wait that's the opposite of what he's saying! him: uk -> you buy files to store papers/documents (thus breaking the metaphor) you: us -> people keep files (collections of papers) on you (thus breaking the metaphor)
try debian lenny (im fairly sure debian lenny kde3.5 didn't use PA for anything) or suse (I've not hear anything specific but I get the impression they are better at dealing with upstream snafus like networkmanager/compiz/etc (as they created many of them)), fedora11 has given me a few PA problems but since i fixed turned modesetting off it seams ok (yeah i know it doesn't make sense but hey).
as has been pointed out files and folders are bad terms. ATM directories containing files are good for most stuff, IF you know what your doing, however that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved on. There is nothing pure or good about folders, on your disk you only have files, a while ago somebody decided to implement hierarchical trees to simplify the mess you end up with by just listing files on the system, there is no reason to stick with it just for the sake of it. When gmail came out with its tags only method of sorting mail people thought it was stupid and pointless, overtime most people accept that in a worst case scenario it's as good as folders, but can be much better for many scenarios. Personally i like folders, the first thing i do is get rid of autofolders like Documents/Pictures/Music as my ~ is organised by other critera, but for many people a few "virtual folders" would be great, even i would use them over normal folders for certain sets of files (e.g music collections). If virtual folders are going to be done right then its going to take collaboration and planning to get it implement at the right level, this isn't something the filebrowser should run off and do by itself, but its also not something kernel devs will be wasting time on, that's why it's great that somebody like shuttleworth is asking the right questions (how can we improve on the directory/folder metaphor), even if he doesn't have any answers
in practice they're not followed or don't really solve the problem. The executable may end up in/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/usr/local/bin,/opt/bin,/opt/local/bin, etc., etc.
Thats up to package maintainers and generally they are followed, sbin = executables for root only / (core os)/usr (everything else)/usr/local (locally compiled stuff) I'm yet to see anything use/opt unless i unpacked it there in which case it goes/opt/program_name/whatever_the_developer_wants
The configuration may be in a dotfile in your home directory, it may be in multiple files in one or more directories, it may be site-wide in/etc and customizable (or not) on a per-user basis, etc., etc.
This is down to each program so very hard for a distro to change, but generally its also simple if its a system setting its configured in./etc, some programs prefer a flat rc file, some prefer a subdir with all the settings in seperate files (whatever fits the task best tbh), but generally/etc/prgname+tab will list the correct file/dir. per-user configs vary more but anything kde based is in.kde/ anything else is in.prgname/ (i think gnome is a bit more of a mess as they decided to switch to.settings but not everything has yet, however gnome3 will probably finish the transistion)
Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work, distros maintain stuff, thats what they do! The problem with kde4 is at the time canonial only had a couple of dedicated kubuntu devlopers so couldn't do kde3 and kde4, with gnome this isn't the case and they will likely support both 2 & 3 for a while
Whats the point of it? my problem with pulseaudio is I'm getting all these bugs but i cant see a singe case where its better than a tricked out alsa setup (well actually it does deal well with simultaneous log-ins, but I'm sure that could have been edged into alsa without as many problems as PA brought). Perhaps the problem is distros have invested a fair bit of time in it, and now they're in the longest que for the bar but don't want to switch because while they would get served sooner, they'd have to accept they just wasted 5minutes in that que.
Nice troll, but chromeOS is also ditching fluxbox! and i bet you can't justify your hatred of X either! I'll give you PulseAudio, expanding/improving alsa would have been a better call, but AFAIK neither you nor I are good enough to do the actual development of audiosubsystems, those that are got to make the call.
Debian release team. So the Debian release team has indicated that they are very open - not about a release date but a freeze date. That freeze date would be the time where we sit around and look at all the major components and decide what the major versions would be that we collaborate around. There is no pressure that we have to agree on everything, but just actually having the conversation is useful for any upstreams who care about this information.
I understand why kubuntu choose to jump the shark (they thought it was easier to shift people to kde4.x and help get it working*, than "waste" time supporting an old version of their second rate DE), and while i belive they were wrong, i switched to debian, I'm glad that they are moving to address the problem.
