...that killed X on the desktop.
Gstreamer, Bonobo, HAL, dbus, gnomevfs... I'm looking at all of you and more. Twisty mazes of library dependencies, all different; absolutely ZERO FUCKING BENEFIT delivered to the user... fuck them, fuck the Songbird guys for helping them spread, and fuck you just because I'm feeling generous at the moment.
I've noticed that many people here are saying that they hate Songbird, but I found it to be a very useful application. I liked the way that you could customize the interface with extensions. I also liked the fact that it had a web browser built into it. It was very convenient for looking up info about a song without having to launch a separate program. I'm really kinda sad that it never really took off, and I'll really be sad if the Linux version completely disappears. I just figured that I'd say that so that people reading this will know that songbird was not completely hated by all that have used it.
Desktop development of Linux has stagnated over the last 2 years. We have not seen anything but more fragmentation of the underlying building blocks and several high profile vendors have all said the same things. Adobe said the sound system sucks, Nvidia and ATI have complaints about X.Org windowing systems and in general while I love what Ubuntu has done, it "Appears" that they've dominated the direction desktop Linux is taking lately. I used to be impressed with every new build and the features it has brought, the last few releases bring nothing but yawns and maybe a new skin or some flashy effects, but nobody is addressing the more pressing issues of standards for underlying systems. I understand people want something customizable, but in the end you have to have standards so people who make you all these fun custom things can know what to expect when building them.
Not only nothing indicates the inclusion of DRM, has the sibling post has mentioned, but implementing DRM in an OSS application is even more pointless than with a binary-only app.
If Songbird implements DRM, anyone can simply take the source, disable the DRM, recompile and distribute.
Unless of course the DRM is imported from a closed source part (or third party DRM system), like a .dll file.
Compiling both qt and gtk on Gentoo is a bear for every security fix. Thank god for Qt being recently split up into different components making things a bit easier, though.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Actually, we are working on a branch of Songbird which will be community oriented (and use Git rather than SVN which POTI uses), maintains Linux support, fixes some of the silly issues which Songbird linux had, such as using Gstreamer system, and starts using less forked libraries. Those who are interested should visit #lyrebird on mozilla IRC, or http://talksongbird.com . There are some pretty quick changes we can add already (and have patches for). I also suspect that using Git will help accelerate development ;)
We aren't entirely up and running yet (it's only been a day), but as you can see from http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcU_F4NVncBXZGc0MmNkY3FfNjY0cDRrcW1mcw&hl=en , its been in the happening for a while now. Also, Lyrebird wont be the final name, we need to change it. But definitely looking for people (anyone feel like joining?). We will also be trying to get the code merged back into Songbird (so not a total fork).
Andrew Luecke
How can they with a straight face make such a claim when they intend to let the Linux version to slowly die of bit rot? Their platitudes towards Linux and the community is nothing short of a backhanded slap in the face.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I call Shenanigans! A real old school Unix user would have:
b) Waxed nostalgically about Unix (at least 3 full paragraphs)
As for me, an old school Unix user, I switched to Mac because it was the best computer I could steal. The old lady I took it from still thinks her toaster is the slowest screen saver ever.
Why are you pretending to be an old school Unix user?
Not only that, but the default call to action is not to ask some volunteers to help with a fork, but to incite rage against the songbird publishers when their product failed in the market (as evidenced elsewhere in this discussion).
So, unless I already have a more or less perfect product and marketing, why would I want to risk entering this community which is apparently hostile in the common case of failure?
Gstreamer used to be the first thing I'd (painfully) strip out of Ubuntu, because it never fucking worked and every program wanted to use it by default.
About the time it got good enough to leave in they broke audio far, far worse with the premature inclusion of PulseAudio. I hear it's gotten better, but Ubuntu's inability to get its shit together on audio (which was weird, since audio'd been Just Working (TM) for me in Linux since '04 or so) drove me to delete its partition and banish it to a Virtual Box VM, only "booting" it up to write code.
Any Windows program that advertised the porting and inclusion of either of these things would cause me to run way the hell away and find some other solution.
So? There is not really a difference between "disabling code" and "disabling a call to code".
Hrm, I recall having gotten one version of Songbird's iTunes library plugin to handle my copied-over library on Linux, but a subsequent change broke it, and it was never formally supported in Linux anyway.
