I've been looking at thesse comments and the linked article for about 5 minutes now and I still don't see what this has to do with GNU/Free Software?
Do people do things differently around here after Christmas or what?
Add in KNOPPIX's Debian roots, the potential to install the system, the default initial setup is useful and has excellent (in my experience) hardware detection (also useful as a diagnosic tool to figure out a PC). The other thing to give someone if you give them KNOPPIX and/or a distro is to give them ASPLinux as it can non-destructively resize NTFS partitions and it costs nothing (it's not Free(dom) but there's nothing to do the job that is, they licensed a commercial tool and built it into their installer).
Re:The actual ranking...
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
Be very, very thankful! I'm in Ireland and we have no option to get cable modem and our part of the list looks like this!
Germany, 2800, 3.4
Iceland, 18, 6.3
Ireland, 1.9, 0.0
Italy, 700.4, 1.2
Luxembourg, 3.0, 0.7
And to make matters even more sickening, from their entire list Croatia, Romania, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are the only countries with fewer lines than us, and were about the bottom of the lines per 100 aswell (4 million people, 1900 lines). For more on just what a miserable mess our internet access is in look at irelandoffline. I wish that errorcom.com still exited so I could show it to you, but guess what, you can find mirrors here, like this! In case anyone thinks any of this is funny just hear it from the horses mouth.
Why would Lucas Arts pass this out? Can anyone out there tell me how difficult it would really be to make a 1942 esque mmorpg out of Jedi Knight, X-wing series (and follow-ups) and all the other Star Wars games they have released? I can see they don't have the expertise with dealing with a huge number of simultaneous users and running the servers for it, would that really be an issue for them? Finally why can't "universe" games run on a distributed network of servers where anyone can design their own region of space and have it inserted (perhaps based on network geography so if you stay close to home you have more of an advantage)?
Your absolutely right about the charging people individually for watching a flick bit, they certainly see it as a big money spinner! However the Two Towers is being released in Ireland on December 18th aswell and it wouldn't surprise me if it isn't (perhaps english speaking) planet wide?
I think the key facts for the movie industry to consider are HDTV, Digital Projectors and HD-DVD(+-R/RW/RAW/RAM/V). If they simultaneous release on all formats, but charge a premium for the opening month, people go to the cinema for the social (?) and visual enhancement it offers and pay-per-view to see the highest-res version they can get at (perhaps balanced with sound system and screen size, noise levels, distance to travel...). If you want to watch it on your HDTV of through your digital projector you pay more based on resoultion. If you live in China and all you want is a VCD so you can watch it it's cheap!
The real problem is it takes a special movie for them to be able to risk going at the entire world market simultaneously! The cost of making films can be very high, and the amount spent on publicity is enormous! To risk trying to go planetwide and not have any ability to refine your strategies based on experience is a big deal.
If I had a PVR I would easily have an advertisment filled copy of DS9 to watch in order, but even a 250Gb hard disk is going store with little to spare. However I don't see why they don't just charge you to buy episodes (one-view or lifetime, again charge by quality), you can stream or download them, burn them etc. What Star Trek Fan isn't gonna buy everything in a minimal format (256kbits) if it costs $100? That's maybe $100 million dallars right there. You could expect to see that rise consistently over time and a whole lot more cash from selling decent quality versions! I'd like my copy of the Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Jackass, Battle of the Planets, Mash etc. etc. (I reckon they could get $1000+/annum out of me).
Now while I'm imagining a world with no advertising adgents let me dream about a world with no lawyers!
Just because a file format is XML does not mean it is in the slighest bit useful! Now if the file format is an open specification of XML you should be fine. The above example is silly, but isn't.doc now XML and it hasn't imrpoved things in the slightest for bodies looking to write.doc compatible programs.
How many distros have an automatic package management system which includes thet ability to ensure that your system is redistributable (i.e. leave out non-free and your debian box is a system that can be replicated and/or modified at will without legal repercusions)? How many distros are produced without commercial considerations? Debian is more than just apt-get!
While I generally agree with the opinions of OpenCD, I would have to disagree with you that "GIMP is a very difficult program to set up.. on Windows". Have you tried? I did (about four months ago" and it was increidly easy to do, all you have to do is follow the instructions . A few downloads and a couple of installs later and you have The Gimp in a pretty indistiguisable form from the Linux version (though behind). The wingimp.org site suggests that this is now even easier! I would agree that The Gimp is not the simplest of programs to use however as it is a powerful complex program with a non-standard interface (if their is such a thing as a really standard interface for any specific type of program).
