Not sure what iOS has to do with this. An end user does need to recompile their apps if the distribution discontinues support for it. Assuming the dependent libraries are still available on the new platform, or can be compiled against the new system without problems.
I agree all the desktops don't do much Q&A. I find the general lack of quality in Linux pretty infuriating. But I understand, QA takes a lot of money and a lot of time. That being said, things working the same way for almost 20 years is why I like WindowMaker when I can.
I ran Debian for 10 years and yes as far as Linux goes it is my distribution of choice. But it still suffers the same problems, just at a slower pace. If i want to run a proper unix (vs OS X) i run FreeBSD. The quality and change control in the base OS is far superior to what i've experienced in the Linux world, however the desktop environment world is still a pain in the arse. It wouldn't be so bad if actual progress was made, but as I said, most of it appears to be bikeshed related.
I too like Windowmaker, i just wish GNUstep would take off so that there was a decent level of source compatibiity with OS X.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
And multiple virtual desktops with a decent sized monitor are over-rated. Having used them extensively back in the early 00s, i can't say i desperately miss them. And as to enjoying Windows 7, well i have to use it at work, but my desktop of choice is currently OS X.
But, keep denying the problems exist if it makes you feel better. The lack of new users putting up with random BS in the free unix desktop will enable you to feel "leet" for a while yet. Personally, i can't be fucked dealing with it any more. I don't care how shiny it is,if it doesn't work properly.
I'm not sure if you've used Windows recently, but its actually quite a way away from being a crock of crap. Resource intensive? Yes. RAM is cheap. All my hardware works properly, virtually all of my apps work properly, and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell.
Don't get me wrong: Windows is no shining example of desktop design. But in terms of getting shit done with a minimum of fucking around fixing broken shit - we're not in 1995 any more.
I agree, being WILLING to break compatibility to FIX or IMPROVE is arguably a strength. My point is that people are breaking compatibility more often due to bikeshedding, rather than any fundamental need to do so.
The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995 is that waves of new programmers hit a project every few years, decide that they can reinvent the wheel better than the last guy (or that whatever Apple/Microsoft did last week is a must have), break a heap of stuff rewriting in flavour of the month language/programming paradigm and end up with essentially the same real world functionality we had 5 years ago but with double the resource usage - and broken apps.
The issue is that Windows adopted the Aero interface. That means both Mac and Windows have interfaces vastly more sophisticated than what is available on KDE2. If they didn't do the eye candy work Linux desktop would look a decade behind minimum.
Actually i was more referring to the rip offs of spotlight/windows search, launchpad, etc., but good point. A new Windows feature is no excuse for Linux being broken. Haven't tried it recently, but when the composted desktop was first implemented, it broke openGL apps (unless turned back off). Wtf. I'd rather have my OpenGL apps work than some desktop candy. Its probably fixed now, but an instance of my point about stuff being rushed out the door "half-assed". Sound is another example. Fix the mixer at a system level once properly rather than rooting around with sound daemon of the month.
As for old apps, this is Linux apps should recompile and be sent out by the distribution. Linux has never sought binary compatibility.
Am aware of this, and this is why it is still a niche (and will remain so). End user doesn't care for recompiling apps, they do care about app X going away and rendering their workflow broken. However, unless you're manually installing old libraries (which may not work with newer versions of system libraries, new compilers, etc), even a recompile often isn't possible to get the old apps back.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems. OS X has even carried compatibility with old apps for at least 5 years, and its been through a major operating system redesign and CPU architecture shift.
Can I do that with the free unix desktop? Sure, vanilla X apps probably work, but every major rev of KDE (haven't tried old gnome apps on newer gnome versions) breaks heaps of old apps. Every version of KDE or Gnome i have ever used since both projects began (i remember compiling KDE 1.0 and QT from source and being impressed:)), i have found "wierd" shit where i can make part of the UI crash or errors thrown on screen.