The only thing I care about in a Linux-based 'iTunes replacement' would be actually supporting a legacy iTunes fileset, preferably over NFS/SMB/Appletalk. I almost got Rhythmbox to do it, but it kept hanging as it tried to rescan all the media files. Songbird worked for a little while and then stopped.
Meh.
So? There is not really a difference between "disabling code" and "disabling a call to code".
And then you're unable to play the DRM content. I suspect the parent meant you could start playing DRM'd files like that, since you can modify the DRM system in the code.
Actually, real old-school Unix guys love SCO for giving them some sweet x86 love back in the '90s, and wonder why these young Linux guys hate them so much. Then you inform them that years ago some tiny Linux startup led by a giant jackass went, bought the brand from the SCO guys then proceeded to sue everybody left and right while the old SCO changed its name to the horribly-sounding "Tarantella" before being acquired by Sun before being acquired by Oracle, at which point they usually say something along the lines of "man, that's too complicated. Just gimme an old 486, a copy of SCO Unix and lemme do my work in peace, 'kay?".
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I've seen a lot of posts that are essentially saying, "good riddance." However, I will miss Songbird. Let me tell you why. When Songbird was first released, it ate through way too much memory for me to be able to use it in Linux. I love the features though, so I kept checking back as new releases came out. By about version 1.0 or so, the memory leaks were taken care of, and it was a great music player! It has far more features than Rhythmbox, especially for managing your song library and meta-data (I have about 12,000 songs, so I appreciate this). As compared to Amarok, it knocked it out of the park. Amarok crashed for me all the time (I've heard it doesn't do well with large libraries), I personally find it ugly, and the layout is unnecessarily cluttered. Songbird has worked like a dream after they fixed their beta-version issues. It's nice to look at, easy to use, very customizable, and should also make iTunes users feel at home (although it has many, many advantages over iTunes). So Songbrid, I will miss you. I'll keep your current version on my system for as long as I can, but with my distro upgrades, etc., you will probably be swept away within a few years. So long, and thanks for all the music.
I tried using Songbird on OS X and tried to help a little. I submitted a few bugs and tried building it a few times, once or twice successfully. In the end, I found it to be bloated, buggy, and unusable. I thought about "contributing" (fixing things), but when I looked at the so-called architecture (using a browser framework to implement a media player?!), I gagged, uninstalled Songbird, and never looked back.
I think of things like this as Fucking Gothic Cathedrals (FGCs). The equivalent C/C++ code would probably run in 10% of its footprint and at 5000% of its performance. Maybe I'm behind the times, but the idea of doing everything inside a browser seems stupid to me. Just saying.
I've never been a big fan of Songbird. I heard about it a couple years ago; nobody I knew actually used it, but it got some rave reviews on blogs, so I thought I had better check it out.
Songbird is a very awkward program with many flaws. What it is is basically a web browser with a music player hacked into it. It's more or less a fork of Firefox. Do you really want to run a fork of Firefox? I sure didn't; I already had Firefox running on my desktop--now it was running twice just to play music. Forget about it! It's a huge waste of resources, and I didn't much care to do all my web browsing from within Songbird... I want a web browser that's designed to be a web browser, not a music player (for security's sake).
Another big problem with Songbird is that it uses XULRunner, but it doesn't use XULRunner. XULRunner is meant to be a general purpose run time that many programs can utilize, but Songbird has a fork of XULRunner customized *just* for Songbird. Not only does it completely defeat the purpose of XULRunner, but packagers don't want to package it--Fedora already had an XULRunner package, so why should they make another just for Songbird? Who wants to deal with the mess of packaging Songbird with its own XULRunner environment when there is already a package for that? When I asked the Songbird developers what sense there was in forking XULRunner, they simply said "well it doesn't do what we want." Boo hoo... let's say Java doesn't do what you want, so you fork the JRE and rewrite it instead of rewriting your application. That's all well and good--now watch everyone *not* install your Java fork. Next thing you know the Songbird team will be forking Linux to add Songbird-specific codes to the kernel.
Honestly, Sonbird is neat, but it's just not practical. I can't recommend it to anyone. I've used Amarok, and these days I use Banshee. Those are only two of the many great media players available for Linux. Hardly anyone is going to notice that Songbird has dropped Linux support.