One small problem, the Gimp is NOT included. According to their faq this is because
The installer is unreliable and complex
It depends on GTK+
The interface is clunky
The program is very complex
It doesn't support gifs out of the box
Windows port lags behind the Linux version
Now they say they could handle a few of these problems, but combine them all and they think it's a no no. Personally I think the Gimp for windows is closer to the killer Free app than anything else (though openoffice.org is in with a shout) but I can understand why they think it would be problematic. I hope that someone will address some of these issues (installer could take care of GTK+ and be stablised, gif support could be simplified with a check box in the installer to download and install it and finally maybe someone could help get the windows version into step with the linux one).
That;s exactly why the EU brought in laws/rules to break the national telecom monopolies. I know in Ireland we took forever to actually get to a stage where you can start to consider it broken (it isn't but at least people can choose different call carriers and adsl suppliers can gain access to the lines). I would have thought Germany would be ahead of us, and that everyone would be able to choose alternative carriers to get prices similar to the one I quoted (geography would dictate variations, but I would not expect them to be that substantial across the EU).
One problem, only 700 people voted because the entire registration project was a monumental cock-up. I know I personally tried a hell of a lot of times on a few occassions to register and bever suceeded. If ICANN are truly arguing that they can drop the elected officials because the overall vote was too low then they are only reaffirming my belief of the time, they didn't want people to register and they didn't want votes. Annoyingly I can't track down my/. posts at the time!
Perhaps what should happen is that Free software should by default support opennic aswell as icann. It could take quite a while for us to actually get far enough into the system for it to become "standard" but if every Linux box added to the net as a server, every mozilla browser downloaded and every name server using a Free dns server all supported the opennic tlds...
Run your own dns server with the appropriate entries
Lots of obvious problems with this of course, but if you are really worried about the entire dns system getting taken down you should have all your vital ip addresses to hand.
I don't know if it still exists, but a few years ago at least one of the net2phone services (ok it was windows based but nothings perfect) allowed you to call 1800 numbers in the US for... nothing! Might be worth investigating if you have a real need for it (I personally don't care much about paying about 2/hour to ring the US from Ireland).
Well it's done now! I'm posting this under the ATI driver on a Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9 / RV250). The only issue I have is that it's corrupting for me at resolutions other than the native 1600x1200 (noticed in UT2003 and TuxRacer). Performance is reasonable , I think I will probably be able to improve things with some tweaking. TuxRacer at about 100fps on a Mobile-P42GHz (glxgears 240ish) under a default woody install (XFree86 4.1). Next stop DRI to see how they go. Installing the ATI driver on Debian involved extracting the rpm, copying the files across to your real filesystem (have to replace libGL), compiling a kernel and then building the ati kernel module for X, modconfing it in after a reboot, finally I used the debian and ati X config tools and vi to cobble together a config file. I think that was everything, far from straight forward but not too tough (come on ATI, next thing to do is recognise anything other than RedHat). Next stop is MPlayer with wmv9/wma9 support, some kernel patches (2.4.20, 0[1], pre-empt) and then hopefully I'll get a cvs (or 4.3) XFree86 so I can do some good driver comparisons.
Does that mean you got the Radeon Mobility 9000 based model and if so which drivers can you use? DRI (CVS I believe) and/or ATI? Any idea on performance? Any gotchas to configure it? Put a page up to tell me how? Guess who was doing this tomorrow anyway?
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the sort of latency you see from current "realtime" audio systems is about right to meet my demands, <2ms! When we can have our computer provide a simulated environment at the compexity of modern physics in which we can shoot at our friends driving F1 cars while impregentating our girlfriend, all modeled indistinguisably from real life (could we ever model the creation of a human life meaningfully). That should keep us going for a few years but it will give scientists an incredible toy!
With up to 10^81 (2^273) atoms in the universe and then what level of subatomic detail? 512bit seems about right to me. Pity Moore's Law suggests we might have to wait til around 2674 til/. will be covered with questions over whether 512bit really is enough, with processor speeds of 3 Peta9Hz (thats 3 + 9 * 000,000,000,000,000). Who would want a beowolf cluster of those? Whose going to supply the power!
