How many of you zealots have actually used the W7 release candidate?
*raises hand*
I thought it was okay. If I didn't already have XP installations for gaming, I'd probably install it instead. But there's no chance it hell I'd actually pay money for it; it really has nothing, on the user side of things, that my XP/Ubuntu dual boot can't.
I've gone beyond the days where I actually care about the OS I use, and Windows 7 simply doesn't add enough to the equation to change that.
Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.
Not really. It fits in with the rest of Gnome fairly well, and if you throw on the Linux equivalent of "Cleartype" the fonts are actually quite nice. Installing the "mscorefonts" that most distros have these days makes Firefox rendering between the two practically indistinguishable, aside from, again, that Clear/Freetype rendering beauty.
But here's the thing - there are more people using desktop Linux than there are playing World of WarCraft. Ubuntu alone has 13 million; WoW has 11.5, according to announcements made in late 2008. 1% is a lot more than it looks.
Profit can be made here by people who don't underestimate how big Linux is as it is. If you could get all of them to buy something for $20, wouldn't that be worth it? Games come to mind here.
But taking this gleeful money grab out of the equation, all of the companies funding Linux must have some return on it, right? Intel is not stupid. They would not throw money at Linux unless it gave them a tangible return on that investment. That really has little to do with how popular Linux is, though I'm sure they would like it to be so Microsoft could be knocked down a peg or two.
I agree with your overall premise, but the money flying around Linux has to be flowing for a reason. It certainly is now, and if it's for popularity's sake, that may not grow as fast as some people would hope or predict. But even without growing popularity, there's still money there. It's not the only reason for the push.
Don't want to leave you folks with the impression that I am somehow responsible for the state of the linux desktop.
Damn you. I've found LXDE to be an extremely well put together project. Hopefully they can polish it up a bit more without ruining what makes it so great.
Way to miss the point. He's saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't try to compete.
I agree with his premise. Who gives a shit if Linux has 1-2% market share? Does Ubuntu get worse on my laptop if it's not out there conquering the world?
Vista was the change in that. How many people didn't even know where the shutdown button was after, what, five or six years of XP?
The problem here is that if you want to improve on XP's interface, you have to do it gradually or evolutionarily. But that's the thing: XP's interface, while okay, could be better. To get any innovation and superiority, you'll need to deviate from the norm. Both Linux and Microsoft have had issues with this, and Linux in particular. If they're too different, users will discard it, but if they're too "samey" to XP, users will just go, "Well, what's the point?"
Wow, Firefox has some fucking huge memory leaks. Maybe you need to be running Adblock Plus on when you're surfing for Hi-Def porn.
I can't say I've ever has numbers like ones that you've listed, but that's just me. In both Windows and Ubuntu, Firefox rarely goes over 150 MB, unless I'm watching YouTube. What kinds of websites do you browse? (I'm not attacking your stats, I'm just curious)
I said I've seen Linux improve over the years, but only in certain directions. Linux improves in the directions that the developers of Linux find relevant, to themselves.
Dude, now you're just posting your stereotypes over and over again. If I had any doubt that you haven't used Linux in years, it's gone.
1) You claim that package managers force you to hunt and install for dependencies. This is wrong. Most package managers install these for you.
2) You claim that users don't like package management systems. You fail to realize that not everyone has the same opinion as you, and that millions of users have learned how to use a repository and have adapted quite easily. You also fail to realize that programs such as Steam use package management and shared library ideas without a hitch.
3) You claim, as above, that developers only code for developers. So all of that desktop stuff so far is developer crap. And the notifications and userface improvements that Ubuntu has been working on. And the netbook development Fedora has been working on. Oh, and the boot speeds. Don't forget the Plymouth project, which smooths out the boot process.
4) You claim Linux has only advanced in only ways developers care about. Sure, if developers care about Wi-Fi support for the majority of devices, better monitor detection, simplifying configuration to make most of them automatic (developers really don't like that one), removing dependency hell entirely, making package managers so easy that a five year old can install a game, creating LiveCD technology so that users can run a full OS off their CD drive, and adapting the GUI so that it's largely self explanatory.
5) You claim everything that deviates from Windows or Mac is a weakness. You misunderstand the idea of "improvements," which by definition have to be different compared to the thing they're improving on.