*Probably not the best call as ubuntu has more end users pre developer(esque) people than most distros.
so I'll have no choice but to upgrade to Karmic
There are other distros *cough*debian lenny still has 3.5*cough*, I used kde4 as an excuse for a wander and i do despite what some upstream devlopers claim, ubuntu really is a pretty good distro. But im generally under the impression KDE4.3 will be much more useable for end users than 4.0/.1 (.2 is ok but a bit slow and buggy on fedora)
people pick up a.0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a.5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
damn reality-distortion field must be fucking huge to cover all the western world except America! America is a country founded and run by religious fanatics, unfortunately its a damn powerful country, so the rest of us get pretty frustrated when you squander budgets the rest of us could only dream of!
It's complicated and depends on how its implemented, as both GTK and QT are cross platform, they could be ported to the new windowing system and AFAIK any programs that don't make any X specific calls would run on a gtk/qt-port-to-new-ws without porting the apps themselves. The ws itself could also support a subeset of X11 calls allowing gtk/qt to run without porting. However my suspicion is that for both technical and business reasons google will use a different toolkit, so gtk/qt will take a while and a port of any app with X11 specific calls will be need (or a compatibility library ala wine).
Google has stated that the Google Chrome OS project will be open source[5] by the end of 2009. Although it is based on the Linux kernel, it will use "a new windowing system".[6]
[1] I doubt google would confuse windowing system (X11,tinyX,quartz,etc) with window manager (fluxbox,Enlightenment,compiz,metacity) or Desktop environment (KDE,gnome,xfce)
wait you mean its more likely that a web based os that will need flash to provide a rich web experience, will partner with the makers of flash for their flash technology, rather than the web-services which will surely be available to anybody with a webbrowser anyway?!
The OS wont have x11 so you are limited in what conventional apps you can run OO (not much chance), abiword/gnumeric/koffice all have plenty of their own problems to sort before porting, so what office suite will this ship....google-office, compete with ads. same goes for mail clients, thunderbird/kontact/etc are all huge projects porting to run without X will be a pita....gmail to the resuce OFC people will eventually port thier apps and thier are alternatives (yahoomail, livemail, etc), but if we've learnt anything from IE still having a huge marketshare its that most people stick to defaults. Google won't even need lock-in, they have default-in.
moblin is a conventional desktop shrunk down for use on a netbook, chrome is a web browser+web apps expanded to make an os for netbooks, both compete on netbooks but just like this isn't really an attack on anything its just an attempt to capitalise on the demand for cheap, long life netbooks.
how can a local application compete with powerful servers, it takes my pings 20ms to get to google and back, on old computer (42,000rpm drive) can take a similar amount of time to read its disks (14ms worst-case 7avg), but the processing by google can be nearly instant. Say i want to do 4 things at once that all require small amounts of disk access e.g listen to music,browse the web, im friends, have my email client running, on my computer the disk will spend 7*4=28ms running around touching these files, if i throw this all to google they probably have what i want stored in ram and the whole thing will take 20ms.
Obviously this isn't entirely fair as most OSs will cache files and unless your using fsync too much (stares at firefox) you don't have to wait for the disk read/writes, but this is basically why internet-based apps can compete.
Because most linux users will accept slightly (or moderately) inferior OSS apps over ports of closed apps. It's not just the low market-share that stops it, its the unreceptive market too.
Whats so bad in linux land? Yes there are a million options and if you use certain distros (looking at you fedora and ubuntu) you get half-baked versions of lots of them, but if you want a full-baked solution its there (debian does pretty well), sure its not a shiny as vista/os X but its faster & more secure!
It might be smaller, faster, more secure because it literally is smaller and thus supports a smaller range of hardware.
Funny because a linux distro can fit support for 90% of windows devices and easily fit in 3G which is about a third/quater of your average windows install, oh and most of that space comes from apps, the kernel(10M)+xorg+managemnt apps(what windows gives you) easily fit inside 1G.
