Out of developers etiquette, yes, they shouldn't. They are sure hell expected to respect the choice of WM by the user, or face accusations of being racist.
But, not all WMs are born equal. A good deal of them make their living by simply being small. It is absurd to require of the GIMP developers to cater for them too. For a decent workflow, to start with, you need 4G+ -- who on earth would consider a WM with exceptionally small memory footprint in preference to whatever GIMP devs happen to recommend?
1. A good WM matters, additionally, for the configurability of its actions. Having to reach with the mouse for a window's title to move that window is, admittedly, a sane default for the masses, but for a designer who needs to drag two windows apart which GIMP has just batch-opened, and needs to do it quickly, holding Win key and click-dragging at anywhere the window, gets him a +200% boost in efficiency. And, if he happens to own a keyboard without the Win key, he will want to be able to remap that for whatever his left thumb is hovering over. In Windows, the most usable key modifier for a designer, is reserved. How's that cool?
2. For those with a decent WM which respects freedesktop.org hints and where windows can be made sticky by regex matching at creation time, it's oh so logical to have toolbox and palettes sticky and keep images in windows on several workspaces, and switch between them by sliding to an adjacent workspace (ideally by just hitting the screen edge). Second, if your WM supports viewports (along with workspaces), you can spread an image window over several viewports and work on it in parts, similarly by sliding up/down/sideways. Finally, enabling the Wall plugin (rather than that rotating Cube which has littered youtube ad nauseam) in compiz will give you an overview of all your viewports at a key press.
I challenge any MDI proponent to beat me on these two points.
The reason Photoshop never had multiple-window GUI is that such is the Windows way. In Adobe Reader for Linux, interestingly, they implemented their own MDI for GTK+. Looks like Adobe just has it carved in stone, while Photoshop users keep thinking Adobe UI designers have tried and tested it and proved that is the best way to get windows organised, period.
In most things open source (at least, open source by birth, less so originally proprietary projects that get eventually opensourced) you first get that itch to scratch, and then -- given you do it better than others -- you find there are people willing to pay you for that.
It's not like you first find yourself needing money, and then consider getting into an open-source project for a pay in preference to other means and wages.
Don't expect a particular version of FF to get entrenched and pose an obstruction in the way of newer versions that will follow. The notorious lock-in around IE6 is a microsoft-only disease.
Because FF is so emphatically standard-conforming, whatever works in version X is bound to work in version X+1. Yes, extensions need to be kept up-to-date with every new release, but no site (well, except quakelive.com:) relies on a particular extension installed.
Wrt plugins, Mozilla plugin API is fairly stable and well-rounded. The same Flash plugin works with FF 1.5 all through 3.5.
Note how (relatively) abrupt was the decline of FF2.0 neatly matched by the increase in version 3.0 share, and, later, 3.0 promptly giving way to 3.5. That's just people upgrading, and most of the time, automatically either through built-in Firefox updater or via general distro upgrade.
Grandma or Grandpa blindly installing... without understanding exactly... -> A handsome botnet, and a fair remittance of their children's $$ to whoever comes to fix their problems.
Call me when OP's piece of software gets approved in any major distribution.
Before I moved from Debian to Gentoo, the only few apps I actually had installed other than by apt-det install, was the flash plugin, Skype, Quake3 and nvidia drivers. In Gentoo, by virtue of it being what they call `meta-distribution' all executable code comes from portage, which means it has passed maintainers' QA. And, what really matters here is, I trust them.
When leaders of a project decide to get incorporated as a firm and draw profit from their product, they become necessarily aware that they run the risk of being bought, all their body and soul. This happens because in their mindset, they consider a growth, a successful career, and all things commercial -- not related or stemming from the merits and fitness for life of the project itself. It's all logical from entrepreneurial point of view, isn't it, but there fun becomes a chore.
By a deliberate extension, I try to imagine Ekiga or Twinkle -- projects just as good in their capacity of VoIP clients -- getting `bought' and eliminated as projects, on some commercial grounds, and I can't imagine this happening.
Out of three (perhaps more) FOSS SIP clients disappeared, what a sensational news.
