Slashdot Mirror
Linux Foundation President Used MacOS For Presentation at Open Source Summit (itsfoss.com)
Slashdot reader mschaffer writes:It appears that Jim Zemlin, President of the Linux Foundation, was using MacOS while declaring "2017 is officially the year of the Linux desktop!" at the Open Source Summit 2017. This was observed by several YouTube channels: Switched to Linux and The Lunduke Show. Finally it was reported by It's FOSS.
if, indeed, this is the year of desktop Linux, why oh why cannot people like Zemlin present a simple slide presentation -- let alone actually use a Linux distro for work.
A security developer at Google has now "spotted Jim Zemlin using Apple's macOS twice in last four years," according to the article, which complains the Foundation's admirable efforts on cloud/container technology has them neglecting Linux on the desktop.
Ironically, in March Zemlin told a cloud conference that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
if, indeed, this is the year of desktop Linux, why oh why cannot people like Zemlin present a simple slide presentation -- let alone actually use a Linux distro for work.
A security developer at Google has now "spotted Jim Zemlin using Apple's macOS twice in last four years," according to the article, which complains the Foundation's admirable efforts on cloud/container technology has them neglecting Linux on the desktop.
Ironically, in March Zemlin told a cloud conference that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
Inuff said.
When I present, usually my slides are loaded onto a conference laptop.
Ha ha!
Please also tell us your theories on how Trump was behind 9/11!
Well, maybe he's still living it.
Maybe there just haven't been any shared innovation on the Linux desktop. Ever thought about that? ;D
That's entirely normal. Those machines belong to the conference and presenters supposedly have no say. I guess people are expecting everyone to be paranoid like rms when it comes to commercial software (or more recently, open source software such as LLVM.)
Even rms gave one of his TED(x?) talks from a Windows machine. Stop being paranoid.
There is no good software for presentations on Linux that compares to Keynote or PowerPoint.
Jupyter Notebooks presentation mode is great.
It is lacking in key features like "Word Art", but for a technical presentation it's pretty good.
...not as I do. Horrible! As someone who ran a presentation to Intel execs back in 2003 using OO running under Linux on an Itanium, I call Bullshit(TM) on anyone who says "Oh - nothing else measures up to Powerpoint!".
Do you want to know the best way for an executive to give an out of touch presentation?
Don't use your own product.
What this guy does isn't a huge deal, but if he had personal trouble with the linux desktop, perhaps he or most likely one of the developers under his influence would scratch that itch for all of us. Leadership is a tough thing when you don't live by example.
There is no good software for presentations on Linux that compares to Keynote or PowerPoint.
I've found this to be true only at very extreme levels of flashiness where razzle and dazzle are more important than content, and you want people paying attention to the special effects rather than the point you're trying to get across, if there even is one.
The most probable scenario for this, in my own experience, is suits selling expensive stuff to suits ... stuff that the salesman doesn't really understand and the prospective buyer maybe isn't capable of understanding.
Short of that, if you, you know, actually want to get a message across, Linux has all sorts of excellent options.
My desktop has been linux for maybe 9 years now. started centos 5 with no windows boot after dual booting fedora/windows since the 90s.
Year of the linux desktop kinda irrelevent now isn't it? Linux devices have had the lions share of global cpu cycles since the samsung s5. Even microsoft released its flagship visual studio product for generic linux in recent years, and office runs on android linux natively for a while, not that you need it now libreoffice has the ribbon ui. China and Russia and many other countries have linux variants.
Only guys waiting for the linux desktop are the people who don't earn enough to buy a semi decent phone.
I'm no Apple user so I don't know about Keynote. But for ensuring compatibility, I make sure that my wife's PowerPoint presentations are all converted to PDF.
Anyway, in Linux you could use Impress, which is more than enough for most people in need of a graphical slide editor.
As for me, in my lectures I use Beamer in LaTeX, which is more than enough for my needs. And its output is, again, PDF.
I can project anything of these with Okular in presentation mode, easily. So I think Linux is more than capable in the area.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
If true, this story would be disappointing, because of the hypocrisy if for no other reason. I've searched for articles or photographic proof of the claim but not found any yet... There are images of the presentation up and running, but the display shows an all-screen slide and it isn't possible to definitively identify the operating software.
