You have FUD on your shoes and now you're traipsing it all over my nice clean carpet.
If you're a company that produces a product and you stake your living on that product then you hire somebody half-way competent and these issues are just totally non-issues.
If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that?
They write code in a portable way and compile it for a Linux target. it's really not hard. For more information, see any of the ten thousand "writing portable code" guides. As a bonus, portable code tends to be much cleaner and is less likely to have issues with things like newer versions of windows where compatibility changes are made, because you stop making assumptions about the operating system.
Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs
Why does an image editor need to care about the filesystem? What's wrong with just telling the operating system "I want to (read|write) file X" and letting it take care of that?
Ubuntu, Fedora
An approach that seems to be working just fine for valve and steam is to just support ubuntu, which also covers about a million derivative distros. If you want to be really nice you could also package for fedora and just with those 2 you'll cover something like 90% of Linux users. And the rest will be able to get your stuff working anyway, since they're smart enough to run obscure distros and generally know what they're doing (or can find a howto). I don't think any Linux user is going to complain if you're not packaging for their obscure distro.
GNOME, Mate, KDE
Pick one of the major toolkits like GTK or QT and you'll find that 99% of Linux users have it installed. Write your code to work with standards and you'll be just fine. Assuming you're doing something weird and wonderful enough for this to actually be an issue. But you're probably not.
systemd
Again, unless you're doing something weird and wonderful you will have no cause to know or care about systemd. Or openrc. or sysvinit. or any init system. And if you are doing something weird and wonderful where you actually do need to care you have many options: you can engage the community and they'll tell you everything you need to know, and maybe even write your systemd service files for you. Or you can just support the dominant platform and let the people using other systems sort it out themselves. And they will. And if they can they'll write howtos and send you patches to enable you to support the others if you want to.
You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
I sure can. If they hire morons they'll say "ooh Linux! scary!". Or they could hire skilled people who will see that these are all either total non-issues or trivially addressed.
It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are
It depends on what you're trying to sell, and at what price point. If it's a system utility, we probably don't want it anyway because we probably have something better that's not only free as in beer but free as in freedom. But if you're trying to sell a good, easy to use, prosumer-grade nonlinear video editor, shut up and take my money, as long as you don't want $500 for it.
Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission
It's really not that much time and effort if you have competent developers.
I literally do not know a single Linux user that doesn't have a pretty reasonable list of games in their steam Library. Mine is about to hit 300.
As far as I can see the problem is not one of price but
Well maybe they are wrong after all. I make no claim of being an expert.
introduces distortion over the entire frequency spectrum
Care to elaborate on this or point me to further reading? I'd be interested to hear what my vinyl-snob friends have to say about this. I'm sure they'll have a rebuttal prepared.
One thing I never understood about this debate is why do people care that people care? why do people insist on debating it? If they think they hear a difference then can't they just have their vinyl, and you can have your CDs, and I can have my MP3s, and we all just live in harmony?
I have had people suggest that maybe they can "feel" the higher frequencies somehow. Of course they don't ever seem to want to theorise about the biology of that idea.
Yes, but the argument that an analog reproduction of a 96khz source is more faithful than a 44khz CD is not incorrect.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to say you're wrong - I did say that we're not talking about differences you can hear, and personally I prefer digital over vinyl. All I'm saying is that their argument isn't 100% invalid - they're not wrong either.
It's a bit of both. A regular 44khz audio CD can't capture the full resolution of a digital master done at e.g 96khz. But imperfections in the medium are more likely to cause differences you can actually hear.
FYI, this person is a Mozilla employee. Look at the comment history. You'll find two types of comments: firefox advocacy, and abuse directed towards people calling her out for being a Mozilla employee. This describes 100% of her contributions to./
This person will now show up and deny being a Mozilla employee, citing lack of proof, and will label me insane and/or a conspiracy theorist, per the pattern.
Keep the above in mind whenever you read anything written by this person.