Please: stop fucking around with eye candy and the colour of the bicycle shed. Debug what you have, get it stable and THEN go about adding new stuff. Just because Windows or OS X has new feature of the month, it doesn't mean you need to kludge a clone of it on top of your DE within 2 weeks in some shitty half-assed way.
"Usability" of a UI is to a certain extent, bullshit. Most users can adapt to design decisions made on your environment. Apple knows this - yes, I wish i could customise the OS X desktop a bit more, but at the end of the day the fact that I can't is no major deal-breaker. Because it actually works. Yes, UI testing can make soemthing a little nicer to use - but if it is full of bugs, crashes, breaks your old apps that you like and generally misbehaves, then all that usability testing and research is WASTED.
I didn't mean this to turn into a big unix-desktop rant, but i've been really wanting to like the unix desktop since 1995. Some aspects of it, I do love. But since the days of say, KDE2 (or gnome equivalent - essentially when we got a usable file manager style desktop), there's been very little actual progress in real world usablity that I can see. Sure, there's new eye candy. Whoopie. Can it help me get shit done better? Not really.... progress appears to have stagnated.
"Its not that bad" is damning with faint praise, when there were already c++, and objective C out there. Why the waste of time reinventing the wheel when that time and effort could have been put into actually making a better desktop environment?
Its not a complete rip off of OS X. They just ripped off the look of the UI, the actual shit that matters under the covers is still nowhere near good enough.
Thing is, at least OS X has the architectural foundations to make the trade-off worth it. Gnome LOOKS a bit like a Mac, but the mac UI is actually the least attractive part of the entire OS, imho.
Newsflash: governments (including your own) lie. However, images of a relatively in-tact stealth recon aircraft in Iranian hands + confirmation from the US that one or more have gone missing lends credence to the iranian claims that they were able to bring it down without actually shooting it down.
I think he meant "real toolkits" as in examples from the real world, both good and BAD, that demonstrate both some of the brain damage in firefox, and how to not do it. Only having used a good toolkit, you have perhaps not been exposed to the brain damage that firefox has, and seen that it is a horrible idea.
The study itself appears to be bunk. They assume that the browser is going to be exploited which doesn't give any credit to how difficult that might be
Hate to break it to you, but it doesn't matter how difficult it was to exploit when there are scripts available for free to do it. If an exploit is feasible, it will be exploited eventually. Running an application that runs any sort of un-trusted code from the internet without a sandbox in 2011 is playing with fire. Eventually you'll get burned.
You don't run your daemons on your servers without TCP wrappers, and/or Jails now do you?
Pretty much agree with this. Whilst in theory maybe firefox code is more reviewed or whatever (i'm willing to play devils advocate on that one) the simple fact is that the industry has moved on from attempting to write secure code and ensure that all code in the browser is written securely, to sandboxing. Sandboxing makes the assumption that all this code is insecure - which with 20/20 hindsight is probably the way browsers (or anything connected to a network) should have been written in the first place.
Firefox needs to catch up. If some badly written patch or plug-in can be exploited within the browser to own your machine, thats a problem. Yes, it will still happen if the sandbox can be exploited, but thats a far smaller subset of code to review. If you can get a secure sandbox environment, then an overlooked problem in the rest of the code has far less impact.
IE has been reasonably secure for years if you bother to go to the effort to lock it down sufficiently with security zones (why should my corp browser be running unknown active-x or plugins from the internet??), but no home user bothers.
Hate to break it to you, but MOST PEOPLE don't care about modding their tablet. They want it to get job A, B, and C dont with a minimal amount of fucking around. Until more open source people "get that" linux, etc will continue to be a niche product. Sure, make it customizable. But easy things should be easy, and actually reliably work.
Full screen isn't necessarily bad. Fullscreen on Lion for example, works well. Swipe left/right to change apps. When i am working in an app i want to see what i am doing, most of the time - the times i want to look in one window and work in another is perhaps 20% of the time.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be able to figure out this will probably be coming to IOS in the next 18 months.
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Exactly. As i mentioned yesterday, bicycle-shedding....