The only reason I ask [and I don't have an opinion on the claim one way or the other] is because I'm aware of several friends of mine who run both Windows and Linux on MacBook Pro hardware. Their justification is that even though it's crazy-expensive, the Apple MacBook Pro hardware is among the very best available today, hence their use of the product. I make this additional observation because if Zemlin walked in to the theatre / hall carrying a MacBook Pro it would be easy to conclude that he was running MacOS. However, until there is actual concrete proof, nobody can say with certainty what OS the guy is running.
Perfectly happy to express my disappointment when the evidence is on the table, but until then...
My desktop has been linux for maybe 9 years now. started centos 5 with no windows boot after dual booting fedora/windows since the 90s.
I'm pretty sure Fedora didn't exist in the '90s. I assume you mean Red Hat?
My FOSS days started in 1995 with FreeBSD, and then in 1996 with Linux (Slackware Unleashed, I forget the Version) in the University, then I was a firm proponent on the server side... I've been hearing about the linux desktop for a loooong time...
But, that was 22 years ago. Nowadays, in a production desktop, I have some requirements, which are quite different from the requirements on a Phone, or a Kiosk, or a retail point, or a computer for Kids/Schools:
* I want the power of an OpenSource Unix (Darwin) under the Hood, wrapped in a slick GUI (sadly, propiertary) that makes my workflow Easier and does not change all of the sudden (BTW, Ubuntians, how's the Transition from MIR/Unity to Wayland GNOME going?).
* Also, is nice if the Hardware in which that software resides is well built, and all the drivers play nice (granted, thanks to things like Dell's project MIR, this is easier nowadays with Linux too). I have stuff to do. Playing decetvive with drivers and libraries was entertaining in 2002 (last time I did that). Nowadays, not so much, quite the contrary, very, very frustrating!!!
* Also, I want commonly used productivity Software available, no matter if it is FOSS or Closed. The dektop/laptop is a TOOL for Production, I want to use the most suitable tools to do my work. For instance, when I was teaching at the university, I did Everything using LibreOffice (for MAC). When I started doing technical training for Telco OpenStack Cloud (Huawei's Flavour) and Hadoop/Spark/Storm (Nokia's CEMoD 16), I pretty much had to use Office. otherwise, the powerpoints would loose all formatting, and it would take ages to fix that (and no one paid me to fix it), Macros in the Excel report sheets would be borked. Also, many iLO/IPIMI/Javascript crap would not work on Linux... You get the drift.
* But, from time to time I have to unwind. I want the available games in steam for my machine to cont in the Thousands, not in the hundreds...
* Speaking of telco clouds: What do you think those clouds used? If you guessed KVM, Redhat, CentOS, SuSE, Apache, Puppet, MariaDB, Postgres, yarn, etc, you are right, come collect your prize. The requirements for servers are different than from desktop, which in turn are different from cellphones, which in turn are different from kids/school computers, which in turn are different from ... you get the idea!!!
Now, these are the reasons why he did it. Having said that, the irony does not escape me that, he being a top dog in a linux company, he should "Eat his own dog food". Even microsoft eats their own dog food.
But, this being The Linux Foundation, and not The GNU/Linux foundation, or the FOSS foundation: how much of FOSS is "his own dog food". Certainly the linux kernel is. But neither X-free86 nor Wayland seems to be part of his dog food. Nor are KDE/GNOME/Enligthment/all other window environments out there. Is Pulseaudio/ALSA part of his dog food? What about security practices like demanding the root PW for changing the timezone or adding a printer from school? So, If the guy used a MAC with OSX instead of linux, can you blame him? perhaps a little bit, yes. If he also used PowerPoint or Keynote instead of LibreOffice, can you blame him? In my oppinion, no way!!!!
Do not believe me, well, perhaps this guy who was using a macbook on 2012 (with linux), that does not like GNOME 3 and maybe, just maybe, knows a thing or two about linux (certainly he knows more about linux than me and you), can enlighten you all, even more than I can, on why some people preffer MACs to Linux and WinPCs. Please read his rant on the link...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/l...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
There is, unfortunately, among certain developer communities a certain mindset that allows a thought process that seems to go something like this:
I have a new idea. This new idea will disrupt everything and is therefore good. Everything from before must go. Rinse, repeat.
I guess it makes them a living. It makes working around them hell.
It just happens that Redhat employs certain highly visible people. If you look a bit closer, you find much of this and it's underpinnings come out of freedesktop.org and in aggregate those folks are all over the place.
fedora was launced 2003 according to wikipedia, before that was mandrake linux and an early redhat, but fedora was the first install i started using more than windows. all basically the same because they use the redhat rpm system.