Unfortuantely anyone who reads this today will be lucky to see a nice 128bit computer in 96 years time at 1.5MegaPetaHz:-(
It's great that ATI released a binary driver (it would have been better if they had released a Free driver or at least something portable and fixable). Why do I say this? It adds to Linux credibility! If more hardware manufacturers start to support their hardware under Linux thats good. However I feel stung personally. I can't try their drivers but they don't build laptops so I couldn't have gotten a "built by ATI" solution. I have a Radeon M9 (RV250) so I should be able to get some support from the DVI CVS but it would be much nicer if I could get a supported driver (and not the no Xv $179 Xi one) and compare the DRI one. I asked ATI what the situation was, for any pointers, told them I would try to use their driver anyway and told them that I had supported a commercial Linux distro. I asked them if they would supply Dell with a "source" for the drivers as they would with the Windows version so Dell could supply a driver for their configuration (and ATI support could pass me off to Dell). Their reply? A stock letter telling me to go to the manufacturer of my product. My next move? A call to ATI customer services tomorrow, until I at least get an email address to a human and a human reply that answers my questions!
Well according to Linux Format the reason you need a NVidia card for UT2003 is that only a commercial driver can implement the patented S3 texture compression used by UT2003! Sounds like the beef there is with Epic not ATI. btw, is there a good source on how to get cvs X up and running (on debian for preference)? I got a new laptop with an ATI M9 a couple of weeks ago and know that this is only supported in CVS at the mo. The last times (4+ years ago) I tried compiling X things worked far less than wonderfully!
I didn't say filmGimp had taken over, I said it is taking hold, BIG difference! it just demonstrates that the filmGimp is good enough for TRUE graphic artists! Anyway I'm also thinking of a Linux Format article (cover story) which discussed the use of Linux in Hollywood, I do read more than/. (and more than just Linux/GNU/OS/FS stuff).
After the couple of reply's to my comments I went and had a look for the IDE tools available for RAD and I was far from convinced that they came up to the level of functionality proved by the VB IDE! The main thing that I find incredibly useful is the ability to debug run the programs within the ide with breakpoints and quickwatches, though also the documentation (ok it's crazy, but it's there and does provide the information you need eventually) and it's counterpart the autocomplete/pop-up references for functions and subs.
I'm certainly going to look into this further as I would love to ditch VB for the work I have to do for a Free cross-platform development tool, though I cannot realistically do this unless it is not going to severly impact the main work (RAD for windows where 99% of our customers will be). I can't afford to spend any more time than I already do with VB trying to figure out how to get the system working as I need it, and my experiences (many and widespread) of OS/FS are that getting going takes signifcantly longer (though frequently once going you can keep moving faster). It certainly doesn't help me that boaconstructor isn't packaged in debian.
Can I redistribute my python/wxWindows written apps commercially under the license of my choice (at least for my code)?
Does it have an IDE that comes into the same category as the VB IDE?
Now I'm using VB at present for cross-platform RAD for many reasons, including the fact that one other person who will be working on the code knows Basic only as far as programming languages are concerned and that fact alone makes VB far more _R_AD than anything else I could come up with would be. Are you really suggesting that Python/wxWindows is comparable or are you saying that you could use them to write apps?
OK, so when you have a 10THz processor in your case, with Tbit networking and a GPU capable of pumping out any film of today in realtime you are still going to complain that it's client-server based and therefore a couple of picoseconds less responsive then it might be?
As for the stability of X apps, how many windows apps can you name that have never crashed on you? I can't think of any personally (though no doubt there are plenty I only ever used for 15 seconds).
As for the desktops not coming anywhere near mopre polished corporate funded alternatives, what about Gnome with its backing from Sun? What about Gnome which received a Helen Keller award for lifting the standard for users who are in some way impaired?
So how come Linux is going onto the desktop of all the film production companies? How come filmGimp is taking hold? Oh yeah, I forgot that hollywood blockbusters aren't created by TRUE graphic artists, just MPAA drones!
Now I'm not saying that the gimp is a match for photoshop in every way, but while perhaps the gimp is adequate for 90%, the remaining 10% are not going to all require photoshop (though some will) and the split of gimp/non-gimp suitable people is not going to be divided into FALSE/TRUE graphics artists.
Personally I use "apt-cache search" to find what I want to install (maybe grep it aswell) and then "apt-get -u install" to install it. This way I can see what else is going to be installed before going ahead and I can use standard text tools to filter the list of packages apt-cache might spit out to find what I want. Sometimes I need "apt-cache show" just to check what I'm going to get. Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or..... just tell it to install what you want, make sure it isn't going to go insane to do it (like installing 100 other packages or replacing your mail transport or upgrade half your system to testing/unstable) if you don't want it to!