Given the astronomical timescale organic matter had been lingering on the young Earth before producing some more `life-competent' than just iridescent blotches of slime along the ebb-line, and given the rough times of the Hadean, it is fairly plausible such precursors to true life had existed on Mars as well (even more likely, in some nooks on the Moon), and continue to exist in this state without evolving. Whether these may find the time and suitable conditions before the Sun burns out, actually to achieve the stage of self-reproduction, develop adequate genetic machinery, proliferate into a variety of life forms and all, is quite uninteresting -- to NASA at least.
On a separate note, I am wondering nobody has so far in this thread, brought up the pretty obvious connection to Doom3. Looks rather appropriate on/.
> Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. > At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform. Searching a package repository is emphatically *not* difficult. Just enter a name, or some keywords if you don't know how it spells.
Easiness of installation by no means implies easiness of *un*installation--quite the opposite, and dll hell ensues. Even more importantly, because any decent project does evolve, there must be some sane and practical way for continual updates and bugfixes to make it to your desktop. Know what is ignorance in this matter? No, not bliss, but a botnet.
And the channels of distribution is what Linux distros are primarily about, with due QA and an ensurance that what you download is indeed what you think it is, but not a trojan-laced freeware. And that's exactly what's dead missing in Windows (albeit Apple AppStore is definitely a move in the right direction).
> For obvious reasons you can't go into a store and purchase Linux based programs. You don't generally want to. Use your package manager instead. If the piece of software you want is missing, switch to Debian. If it's not in Debian, then probably that piece of software is so freaking exotic that it barely can be something you really, essentially need. Check for a package with the same features/functionality but with a different name, -- be prepared that that different name might seem somewhat non-marketworthy, like 'gimp'. Still need that program? Then you are stuck with Windows. You have my sympathy.
> 2 freakin hours to install some software on CentOS? I beg your pardon, this is bollocks. Unless someone can prove to me that 'apt-get install stuff' can be made easier. (Yes, I know CentOS is rpm based and hence uses a package manager other than apt-get.)
> That's not going to pass the Granny Test. Who cares? Since when grannies pass along as competent in this? Why do you spell it with Capitals? Is it a common name like google? Sure, grannies do use computers, but please, spare them the task of *managing* computers.
> people lack the expertise to compile their own programs, use a GUI package manager These are two vastly different things. In fact, it is exactly the reason why distribution existed in the first place, to save the end user the trouble of needing to compile.
> It has to be made for the unwashed masses. Washing (hands) helps, really.
I find it odd that having endured all the hardships of a desktop Linux of late 1990 (badly hinted fonts, hardware support, anyone?), now that things have by and large smoothed out, you call your effort... err... wasted. Takes a real man to admit being a sufferer for a decade.
Following up on your 'When I am using my computer' tune: Every day when I come to work, I bring the PC up from suspend, fetch whatever updates have been posted overnight, approve them, hit Enter, go get a cup of tea, come back and start working. At the end of the day, I suspend it. Next morning, the cycle continues. Where exactly is that 'it's too much work'?
From my six-year experience, after a more-than-usually-tolerable learning curve, consistent Linux users get a healthy, and ever increasing, return on the investment. Unless they flit from one distro to another every month, and always entertain the idea that Linux is somehow 'experimental' and always keep a serviceable XP to fall back to.
Journalist stunts like this obviously feed the insightful notions of how dumb people generally are, and get remembered the most.
But please, computers aren't yet cars in terms of the minimal technical knowledge required. As much as I wished to argue that this should be so for whatever idea's sake, I clearly see that this is the case rather often than not.
Whoever nowadays owns a computer, is at least of sufficient means to afford one, and is necessarily sufficiently smart not to waste the money. Even those fairy-tale people who only use their PC for email are told to sit on their hands before they click, and the reasons why. If they go out into the internets at large, they very darn quickly learn to exercise discretion (after a visit to their nearest guy who earns his small wage fixing computers). Most importantly, online banking is really the way to go, with due amount of caution they learn to observe, even more quickly. Credit cards, amazon, anyone? Let alone the fact that any `grandma' has a `grandson,' who is very likely to care about mom's PC if she doesn't.
So perhaps those "50% of people [who] don't even know what Windows is", are either a gross overestimate, or they know nonetheless to check their bank's URL begins with https: regardless of what their OS is.
And, I have a lingering distrust towards people who never fail to no note that so much of our fellow citizens need improving, but that's an altogether different matter.
My take on the whole story is just that: Neelie the Bringer of Gold for the EU sees the fine, as well as the browser ballot requirement, as yet another means to tell MS that they are not really liked here in Europe. And if they keep wearing out their welcome, fine (reminiscent of what I see in Brighton buses: "Don't have a valid ticket? Fine").
