Heh. I have a two year old PIII-550 which I run Windows 2000 on and really have no complaints.
Try that on an AMD K6-450. Oh, and don't give it more than 128meg of RAM either. While you're still booting I'll have already started KDE 2.1 and be at the desktop. FreeBSD baby, yeah!
This is why I think document formats and the like should be open - by law
I'll agree that having open document formats would level a LOT of the playing field. Doing this by force of law is just begging for trouble though. One of the problems we have now is the law mucking up copyright to the point of giving a nearly unlimited timespan to what should be a temporary monopoly. We do NOT want to bring the law into this.
Also, let's just imagine this was a bill before the US Congress. Who do you think is going to have more lobbying power? A bunch of open source zealots with a few $5/share companies or a group of economy movers like Microsoft? Sorry if I'm coming down hard here, but even the suggestion that a governmental body dictate how you or a company should license your software is a dangerous wish.
Lastly, we don't need the government here. MS is already making moves towards XML based docs. Even if they weren't, alternatives are finally popping up and maturing. Better products, customer friendly licenses, and an industry push towards interoperability are what is needed. The world is moving towards that now, with or without the help of either Microsoft or the muddling hands of government. Be patient, and thank whatever deity you pray to that our hands aren't tied by regulation.
Re:Look matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one
on
Perl + Python = Parrot
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· Score: 2
informative???
these moderators have just had their credibility smashed over the head with a rotten potato...
Look, it's not like they expected some kind of Spanish Inquisition.
You're quite right. As time and available boxes to play with permits I will be trying out some other flavors of Linux. I'm just not in any rush to, as FreeBSD does everything I would expect of a Linux box. As this discussion was over the suitability of Linux versus FreeBSD I may have over stressed the point a bit.
Although I have not used FreeBSD myself
Take one empty box, a connection to the net, and 2 blank floppy disks. If you weren't on a Northpoint DSL connection (like I was), and happen to have a fair bit of bandwidth you'll be playing with an up and running FreeBSD box in about 30 minutes. Your mileage may vary based on how much stuff you check off to install, and how big a pipe ya really got.
Personally, I recommend installing very little from the sysinstall menu. Better to cvsup everything to the latest greatest and build all the rest from the ports tree. Takes a little longer, but it sure is worth it. For the quicker route, just install from the binary packages. They install from across the Internet as well.
If I never see another f**king RPM file again with it's dependencies to totally unknown files belonging to unnamed packages it'll be way too soon. I do not miss RedHat. On the other hand, I am still very curious to see Debian's magic in motion with them get-apt things. Maybe some time this summer between rolling blackouts.
As a one time RedHat user and now fully FreeBSD when not on my NT Workstation I suppose I can kinda see why the perception is the way it is. The RedHat installer walks you through from an empty system to a graphical logon straight into Gnome. At this point in time if a user isn't taken straight to a GUI, then it must be a server kinda machine.
Personally, I feel that RedHat's hand holding actually hurt me in the long run. I never felt comfortable going any where near the command line when using it. I couldn't figure out why the directories were structured the way they were. Oh boy, then there was the couple of times that X crashed and left me at a blinking command prompt. Reboot!
With FreeBSD I was forced to get at least somewhat comfortable with getting around without a GUI. Due to it's being a bit harder to get going it actually made things easier for me in the long run. The real problem with this is that you're never going to manage to convince someone who isn't willing to put in the time of this.
One issue that folks like bringing up is the lack of hardware support for FreeBSD. Not only has this not had any impact on me, but I've actually found FreeBSD to be a good bit smarter. For example, on my RH box I had 128meg of RAM installed, where only 64meg was being seen. A kind soul over on #LinuxHelp walked me through configuring the system to see the rest of the memory. If my life depended on it I couldn't recall all the steps that went into fixing this. FreeBSD just picked up whatever was in the box and ran with it! When I've needed to add support for something, doing up a custom kernel was surprisingly easy.