Have you ever presented at an actual business? The razzle dazzle is the only part that counts at the end of the day.
Presented stuff many, many times, but to be fair, it was almost always technical stuff where content mattered.
Eat your own dog food.
If you can't, then you have no faith in your own products.
To be honest, Linux Foundation was always just some-off, not-affecting-me group anyway. I never quite get what they do, or where the money comes from or goes to.
But you can't say "Linux does/doesn't work on the desktop" until you've done it yourself.
P.S. Yes, I've done it. Exclusively. For 8+ years. While managing Windows networks for a living. It's perfectly viable, and in many ways better.
Nowadays, though, I virtualise everything so it barely matters what the core-OS is and can work in Linux or Windows depending on what I'm doing.
For sure, if I was working for something called the Linux Foundation, myself and EVERYONE under me would be using Linux. Unless I literally had used it and had deemed it inadequate myself, in which case there's be bigger problems than what my people were using to get their work done.
You raise valid questions, but the original assertion was that Linux doesn't have decent presentation software, and the scope of my reply including that, and no more.
But I will answer you briefly: Linux offers openness, freedom, and control. It also does everything I need with increasingly little in the way of limitations for the things I need to do. That's why I use it. Whether that line of thought and practice provides a sufficient business case for others is up to them to decide. Obviously, we should use what works for us. I'm not at all from the school that says everyone should be on Linux. Some should, some shouldn't, and for many it probably doesn't matter either way.
Yes, apologies for broadening the scope. I didn't mean to imply that your response was one to be applied to everything.
I certainly see why some people use it, I don't use it exclusively but I do use it in scenarios where it is the most appropriate choice. It just so happens those are very niche.
once vulkin gets more widely used this will remove the last big roadblock for linux and thats games.
Agreed with parent. And in addition, the examples offered by grandparent are corner cases. Most desktop work is done in an office suite and/or a Web browser. In both regards, Linux is well covered.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I use LibreOffice. Never had a problem with PowerPoint compatibility in either direction.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Saying 2017 is "officially the year of Linux desktop" is pure bullshit anyways, so he could be using a Surface Studio for all I care.
Linux dominates a whole ton of categories, including servers and supercomputers, but let's cut the bullshit right there.
Linux doesn't even have the same marketshare Windows 8.1 has, which has the same marketshare of Windows XP.
Windows 10 has like over double of both put together, and Windows 7 almost double of Windows 10.
That's how distant Linux is. Mac OS has a bigger market share than all Linux distros put together on desktops.
In any case, it's just weird... it's not like you can't make presentations on Linux or anything like that. Doesn't look good when the president of a foundation doesn't actively use what he's supposed to be promoting though.
Ironically, in March Zemlin told a cloud conference that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
What's ironic? macOS does "harvest" open source code. Tons of it.
Should be taken outside and shot behind the chemical shed
Jim Zemlin is a well-known idiot who is more tolerated by the community than respected. He is found of boasting about how he "writes Linus's paycheck". In reality, Jim Zemlin is just a random no-talent enjoying a free ride by being at the right place at the right time.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
All that does is change the question to why a conference called the "Open Source Summit 2017" does not use Linux to present. I suspect the reason is that presentations are all about polish and while I love Open Source software the one (and perhaps only) thing that commercial software does seem to do better is polish.
Simple OpenOffice and Libre Officer are just not nearly as good as Microsoft Office. I use Linux every day for work but I also have a Windows PC just for Office and Skype for Business, Google Docs, OpenOffice, and Libre Office are just not as good as Microsoft Office. Until it is it people will use OS/X and Windows.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Most desktop work is done in an office suite and/or a Web browser. In both regards, Linux is well covered.
In that case the operating system doesnt matter at all so why bother using something different to all the people in your organization to which the operating system does matter? Case in point there was no reason for Jim Zemlin to use Linux over Mac in his presentation so he just used Mac.
It's called "eating your own dogfood". It's disingenuous to promote a platform without at least using it yourself.
You get "Word Art" with inkscape.
Although it is 2017, and LibreOffice requires an external editor to launch. There's no excuse why we can't embed Inkscape, Dia, Xmind, etc. directly into LibreOffice when the user adds a file of that type to the document..