No, it's just that I don't care what you have to say. What I don't understand is how you failed to notice that I've been trolling you since your first reply. I knew you were a Mozilla shill because I recognised your name from the approximately 30,000 other "firefox is great" comments you've made this week. I watched while others called you out for being a Mozilla employee and you resorted to name-calling. Talk about schoolyard.. When you replied to my comment it was just too juicy for me to pass up. Thanks for playing!
Ooooooh, you were asking for data to support my claims. I see. I assumed that you were asking a question and were just too lazy to look it up yourself.
Do you have supporting data or not?
Sure do!
How many did switch
More than 5.
what's the percentage user share of Pale Moon and Waterfox?
Higher than it was before FF57 came out. If you want an actual number, it's greater than zero.
If you'd like more accurate data, I'd suggest a search engine. Or you could log into whatever interface you Mozilla marketing people have for your telemetry data.
I've read this sentence about 50 times and I still don't know what would possess someone to write something like this
Isn't it obvious? Ten. Thousand. Dollars. This is an ad, pure and simple. Just read it: This is rhetoric written by a Mozilla marketing person.
What is the point of writing this?
Increasing market share. Mozilla have been looking at their metrics and have discovered that they've lost a huge number of users since 57 came out. So they've bought an article in wired to try to lure some unsuspecting people back from chrome. It's all right there in the text, talking about how firefox is now more chrome than chrome.
If these things are true and manifestly evident, there's no need to write this at all
The people this is written for switched to chrome years ago and are happy with it. They haven't seen the new firefox, and they don't care. This ad is trying to lure them back.
what's the end game for this idea?
They're hoping they can get more people to switch from chrome to firefox than the number of people who switched to pale moon or waterfox last week.
Who would buy into this idea that hasn't already?
Nobody. What they fail to understand is that the people who use chrome like it. They just don't get that becoming a crappier version of chrome isn't a sensible business plan. They've been told this over and over again but they have their fingers in their ears and they're going "lalalalalala". And now they're in panic mode because the things their users have been saying for the past year turned out to be true.
This smacks of "hey fellow kids, I'm cool too" type rhetoric.
It's a paid ad.
I switched to Pale Moon long ago and regret nothing.
Waterfox here, pale moon and firefox 52 (locked at that version, never to be upgraded) on my last remaining 32 bit system. Both are faster than firefox and don't have a terrible UI. I was particularly impressed by the way waterfox imported everything from firefox: addons, the tabs I had open, everything. Was probably the most painless migration I've ever done.
I see you have the git repo there. Are you a codeweavers person or a wine person? I'd love some help getting UnrealEd 3 working properly. It's the only thing I miss from my windows days. The response on the wine bugtracker wasn't at all helpful, even though I gave all the requested info and Running With Scissors offered free copies of Postal 2 to anybody willing to help. One guy took a free copy and we never heard another word from him. This show-stopping bug has been open for over 3 years and is still marked "unconfirmed" despite being confirmed by multiple people. Before that there was another show-stopping bug dating back to about 2008 (which did eventually get fixed). The day I can run UnrealEd again will be a day of celebration.
Wow, another ad for Firefox 57. So this brings the total to about 57 positive articles about FF57 on slashdot so far and 0 talking about the decision to drop most of the functionality. Which seems to contrast the roughly 57,000 negative comments I've read about it.
I'm forced to wonder how much Mozilla is paying for these ads. I'm gonna go ahead and guess $57 per article. It seems obvious to me that Mozilla are looking at their telemetry data and watching their market share drop by the hour, so they're buying up every "journalist" they can afford.
I do think that this ad takes things a bit too far and is a bit too obvious - "gorgeous"?!? If you're going to pay for positive press, you should at least try to make it sound like an article rather than an ad.
the majority of them had malicious Firefox/Chrome plugins installed
You realise that chrome is already on webextensions, right? If webextensions solves all these problems then why are you removing malicious chrome plugins?