The decision to drop support for GNU/Linux and instead put more effort towards video support was poorly thought out. Especially when you consider they're keeping OSX support. Drop a platform which favors FLOSS software to support platforms dominated by iTunes and with lots of users who couldn't care less about Songbird as an iTunes alternative. This decision is the start of the end for Songbird.
Blah, blah, KDE, Gnome, blah, blah, version 3.x to 4.x, blah, blah, DRM2, Gallium whatever. WOW! Gigawatts of flux.
Your post underscores the parent's point. Linux has stagnated. Version bumps and DRM2 only get YOUR motor started, and guess what -- you already use Linux.
Underlying systems. General usability. Drivers that work and are supported. Linux has a ways to go.
What was the most discussed change in the upcoming Ubuntu release? Whether the window widgets were going to be on the right or the left side. Wake me up when I can hook my Linux box into my HDTV using a dvi to hdmi converter and be able to get the screen dimensions right without doing nasty things to my X config files. That's consumer grade. Linux remains hacker/hobby grade despite efforts by Canonical and others, and now Nvidia and others are starting to flake off. With Apple's non-iPod products providing many users with "just works" systems on decent hardware with functional UI and still providing the *nix capabilities to run the "12 line shell script he uses for grabbing entries from /var/log/messages" someone joked about above, perhaps Linux's foray into mainstream has apexed.
Be angry all you want. Flag me flamebait or troll, fine, but first put up some sort of evidence that the next desktop upgrade or Gallium3d is going to make anyone but you stand in line to get the latest Linux distro.
What - this is surprising? It's not really. They dropped trying to support iPods back in December (and any extensions of that gist), and now this - that's surprising? It's easy enough to open up one's eyes and look at the bigger picture. The more GNU/linux is being accepted, the more the lines are going to be drawn on software and software projects. Besides, it's dog-slow anyways, there's heaps better alternatives that suck up way less system resource - oh yeah, and work faster, too.
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
c) Included "rm -SCO" or "sudo fuck SCO" in their post
sudo fsck SCO. And you call yourself an old-school Unix user.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I have used QCD (quintessential media playerd) for a long time, an it works for me
News for you, System V was crap. Which is why UNIX died and one of the main reasons Linux is a bloated mess. You don't call that nostalgia, it is Stockholm syndrome.
Switched to Banshee long ago.
Old school Unix? MacOS? You must be joking?
I say that as an old SunOS user that ignores his mini that sits under the desk.
Funny considering that most of Sun's Solaris engineers use MacBook Pro's.
I really don't see Linux's vaunted stability with Ubuntu, especially with media players. I was pretty happy with Amarok (the only one I could get to work decently to that point), but then it broke for no discernible reason. Do you have another distro you would recommend that has similar usability, but perhaps more power options and stability?
I'm personally very disappointed with this decision. Having a fairly fast computer and a music library containing under 2000 files, I've experienced none of the delays and usability problems other people are complaining about. My only problem with it is that a third party addon I favor is incompatible with the latest builds. It has tons of addons, it looks great, and the UI is pretty simple. It's my favourite music player. This news makes me very sad.
"All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in another sense."
``Your post underscores the parent's point. Linux has stagnated. Version bumps and DRM2 only get YOUR motor started, and guess what -- you already use Linux.
Underlying systems. General usability. Drivers that work and are supported. Linux has a ways to go.''
People have been making posts like yours for at least 15 years. I don't disagree with you, but I will point out that, in the meantime, Linux has gone from a pet project that a bunch of hackers did just for kicks to a major force that most people have heard of and giant corporations account for in their strategies.
``Linux remains hacker/hobby grade despite efforts by Canonical and others, and now Nvidia and others are starting to flake off.''
Linux is the hacker/hobby grade project that also happens to be pushed by the likes of Google, Oracle, IBM, Dell, HP, and Novell. Not to mention all the big-name corporations that are using it.
``With Apple's non-iPod products providing many users with "just works" systems on decent hardware with functional UI and still providing the *nix capabilities to run the "12 line shell script he uses for grabbing entries from /var/log/messages" someone joked about above, perhaps Linux's foray into mainstream has apexed.''