I like Linux. I don't use it completely, and I know it has weaknesses (games, standard package formats, the fact that it's not installed by default on computers, Ubuntu's default color, other random bugs I've reported over the two years) but I really don't enjoy ignorance and misinformation, even if it is innocent in nature.
This so called "smoking gun" is really just what the parent poster has described, a desperate effort by the FOSS community to blame someone else for their failings.
Have you used any of the distros installed on any of these netbooks? Many of them were shadows of their former Linux implementations, mostly crapped together by their manufacturer, not the FOSS community. Drivers missing, updates breaking functionality, etc.
If anything, the FOSS community has been trying to get vanilla Linux distros running easily with netbooks to fix the bad press they got because of Asus and MSI's so called "Linux."
Third round Ubuntu Netbook Remix... Ok, the install was a breeze, the price cant be beat, and it picked up 90% of the hardware without a hiccup. Not bad. Until you start using it - graphical glitches everywhere. There is some single window dashboard on the netbook version that is sluggish and confusing garbage - turn it off first to even attempt to have a decent time. It still fails on so many common tasks without tweaking / dl'ing that it failed "The Wife Test" and that was it.
The only major bug report for the HP Minin 1000 series in UNR is an issue with the sound. If you can replicate this issue, please, by all means, do so and tell someone about it so it can be fixed.
Linux on any platform, whether it's a desktop computer, a server, a netbook, or a router works great, IF you know what you're doing and IF you have time to play with it.
Just like any other Operating System! How could that be?!
I stopped reading there, considering you didn't even get THAT right. Sure, repositories have issues occasionally, I agree, but it's not a travesty that you're making it out to be. Ubuntu has the PPA stuff going on, where developers can make Peronal Repositories for users to download software. I wish they'd make these easier to access, but it's not like it's hard now.
>If Linux were up to snuff for end user use and MS tried the "we'll raise the price from $15 to $100" trick then ASUS would just tell them, "well, we're getting Linux for free, and everybody likes it just as much, so piss off."
Not really, because you can't deny that every manufacturer needs to sell Windows at least somewhat, because there are some people who just like Windows better. Microsoft's threats could be a huge jump that could kill a company.
Once again, you start ranting as if there's this huge stockpile of feedback that Linux developers are ignoring outright. Because if there is, please point it out. There are people looking for that sort of thing.
A concrete example, from personal experience: when my girlfriend was deciding whether or not to get her netbook with Linux or XP, one of the deciding factors was that, if she wanted to use it as a desktop replacement, with a large monitor, or to give presentations, hooked up to whatever data projector was at hand, that was going to be a pain because Linux doesn't autodetect monitors well, or at all.
Thanks for giving Linux some reasonable, good feedback. Wouldn't it be great if everybody did that, rather than randomly complaining about it on Slashdot (and then calling a doubter "an idiot and possibly illiterate" shortly after)? By the way, Ubuntu has tried to fix this in their latest release and will continue to do so (I haven't tested their latest effort, myself - no use for second monitor).
Want to install some software? You can't just go download a nice installer package.
Instead, you open up a program click what you want, and then it downloads and installs for you, right? And, by the way, some companies do distribute packages (like Opera).
You've got to do this repository thing. Repositories are great for geeks, but are overwhelming and cryptic for non-geeks.
EERRT. Wrong. Strawman yourself, Batman! People can grasp Steam, which is a repository concept, and nobody seems to be complaining about a geeky idea. The difference is that geeks bother to learn about using them properly OS-wide, which is the key of the issue. Most people (you, maybe?) just see that their random exe's don't work and give up. You can't take interest and five minute user research for granted anymore; it all has to be spelled out if it changes AT ALL from Windows. You're not complaining about an inferior system, you're complaining about how it's different. "Different" and "inferior" are not synonyms.
Your own example: "My son's copy of Tonka Raceway didn't run in Wine because of a regression in the 1.1.13 release." If a Windows game doesn't run in WINE because of an incompatibility, fine.
Bug report that shit all over Amazon.com! In any case, Wine has an awesome bug tracker, and they fix stuff really quickly..
If it, or any other software, doesn't run because of some stupid mistake in the release or, worse, a dependency, that's bad.