When MacOS X came out, it included classic mode, which was able to run most OS9 programs. Apple made some basic minimal effort to provide backwards compatibility, despite making huge architectural changes under the hood.
Another key difference between these scenarios is that Mac OS X wasn't crippled in such a way that it was suddenly impossible to do things you could do on OS9. In fact OSX was more capable.
It's kind of funny how often I see people justifying this insanity by talking about how horribly insecure the old API was. Kind of funny because in over a decade I have had exactly zero problems with addons doing nasty things. And I can recall hearing about exactly zero addons doing nasty things.
But we want to kill the old API, so...uh...security!
It reminds me of that time McLaren realised that they could increase the power to weight ratio of their F1 cars by removing that heavy steering wheel.
The harm done to the tardigrade was not agreed-to across the board. As the captain had mentioned, this ship was at war. The captain is willing to take questionable actions in order to defend his people. War is horrible, and this captain is a maverick.
If it was just that the captain is a maverick (or, more accurately, war criminal) and we could expect to see a real starfleet ship turn up and take him into custody then that would be fine. But the problem is much deeper than that - instead of what you describe we have starfleet admirals saying "we need more tardigrades!" without even bothering to ask whether it's being harmed. Sure, the harm might not have been agreed to by everyone, but there's still a whole lot of people who just don't give a shit. And that list includes starfleet admirals.
Slashdot Mirror
You have FUD on your shoes and now you're traipsing it all over my nice clean carpet.
If you're a company that produces a product and you stake your living on that product then you hire somebody half-way competent and these issues are just totally non-issues.
If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that?
They write code in a portable way and compile it for a Linux target. it's really not hard. For more information, see any of the ten thousand "writing portable code" guides. As a bonus, portable code tends to be much cleaner and is less likely to have issues with things like newer versions of windows where compatibility changes are made, because you stop making assumptions about the operating system.
Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs
Why does an image editor need to care about the filesystem? What's wrong with just telling the operating system "I want to (read|write) file X" and letting it take care of that?
Ubuntu, Fedora
An approach that seems to be working just fine for valve and steam is to just support ubuntu, which also covers about a million derivative distros. If you want to be really nice you could also package for fedora and just with those 2 you'll cover something like 90% of Linux users. And the rest will be able to get your stuff working anyway, since they're smart enough to run obscure distros and generally know what they're doing (or can find a howto). I don't think any Linux user is going to complain if you're not packaging for their obscure distro.
GNOME, Mate, KDE
Pick one of the major toolkits like GTK or QT and you'll find that 99% of Linux users have it installed. Write your code to work with standards and you'll be just fine. Assuming you're doing something weird and wonderful enough for this to actually be an issue. But you're probably not.
systemd
Again, unless you're doing something weird and wonderful you will have no cause to know or care about systemd. Or openrc. or sysvinit. or any init system. And if you are doing something weird and wonderful where you actually do need to care you have many options: you can engage the community and they'll tell you everything you need to know, and maybe even write your systemd service files for you. Or you can just support the dominant platform and let the people using other systems sort it out themselves. And they will. And if they can they'll write howtos and send you patches to enable you to support the others if you want to.
You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
I sure can. If they hire morons they'll say "ooh Linux! scary!". Or they could hire skilled people who will see that these are all either total non-issues or trivially addressed.
It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are
It depends on what you're trying to sell, and at what price point. If it's a system utility, we probably don't want it anyway because we probably have something better that's not only free as in beer but free as in freedom. But if you're trying to sell a good, easy to use, prosumer-grade nonlinear video editor, shut up and take my money, as long as you don't want $500 for it.
Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission
It's really not that much time and effort if you have competent developers.
I literally do not know a single Linux user that doesn't have a pretty reasonable list of games in their steam Library. Mine is about to hit 300.