Slashdot Mirror
wait that's the opposite of what he's saying!
him: uk -> you buy files to store papers/documents (thus breaking the metaphor)
you: us -> people keep files (collections of papers) on you (thus breaking the metaphor)
try debian lenny (im fairly sure debian lenny kde3.5 didn't use PA for anything) or suse (I've not hear anything specific but I get the impression they are better at dealing with upstream snafus like networkmanager/compiz/etc (as they created many of them)), fedora11 has given me a few PA problems but since i fixed turned modesetting off it seams ok (yeah i know it doesn't make sense but hey).
as has been pointed out files and folders are bad terms. ATM directories containing files are good for most stuff, IF you know what your doing, however that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved on. There is nothing pure or good about folders, on your disk you only have files, a while ago somebody decided to implement hierarchical trees to simplify the mess you end up with by just listing files on the system, there is no reason to stick with it just for the sake of it. When gmail came out with its tags only method of sorting mail people thought it was stupid and pointless, overtime most people accept that in a worst case scenario it's as good as folders, but can be much better for many scenarios. Personally i like folders, the first thing i do is get rid of autofolders like Documents/Pictures/Music as my ~ is organised by other critera, but for many people a few "virtual folders" would be great, even i would use them over normal folders for certain sets of files (e.g music collections). If virtual folders are going to be done right then its going to take collaboration and planning to get it implement at the right level, this isn't something the filebrowser should run off and do by itself, but its also not something kernel devs will be wasting time on, that's why it's great that somebody like shuttleworth is asking the right questions (how can we improve on the directory/folder metaphor), even if he doesn't have any answers
in practice they're not followed or don't really solve the problem. The executable may end up in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/bin, /opt/local/bin, etc., etc.
Thats up to package maintainers and generally they are followed, /usr (everything else) /usr/local (locally compiled stuff) /opt unless i unpacked it there in which case it goes /opt/program_name/whatever_the_developer_wants
sbin = executables for root only
/ (core os)
I'm yet to see anything use
The configuration may be in a dotfile in your home directory, it may be in multiple files in one or more directories, it may be site-wide in /etc and customizable (or not) on a per-user basis, etc., etc.
This is down to each program so very hard for a distro to change, but generally its also simple ./etc, some programs prefer a flat rc file, some prefer a subdir with all the settings in seperate files (whatever fits the task best tbh), but generally /etc/prgname+tab will list the correct file/dir. per-user configs vary more but anything kde based is in .kde/ anything else is in .prgname/ (i think gnome is a bit more of a mess as they decided to switch to .settings but not everything has yet, however gnome3 will probably finish the transistion)
if its a system setting its configured in
Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work, distros maintain stuff, thats what they do! The problem with kde4 is at the time canonial only had a couple of dedicated kubuntu devlopers so couldn't do kde3 and kde4, with gnome this isn't the case and they will likely support both 2 & 3 for a while
Whats the point of it? my problem with pulseaudio is I'm getting all these bugs but i cant see a singe case where its better than a tricked out alsa setup (well actually it does deal well with simultaneous log-ins, but I'm sure that could have been edged into alsa without as many problems as PA brought). Perhaps the problem is distros have invested a fair bit of time in it, and now they're in the longest que for the bar but don't want to switch because while they would get served sooner, they'd have to accept they just wasted 5minutes in that que.
Nice troll, but chromeOS is also ditching fluxbox! and i bet you can't justify your hatred of X either! I'll give you PulseAudio, expanding/improving alsa would have been a better call, but AFAIK neither you nor I are good enough to do the actual development of audiosubsystems, those that are got to make the call.
I think this is what hes trying to address
Debian release team. So the Debian release team has indicated that they are very open - not about a release date but a freeze date. That freeze date would be the time where we sit around and look at all the major components and decide what the major versions would be that we collaborate around. There is no pressure that we have to agree on everything, but just actually having the conversation is useful for any upstreams who care about this information.
I understand why kubuntu choose to jump the shark (they thought it was easier to shift people to kde4.x and help get it working*, than "waste" time supporting an old version of their second rate DE), and while i belive they were wrong, i switched to debian, I'm glad that they are moving to address the problem.