Examples of this happening? Especially the dependency thing. Never ran into that issue before, myself, or seen any newbies complaining on the forums. No complaining on bug reports or mailing lists. You'd think an issue that big would be, you know, talked about more.
When you install a Windows or Mac program you don't have to spend the next few hours hunting down all the other stuff it depends upon but doesn't come with.
You don't have to do that in Linux either, smartass. It already comes with everything it needs (well, a list of what it needs, which it downloads immediately), and if it doesn't work correctly, it's a bug. File a report, if you kindly. Unless you're just, again, making things up, because you're ranting about dependency hell from the late 90's. Or maybe you tried Slackware first, which wasn't probably a good idea. Not cool, man, not cool.
If there's no direct feedback from the Linux netbook experiment, the correct response isn't to sneer and say "what feedback?" it's to ask WHY there isn't any.
Because all of the OS' implementations that were installed by the manufacturers on Linux netbooks were shit and scrapped immediately by anybody with a clue? That might be a hint. And you think all of the distros now trying to support the netbooks out of their respective boxes is just coincidence?
Do you think Microsoft just takes a new OS, drops it on the world by surprise and then says "well hey, nobody actually complained in so many words...."
Hey, now, no need for that. Rather, why don't you actually come up with an argument rather than posting some random story that cannot be verified and really has nothing to do with what your parent posted? Because you can't? Oh, that's right.
They didn't doubt you. Why did you feel the need to post a long and fruitless story? You barely even addressed the Windows comment.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of you zealots have actually used the W7 release candidate?
*raises hand*
I thought it was okay. If I didn't already have XP installations for gaming, I'd probably install it instead. But there's no chance it hell I'd actually pay money for it; it really has nothing, on the user side of things, that my XP/Ubuntu dual boot can't.
I've gone beyond the days where I actually care about the OS I use, and Windows 7 simply doesn't add enough to the equation to change that.
I had the same thing. The Beta ran fine, a little slower than XP, but not much. The RC was sluggish.
Is the hardware less powerful? That's typically the case, as far as I've seen.
As long as I get my next Elder Scrolls fix (and it's still single-player and anywhere near as good as Morrowind), Bethesda can do no wrong.
Fixed that for you.
Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.
Not really. It fits in with the rest of Gnome fairly well, and if you throw on the Linux equivalent of "Cleartype" the fonts are actually quite nice. Installing the "mscorefonts" that most distros have these days makes Firefox rendering between the two practically indistinguishable, aside from, again, that Clear/Freetype rendering beauty.
Unless you're fat. The Milkshake Dance is not considered dancing in most lessons.
But here's the thing - there are more people using desktop Linux than there are playing World of WarCraft. Ubuntu alone has 13 million; WoW has 11.5, according to announcements made in late 2008. 1% is a lot more than it looks.
Profit can be made here by people who don't underestimate how big Linux is as it is. If you could get all of them to buy something for $20, wouldn't that be worth it? Games come to mind here.
But taking this gleeful money grab out of the equation, all of the companies funding Linux must have some return on it, right? Intel is not stupid. They would not throw money at Linux unless it gave them a tangible return on that investment. That really has little to do with how popular Linux is, though I'm sure they would like it to be so Microsoft could be knocked down a peg or two.
I agree with your overall premise, but the money flying around Linux has to be flowing for a reason. It certainly is now, and if it's for popularity's sake, that may not grow as fast as some people would hope or predict. But even without growing popularity, there's still money there. It's not the only reason for the push.
Also, I meant stumble upon, not stomp ;)
Don't want to leave you folks with the impression that I am somehow responsible for the state of the linux desktop.
Damn you.
I've found LXDE to be an extremely well put together project. Hopefully they can polish it up a bit more without ruining what makes it so great.
And there are very easy ways to see where Gnome is headed. They freaking plaster it all over their website!
I tested the Gnome Shell stuff and thought it was brilliant. It will take some work, but at the point it's at now, I have no worries whatsoever.
Way to miss the point. He's saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't try to compete.
I agree with his premise. Who gives a shit if Linux has 1-2% market share? Does Ubuntu get worse on my laptop if it's not out there conquering the world?
Vista was the change in that. How many people didn't even know where the shutdown button was after, what, five or six years of XP?