-dk
Fair question. First, I'll give you an answer which was already offered in this thread:
Second, as for using "something different to all the people in my organization", I'm my own organization. I work for myself so I get to choose my platform.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
So you've got nice and open Linux, then you've got relatively locked down but still pretty freedom-oriented Windows. Then a million miles away in a different dimension and outside the observable universe you've got Apple as a company and all their garbage products by extension. But you guys know how Apple fanboys are. They're stuck in 2004 when owning Apple products made you better than everyone else and everyone was so jealous of your ability to spend money you don't have.
Live-debugging my X config file in front of a room of open-source users is not my idea of a good time.
They'd be perfectly civilized until you picked between vi and emacs...
Real lawyers write in C++
for those of us actually out in the field doing the hard work of switching small businesses to Linux that statement is rarely true. Quickbooks unfortunately doesn't run on Linux and when you setup a samba server it does not work with more than one user. I'm afraid I have to inform you that many many small businesses probably the majority cannot use Linux on the desktop if they need Quickbooks and unfortunately, at least here in the USA most of them use Quickbooks.
A long time ago, I walked through LinuxWorld about an hour before it was open to the public, and nearly every large screen that was about to be used for presentations was showing a Windows logo.
Also, I've been trying to ditch Windows for Linux for a very long time, easily 15 years, and I haven't been able to do it. There are simply too many apps I depend on for work and recreational computing that don't have serviceable equivalents under Linux, not to mention the still poor driver support for things like large format color printers.
Because of my professional background, I likely hate MS more than the average person on this site, yet I effectively have no choice but to stick with Windows or make the big shift to a Mac and support a company I hate nearly as much as I do MS.
Keep apologizing.
Then why are you (presumably) in the business of switching small businesses to Linux, if it won't work for them?
As I've made clear above, I'm all for Linux because it's right for me (and many, many others).
But if it's not a fit, and something else is ... leave things alone.
I use LibreOffice. Never had a problem with PowerPoint compatibility in either direction.
I used to say that.
Last April I was given a MS PPT to convert to LibreOffice. The bullets changed (and not in a good way), the font changed, all the indents changed, all the animations stopped working, and there were problems with some of the images. Essentially I had to recreate the entire presentation.
Then when I tried moving it back, everything fell apart again regardless in which file format I "saved as."
There was a time when I could create PPT presentations and move them between OSes. It doesn't appear to be that way anymore.
BTW, I had all the MS fonts installed on my Linux machine, the most recent kernel, and most recent LibreOffice. My distro uses rolling updates. Didn't matter.
LibreOffice still has work to do. I'll still promote it to people I know. But it still needs work.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
at allot of conferences you see alot of macs, even among OSS devs. many run Linux/BSD in a VM. even some of the kernel devs work in this work flow. I know a few OSS Devs and most have Macs, and Run in VMs.
and anyone who thinks, impress is anywhere close to keynote or powerpoint in dreaming is like 10 years behind and thats being nice. I tryed to
do a impress deck once with video, audio transitions and i spent days on it and it never worked. but i was able to do it in powerpoint in a few hours.
THATS why he used a mac.... its very simple he wants to get shit done... and I am really sure i has Linux VMs he spends most of his time in....
Sun's Scott McNealy cared - he cared a lot.
Ken
Have you ever presented at an actual business? The razzle dazzle is the only part that counts at the end of the day.
Depends on the business. This may be true if you're presenting to idiots or if presentations never existed before 2002.
Frankly, reveal.js is all most people need who can hack out some trivial HTML - you'll save tons of time nudging around layouts. You should only be illustrating your talk with slides anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
why bother using something different to all the people in your organization to which the operating system does matter? Case in point there was no reason for Jim Zemlin to use Linux over Mac in his presentation so he just used Mac.
Did you forget that Jim Zemlin is President of the Linux Foundation? If Jim is using a MacOS laptop because that's what everyone in his organization uses, then that begs the question even harder - how can the Linux Foundation argue convincingly that Linux is poised to take over the desktop if the Linux Foundation can't/hasn't cut over their operations to Linux?
Ken
His ORGANIZATION is the Linux Foundation, does no one there use Linux on their desktop?
Ken
As noted by others (perhaps at even more excessive length than me), it's reasonable to have different o/s and software environments for different uses.
Even inside the Linux Foundation?
Reminds me of when Sun railed against corporations using IBM computers, but ran their back-office on an IBM Mainframe complex...