As it is now, I'm writing this using Konqueror under KDE 2.1 with FreeBSD 4-STABLE and doing just fine. Occasionally I use the Linux version of Netscape for the better plugin support, as well as a few other Linux only apps. StarOffice works just fine here. I also keep Apache, PHP, and MySQL going in the background for stuff I'm developing. I just can't see going back to any distro of Linux any time soon.
When IBM went a shopping for a DOS for their IBM PC, everybody and their brother fully expected it to sport a CP/M DOS since IBM made it known that they weren't going to develop their own. Lo and behold, Microsoft emerged with the contract using a CP/M rip-off they bought for a paltry $50K
One more try at bat here. First off, nobody knew that IBM was shopping for an OS for a new PC platform. IBM was very strict about non-disclosure agreements. Folks had assumed that if such a project were going on CP/M would be on there. Those folks included Microsoft. In fact, it was Microsoft that referred IBM to GDR for CP/M. It was GDR that turned IBM away, not MS stealing anything.
The only reason MS took on the project at all was to have a platform to sell their development languages on. They didn't have the man power or time to do it, so they bought it. No evil conspiracies, just a major screw up by GDR that changed history.
They did? Do you use a mouse? GUI? Memory mapped graphics? Multiple monitors? Synthetic sound?
The notion of a GUI, MM Graphics, and synth sound easily pre-date Mac, and out in the general public I might also add.
Virtually everything you take for granted on your desktop machine is there because Apple developed it. And don't whine about how they "stole" it from Xerox PARC because (a) Apple paid for the privilege of examining what PARC was doing
If it was all so clean, why did Xerox end up suing Apple then? Xerox lost, pretty much on the same grounds that would decide a defeat against Apple when they tried the same on Microsoft. Sorry, Apple is not the Alpha and Omega of all things GUI. They did some very interesting things based on the work of others, as has Microsoft, Gnome, KDE and others. That doesn't excuse them for being assholes with lawyers.
Uh... yah. Sure. What were you doing during the 1980s? Sucking your thumb and soiling your diapers?
No, I was actually putting a lot of the platforms you mentioned to use first hand, to include the Mac. I know, if I refer to the crap things that Apple has done in their past I must either be 15, ignorant of computers, or what not. How can anyone not see the true glory that Steve Jobs has brought down from the mountain to us? Yes, I'll drink the kool-aid!
Right. History has shown the superior product always wins over the inferior one with superior marketing.
Are you meaning to suggest that Apple didn't pour big bucks into marketing? They ran a LOT more ads on both TV and in movie theaters for the Mac when it came out then MS did for Win95. Today Apple has another huge marketing blitz on the iMac and now the new G4's. Somehow, I don't think MS is especially worried about it.
Apple sells hardware and software as a single package because it makes the final product far more coherent.
Eeyup, that's the standard line for ANY proprietary hardware platform. So?
Microsoft isn't probably going to open source anything anytime soon, but Apple has open sourced all kinds of stuff.
Oh really? I guess all that XML that MS was integral in the development of must all be "closed source" then. How about USB devices, which again MS was a major player in the development of. Both of which are readily evident on free OS's and software right now, today.
With all that Apple is doing for open source software, I suppose I should be able to load up some of them things on my FreeBSD box. Like a QuickTime player, or a Firewire adapter, or something! Hell, at least the Linux world got a journaling file system out of IBM.
Oh, and doing a quick search through the FreeBSD ports collection (that's the OS that Apple is giving SO much back to with the single developer on staff with commit rights to the FreeBSD tree) no sign of a QuickTime server actually produced by Apple. One server is in there that somebody hacked together... the web site was dead though.
By contrast, a substantial amount of OSX is built on open standards -- TCP/IP, Apache, NetInfo, OpenGL, I/O Kit, Java, BSD, Mach.
OpenGL was out for NT LONG before Mac, which was a serious problem for Apple as they were losing market share in the graphics realm for a while due to this. All the rest is JUST now going in, on layers behind the fluff that was the older Mac OS's without any of that stuff.
With Windows, you have to deal with NetBios, WINS, IIS, DirectX, ActiveX, and kernel source that nobody can look at.
You got the source code to Mac OS9? Wow! And you don't have to deal with AppleTalk, Network Seeding and all that? Get real. Also, you're not gonna get much of a peek at anything but Darwin for MacOSX anyway.