Perhaps it has. As far as I can tell, Linux desktop share is about the same as OS X desktop share. Some sources have the one higher, others have the other higher. Is OS X not ready for the desktop? For that matter, is Windows ready for the desktop? If "just works" is the criterion, Windows certainly wouldn't be high on my list. Yet it seems to hold at least 90% of the market share on the desktop.
Once again, I don't necessarily disagree with you. I do think you have a couple of your facts wrong, but I won't dispute that Linux doesn't have a huge share of the desktop sphere, nor will I dispute that there are things that could be improved in Linux-land.
However, I am at a loss as to what your point is. You say your parent missed the point. I'm missing it, too. What _is_ your point, really?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
MiB?! We really need an "evil" tag!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I've not been impressed with it on any platform as all it does is crash whenever I attempt to import my music library.
No sig for you!!
I don't know about your HDTV, HDMI and DVI, but at least a friend's computer needed no configuring at all to get it to work properly in the correct resolution for his HTPC. Same kind of setup. It just worked (tm) with Ubuntu 9.04 IIRC, with no xorg.conf hacking. That's consumer grade, according to you.
Only a few years ago, every screen needed to be set up with correct modelines; it's a fairly recent development that you don't need an xorg.conf. The driver sets the correct resolution automatically in most cases. I'm sure this somehow "confirms" stagnation to you.
Also, Gallium3d and DRI2 are excellent examples of underlying systems that will improve usability and make driver development easier and more unified. Your whole "argument" depends on ignoring that simple fact.
I don't care whether it will improve Linux's market share. I don't work in advertising.
I am suddenly enraged about a piece of software I had no idea existed, had no intention of using, and never even considered looking at before.
...Have I finally found the community I belong to...?
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
Another such "K" program that uses neither KDE nor QT libraries is k3d, a 3D modeling program similar to Blender. And don't forget KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine.
Aww, this news makes me sad. I have Songbird installed on all of my 4 Ubuntu Desktops.. I quite like it. Yes it's not perfect, but it's damn fine and I shed a lone tear to read they're not going to be continuing official Linux support. Maybe I'll just go back to "mp3blaster", or "mpg123".. or records for that matter.
Wake me up when I can hook my Linux box into my HDTV using a dvi to hdmi converter and be able to get the screen dimensions right without doing nasty things to my X config files. That's consumer grade.
Sounds painfully similar to my experiences with Nvidia hardware on Windows 7 x64... (hours of attempts at hacking away at .inf files, attempting to override EDID values from the display, and searching out different drivers versions to try).
As soon as I tossed an ATI card with a real HDMI-out port on it, everything just magically worked.
No.. It isn't.. I'm a songbird champ, and that isn't something that will happen..
Say Irregardless one more time motherfucker! BMF
Read: we want to make more money, and Linux doesn't really let us do that. We'd rather sell the product to Windows and Macs and make money, than live up to the original ideals that we released the software under in the first place. Never used it, certainly wouldn't now.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
There was amarok 1.x ...which was brilliant. ... Then for some f****** reason, they decided to make 2.x and that signaled the end of that.
Then began the great linux-music player search. Everything from mplayer to xmms to rhythmbox to
*songbird* to banshee was tried.
Since the songbird UI looked cool,it was given a real go till it choked the system to multiple near-death experiences.
So, I turned to banshee and been using it ever since.
Long story short... no one gives a shit!
I'm sure everybody here is all happy as a pig in shit you learned a new word today, but do you really have to wear it out in one sitting on /.?
No loss, it SUCKED anyhow no matter what platform it was on.
And iTunes still sucks too.
I mean, music players are dime a dozen. It's everybody's favorite app that is fashionable to be developed, and you have most of the framework already done for you (masses of truly superb media libraries, like ffmpeg, mplayer and gstreamer). Just punch up a GUI you like in a language you like, spice it with some nice features and you're good to go.
The only thing that made Songbird remarkable was their purpose to build a truly multi-platform music player by leveraging the Mozilla-developed portable XUL-engine. Now they failed just that? So what you have left is a bloated hunk of glue that failed to make it work. Oh well, back to recommending foobar2000 to all windows users.
Their last release seems to indicate more looming bloat, by adding video playback to a music player. I hated it everytime winamp jumps up trying to play every video file, yet the b*st*rd keeps stealing file associations by default.. In addition to betraying the GNU/Linux platform, Songbird also eschewed the UNIX philosophy of having many simple tools for specific purposes.