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking at thesse comments and the linked article for about 5 minutes now and I still don't see what this has to do with GNU/Free Software?
Do people do things differently around here after Christmas or what?
Add in KNOPPIX's Debian roots, the potential to install the system, the default initial setup is useful and has excellent (in my experience) hardware detection (also useful as a diagnosic tool to figure out a PC). The other thing to give someone if you give them KNOPPIX and/or a distro is to give them ASPLinux as it can non-destructively resize NTFS partitions and it costs nothing (it's not Free(dom) but there's nothing to do the job that is, they licensed a commercial tool and built it into their installer).
- Germany, 2800, 3.4
- Iceland, 18, 6.3
- Ireland, 1.9, 0.0
- Italy, 700.4, 1.2
- Luxembourg, 3.0, 0.7
And to make matters even more sickening, from their entire list Croatia, Romania, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are the only countries with fewer lines than us, and were about the bottom of the lines per 100 aswell (4 million people, 1900 lines). For more on just what a miserable mess our internet access is in look at irelandoffline. I wish that errorcom.com still exited so I could show it to you, but guess what, you can find mirrors here, like this! In case anyone thinks any of this is funny just hear it from the horses mouth.Why would Lucas Arts pass this out? Can anyone out there tell me how difficult it would really be to make a 1942 esque mmorpg out of Jedi Knight, X-wing series (and follow-ups) and all the other Star Wars games they have released? I can see they don't have the expertise with dealing with a huge number of simultaneous users and running the servers for it, would that really be an issue for them? Finally why can't "universe" games run on a distributed network of servers where anyone can design their own region of space and have it inserted (perhaps based on network geography so if you stay close to home you have more of an advantage)?
Your absolutely right about the charging people individually for watching a flick bit, they certainly see it as a big money spinner! However the Two Towers is being released in Ireland on December 18th aswell and it wouldn't surprise me if it isn't (perhaps english speaking) planet wide?
I think the key facts for the movie industry to consider are HDTV, Digital Projectors and HD-DVD(+-R/RW/RAW/RAM/V). If they simultaneous release on all formats, but charge a premium for the opening month, people go to the cinema for the social (?) and visual enhancement it offers and pay-per-view to see the highest-res version they can get at (perhaps balanced with sound system and screen size, noise levels, distance to travel ...). If you want to watch it on your HDTV of through your digital projector you pay more based on resoultion. If you live in China and all you want is a VCD so you can watch it it's cheap!
The real problem is it takes a special movie for them to be able to risk going at the entire world market simultaneously! The cost of making films can be very high, and the amount spent on publicity is enormous! To risk trying to go planetwide and not have any ability to refine your strategies based on experience is a big deal.
If I had a PVR I would easily have an advertisment filled copy of DS9 to watch in order, but even a 250Gb hard disk is going store with little to spare. However I don't see why they don't just charge you to buy episodes (one-view or lifetime, again charge by quality), you can stream or download them, burn them etc. What Star Trek Fan isn't gonna buy everything in a minimal format (256kbits) if it costs $100? That's maybe $100 million dallars right there. You could expect to see that rise consistently over time and a whole lot more cash from selling decent quality versions! I'd like my copy of the Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Jackass, Battle of the Planets, Mash etc. etc. (I reckon they could get $1000+Now while I'm imagining a world with no advertising adgents let me dream about a world with no lawyers!
Just because a file format is XML does not mean it is in the slighest bit useful! Now if the file format is an open specification of XML you should be fine. The above example is silly, but isn't
How many distros have an automatic package management system which includes thet ability to ensure that your system is redistributable (i.e. leave out non-free and your debian box is a system that can be replicated and/or modified at will without legal repercusions)? How many distros are produced without commercial considerations? Debian is more than just apt-get!
While I generally agree with the opinions of OpenCD, I would have to disagree with you that "GIMP is a very difficult program to set up .. on Windows". Have you tried? I did (about four months ago" and it was increidly easy to do, all you have to do is follow the instructions . A few downloads and a couple of installs later and you have The Gimp in a pretty indistiguisable form from the Linux version (though behind). The wingimp.org site suggests that this is now even easier! I would agree that The Gimp is not the simplest of programs to use however as it is a powerful complex program with a non-standard interface (if their is such a thing as a really standard interface for any specific type of program).