Actually, Microsoft has no plans to allow third party developers/users to create new themes for Windows XP.
Personally, I have no intention at this point of ever running XP, but this sounds like FUD. Care to back this up with some facts? A link to an MS FAQ on XP, interview with an actual MS employee? Anything at all?
Okay, I know it's a bit off the topic of Linux and all, but isn't TrustedBSD working in ACL's into FreeBSD 5.0? I need to go back and read that interview again.
For myself, I know that ACL's are the #1 reason why my primary file server at work is still an NT. Maybe I just don't fully grasp all the ways you can tweak *nix file permissions. I just don't see how you can assign one group ownership rights, one group read/write, and yet another group read only while not allowing "everyone" any kind of access. How about allowing a group of folks the right to write to a file, but not delete it?
I do prefer FreeBSD for specific server tasks. Web serving is certainly the top of that list. Thing is, without the granularity of ACL's I can't leave NTFS behind when it comes to the more complex task of file sharing to a bunch of users on a LAN.
Additionally, I've gotten quite used to the notion of leaving the OS permissions to Everyone on my files on the server, then restrict access via the share permissions. The server itself is physically locked in a room so I'm not normally concerned with local security. As cool as Samba is, it makes no provisions for implementing permissions of any sort. Heck, for 95% of my ACL needs, they could be implemented in Samba and never touch the FS.
If my deciphering of that is correct, you're saying that the MS OS helped Compaq clone the IBM PC.
Your deciphering is not quite correct. Compaq certainly worked alone on hacking the BIOS. Then what? They've got themselves a BIOS that's all hacked, but no product to put on the market. MS comes into play after this point, bringing the other piece of the puzzle into play. Neither company could have done this alone.
And there's always the allegation that Gates & co. didn't even write DOS, but stole it.
What allegation? Hell, MS didn't even want to do the OS for them PC's. They referred IBM to GDR to put CP/M on there. It wasn't until after GDR refused to sign a non-disclosure that MS was faced with either coming up with an OS or lose a ton of market for their programming languages.
They purchased QD-DOS (Quick and Dirty DOS) from a fella working at a computer store. They put $50,000 cash in his hands for all rights to it. More money then this guy ever saw in his life. You also have to keep in mind that neither this fella nor Microsoft saw the huge cash cow that selling an OS would become.
Nothing was stolen, nothing even underhanded. There are no allegations, other than those dreamed up by folks who thought "AntiTrust" should have been an Oscar nominee.
Let's take a look at this from a purely cash flow point of view. Apple needs MS for their browser and office suite. MS feels that Linux and open source software is it's biggest threat, yet can't act directly to attack it without the justice department all over their ass.
Now Apple goes and actually tries to enforce this patent at some point in the future. In the process, the ask for a ludicrous royalty to be paid for the right to do theming. Who really loses?
Well, Microsoft can afford the licensing without breaking a sweat. On the other hand, this patent sounds a LOT like what Mozilla does with it's themes. Damn near describes exactly the operation of Gnome and other Linux style window managers. Furthermore, who do you think is going to be able to pay for the lawyers to fight this thing? A bunch of hackers working out of their bedroom? They going to be able to pay the licensing for thinking a certain way?
Microsoft isn't going to fight this. In fact, if they weren't somehow behind it they're certainly celebrating. They've got somebody else to go out there and fight for their market leads in both the OS and Browser fronts without having to get their own hands dirty.
How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
How about they actually produce a better product for a reasonable cost to consumers?
I just find it constantly amazing how anyone who can even entertain the notion that freedom and computing have ANY relationship to Apple Corp. Bash Microsoft all you like, but let's not forget that it was those evil folks that made it possible for the seperation of the hardware from the OS. No, some mainframe at MIT doesn't count either, nor does some kit machine. Before MS-DOS hit the streets, darn near any machine available to us consumer types had a closed architecture with a closed OS.
Because there was a Microsoft to provide an OS to them machines that Compaq managed to hack away the IP rights from IBM we all enjoy hardware advances we would have never seen otherwise. All this, at costs WAY below what would otherwise have been available.