There is, also, a rather nuanced, largely unspoken of directly, intuition that goes with NK's message to be taken across the pond. By way of example, recall poor Floyd Landis and the litigation he had undertaken, in 2006 and onward. What he had striven so hard to achieve was, "to prove his innocence", and do it the American way, i.e., in court. In all appearance, he has conceived it and carried it out right, and as Armstrong would say afterwards, in honest belief he was not guilty--except that, as some other riders opined, litigation just isn't a proper way to prove anything in cycling.
Likewise, by imposing this fine or that requirement EU doesn't want MS to change, be it to assure a better competition or obey EU rules or whatnot. Seeing Linux take ground wherever local people find themselves able and willing to take local (up to municipal, in Munich) IT operations in their charge, and seeing perhaps less and less reason to assume the end-user role as the American way of life paints it, Europeans are only logical gradually to rid themselves of MS.
And if MS doesn't get that nuanced message, let them pay.
Agh. I'd rather forfeit my modding points in this lucrative thread.
I think the major reason people dont use linux is Linux is as complicated as it gets, or as root has deemed it to be. If a casual user (those fictional grandmas, or the "most people" referred to above) doesn't want to care to the fullest extent, let them have their PC managed by someone who's competent and willing to -- or let them stay with Windows, or buy them a Mac. And care they so obviously should, because no Canonical nor any legislature nor any court ruling can make a kilobyte be 1000 not 1024 bytes to suit the complacency of the 'casual'. If the current state of PC playground (as compared to Macs) is so rough, there will be malfunctioning hardware, upgrade issues, compatibility issues, data loss issues at a scale no Canonical can insure against. Have a competent man manage a Linux install, and *only then*, in every individual case, your grandma will be happy.
It has been said, although in a low and wary words, that with the advent of Ubuntu the Linux user base at large has grown, and is growing, dumber and less competent. Many have moved to tinker with Ubuntu as a cool addon for Windows, and have brought with them all the sloppy and arrogant ways and manners of Windows users who didn't pay for it. They have flooded the fora with babble of all sorts that's become a pain to search through when it comes to consulting the (google-assisted) community knowledge.
I dont think linux really needs any marketing. I do by all means concur.
(oh my, look at the flame the next post has started with "Ubuntu has really removed the need for a terminal."...)
Remembering a most preposterous occurrence of a game key stealing trojan on a flash-drive that got lifted to ISS, and the more recent one of a hospital's IT succumbing to some other malware.
How smart-alecky one would look if he takes on this problem thusly: Let all the windows ecosystem die its natural death and take all the botnet scum with it. Or does it take an ueberinsightful, astutely daring sci-fi fellow to see it as one efficient remedy to the dullest problem of modern age?
My honest opinion, too, in the hope it is not utterly drowned in this flood of honest opinions.
1. Anyone with a knowledge of the evolutionary process, especially as given in the natural history, would instinctively seek to regard a phenomenon as a form of life. Any form of life has that potency to survive and evolve, possibly suffering along the way but eventually possessing the qualities to outlive the current craze and ultimately thrive afterwards. Such was the case of mammals being bullied by XXL reptiles; such, I tend to think, was the way of early Christians in the Roman Empire.
What was it mammals possessed that allowed them to survive? Homeothermy, wool, milk, brain and crepuscular vision; whatever it was, it was not useful in fighting back. Whatever it was, it wasn't useful in the short run. Strong belief not drawn from any material token.
Stallman's propounded "free software" being the case in hand, is likewise not limited to 'here and now'. Many flashy things of early 80's from proprietary software are long dead and forgotten: emacs and, especially, gcc have ever been gaining vitality.
Stallman is right in dismissing commercial value as a principal condition of any piece of software to exist. One does not need to be a chosen one to go hacking; granted, a certain degree of talent is necessary, but the amount every male has inborn, would by and large suffice. And, to put the same differently, a piece of software will survive not because it is patentable and patented and protected, but because it is a *good* piece of software. Short-term exigencies and profitability don't matter here.
2. Yet I believe open source, as a form of life, is even more fit. Accessory to the nat. hist. criterion are the notion of enthropy in physics, and the notion of parsimony in discourse.