*Probably not the best call as ubuntu has more end users pre developer(esque) people than most distros.
so I'll have no choice but to upgrade to Karmic
There are other distros *cough*debian lenny still has 3.5*cough*, I used kde4 as an excuse for a wander and i do despite what some upstream devlopers claim, ubuntu really is a pretty good distro. But im generally under the impression KDE4.3 will be much more useable for end users than 4.0/.1 (.2 is ok but a bit slow and buggy on fedora)
people pick up a .0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a .5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
That's nice but wake me up when it leaves beta^H^H^H^H SP1
damn reality-distortion field must be fucking huge to cover all the western world except America! America is a country founded and run by religious fanatics, unfortunately its a damn powerful country, so the rest of us get pretty frustrated when you squander budgets the rest of us could only dream of!
I see you did some researched before posting, do you have the time to fill out a questionnaire?
It's complicated and depends on how its implemented, as both GTK and QT are cross platform, they could be ported to the new windowing system and AFAIK any programs that don't make any X specific calls would run on a gtk/qt-port-to-new-ws without porting the apps themselves. The ws itself could also support a subeset of X11 calls allowing gtk/qt to run without porting. However my suspicion is that for both technical and business reasons google will use a different toolkit, so gtk/qt will take a while and a port of any app with X11 specific calls will be need (or a compatibility library ala wine).
Google has stated that the Google Chrome OS project will be open source[5] by the end of 2009. Although it is based on the Linux kernel, it will use "a new windowing system".[6]
[1]
I doubt google would confuse windowing system (X11,tinyX,quartz,etc) with window manager (fluxbox,Enlightenment,compiz,metacity) or Desktop environment (KDE,gnome,xfce)
I look forward to acer machines shipping a web based os, whenever i move mine it loses its harddrive and needs a reset.
dammit i was supposed to edit that to say adobe flash
learn to type noob
Anything but Acrobat, king of the bloatware!
wait you mean its more likely that a web based os that will need flash to provide a rich web experience, will partner with the makers of flash for their flash technology, rather than the web-services which will surely be available to anybody with a webbrowser anyway?!
The OS wont have x11 so you are limited in what conventional apps you can run OO (not much chance), abiword/gnumeric/koffice all have plenty of their own problems to sort before porting, so what office suite will this ship....google-office, compete with ads.
same goes for mail clients, thunderbird/kontact/etc are all huge projects porting to run without X will be a pita....gmail to the resuce
OFC people will eventually port thier apps and thier are alternatives (yahoomail, livemail, etc), but if we've learnt anything from IE still having a huge marketshare its that most people stick to defaults. Google won't even need lock-in, they have default-in.
moblin is a conventional desktop shrunk down for use on a netbook, chrome is a web browser+web apps expanded to make an os for netbooks, both compete on netbooks but just like this isn't really an attack on anything its just an attempt to capitalise on the demand for cheap, long life netbooks.
how can a local application compete with powerful servers, it takes my pings 20ms to get to google and back, on old computer (42,000rpm drive) can take a similar amount of time to read its disks (14ms worst-case 7avg), but the processing by google can be nearly instant. Say i want to do 4 things at once that all require small amounts of disk access e.g listen to music,browse the web, im friends, have my email client running, on my computer the disk will spend 7*4=28ms running around touching these files, if i throw this all to google they probably have what i want stored in ram and the whole thing will take 20ms.
Obviously this isn't entirely fair as most OSs will cache files and unless your using fsync too much (stares at firefox) you don't have to wait for the disk read/writes, but this is basically why internet-based apps can compete.
Why don't companies port their apps to Linux?
Because most linux users will accept slightly (or moderately) inferior OSS apps over ports of closed apps. It's not just the low market-share that stops it, its the unreceptive market too.
Whats so bad in linux land?
Yes there are a million options and if you use certain distros (looking at you fedora and ubuntu) you get half-baked versions of lots of them, but if you want a full-baked solution its there (debian does pretty well), sure its not a shiny as vista/os X but its faster & more secure!
It might be smaller, faster, more secure because it literally is smaller and thus supports a smaller range of hardware.
Funny because a linux distro can fit support for 90% of windows devices and easily fit in 3G which is about a third/quater of your average windows install, oh and most of that space comes from apps, the kernel(10M)+xorg+managemnt apps(what windows gives you) easily fit inside 1G.
so tivo is a linux distribution?
GNU/linux/!X11/webkit/chrome ftw