I thank the computer gods daily that way back in the day Apple decisively lost the battle for the desktop. As is in constant evidence by their actions, they have no interest in allowing the rest of us lesser folk decide what we want in a machine or what OS will run on it. We sure as hell wouldn't have seen anything like a Linux come around.
Why not put the effort and money into something new?
That's something like saying, "why do all these movies still have light projected through them to show on a screen". All the while ignoring the fantastic advances in the technology producing those images.
The original Wolfenstein wasn't the end of all fps games, it was merely the beginning. This techology is maturing before our eyes into a genre closer to interactive movies rather than simply just a game. A good case in point would be the first couple of levels of Unreal, and even more so with Half-Life. One of the most important aspects of each of these games is that they include characters that you should not just gun down, and in many cases are a part of the interactive story.
In my mind, it's not so much the notion of inventing something new, but rather to take these wonderful technologies to the realms of artists, writers, and designers to give them depth that goes WAY beyond the media constraints of TV or movies.
Reason we're not off on to completely new paradigms for this type of gaming is that we're really just getting out of it's infancy. There are still some really great problems to get through, like how to effectively interact with other computer characters beyond just shooting them.
On a side note, was reading an article recently in PC Gamer about a new game that hopes to recreate the entirety of WWII as a multi-player game. Bringing together all these different technologies to allow you to work on strategy, tactics, FPS involvement, flight sim, and all that. Forget the name of it as I lent the mag to a bud of mine who is a huge history nut. The great thing about all this, is that we're just now seeing this kind of depth of plot and gaming coming to together.
now if this was *really* a direct sequel to doom 2, there'd be a lot more pulsing blue stuff.
Hey now, anyone who has ever wasted a few months of their life away in the world of Doom knows full well all you really need is a double barrelled shotgun. Dodge baby, dodge!
Scott, I couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but this line of thinking is rather like saying we should just ban all gasoline stations to encourage drivers to buy electric cars. If those folks making browsers put one out that has compelling enough features, those same folks WILL download and use it. Case in point, Napster wasn't exactly embedded into anyone's OS.
The UI is important stuff, and at this time I don't know of another browser that replaces NS 4.x to a reasonable extent.
Like it or not layout is important to lots of people. You're not going to change that. So we can either do it in a clean, efficient manner (CSS), or we can do it in a ugly, bulky manner (HTML + Font tags + Tables + etc).
I totally agree, and as someone who designs web pages for a living I would also love to see that come about. The problem is, this is putting the cart before the horse. Clean efficient browsers are needed BEFORE designers can take advantage of these new tools, not the other way around.
This doesn't have any basis in fact. CSS1 was solidified at the end of 1996. Netscape 4 doesn't even come close to matching those standards from five years ago. Some people are already moving on to XML/CSS.
Yes, CSS has been around a while. XML is just now getting itself solidified. Thing is though, nobody, and I mean nobody, has been able to produce a web browser that is 100% compliant with all that encompasses CSS1 and CSS2. IE maybe has something like 90-95% compatibility with CSS1, with a smattering of CSS2 tossed in. Moz has close to 100% CSS1 and some CSS2. Is full compliance with CSS even possible? There's been a lot of folks throwing in a ton of time trying to get there, yet nobody is.
HTML 3.x is heavy on inline commands to achieve formatting. This is totally backwards.
Yes it is, but it totally worked. Furthermore, browsers of the future will have to support 3.x or we might as call it NML 1.0 (New Markup Lang).
In closing here, I'm not opposed to CSS or any of the new web technologies in the least. What I am saying is that before we'll see any meaningful changes to how the web is developed we will first need to see changes in the browsers being used. It really should be the browsers leading the way, with designers following. The other way around is simply a chaotic mess.
See I have used it before with Enlightenment once upon a kernel 2.0.14 ago, and it seemed bloated as all hell to me...
As others have already pointed out, Enlightenment and Gnome were a bad combo from the get go. Sawfish has turned out to be far more complimentary to Gnome, and thus loses much of that bloated feeling. A truly fair comparison, if for only yourself, would be to run up Gnome 1.2 with Sawfish as the wm. Heck, you might also want to try Enlightenment all by itself as well.