Open source puts the fitness for life down solely to the programmer, with his hackerdom vocation as the primary reason. Open source does away not only with commercial viability of a project, but also with moral attributes Stallman so vehemently stands by. This take on things is simpler, more elegant, more economical in means of subsistence. Both Stallman and Torvalds have that nearly subliminal clarity and succinctness in expression--and even here Torvalds outdoes RMS. Both live to support a grand cause; and yet watching Linus' speak is so gratifying in that it poses an example that there *are* causes to live for, and not just run round peddling whatever is selling to make ends meet.
> 1) The games I play, play in Windows. I play mosterz and lbreakout. I won't move to Windows because these games don't run in Windows. Flame me.
> 2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level Bullshit. Look at what hinting job Adobe Acrobat does, compare to the native rendering by freetype. Then, if you see a darned diff, come back.
Likewise, try DejaVu fonts. They *are* optimized.
Or copy your collection of.ttf files into ~/.fonts and enjoy.
> Especially in FireFox on Linux There is a Preferences menu item under Edit, where you can change fonts alright. Or were you looking for it under Tools?
> 3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator? Try this: If an item in a menu contains a substring 'calc', then that's it. If it doesn't, proceed to the next line. Chances are you'll find a calculator under Accessories.
As a last resort, open a terminal and try bc (caution: no GUI).
> can't play movies Do you first start a movie player then do File->Open? Try locating it in your default file manager, and double-click on it. (Hint: you can press Enter, to open that avi file, too). Whatever it is called, your movie player will start playing it back. Easy.
(Wondering why you haven't brought up the missing codecs issue..)
> It means they are going to use Windows - simple as that. Blimey, good riddance!
>All that useless ranting aside - I am totally looking forward to picking up a >'refurb' Linux based netbook for 1/3rd off retail. Right. And run Windows 3.1 on it.
Re:But does it look like Photoshop yet?
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Well, I'm actually happy without any MDI (except in the form of tabbed browsing in Firefox:) and don't seem to feel in the least discriminated or constrained, for that matter.
But again, GTK+ has no facilities to do MDI -- at all.
Re:But does it look like Photoshop yet?
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That particular keystroke (and others) in fact comes from libreadline, which is used extensively in terminal apps, including bash.
More to the point: Conflicting claims on Alt+Tab are repeated here in the way and manner GIMP windows should be presented. Windows folks won't tolerate anything other than MDI here, traditional (like Word) or Tabbed (like in Excel). Linux folks (at least myself) just don't regard that way as the one and only.
And the argument, on the part of GIMP developers, might be that yes, do handle each image window individually, and if there's a clutter of those on the desktop, then... do as many clicks on Iconify icons. Or, how about switching workspaces?
But the truth is, GTK+ doesn't support MDI, AFAIK. Qt does.
Re:But does it look like Photoshop yet?
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MDI is there for a reason.
By way of analogy: Guess what Alt+Tab does in Linux? It attempts an expansion of previously entered tokens in your terminal session history. Now, you open an xterm window and press Alt+Tab: what to expect? Let window manager handle it and switch windows? Or pass it to xterm to let it handle it privately for history expansion, or whatever it ever did since times immemorial?
I won't openly ostracize either resolution to this conflict; but one really has to acknowledge this conflict exists, and it is rather down to one's preferences. If you discovered what Alt+Tab does in Windows -- fine, but that's far from being obvious and "most intuitive".
Same applies to MDI, which works in perfect harmony if you disable raising windows on click (it's a hint:)
All the gibberish about "viruses for linux" and such self-same security matters...
Excuse me, I don't quite get it. A Linux system is as secure as the admin wanted or cared it to fasten. Period.
If/once bad guys have managed to meddle with it in whatever way, there is no use killing this or that seemingly misbehaving app; there is only one way to rectify matters, and that is, pull the power cord and call the admin in and have him inspect the matter. A particular, named human is in charge here, not a "vendor" nor a contracted third party.
At this point I wonder, if the very subject matter of the article and the research at large it underlies, is just a marketing push of AV companies to plant a foot where there's no foothold for them? They all belong and flourish in "Windows ecosystem", where they enjoy the same rights as malware proper. Why introduce them both in Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
Out of developers etiquette, yes, they shouldn't. They are sure hell expected to respect the choice of WM by the user, or face accusations of being racist.