Ken
Sounds like the Linux Foundation is in need of a new President.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
If it does everything you want then great, but most people are interested in running their applications rather than caring what operating system is running. There are certainly applications that run on macOS that do not run on Linux, maybe Jim Zemlin needs (or prefers) one of those or perhaps there is some feature in macOS that he likes that Linux-based operating systems do not provide.
Yes as the head of the Linux Foundation giving a presentation on mainstream usage of Linux that does send a bad message but outside of that role why should he use Linux over macOS? Like what is it that Linux offers to the average desktop user that macOS and Windows do not?
Please also tell us your theories on how Trump was behind 9/11!
Silly - Obama is the villian. He didn't do one thing about 9/11. There's no denying that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I use LibreOffice. Never had a problem with PowerPoint compatibility in either direction.
I used to say that.
Last April I was given a MS PPT to convert to LibreOffice. The bullets changed (and not in a good way), the font changed, all the indents changed, all the animations stopped working, and there were problems with some of the images.
I've had that happen from one Windows machine to another. Or Windows to MacOS. Or MacOS to Windows. Office is simply not compatible with anything - including itself. This is exactly why I insisted on the presentation running on a vetted laptop where the presentation was opened, saved, and all slides veerified if MO was used.
There is only one Office suite that works on all three, and is compatible between all three. And that is AO.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Macs have now"
Now?
Small sample size, but of the two Macs I've owned in my life, both died after a couple of years. Power supply went wiggy in one, while the other died because the display cable was stupidly put in a poorly-designed hinge (as Apple eventually admitted publicly). They fixed the latter the first time it went out because of the stupid design decision (driven no doubt by narcissistic sociopath pseudoartist Steve Jobs), but when it inevitably went out again they wouldn't. I have literally 10+ year PC laptops that still run.
One workaround is to do presentations on Libreoffice, and then have also portable versions (Windows and OSX) of libreoffice on your USB-stick with the prensentations.
Despite its name the Linux Foundation has no direct relationship to Linux. It's yet another open source foundation, like Apache and Eclipse, and is very business-friendly and business-oriented. Indeed most of its projects have open source licenses other than GPL.
Which isn't to say that using a Mac in this case isn't ironic. But what's more ironic is the Linux Foundation's name.
Strictly speaking a laptop isn't a desktop computer.
Not having kept in touch, how is linux battery and sleep management these days?
sigs are hazardous to your health
Maybe because didn't have time to replace the dumpster fire known as GNOME3 or KDE with a real desktop environment that is usable with less than 32GB of RAM on his recent Linux or BSD install?
I am only half joking. My recent forays back to using *NIX on the desktop left me wanting to take a drill to my frontal lobe. GNOME and modern KDE are almost utterly unusable. MATE w/Compton wasn't so bad, XFCE was ok but the two flagships that are installed by default in most distressed are utterly disgusting resource hogs that seem less functional than Windows 3.1 out of the box but use 1000x the resources. If those clusterfucks are where desktop Linux/BSD are heading then what's the point? They aren't even efficient to use.
X-Windows used to be awesome, what the hell happened?! I'm actually thinking of just finding a decent standalone file manager and going back to WindowMaker at this point. The GNOME project has even managed to make their text editor UI suck.... that's pretty hard to do. Stop letting 20-yr-old kids who want their PC to operate like their phone rewrite perfectly good software.
Rant over.
LibreOffice still has work to do.
I wonder if they do, your example sounds familiar to me .... without ever leaving Powerpoint. Duplicating slides, copying and pasting content, even copying and pasting formatting, or moving a slide from one presentation to the other (selecting either keep source formatting or use destination) has frequently resulted in messed up formatting for me.
I've also had that between different computers where something that looked fine on my laptop suddenly ran off the edge of the page on the presentation machine, even on the same version of MS Office.
And I have 10 year old macs that still work.. Inf act I'm typing this on a 2007 MBP. So you have no point.
the Mozilla marketing head using Chrome.
That is funny - I usually have to repair my wife's presentations, that she has made in Windows - and I use Impress for that. It may be she is just very bad at it and/or I'm very clever, but just saying. How compatible and what is best probably depends on the person and how they use it.
LibreOffice still has work to do. I'll still promote it to people I know. But it still needs work.
Perhaps that is so - although, I am not a fan of always heaping more and more functionality onto a program that is mostly meant for writing smaller documents and that sort of thing. Of course, I don't actually write much that would fit into any word processor - I mostly write maths, so use LaTeX.