I also primarily run KDE or BlackBox as my desktop, but there are features of Gnome that I do miss when doing so. First one in my mind is the ability to drag an application to different desktop. Being able to run my mouse to the border of the screen and have it jump to the next. On a more minor note, being able to drag and drop applets or launchers to and from how ever many toolbars you want to set up. Just a few things that KDE still doesn't do well to this day.
So why am I still primarily using KDE? I personally feel that the efforts gone into the presentation of the desktop have really shown through. The way windows respond to the user. The look and feel of the various widgets, especially stuff like drop down boxes. More importantly, I find that I really prefer many of the apps written for KDE over those for Gnome. Stuff like Konqueror, KMail, KVirc, as well as up and comers like KOffice are some of the best apps for what they do. Additionally, it seems that GTK apps run nicer in KDE than QT apps run in Gnome. This may point out a failure on KDE's part, but as an end user I'm mostly interested in whichever combination works best.
I fully intend to upgrade Gnome to 1.4 when it hits final release and give it a fair run through. Of course I'll be doing the same with KDE 2.1 as well. As others have mentioned already, try the darn things out and see what fits you. I wish I had a magic wand to wave over both of these projects to extract all the good stuff for the single perfect desktop environment. Until that wand comes off of backorder, trying out what is available is the best you can do.
Okay, there must be something I'm just missing in all the browser war talk. NS 4.76 is to this day my primary browser under NT, and my secondary on FreeBSD (Konq being my primary). If the font handling weren't so god awful it'd be my primary on FreeBSD as well.
I personally don't have the constant lock up problems I keep hearing folks complain about. I personally support around 40-50 installations of NS 4.76 at my company, and the darn thing works. To date, it still has the best E-mail client I've used on any platform, and it certainly has the best LDAP integration at there.
Yeah, IE is faster at rendering pages with gobs of emedded tables. So? NS 4.76 still processes JavaScript faster than anything else I've tested, and the right-click menus are noticeably faster. Other than ActiveX security updates, I honestly don't have a reason to move my browsing to IE, or any other browser for that matter.
Even Mozilla, right up to last night's build, doesn't perform any faster for me where it counts, at the UI level. Again, some of the heavy table pages show up a wee bit faster, but no where near a level to compensate for a far slower UI. Oh god, and don't get me started on the mail client.
How about getting us end user types a browser that has a really sweet and fast UI that'd cause us to actually want to upgrade? This strong arming us from the top down makes the web weaker, not stronger. Dreaming up standards faster than developers can implement them is just plain annoying. How about let's all get HTML 3.0 done correctly across browsers and platforms, THEN worry about the wonders of CSS and XML? How about getting JavaScript to actually work 100% across every browser at the version it's at now? We ain't even there yet, and these folks are worried about CSS? Ack!
"This page is not viewable because you need to upgrade to IE or die! Don't like IE? Go buy another 256meg of RAM and run NS 6.0!"
Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only)
Just curious here, but I'm left wondering what kinds of things you do at the triggering of a window.close() event? It seems to me to be pretty rare for even GUI apps to need this unless they're doing some kind of memory clean up. Browser based apps generally don't need this kind of thing, so I'm just left here curious as to the need still yet.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs...
On NS 4.x and IE 5.5 there is such a button, and it's right there on the toolbar! It's the "Stop" button. Once a page has finished loading, press the stop button. This kills all the flashies dead in their tracks. I do this all the time to get away from the distractions of a xmas tree of gifs most sites have turned into.
The nice part about this is that the sites I frequent get the ad hit, which isn't an option with something like junkbuster. I rather like the notion that those sites are getting the revenue from my visit. Might mean they stay around a little longer and all that.
"...cookies..."
Konqueror is the best I've seen in this regard. Each site that asks for a cookie Konq prompts you for. I know other browsers have this option, but in Konq you can specify to allow or deny all future cookies from a specific domain. It is perhaps Konq's best feature yet.
...JavaScript?