But, not all WMs are born equal. A good deal of them make their living by simply being small. It is absurd to require of the GIMP developers to cater for them too. For a decent workflow, to start with, you need 4G+ -- who on earth would consider a WM with exceptionally small memory footprint in preference to whatever GIMP devs happen to recommend?
1. A good WM matters, additionally, for the configurability of its actions. Having to reach with the mouse for a window's title to move that window is, admittedly, a sane default for the masses, but for a designer who needs to drag two windows apart which GIMP has just batch-opened, and needs to do it quickly, holding Win key and click-dragging at anywhere the window, gets him a +200% boost in efficiency. And, if he happens to own a keyboard without the Win key, he will want to be able to remap that for whatever his left thumb is hovering over. In Windows, the most usable key modifier for a designer, is reserved. How's that cool?
2. For those with a decent WM which respects freedesktop.org hints and where windows can be made sticky by regex matching at creation time, it's oh so logical to have toolbox and palettes sticky and keep images in windows on several workspaces, and switch between them by sliding to an adjacent workspace (ideally by just hitting the screen edge). Second, if your WM supports viewports (along with workspaces), you can spread an image window over several viewports and work on it in parts, similarly by sliding up/down/sideways. Finally, enabling the Wall plugin (rather than that rotating Cube which has littered youtube ad nauseam) in compiz will give you an overview of all your viewports at a key press.
I challenge any MDI proponent to beat me on these two points.
The reason Photoshop never had multiple-window GUI is that such is the Windows way. In Adobe Reader for Linux, interestingly, they implemented their own MDI for GTK+. Looks like Adobe just has it carved in stone, while Photoshop users keep thinking Adobe UI designers have tried and tested it and proved that is the best way to get windows organised, period.
In most things open source (at least, open source by birth, less so originally proprietary projects that get eventually opensourced) you first get that itch to scratch, and then -- given you do it better than others -- you find there are people willing to pay you for that.
It's not like you first find yourself needing money, and then consider getting into an open-source project for a pay in preference to other means and wages.
Don't expect a particular version of FF to get entrenched and pose an obstruction in the way of newer versions that will follow. The notorious lock-in around IE6 is a microsoft-only disease.
Because FF is so emphatically standard-conforming, whatever works in version X is bound to work in version X+1. Yes, extensions need to be kept up-to-date with every new release, but no site (well, except quakelive.com :) relies on a particular extension installed.
Wrt plugins, Mozilla plugin API is fairly stable and well-rounded. The same Flash plugin works with FF 1.5 all through 3.5.
Note how (relatively) abrupt was the decline of FF2.0 neatly matched by the increase in version 3.0 share, and, later, 3.0 promptly giving way to 3.5. That's just people upgrading, and most of the time, automatically either through built-in Firefox updater or via general distro upgrade.
FYI, there's a better, fuller Firefox emacsification available with KeySnail.
Grandma or Grandpa blindly installing ... without understanding exactly ... -> A handsome botnet, and a fair remittance of their children's $$ to whoever comes to fix their problems.
I second every statement in this post.
Call me when OP's piece of software gets approved in any major distribution.
Before I moved from Debian to Gentoo, the only few apps I actually had installed other than by apt-det install, was the flash plugin, Skype, Quake3 and nvidia drivers. In Gentoo, by virtue of it being what they call `meta-distribution' all executable code comes from portage, which means it has passed maintainers' QA. And, what really matters here is, I trust them.
When leaders of a project decide to get incorporated as a firm and draw profit from their product, they become necessarily aware that they run the risk of being bought, all their body and soul. This happens because in their mindset, they consider a growth, a successful career, and all things commercial -- not related or stemming from the merits and fitness for life of the project itself. It's all logical from entrepreneurial point of view, isn't it, but there fun becomes a chore.
By a deliberate extension, I try to imagine Ekiga or Twinkle -- projects just as good in their capacity of VoIP clients -- getting `bought' and eliminated as projects, on some commercial grounds, and I can't imagine this happening.
Out of three (perhaps more) FOSS SIP clients disappeared, what a sensational news.
Given the astronomical timescale organic matter had been lingering on the young Earth before producing some more `life-competent' than just iridescent blotches of slime along the ebb-line, and given the rough times of the Hadean, it is fairly plausible such precursors to true life had existed on Mars as well (even more likely, in some nooks on the Moon), and continue to exist in this state without evolving. Whether these may find the time and suitable conditions before the Sun burns out, actually to achieve the stage of self-reproduction, develop adequate genetic machinery, proliferate into a variety of life forms and all, is quite uninteresting -- to NASA at least.