As far as I can see the problem is not one of price but
Disagree? Please watch this several times before hitting 'reply':
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.sh... [xiph.org]
Very interesting video. In particular the explanation of the stair-stepping stuff and how sampling actually works. Thanks!
That's a really good point.
Well maybe they are wrong after all. I make no claim of being an expert.
introduces distortion over the entire frequency spectrum
Care to elaborate on this or point me to further reading? I'd be interested to hear what my vinyl-snob friends have to say about this. I'm sure they'll have a rebuttal prepared.
One thing I never understood about this debate is why do people care that people care? why do people insist on debating it? If they think they hear a difference then can't they just have their vinyl, and you can have your CDs, and I can have my MP3s, and we all just live in harmony?
I have had people suggest that maybe they can "feel" the higher frequencies somehow. Of course they don't ever seem to want to theorise about the biology of that idea.
Yes, but the argument that an analog reproduction of a 96khz source is more faithful than a 44khz CD is not incorrect.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to say you're wrong - I did say that we're not talking about differences you can hear, and personally I prefer digital over vinyl. All I'm saying is that their argument isn't 100% invalid - they're not wrong either.
It's a bit of both. A regular 44khz audio CD can't capture the full resolution of a digital master done at e.g 96khz. But imperfections in the medium are more likely to cause differences you can actually hear.
This is a public service announcement
FYI, this person is a Mozilla employee. Look at the comment history. You'll find two types of comments: firefox advocacy, and abuse directed towards people calling her out for being a Mozilla employee. This describes 100% of her contributions to ./
This person will now show up and deny being a Mozilla employee, citing lack of proof, and will label me insane and/or a conspiracy theorist, per the pattern.
Keep the above in mind whenever you read anything written by this person.
Fi9dTD4V
You're welcome, happy to help :)
sudo apt-mark hold firefox :)
Will lock it at whatever version you have installed
Indeed. Just looking at his history makes it blatantly obvious.
yay!
No, it's just that I don't care what you have to say. What I don't understand is how you failed to notice that I've been trolling you since your first reply. I knew you were a Mozilla shill because I recognised your name from the approximately 30,000 other "firefox is great" comments you've made this week. I watched while others called you out for being a Mozilla employee and you resorted to name-calling. Talk about schoolyard.. When you replied to my comment it was just too juicy for me to pass up. Thanks for playing!
wishful thinking
That's pretty funny coming from a Mozilla employee.
This is useless.
That's exactly the type of response I've come to expect from Mozilla. For someone who claims to not be associated with them, you sure sound like them.
I'm nothing to do with Mozilla
Tut tut! Now you're making a claim with no evidence.
Let me know when you have actual data
I sure won't. What do I care what some random mozilla shill thinks?
Ooooooh, you were asking for data to support my claims. I see. I assumed that you were asking a question and were just too lazy to look it up yourself.
Do you have supporting data or not?
Sure do!
How many did switch
More than 5.
what's the percentage user share of Pale Moon and Waterfox?
Higher than it was before FF57 came out. If you want an actual number, it's greater than zero.
If you'd like more accurate data, I'd suggest a search engine. Or you could log into whatever interface you Mozilla marketing people have for your telemetry data.
it would seem that you've mistaken me for a search engine.
I've read this sentence about 50 times and I still don't know what would possess someone to write something like this
Isn't it obvious? Ten. Thousand. Dollars. This is an ad, pure and simple. Just read it: This is rhetoric written by a Mozilla marketing person.
What is the point of writing this?
Increasing market share. Mozilla have been looking at their metrics and have discovered that they've lost a huge number of users since 57 came out. So they've bought an article in wired to try to lure some unsuspecting people back from chrome. It's all right there in the text, talking about how firefox is now more chrome than chrome.
If these things are true and manifestly evident, there's no need to write this at all
The people this is written for switched to chrome years ago and are happy with it. They haven't seen the new firefox, and they don't care. This ad is trying to lure them back.
what's the end game for this idea?