Actually, I personally don't think we need a button to turn it off. Instead, how about simply removing that damn "window.close()" event entirely from the language? Is there any real use for this event besides throwing gobs of advertising at you as you attempt to leave a site? It's not even effective advertising, as the audience in question isn't going to be looking at the message, but instead how to deal with a browser suddenly out of control.
The other annoying aspect to JavaScript are them pop-up windows. Unfortunately, there are a number of legitimate uses for these making it difficult to say we should just get rid of them entirely. If there were some tool on a bar to deal with these that might be worthwhile. Again, I still don't think that totally disabling JS, even as a switch, is a reasonable solution when there are alternatives that haven't yet been explored.
Re:How about Annoyed enough
on
Is BSD Dying?
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· Score: 3
Does BSD have anything similar to apt? Not ports.
Ummm, why not? It automatically pulls in the source code, applies FreeBSD specific patches to it, compiles what you downloaded as well as any other dependencies it may need.
Ports (AFAIK) are only for installing packages, not upgrading them.
Yes and no. At present there is no "make upgrade" kind of command for the ports tree. A user must first either perform a "make deinstall" or "pkg_delete" to remove the old app. At this point, all you need do is install the new version.
On an additional note, there's been a lot of talk about working in an upgrade ability to the ports tree on the FreeBSD mailing lists. I've only briefly been following the conversation, but it seems that a couple of folks have made some serious progress in this regard. It seems that much of the problems with this are with the process rather than a technical difficulty. The devil is in the details sort of thing.
For example... Say I install bind through ports. Then cvsup my ports, and the new ports contain an upgraded bind. I need to cd/usr/ports/net/bind;make install, to get the new bind. Right?
Your example actually has a couple of oddities to it that you probably aren't aware of, but you've essentially got the idea. I don't see this as a weakness of the port system, nor as a strength of Debian's manner of doing things. By building this into a directory structure it allows a user to sort of browse through the apps they might be interested in. If anything, it may be time for a wider variety of port categories. For example, I have trouble thinking of StarOffice as simply an editor.
As to the oddity of your example, I believe you'd have to run a make world on the entire OS for the latest Bind updates, as they are a part of the core system. Perhaps a more experienced BSD'er can help clarify this point for both of us here. Your example is still relatively valid, as this would be the process for pretty much any other port.
If I ever get back to trying Linux again, it'll most likely be Debian. Darn near installed it to play around a while back. The installation instructions just zoomed over my head at the time, where as FreeBSD was 2 floppies and a handful of menus. Today, FreeBSD is doing pretty much everything I wanted a Unix based box for, so I doubt I'll have a reason to give Debian another try any time soon.
mm. you don't think inertia had anything to do with that? most businesses used IBM's since the mid-80's.
Of course I think inertia had something to do with it. Inertia had a LOT to do with it. Unlike many of their competitors at that time, Microsoft managed to ride that inertia away from over priced OEM hardware solutions. They were simply the first to fully recognize the importance of both supporting the old stuff while building a structure in which any component manufacturer could play.
Along these lines, Compaq deserves equal or higher billing for this very same understanding of what the future of the computer market would become. Well, here we are in the future, and it turns out that folks like Compaq and Microsoft were right. All the while, Apple is still based on the notion of a closed architecture.
Apple once asked the world to think different. The world has, and that different kinda thinking has lead us to a world in which thousands of companies can compete, succeed, and fail to provide the components that make a computer. Thank whatever god you pray to that the likes of Apple and IBM lost big time to those funky upstarts over at Microsoft and Compaq. Otherwise, our computer experiences would still be getting dictated to us by those that truly controlled all aspects of the platforms we use.
People migrating from Windows to *nix, and Linux in particular, are wasting their time if they never leave GNOME/KDE/whatever.
My first introduction to the *nix world was RedHat. Had it running for months, and didn't learn a damn thing about Unix. Problem was, the install worked so darn smoothly it just dumped me right into Gnome. I still vividly recall X crashing and dumping me to a CL prompt. I had no idea what to do, or even how to get X started again. I rebooted.