I use Linux as my main home computer since ~2004.
That being said, I keep one macbook at home for presentations (it's the only non-linux computer I own).
I haven't tried Impress in a while. Maybe it's gotten better.
But Keynote has drag-n-drop videos, beautiful master slide sets, pretty transitions, and supports multiple monitors with the ability to show one slide on the projector while previewing the next on the laptop monitor.
Now, do the shiney and pretty effects matter during a presentation? Absolutely. I'm not generally giving presentations to a bunch of tech guys or PhD candidates. I give them to adults with (at best) a high school diploma. And they like things with a little pizazz.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I have seen people do presentations on PDF. I have seen people use Notepad++. I have seen I have seen people using the whiteboard only.
If you depend on the software to do the presentation, just hand out the printouts and stop wasting my time.
I hate it when they hand then out afterwards. That means either you di not present it very well as I need to re-read it and you wasted my time or you wasted the pape as I will never re-read it, Send/give it upfront. That way you can do a fast presentation and there will be more time to FAQ or coffee.
So yes, Linux does have technical solutions, but giving a good presentation is a social problem.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The Linux Foundation has their own internal events division, and they produce both their own events as well as are contracted to produce some events for other organizations: http://events.linuxfoundation.... Obviously, the hotel physically provided the projectors, screens, etc., but it's the LF events team doing all the rest. The LF normally provides a .PPT slide template deck for speakers, although it's not required.
Out of the four computers I use on a regular basis, three of them are on Ubuntu 17.04 Desktop and the other runs BlackArch, it's not the year of the Linux Desktop, Linux is the Desktop OS for everyone.
Is it even possible to say "The Year of the Linux Desktop" non-sarcastically any more? It's like saying nuclear fusion is five years away. It's been said for so long nobody could possibly take the phrase seriously anymore. Maybe the title of the presentation was intended to be a joke, with the punch line that it's being presented from a Mac?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
In my field of research it is easy to differentiate people's intelligence by what software they use for presentations.
The smart ones use LaTeX or html for their presentations.
Putting an ugly equation up in PowerPoint makes you look dumb.
I actually was fairly happy to do a presentation with a single dia diagram, and a script that extracted lines starting with a tag, and indicating which layers to include. Stuck that in a Makefile, and when I run it, it gives me a series of .png's.
weird, yes, but actually pretty functional.
So they are the geek community equivalent of MBAs?
What if there were and he just didn't choose them?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I know that this comment is going to get modded down, but it is really simple:
As much as I want to use Linux as a desktop, it still sucks and is still too buggy for day to day work. I don't have the time to be fucking around. The shit just doesn't work reliably.
This poor guy probably doesn't have the time either. He doesn't need to get up on stage for a presentation and have to fuck around making it work for 10 minutes either. Just use something that works every time.
the amount of butthurt on this forum is pretty laughable. Who cares? OS X is a polished and beautiful platform and something Linux Desktops should strive for in terms of core technologies and usability. That being said linux desktops are great platforms. They are fast, efficient, and are much better than they used to be. Perhaps he's sending a message that Linux for the desktop isn't where it needs to be? Either way I see the point of saying he should have presented on a Linux machine and shown off some really easy ways to open and start presenting on a Linux platform. But I won't fault him for using OS X. OS X has an open source legacy and Apple contributes to open source projects at a high level.
There is only one Office suite that works on all three, and is compatible between all three. And that is AO.
What is "AO?" Microsoft Office? (MO) Open Office? (OO) Libre Office? (LO) Some Other Office Suite? (SOOS)
I present original content dozens of times a year. Libreoffice is good but not that good. It has a clunky interface, it is hard to customize slides in a way that is productive and has odd "irks". Due to these limitations (and I have been using Libreoffice since it was StarOffice), I have recently switched to Google Slides. I actually write my talks in Google Slides and then download them as ODP and open them in Libreoffice for final publish. That said, I would argue that Libreoffice is 100% fine for 95% of presenters. I have also worked with Power Point and it is miles ahead of Libreoffice in terms of usability and consistency. I think as Free/Open Software people we tend to use our ideology to justify our bad software.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
You need to ask him!
I am personally on Linux since 1999 and so far no distro satisfied me.
At the moment I am on Kubuntu and Archlinux.
For sure I won't go Windows. But if I had money I'd give OSX a try.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Macbook Pros don't need hardware service
If you say this, then you do not have very much experience with computers.