On a separate note, I am wondering nobody has so far in this thread, brought up the pretty obvious connection to Doom3. Looks rather appropriate on /.
> Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux.
> At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform.
Searching a package repository is emphatically *not* difficult. Just enter a name, or some keywords if you don't know how it spells.
Easiness of installation by no means implies easiness of *un*installation--quite the opposite, and dll hell ensues. Even more importantly, because any decent project does evolve, there must be some sane and practical way for continual updates and bugfixes to make it to your desktop. Know what is ignorance in this matter? No, not bliss, but a botnet.
And the channels of distribution is what Linux distros are primarily about, with due QA and an ensurance that what you download is indeed what you think it is, but not a trojan-laced freeware. And that's exactly what's dead missing in Windows (albeit Apple AppStore is definitely a move in the right direction).
> For obvious reasons you can't go into a store and purchase Linux based programs.
You don't generally want to. Use your package manager instead. If the piece of software you want is missing, switch to Debian. If it's not in Debian, then probably that piece of software is so freaking exotic that it barely can be something you really, essentially need. Check for a package with the same features/functionality but with a different name, -- be prepared that that different name might seem somewhat non-marketworthy, like 'gimp'. Still need that program? Then you are stuck with Windows. You have my sympathy.
> 2 freakin hours to install some software on CentOS?
I beg your pardon, this is bollocks. Unless someone can prove to me that 'apt-get install stuff' can be made easier. (Yes, I know CentOS is rpm based and hence uses a package manager other than apt-get.)
> That's not going to pass the Granny Test.
Who cares? Since when grannies pass along as competent in this? Why do you spell it with Capitals? Is it a common name like google? Sure, grannies do use computers, but please, spare them the task of *managing* computers.
> people lack the expertise to compile their own programs, use a GUI package manager
These are two vastly different things. In fact, it is exactly the reason why distribution existed in the first place, to save the end user the trouble of needing to compile.
> It has to be made for the unwashed masses.
Washing (hands) helps, really.
I find it odd that having endured all the hardships of a desktop Linux of late 1990 (badly hinted fonts, hardware support, anyone?), now that things have by and large smoothed out, you call your effort... err... wasted. Takes a real man to admit being a sufferer for a decade.
Following up on your 'When I am using my computer' tune: Every day when I come to work, I bring the PC up from suspend, fetch whatever updates have been posted overnight, approve them, hit Enter, go get a cup of tea, come back and start working. At the end of the day, I suspend it. Next morning, the cycle continues. Where exactly is that 'it's too much work'?
From my six-year experience, after a more-than-usually-tolerable learning curve, consistent Linux users get a healthy, and ever increasing, return on the investment. Unless they flit from one distro to another every month, and always entertain the idea that Linux is somehow 'experimental' and always keep a serviceable XP to fall back to.
I beg to disagree.
Journalist stunts like this obviously feed the insightful notions of how dumb people generally are, and get remembered the most.
But please, computers aren't yet cars in terms of the minimal technical knowledge required. As much as I wished to argue that this should be so for whatever idea's sake, I clearly see that this is the case rather often than not.
Whoever nowadays owns a computer, is at least of sufficient means to afford one, and is necessarily sufficiently smart not to waste the money. Even those fairy-tale people who only use their PC for email are told to sit on their hands before they click, and the reasons why. If they go out into the internets at large, they very darn quickly learn to exercise discretion (after a visit to their nearest guy who earns his small wage fixing computers). Most importantly, online banking is really the way to go, with due amount of caution they learn to observe, even more quickly. Credit cards, amazon, anyone? Let alone the fact that any `grandma' has a `grandson,' who is very likely to care about mom's PC if she doesn't.
So perhaps those "50% of people [who] don't even know what Windows is", are either a gross overestimate, or they know nonetheless to check their bank's URL begins with https: regardless of what their OS is.
And, I have a lingering distrust towards people who never fail to no note that so much of our fellow citizens need improving, but that's an altogether different matter.
My take on the whole story is just that: Neelie the Bringer of Gold for the EU sees the fine, as well as the browser ballot requirement, as yet another means to tell MS that they are not really liked here in Europe. And if they keep wearing out their welcome, fine (reminiscent of what I see in Brighton buses: "Don't have a valid ticket? Fine").