- The installer is unreliable and complex
- It depends on GTK+
- The interface is clunky
- The program is very complex
- It doesn't support gifs out of the box
- Windows port lags behind the Linux version
Now they say they could handle a few of these problems, but combine them all and they think it's a no no. Personally I think the Gimp for windows is closer to the killer Free app than anything else (though openoffice.org is in with a shout) but I can understand why they think it would be problematic. I hope that someone will address some of these issues (installer could take care of GTK+ and be stablised, gif support could be simplified with a check box in the installer to download and install it and finally maybe someone could help get the windows version into step with the linux one).That;s exactly why the EU brought in laws/rules to break the national telecom monopolies. I know in Ireland we took forever to actually get to a stage where you can start to consider it broken (it isn't but at least people can choose different call carriers and adsl suppliers can gain access to the lines). I would have thought Germany would be ahead of us, and that everyone would be able to choose alternative carriers to get prices similar to the one I quoted (geography would dictate variations, but I would not expect them to be that substantial across the EU).
One problem, only 700 people voted because the entire registration project was a monumental cock-up. I know I personally tried a hell of a lot of times on a few occassions to register and bever suceeded. If ICANN are truly arguing that they can drop the elected officials because the overall vote was too low then they are only reaffirming my belief of the time, they didn't want people to register and they didn't want votes. Annoyingly I can't track down my /. posts at the time!
Perhaps what should happen is that Free software should by default support opennic aswell as icann. It could take quite a while for us to actually get far enough into the system for it to become "standard" but if every Linux box added to the net as a server, every mozilla browser downloaded and every name server using a Free dns server all supported the opennic tlds ...
- Edit
/etc/hosts and add the name->ip
- Run your own dns server with the appropriate entries
Lots of obvious problems with this of course, but if you are really worried about the entire dns system getting taken down you should have all your vital ip addresses to hand.I don't know if it still exists, but a few years ago at least one of the net2phone services (ok it was windows based but nothings perfect) allowed you to call 1800 numbers in the US for ... nothing! Might be worth investigating if you have a real need for it (I personally don't care much about paying about 2/hour to ring the US from Ireland).
Well it's done now! I'm posting this under the ATI driver on a Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9 / RV250). The only issue I have is that it's corrupting for me at resolutions other than the native 1600x1200 (noticed in UT2003 and TuxRacer). Performance is reasonable , I think I will probably be able to improve things with some tweaking. TuxRacer at about 100fps on a Mobile-P42GHz (glxgears 240ish) under a default woody install (XFree86 4.1). Next stop DRI to see how they go. Installing the ATI driver on Debian involved extracting the rpm, copying the files across to your real filesystem (have to replace libGL), compiling a kernel and then building the ati kernel module for X, modconfing it in after a reboot, finally I used the debian and ati X config tools and vi to cobble together a config file. I think that was everything, far from straight forward but not too tough (come on ATI, next thing to do is recognise anything other than RedHat). Next stop is MPlayer with wmv9/wma9 support, some kernel patches (2.4.20, 0[1], pre-empt) and then hopefully I'll get a cvs (or 4.3) XFree86 so I can do some good driver comparisons.
Does that mean you got the Radeon Mobility 9000 based model and if so which drivers can you use? DRI (CVS I believe) and/or ATI? Any idea on performance? Any gotchas to configure it? Put a page up to tell me how? Guess who was doing this tomorrow anyway?
I think the sort of latency you see from current "realtime" audio systems is about right to meet my demands, <2ms! When we can have our computer provide a simulated environment at the compexity of modern physics in which we can shoot at our friends driving F1 cars while impregentating our girlfriend, all modeled indistinguisably from real life (could we ever model the creation of a human life meaningfully). That should keep us going for a few years but it will give scientists an incredible toy! /. will be covered with questions over whether 512bit really is enough, with processor speeds of 3 Peta9Hz (thats 3 + 9 * 000,000,000,000,000). Who would want a beowolf cluster of those? Whose going to supply the power! :-(
With up to 10^81 (2^273) atoms in the universe and then what level of subatomic detail? 512bit seems about right to me. Pity Moore's Law suggests we might have to wait til around 2674 til
Unfortuantely anyone who reads this today will be lucky to see a nice 128bit computer in 96 years time at 1.5MegaPetaHz
It's great that ATI released a binary driver (it would have been better if they had released a Free driver or at least something portable and fixable). Why do I say this? It adds to Linux credibility! If more hardware manufacturers start to support their hardware under Linux thats good. However I feel stung personally. I can't try their drivers but they don't build laptops so I couldn't have gotten a "built by ATI" solution. I have a Radeon M9 (RV250) so I should be able to get some support from the DVI CVS but it would be much nicer if I could get a supported driver (and not the no Xv $179 Xi one) and compare the DRI one. I asked ATI what the situation was, for any pointers, told them I would try to use their driver anyway and told them that I had supported a commercial Linux distro. I asked them if they would supply Dell with a "source" for the drivers as they would with the Windows version so Dell could supply a driver for their configuration (and ATI support could pass me off to Dell). Their reply? A stock letter telling me to go to the manufacturer of my product. My next move? A call to ATI customer services tomorrow, until I at least get an email address to a human and a human reply that answers my questions!