This ignores the fact that Linux solves 100% of the use cases for a large percentage of users, and might be chosen by them because it's free and open.
I keep hearing things like "LibreOffice is inferior to MS Office" and "GIMP is inferior to Photoshop" when in fact the same arguments apply: LO and GIMP probably provide what 90% of users need. The upper end market, who truly need (say) Photoshop, are indeed corner cases.
I do a lot more than web surfing and office suite stuff, and Linux satisfies 100% of my use cases. The last remaining "lack" had been decent scanning and OCR but that's been solved now for several years. As to GIMP, I've done book covers, posters, flyers, etc. with no problem.
There is no good software for presentations on Linux that compares to Keynote or PowerPoint.
I've found this to be true only at very extreme levels of flashiness where razzle and dazzle are more important than content, and you want people paying attention to the special effects rather than the point you're trying to get across, if there even is one.
The most probable scenario for this, in my own experience, is suits selling expensive stuff to suits ... stuff that the salesman doesn't really understand and the prospective buyer maybe isn't capable of understanding.
Short of that, if you, you know, actually want to get a message across, Linux has all sorts of excellent options.
Linux people are even more clueless about "polish" than Windows people.
And that's saying something...
His ORGANIZATION is the Linux Foundation, does no one there use Linux on their desktop?
Don't dangle that kind of phrase out... You're REALLY asking for it!
But, I'll be nice. This time. ;-)
I'm no Apple user so I don't know about Keynote. But for ensuring compatibility, I make sure that my wife's PowerPoint presentations are all converted to PDF.
Keynote (like almost ALL Applications on macOS), can easily output to PDF. PDF support is (and always has been) built into the OS itself.
His ORGANIZATION is the Linux Foundation, does no one there use Linux on their desktop?
They don't have desktops, only MacBooks.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The corner cases are important, why choose an alternative platform that supports 90% of things when the incumbent platform supports 100% of them?
Because, as I've said many times: freedom, control, openness.
Of course we all want to see Linux broaden its appeal. And you make a decent point by saying that Linux has to offer something more in order to get people to look at it. I believe that freedom, control, and openness --- especially freedom from built-in spyware --- are good selling points.
The big elephant in the room hasn't come up in this thread, which is surprising. High-end gamers are probably always going to be on Windows, and they're a big enough group not to be considered a corner case. My opinion and use cases might be different if up-to-date gaming was of interest to me. But my checkers, chess, go, and Skat programs all run with Linux Wine. That actually says a lot as to how far Wine has come, but it's certainly not the answer to everything or even most things.
I've typically always seen PR folks using Apple products if left to their own devices, as that seems to be the platform of choice for the personality type that makes you want to be a PR person.
There is only one Office suite that works on all three, and is compatible between all three. And that is AO.
Or Office365. Microsoft, of all companies, has been the one to abstract their Office suite away from the OS and make it OS agnostic by putting it on the web.
Unless there has been a drastic change, opening up a PowerPoint that was composed on a Windows machine then on a Mac, gives fascinating results, and you would not want to wager a cup of coffee, much less your job on them looking like they did as originally composed.
This is argument form experience.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
However, she had copied the presentation way deep into the filesystem hierarchy, something like C:\Users\Guest\Department\Documents\Conference\Presentations\Saturday\ blah blah blah.
I remembered in the back of my mind something about paths in Windows being limited to 255 characters or thereabouts, so I copied the whole presentation and source videos up to C:\Users\Guest\Desktop and the videos played fine.
Sometimes things don't even have to be converted to fail...
I call these "Stupid Windows tricks" and assign a big number to them. All manner of amazing things, like people not finishing a CD, which you can't do anything about, to the pretend long filenames they had. Using weird fonts that are only on their machine, Microsoft getting ito a bitchfight with a popular codec provider, so they removed the codec, and left you high and dry.
This can happen even if you pre-flight the things. We had a dry run once the evening before a big meeting and everything worked. Our IT department pushed an update in the middle of the night, and the next morning no one's video worked. Of course, the IT department only checked if Office Word and Excel opened. The only cure we ever came up with was for me to use my own special case laptop, which was independent of the local network, and not updated until I said it was.
My hatred of Microsoft is well earned.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As I was really disappointed with this news, I've just made an online petition to see how many people would support it and how TLF would react.
Year of the Nuclear Fusion-Powered Linux Desktop?