There is, also, a rather nuanced, largely unspoken of directly, intuition that goes with NK's message to be taken across the pond. By way of example, recall poor Floyd Landis and the litigation he had undertaken, in 2006 and onward. What he had striven so hard to achieve was, "to prove his innocence", and do it the American way, i.e., in court. In all appearance, he has conceived it and carried it out right, and as Armstrong would say afterwards, in honest belief he was not guilty--except that, as some other riders opined, litigation just isn't a proper way to prove anything in cycling.
Likewise, by imposing this fine or that requirement EU doesn't want MS to change, be it to assure a better competition or obey EU rules or whatnot. Seeing Linux take ground wherever local people find themselves able and willing to take local (up to municipal, in Munich) IT operations in their charge, and seeing perhaps less and less reason to assume the end-user role as the American way of life paints it, Europeans are only logical gradually to rid themselves of MS.
And if MS doesn't get that nuanced message, let them pay.
quickly and reliably? choose one.
Agh. I'd rather forfeit my modding points in this lucrative thread.
I think the major reason people dont use linux is
Linux is as complicated as it gets, or as root has deemed it to be. If a casual user (those fictional grandmas, or the "most people" referred to above) doesn't want to care to the fullest extent, let them have their PC managed by someone who's competent and willing to -- or let them stay with Windows, or buy them a Mac. And care they so obviously should, because no Canonical nor any legislature nor any court ruling can make a kilobyte be 1000 not 1024 bytes to suit the complacency of the 'casual'. If the current state of PC playground (as compared to Macs) is so rough, there will be malfunctioning hardware, upgrade issues, compatibility issues, data loss issues at a scale no Canonical can insure against. Have a competent man manage a Linux install, and *only then*, in every individual case, your grandma will be happy.
It has been said, although in a low and wary words, that with the advent of Ubuntu the Linux user base at large has grown, and is growing, dumber and less competent. Many have moved to tinker with Ubuntu as a cool addon for Windows, and have brought with them all the sloppy and arrogant ways and manners of Windows users who didn't pay for it. They have flooded the fora with babble of all sorts that's become a pain to search through when it comes to consulting the (google-assisted) community knowledge.
I dont think linux really needs any marketing.
I do by all means concur.
(oh my, look at the flame the next post has started with "Ubuntu has really removed the need for a terminal."...)
... in a non-aggressive, easy way, I mean: ignore windows. Or, let them be but prohibit them to connect to the Internet. Not clear yet? :}
Remembering a most preposterous occurrence of a game key stealing trojan on a flash-drive that got lifted to ISS, and the more recent one of a hospital's IT succumbing to some other malware.
How smart-alecky one would look if he takes on this problem thusly: Let all the windows ecosystem die its natural death and take all the botnet scum with it. Or does it take an ueberinsightful, astutely daring sci-fi fellow to see it as one efficient remedy to the dullest problem of modern age?
My honest opinion, too, in the hope it is not utterly drowned in this flood of honest opinions.
1.
Anyone with a knowledge of the evolutionary process, especially as given in the natural history, would instinctively seek to regard a phenomenon as a form of life. Any form of life has that potency to survive and evolve, possibly suffering along the way but eventually possessing the qualities to outlive the current craze and ultimately thrive afterwards. Such was the case of mammals being bullied by XXL reptiles; such, I tend to think, was the way of early Christians in the Roman Empire.
What was it mammals possessed that allowed them to survive? Homeothermy, wool, milk, brain and crepuscular vision; whatever it was, it was not useful in fighting back. Whatever it was, it wasn't useful in the short run. Strong belief not drawn from any material token.
Stallman's propounded "free software" being the case in hand, is likewise not limited to 'here and now'. Many flashy things of early 80's from proprietary software are long dead and forgotten: emacs and, especially, gcc have ever been gaining vitality.
Stallman is right in dismissing commercial value as a principal condition of any piece of software to exist. One does not need to be a chosen one to go hacking; granted, a certain degree of talent is necessary, but the amount every male has inborn, would by and large suffice. And, to put the same differently, a piece of software will survive not because it is patentable and patented and protected, but because it is a *good* piece of software. Short-term exigencies and profitability don't matter here.
2.
Yet I believe open source, as a form of life, is even more fit. Accessory to the nat. hist. criterion are the notion of enthropy in physics, and the notion of parsimony in discourse.