Not sure what iOS has to do with this. An end user does need to recompile their apps if the distribution discontinues support for it. Assuming the dependent libraries are still available on the new platform, or can be compiled against the new system without problems.
I ran Debian for 10 years and yes as far as Linux goes it is my distribution of choice. But it still suffers the same problems, just at a slower pace. If i want to run a proper unix (vs OS X) i run FreeBSD. The quality and change control in the base OS is far superior to what i've experienced in the Linux world, however the desktop environment world is still a pain in the arse. It wouldn't be so bad if actual progress was made, but as I said, most of it appears to be bikeshed related.
I too like Windowmaker, i just wish GNUstep would take off so that there was a decent level of source compatibiity with OS X.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
And multiple virtual desktops with a decent sized monitor are over-rated. Having used them extensively back in the early 00s, i can't say i desperately miss them. And as to enjoying Windows 7, well i have to use it at work, but my desktop of choice is currently OS X.
But, keep denying the problems exist if it makes you feel better. The lack of new users putting up with random BS in the free unix desktop will enable you to feel "leet" for a while yet. Personally, i can't be fucked dealing with it any more. I don't care how shiny it is ,if it doesn't work properly.
I'm not sure if you've used Windows recently, but its actually quite a way away from being a crock of crap. Resource intensive? Yes. RAM is cheap. All my hardware works properly, virtually all of my apps work properly, and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell.
Don't get me wrong: Windows is no shining example of desktop design. But in terms of getting shit done with a minimum of fucking around fixing broken shit - we're not in 1995 any more.
I agree, being WILLING to break compatibility to FIX or IMPROVE is arguably a strength. My point is that people are breaking compatibility more often due to bikeshedding, rather than any fundamental need to do so.
The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995 is that waves of new programmers hit a project every few years, decide that they can reinvent the wheel better than the last guy (or that whatever Apple/Microsoft did last week is a must have), break a heap of stuff rewriting in flavour of the month language/programming paradigm and end up with essentially the same real world functionality we had 5 years ago but with double the resource usage - and broken apps.
Actually i was more referring to the rip offs of spotlight/windows search, launchpad, etc., but good point. A new Windows feature is no excuse for Linux being broken. Haven't tried it recently, but when the composted desktop was first implemented, it broke openGL apps (unless turned back off). Wtf. I'd rather have my OpenGL apps work than some desktop candy. Its probably fixed now, but an instance of my point about stuff being rushed out the door "half-assed". Sound is another example. Fix the mixer at a system level once properly rather than rooting around with sound daemon of the month.
Am aware of this, and this is why it is still a niche (and will remain so). End user doesn't care for recompiling apps, they do care about app X going away and rendering their workflow broken. However, unless you're manually installing old libraries (which may not work with newer versions of system libraries, new compilers, etc), even a recompile often isn't possible to get the old apps back.
wm2. or wmx, try it you might like it.
Here here. If i want to get rid of the UI, that is what the F11 key is for.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems. OS X has even carried compatibility with old apps for at least 5 years, and its been through a major operating system redesign and CPU architecture shift.
Can I do that with the free unix desktop? Sure, vanilla X apps probably work, but every major rev of KDE (haven't tried old gnome apps on newer gnome versions) breaks heaps of old apps. Every version of KDE or Gnome i have ever used since both projects began (i remember compiling KDE 1.0 and QT from source and being impressed :)), i have found "wierd" shit where i can make part of the UI crash or errors thrown on screen.
Please: stop fucking around with eye candy and the colour of the bicycle shed. Debug what you have, get it stable and THEN go about adding new stuff. Just because Windows or OS X has new feature of the month, it doesn't mean you need to kludge a clone of it on top of your DE within 2 weeks in some shitty half-assed way.
"Usability" of a UI is to a certain extent, bullshit. Most users can adapt to design decisions made on your environment. Apple knows this - yes, I wish i could customise the OS X desktop a bit more, but at the end of the day the fact that I can't is no major deal-breaker. Because it actually works. Yes, UI testing can make soemthing a little nicer to use - but if it is full of bugs, crashes, breaks your old apps that you like and generally misbehaves, then all that usability testing and research is WASTED.