Well according to Linux Format the reason you need a NVidia card for UT2003 is that only a commercial driver can implement the patented S3 texture compression used by UT2003! Sounds like the beef there is with Epic not ATI. btw, is there a good source on how to get cvs X up and running (on debian for preference)? I got a new laptop with an ATI M9 a couple of weeks ago and know that this is only supported in CVS at the mo. The last times (4+ years ago) I tried compiling X things worked far less than wonderfully!
I didn't say filmGimp had taken over, I said it is taking hold, BIG difference! it just demonstrates that the filmGimp is good enough for TRUE graphic artists! Anyway I'm also thinking of a Linux Format article (cover story) which discussed the use of Linux in Hollywood, I do read more than /. (and more than just Linux/GNU/OS/FS stuff).
After the couple of reply's to my comments I went and had a look for the IDE tools available for RAD and I was far from convinced that they came up to the level of functionality proved by the VB IDE! The main thing that I find incredibly useful is the ability to debug run the programs within the ide with breakpoints and quickwatches, though also the documentation (ok it's crazy, but it's there and does provide the information you need eventually) and it's counterpart the autocomplete/pop-up references for functions and subs. I'm certainly going to look into this further as I would love to ditch VB for the work I have to do for a Free cross-platform development tool, though I cannot realistically do this unless it is not going to severly impact the main work (RAD for windows where 99% of our customers will be). I can't afford to spend any more time than I already do with VB trying to figure out how to get the system working as I need it, and my experiences (many and widespread) of OS/FS are that getting going takes signifcantly longer (though frequently once going you can keep moving faster). It certainly doesn't help me that boaconstructor isn't packaged in debian.
- Can I redistribute my python/wxWindows written apps commercially under the license of my choice (at least for my code)?
- Does it have an IDE that comes into the same category as the VB IDE?
Now I'm using VB at present for cross-platform RAD for many reasons, including the fact that one other person who will be working on the code knows Basic only as far as programming languages are concerned and that fact alone makes VB far more _R_AD than anything else I could come up with would be. Are you really suggesting that Python/wxWindows is comparable or are you saying that you could use them to write apps?OK, so when you have a 10THz processor in your case, with Tbit networking and a GPU capable of pumping out any film of today in realtime you are still going to complain that it's client-server based and therefore a couple of picoseconds less responsive then it might be? As for the stability of X apps, how many windows apps can you name that have never crashed on you? I can't think of any personally (though no doubt there are plenty I only ever used for 15 seconds). As for the desktops not coming anywhere near mopre polished corporate funded alternatives, what about Gnome with its backing from Sun? What about Gnome which received a Helen Keller award for lifting the standard for users who are in some way impaired?
So how come Linux is going onto the desktop of all the film production companies? How come filmGimp is taking hold? Oh yeah, I forgot that hollywood blockbusters aren't created by TRUE graphic artists, just MPAA drones! Now I'm not saying that the gimp is a match for photoshop in every way, but while perhaps the gimp is adequate for 90%, the remaining 10% are not going to all require photoshop (though some will) and the split of gimp/non-gimp suitable people is not going to be divided into FALSE/TRUE graphics artists.
Personally I use "apt-cache search" to find what I want to install (maybe grep it aswell) and then "apt-get -u install" to install it. This way I can see what else is going to be installed before going ahead and I can use standard text tools to filter the list of packages apt-cache might spit out to find what I want. Sometimes I need "apt-cache show" just to check what I'm going to get. Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or ..... just tell it to install what you want, make sure it isn't going to go insane to do it (like installing 100 other packages or replacing your mail transport or upgrade half your system to testing/unstable) if you don't want it to!