Open source puts the fitness for life down solely to the programmer, with his hackerdom vocation as the primary reason. Open source does away not only with commercial viability of a project, but also with moral attributes Stallman so vehemently stands by. This take on things is simpler, more elegant, more economical in means of subsistence. Both Stallman and Torvalds have that nearly subliminal clarity and succinctness in expression--and even here Torvalds outdoes RMS. Both live to support a grand cause; and yet watching Linus' speak is so gratifying in that it poses an example that there *are* causes to live for, and not just run round peddling whatever is selling to make ends meet.
cat /boot/vmlinuz >/dev/dsp
and hear the subliminal message in it.
+10 Insightful (I've already posted in this thread, so can't vote).
Thanks, man!
> 1) The games I play, play in Windows.
I play mosterz and lbreakout. I won't move to Windows because these games don't run in Windows. Flame me.
> 2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level
Bullshit. Look at what hinting job Adobe Acrobat does, compare to the native rendering by freetype. Then, if you see a darned diff, come back.
Likewise, try DejaVu fonts. They *are* optimized.
Or copy your collection of .ttf files into ~/.fonts and enjoy.
> Especially in FireFox on Linux
There is a Preferences menu item under Edit, where you can change fonts alright. Or were you looking for it under Tools?
> 3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator?
Try this: If an item in a menu contains a substring 'calc', then that's it. If it doesn't, proceed to the next line. Chances are you'll find a calculator under Accessories.
As a last resort, open a terminal and try bc (caution: no GUI).
> can't play movies
Do you first start a movie player then do File->Open? Try locating it in your default file manager, and double-click on it. (Hint: you can press Enter, to open that avi file, too). Whatever it is called, your movie player will start playing it back. Easy.
(Wondering why you haven't brought up the missing codecs issue..)
> It means they are going to use Windows - simple as that.
Blimey, good riddance!
>All that useless ranting aside - I am totally looking forward to picking up a
>'refurb' Linux based netbook for 1/3rd off retail.
Right. And run Windows 3.1 on it.
Well, I'm actually happy without any MDI (except in the form of tabbed browsing in Firefox :) and don't seem to feel in the least discriminated or constrained, for that matter.
But again, GTK+ has no facilities to do MDI -- at all.
That particular keystroke (and others) in fact comes from libreadline, which is used extensively in terminal apps, including bash.
More to the point: Conflicting claims on Alt+Tab are repeated here in the way and manner GIMP windows should be presented. Windows folks won't tolerate anything other than MDI here, traditional (like Word) or Tabbed (like in Excel). Linux folks (at least myself) just don't regard that way as the one and only.
And the argument, on the part of GIMP developers, might be that yes, do handle each image window individually, and if there's a clutter of those on the desktop, then... do as many clicks on Iconify icons. Or, how about switching workspaces?
But the truth is, GTK+ doesn't support MDI, AFAIK. Qt does.
MDI is there for a reason.
By way of analogy: Guess what Alt+Tab does in Linux? It attempts an expansion of previously entered tokens in your terminal session history. Now, you open an xterm window and press Alt+Tab: what to expect? Let window manager handle it and switch windows? Or pass it to xterm to let it handle it privately for history expansion, or whatever it ever did since times immemorial?
I won't openly ostracize either resolution to this conflict; but one really has to acknowledge this conflict exists, and it is rather down to one's preferences. If you discovered what Alt+Tab does in Windows -- fine, but that's far from being obvious and "most intuitive".
Same applies to MDI, which works in perfect harmony if you disable raising windows on click (it's a hint :)
Uhm.. Is PIMP any freer of unsavoury connotations than GIMP?
All the gibberish about "viruses for linux" and such self-same security matters...
Excuse me, I don't quite get it. A Linux system is as secure as the admin wanted or cared it to fasten. Period.
If/once bad guys have managed to meddle with it in whatever way, there is no use killing this or that seemingly misbehaving app; there is only one way to rectify matters, and that is, pull the power cord and call the admin in and have him inspect the matter. A particular, named human is in charge here, not a "vendor" nor a contracted third party.
At this point I wonder, if the very subject matter of the article and the research at large it underlies, is just a marketing push of AV companies to plant a foot where there's no foothold for them? They all belong and flourish in "Windows ecosystem", where they enjoy the same rights as malware proper. Why introduce them both in Linux?