The problem here is that if you want to improve on XP's interface, you have to do it gradually or evolutionarily. But that's the thing: XP's interface, while okay, could be better. To get any innovation and superiority, you'll need to deviate from the norm. Both Linux and Microsoft have had issues with this, and Linux in particular. If they're too different, users will discard it, but if they're too "samey" to XP, users will just go, "Well, what's the point?"
Only the engine is Open Source. Personally, I don't like the game very much.
Old version.
Could it be Flash, perhaps? Or the way Linux manages memory?
Wow, Firefox has some fucking huge memory leaks. Maybe you need to be running Adblock Plus on when you're surfing for Hi-Def porn.
I can't say I've ever has numbers like ones that you've listed, but that's just me. In both Windows and Ubuntu, Firefox rarely goes over 150 MB, unless I'm watching YouTube. What kinds of websites do you browse? (I'm not attacking your stats, I'm just curious)
I said I've seen Linux improve over the years, but only in certain directions. Linux improves in the directions that the developers of Linux find relevant, to themselves.
Because this website doesn't really exist, and is only for developers to post?
Dude, now you're just posting your stereotypes over and over again. If I had any doubt that you haven't used Linux in years, it's gone.
1) You claim that package managers force you to hunt and install for dependencies. This is wrong. Most package managers install these for you.
2) You claim that users don't like package management systems. You fail to realize that not everyone has the same opinion as you, and that millions of users have learned how to use a repository and have adapted quite easily. You also fail to realize that programs such as Steam use package management and shared library ideas without a hitch.
3) You claim, as above, that developers only code for developers. So all of that desktop stuff so far is developer crap. And the notifications and userface improvements that Ubuntu has been working on. And the netbook development Fedora has been working on. Oh, and the boot speeds. Don't forget the Plymouth project, which smooths out the boot process.
4) You claim Linux has only advanced in only ways developers care about. Sure, if developers care about Wi-Fi support for the majority of devices, better monitor detection, simplifying configuration to make most of them automatic (developers really don't like that one), removing dependency hell entirely, making package managers so easy that a five year old can install a game, creating LiveCD technology so that users can run a full OS off their CD drive, and adapting the GUI so that it's largely self explanatory.
5) You claim everything that deviates from Windows or Mac is a weakness. You misunderstand the idea of "improvements," which by definition have to be different compared to the thing they're improving on.
I like Linux. I don't use it completely, and I know it has weaknesses (games, standard package formats, the fact that it's not installed by default on computers, Ubuntu's default color, other random bugs I've reported over the two years) but I really don't enjoy ignorance and misinformation, even if it is innocent in nature.
This so called "smoking gun" is really just what the parent poster has described, a desperate effort by the FOSS community to blame someone else for their failings.
Have you used any of the distros installed on any of these netbooks? Many of them were shadows of their former Linux implementations, mostly crapped together by their manufacturer, not the FOSS community. Drivers missing, updates breaking functionality, etc.
If anything, the FOSS community has been trying to get vanilla Linux distros running easily with netbooks to fix the bad press they got because of Asus and MSI's so called "Linux."
Third round Ubuntu Netbook Remix... Ok, the install was a breeze, the price cant be beat, and it picked up 90% of the hardware without a hiccup. Not bad. Until you start using it - graphical glitches everywhere. There is some single window dashboard on the netbook version that is sluggish and confusing garbage - turn it off first to even attempt to have a decent time. It still fails on so many common tasks without tweaking / dl'ing that it failed "The Wife Test" and that was it.
The only major bug report for the HP Minin 1000 series in UNR is an issue with the sound. If you can replicate this issue, please, by all means, do so and tell someone about it so it can be fixed.
If it isn't the Year of the Linux Desktop, it's certainly comic relief in these dark times.
Linux on any platform, whether it's a desktop computer, a server, a netbook, or a router works great, IF you know what you're doing and IF you have time to play with it.
Just like any other Operating System! How could that be?!
However, on a desktop, general purpose computer, you might want to, say, for instance, try out Opera's new beta...Here, you're stuck.
Really. So these don't work or exist?
I stopped reading there, considering you didn't even get THAT right. Sure, repositories have issues occasionally, I agree, but it's not a travesty that you're making it out to be. Ubuntu has the PPA stuff going on, where developers can make Peronal Repositories for users to download software. I wish they'd make these easier to access, but it's not like it's hard now.