I didn't mean this to turn into a big unix-desktop rant, but i've been really wanting to like the unix desktop since 1995. Some aspects of it, I do love. But since the days of say, KDE2 (or gnome equivalent - essentially when we got a usable file manager style desktop), there's been very little actual progress in real world usablity that I can see. Sure, there's new eye candy. Whoopie. Can it help me get shit done better? Not really.... progress appears to have stagnated.
"Its not that bad" is damning with faint praise, when there were already c++, and objective C out there. Why the waste of time reinventing the wheel when that time and effort could have been put into actually making a better desktop environment?
Its not a complete rip off of OS X. They just ripped off the look of the UI, the actual shit that matters under the covers is still nowhere near good enough.
Thing is, at least OS X has the architectural foundations to make the trade-off worth it. Gnome LOOKS a bit like a Mac, but the mac UI is actually the least attractive part of the entire OS, imho.
I guess the alternative of handing over control of top secret military hardware to your enemy is preferable then?
Newsflash: governments (including your own) lie. However, images of a relatively in-tact stealth recon aircraft in Iranian hands + confirmation from the US that one or more have gone missing lends credence to the iranian claims that they were able to bring it down without actually shooting it down.
If you see your location suddenly change by a huge variance then you can be pretty sure you're now getting spoofed signals instead of real ones.
Evidently, GPS is not reliable, as it relies on external connectivity.
I think he meant "real toolkits" as in examples from the real world, both good and BAD, that demonstrate both some of the brain damage in firefox, and how to not do it. Only having used a good toolkit, you have perhaps not been exposed to the brain damage that firefox has, and seen that it is a horrible idea.
Hate to break it to you, but it doesn't matter how difficult it was to exploit when there are scripts available for free to do it. If an exploit is feasible, it will be exploited eventually. Running an application that runs any sort of un-trusted code from the internet without a sandbox in 2011 is playing with fire. Eventually you'll get burned.
You don't run your daemons on your servers without TCP wrappers, and/or Jails now do you?
Pretty much agree with this. Whilst in theory maybe firefox code is more reviewed or whatever (i'm willing to play devils advocate on that one) the simple fact is that the industry has moved on from attempting to write secure code and ensure that all code in the browser is written securely, to sandboxing. Sandboxing makes the assumption that all this code is insecure - which with 20/20 hindsight is probably the way browsers (or anything connected to a network) should have been written in the first place.
Firefox needs to catch up. If some badly written patch or plug-in can be exploited within the browser to own your machine, thats a problem. Yes, it will still happen if the sandbox can be exploited, but thats a far smaller subset of code to review. If you can get a secure sandbox environment, then an overlooked problem in the rest of the code has far less impact.
IE has been reasonably secure for years if you bother to go to the effort to lock it down sufficiently with security zones (why should my corp browser be running unknown active-x or plugins from the internet??), but no home user bothers.
Does the USA have a local equivalent of the Iraqi Information Minister? Did he defect and get given a new job?
Hate to break it to you, but MOST PEOPLE don't care about modding their tablet. They want it to get job A, B, and C dont with a minimal amount of fucking around. Until more open source people "get that" linux, etc will continue to be a niche product. Sure, make it customizable. But easy things should be easy, and actually reliably work.
22 inch too small?
At least 26% of people don't do their job properly and should be fired. Pretty much irrespective of industry.
No viruses, no spyware, 10 hr battery with minimal weight. "Only software approved by apple" is a double-edged sword.
Full screen isn't necessarily bad. Fullscreen on Lion for example, works well. Swipe left/right to change apps. When i am working in an app i want to see what i am doing, most of the time - the times i want to look in one window and work in another is perhaps 20% of the time.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be able to figure out this will probably be coming to IOS in the next 18 months.
Ermm.... how do bluetooth keyboards suck? I've been quite happily using on on my mac mini for the past 4 years....