Anyway, the development is driven by a _company_, not a community, so I guess they are free to do whatever their moneygrubbing masters tell them. Most ad/referral-revenue probably lingers on the yet-most-prolific platforms. As a Linux-user I don't consider a music player to play any part in purchasing music, quite unlike iTunes-victims on other platforms.
Debian's always been my personal fallback solution, though it's far more obtuse to install than Ubuntu and has fewer things installed and working by default afterward. Don't like RPM-based distros much, personally. Gentoo was my distro of choice before Ubuntu, but it's pretty hardcore, definitely not a good choice for usability. Still has my favorite package manager ever, though I could do without the constant compiling.
I'm not really sure these days. Ubuntu was so good for so long that I'm not up on many other distros. The last 2-3 versions have really sucked, though. Some good features were added (wireless has gotten far better with every release, for instance) but others were so bad that they offset any gains.
As for media players specifically, I've yet to find one that I liked and that wasn't an unstable piece of crap or a massive resource hog. My advice is aim lower; learn to accept a player one tier of features under Amarok (warning: it will probably be a GTK app). Then again, your trouble may have been Ubuntu's recent and inexplicable sound system shakeup, in which case it might sort itself out in the upcoming release.
Sorry that I'm not much help. Between the fact that I only run Linux in a VM these days and that Ubuntu hadn't given me a good reason to leave for so long, I'm out of the loop. If the next version sucks as much as the last couple, though, I'll be right with you digging through distrowatch.
Have you tried Exaile yet? Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python, uses about 100 MiB resident memory with my ~8500 song library and a bunch of loaded plugins. It's surprisingly fast despite being a Python program. The UI closely resembles the old Amarak 1.x series although it carries less eye candy which you probably like as a GNOME user.
My other favorite for older systems or a laptop running on batteries is ncmpcpp, an ncurses based MPD client written in C++, similar to ncmpc but with a bunch of nice extra features like a flexible search form. Also, the name ncmpcpp has to be the pinnacle of FOSS marketing & branding! That name basically melts on your tongue!
I actually liked Songbird. No, it wasn't perfect, but it showed a lot of potential. It was bad enough that the Linux version was so Linux-dependent (I run FreeBSD), but this just makes things even worse. It's a sad day... hopefully other projects can pick up the slack, but the Songbird team are really shooting themselves in the foot here and forgetting their roots (and support/fan community).
Why would you care if your media player supports some DRM scheme? Don't buy DRM'd media and you won't have to worry about it.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
KDE, Gnome, DRM2, and Gallium3d ARE underlying systems. KDE and Gnome are much more then GUIs, they are also suites of libraries and backends for all sorts activities. KDE 4 was a user space change in the same order of magnitude as the Apple OS 9- OS X switch.
DRM2, gallium3d, and KMS are ways to clean up graphics drivers. Nvidia stopped developing it's open source video drivers since Noveau is much better at this point, and they still support and are making large changes to their closed source driver.
Every Linux computer I've tried to hook up to my HDTV has worked fine. The all are semi-modern and have HDMI output though, so can't speak to what your problem might be.
The velocity of Linux is as high or higher then it ever has been. You might not be happy with the current product, but that doesn't mean it's not improving quickly. It has also "just worked" for me for years now. As the web continues to grow into the dominant application platform, Linux continues to become more and more relevant, and there's less and less downside to switching from Windows or OS X.g
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I just switched from Amarok 2 to Songbird, I tried it many times, but not until 1.4.3 did I find it stable and usable and have all the bugs kinked out that made it me want to switch to use it across me windows, linux and osx machines, only to discover that the next day the dropped linux support. My fav. player to date has been Foobar2000 but thats windows only any cross platform music players anyone would like to suggest. I know amarok is working on a osx and windows version.....
how is this news at all? If the free software advocates are to be believed then there should be no issue here whatsoever, if songbird has a user-base then it will survive, well that's the idea anyway. Let's see how right they are.
Source link here, although your distro should have it in repo. It will take entire folders and turn them into a playlist, and it does it on the console, without the need for XULRunner. It's written in Python as well, so hacking it to support video players should be second nature for most of you.
An anonymous reader writes
what nonsense. Songbird is written in GTK+ and works much better on Linux than on Windows.
They maybe drop the Windows support becease they get tired of porting tons of code ;)