>If Linux were up to snuff for end user use and MS tried the "we'll raise the price from $15 to $100" trick then ASUS would just tell them, "well, we're getting Linux for free, and everybody likes it just as much, so piss off."
Not really, because you can't deny that every manufacturer needs to sell Windows at least somewhat, because there are some people who just like Windows better. Microsoft's threats could be a huge jump that could kill a company.
Once again, you start ranting as if there's this huge stockpile of feedback that Linux developers are ignoring outright. Because if there is, please point it out. There are people looking for that sort of thing.
A concrete example, from personal experience: when my girlfriend was deciding whether or not to get her netbook with Linux or XP, one of the deciding factors was that, if she wanted to use it as a desktop replacement, with a large monitor, or to give presentations, hooked up to whatever data projector was at hand, that was going to be a pain because Linux doesn't autodetect monitors well, or at all.
Thanks for giving Linux some reasonable, good feedback. Wouldn't it be great if everybody did that, rather than randomly complaining about it on Slashdot (and then calling a doubter "an idiot and possibly illiterate" shortly after)? By the way, Ubuntu has tried to fix this in their latest release and will continue to do so (I haven't tested their latest effort, myself - no use for second monitor).
Want to install some software? You can't just go download a nice installer package.
Instead, you open up a program click what you want, and then it downloads and installs for you, right? And, by the way, some companies do distribute packages (like Opera).
You've got to do this repository thing. Repositories are great for geeks, but are overwhelming and cryptic for non-geeks.
EERRT. Wrong. Strawman yourself, Batman! People can grasp Steam, which is a repository concept, and nobody seems to be complaining about a geeky idea. The difference is that geeks bother to learn about using them properly OS-wide, which is the key of the issue. Most people (you, maybe?) just see that their random exe's don't work and give up. You can't take interest and five minute user research for granted anymore; it all has to be spelled out if it changes AT ALL from Windows. You're not complaining about an inferior system, you're complaining about how it's different. "Different" and "inferior" are not synonyms.
Your own example: "My son's copy of Tonka Raceway didn't run in Wine because of a regression in the 1.1.13 release." If a Windows game doesn't run in WINE because of an incompatibility, fine.
Bug report that shit all over Amazon.com! In any case, Wine has an awesome bug tracker, and they fix stuff really quickly..
If it, or any other software, doesn't run because of some stupid mistake in the release or, worse, a dependency, that's bad.
Examples of this happening? Especially the dependency thing. Never ran into that issue before, myself, or seen any newbies complaining on the forums. No complaining on bug reports or mailing lists. You'd think an issue that big would be, you know, talked about more.
When you install a Windows or Mac program you don't have to spend the next few hours hunting down all the other stuff it depends upon but doesn't come with.
You don't have to do that in Linux either, smartass. It already comes with everything it needs (well, a list of what it needs, which it downloads immediately), and if it doesn't work correctly, it's a bug. File a report, if you kindly. Unless you're just, again, making things up, because you're ranting about dependency hell from the late 90's. Or maybe you tried Slackware first, which wasn't probably a good idea. Not cool, man, not cool.
If there's no direct feedback from the Linux netbook experiment, the correct response isn't to sneer and say "what feedback?" it's to ask WHY there isn't any.
Because all of the OS' implementations that were installed by the manufacturers on Linux netbooks were shit and scrapped immediately by anybody with a clue? That might be a hint. And you think all of the distros now trying to support the netbooks out of their respective boxes is just coincidence?
Do you think Microsoft just takes a new OS, drops it on the world by surprise and then says "well hey, nobody actually complained in so many words...."
No, they just run Mojave experiments to conv
Parent is an idiot and possibly illiterate
Hey, now, no need for that. Rather, why don't you actually come up with an argument rather than posting some random story that cannot be verified and really has nothing to do with what your parent posted? Because you can't? Oh, that's right.
They didn't doubt you. Why did you feel the need to post a long and fruitless story? You barely even addressed the Windows comment.
They already know how to use windows, and learning how to use Linux would take time away from them doing other things.
Fifteen whole minutes sure is a lot of time. Wowee.