They're hoping they can get more people to switch from chrome to firefox than the number of people who switched to pale moon or waterfox last week.
Who would buy into this idea that hasn't already?
Nobody. What they fail to understand is that the people who use chrome like it. They just don't get that becoming a crappier version of chrome isn't a sensible business plan. They've been told this over and over again but they have their fingers in their ears and they're going "lalalalalala". And now they're in panic mode because the things their users have been saying for the past year turned out to be true.
This smacks of "hey fellow kids, I'm cool too" type rhetoric.
It's a paid ad.
I switched to Pale Moon long ago and regret nothing.
Waterfox here, pale moon and firefox 52 (locked at that version, never to be upgraded) on my last remaining 32 bit system. Both are faster than firefox and don't have a terrible UI. I was particularly impressed by the way waterfox imported everything from firefox: addons, the tabs I had open, everything. Was probably the most painless migration I've ever done.
Wow, the Mozilla spin machine is still in full swing. They must be hemorrhaging users at a worrying rate.
I wonder how much it costs to buy a "story" in wired. I wouldn't imagine it's cheap.
I see you have the git repo there. Are you a codeweavers person or a wine person? I'd love some help getting UnrealEd 3 working properly. It's the only thing I miss from my windows days. The response on the wine bugtracker wasn't at all helpful, even though I gave all the requested info and Running With Scissors offered free copies of Postal 2 to anybody willing to help. One guy took a free copy and we never heard another word from him. This show-stopping bug has been open for over 3 years and is still marked "unconfirmed" despite being confirmed by multiple people. Before that there was another show-stopping bug dating back to about 2008 (which did eventually get fixed). The day I can run UnrealEd again will be a day of celebration.
Wow, another ad for Firefox 57. So this brings the total to about 57 positive articles about FF57 on slashdot so far and 0 talking about the decision to drop most of the functionality. Which seems to contrast the roughly 57,000 negative comments I've read about it.
I'm forced to wonder how much Mozilla is paying for these ads. I'm gonna go ahead and guess $57 per article. It seems obvious to me that Mozilla are looking at their telemetry data and watching their market share drop by the hour, so they're buying up every "journalist" they can afford.
I do think that this ad takes things a bit too far and is a bit too obvious - "gorgeous"?!? If you're going to pay for positive press, you should at least try to make it sound like an article rather than an ad.
the majority of them had malicious Firefox/Chrome plugins installed
You realise that chrome is already on webextensions, right? If webextensions solves all these problems then why are you removing malicious chrome plugins?
When MacOS X came out, it included classic mode, which was able to run most OS9 programs. Apple made some basic minimal effort to provide backwards compatibility, despite making huge architectural changes under the hood.
Another key difference between these scenarios is that Mac OS X wasn't crippled in such a way that it was suddenly impossible to do things you could do on OS9. In fact OSX was more capable.
It's kind of funny how often I see people justifying this insanity by talking about how horribly insecure the old API was. Kind of funny because in over a decade I have had exactly zero problems with addons doing nasty things. And I can recall hearing about exactly zero addons doing nasty things.
But we want to kill the old API, so...uh...security!
It reminds me of that time McLaren realised that they could increase the power to weight ratio of their F1 cars by removing that heavy steering wheel.
The harm done to the tardigrade was not agreed-to across the board. As the captain had mentioned, this ship was at war. The captain is willing to take questionable actions in order to defend his people. War is horrible, and this captain is a maverick.
If it was just that the captain is a maverick (or, more accurately, war criminal) and we could expect to see a real starfleet ship turn up and take him into custody then that would be fine. But the problem is much deeper than that - instead of what you describe we have starfleet admirals saying "we need more tardigrades!" without even bothering to ask whether it's being harmed. Sure, the harm might not have been agreed to by everyone, but there's still a whole lot of people who just don't give a shit. And that list includes starfleet admirals.
Which means that they're not starfleet.
Which means this is not Star Trek.