Later on my hard drive crashed, through no fault of Linux I might add. I decided to give FreeBSD a try since I'd heard a lot about it. Following the install, there I was on the command line. This was when I really started learning something about Unix.
I don't mean this as a BSD vs. Linux kind of post at all. The point here is that by one making things too easy up front it actually made it harder for later on.
I rather like GUI's for most things that I do with a computer. I personally thought it was a mistake for Microsoft to completely bypass the DOS prompt for Win95 and WinNT. With a bit more Unix experience under my belt, I have to say that I also feel it's a mistake to bypass the CLI entirely with a jazzed up XDM display to take a user straight into a GUI. In the long run, it makes life harder on the user, whether they realize it up front or not.
While I find some of your arguments here have merit, I believe that you're looking at this with a sort of CLI blinder on. That, and breaking your post up into paragraphs would certainly help it's readability.
Yes, many applications that are GUI only tend to be so not due to any need beyond that's where the audience is. Folks used to think, why in the world would I need a spreadsheet run from a GUI? Then those same folks got to seeing all the other information that can be derived from changing a cell color, altering a font, or porting the information to a variety of graphs. Let's face it, the GUI spreadsheet was the real selling point of Windows back in the early days.
As to remote access, from a dial up modem I'm able to log into my office computer running NT and LapLink and utilize it. Delays in typing up stuff like E-mail is annoying, but only slightly more so than logging in via SSH to a remote BSD box and typing in Pine. In each case it just ain't like being there when you're doing the dial up thing.
I will firmly agree with one point you seem to be driving at though. There is an over reliance upon the mouse in many GUI based apps that actually hinder the usability. I personally find that NT does a better job of keyboard support than either KDE or Gnome. Of the two, I find that KDE seems to do a better job with keyboard support, but there's a fair amount of work still to be done.
As a FreeBSD user, I personally don't see a lot of front line CLI based office apps for it. No, I do not count EMACS as a word processor. Nothing even approaching the level of VisiCalc on the spreadsheet front either. I'd love to see more work done on this myself, but the fact is that most folks today simply don't feel comfortable unless there's a GUI running the app. The only thing that will even dent this kind of paradigm are compelling tools for a CLI that folks will want to use. No amount of preaching will have as dramatic an impact as that.
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Heh. I have a two year old PIII-550 which I run Windows 2000 on and really have no complaints.
Try that on an AMD K6-450. Oh, and don't give it more than 128meg of RAM either. While you're still booting I'll have already started KDE 2.1 and be at the desktop. FreeBSD baby, yeah!
This is why I think document formats and the like should be open - by law
I'll agree that having open document formats would level a LOT of the playing field. Doing this by force of law is just begging for trouble though. One of the problems we have now is the law mucking up copyright to the point of giving a nearly unlimited timespan to what should be a temporary monopoly. We do NOT want to bring the law into this.
Also, let's just imagine this was a bill before the US Congress. Who do you think is going to have more lobbying power? A bunch of open source zealots with a few $5/share companies or a group of economy movers like Microsoft? Sorry if I'm coming down hard here, but even the suggestion that a governmental body dictate how you or a company should license your software is a dangerous wish.
Lastly, we don't need the government here. MS is already making moves towards XML based docs. Even if they weren't, alternatives are finally popping up and maturing. Better products, customer friendly licenses, and an industry push towards interoperability are what is needed. The world is moving towards that now, with or without the help of either Microsoft or the muddling hands of government. Be patient, and thank whatever deity you pray to that our hands aren't tied by regulation.
informative???
these moderators have just had their credibility smashed over the head with a rotten potato...
Look, it's not like they expected some kind of Spanish Inquisition.
You can't judge Linux by Redhat alone.
You're quite right. As time and available boxes to play with permits I will be trying out some other flavors of Linux. I'm just not in any rush to, as FreeBSD does everything I would expect of a Linux box. As this discussion was over the suitability of Linux versus FreeBSD I may have over stressed the point a bit.
Although I have not used FreeBSD myself
Take one empty box, a connection to the net, and 2 blank floppy disks. If you weren't on a Northpoint DSL connection (like I was), and happen to have a fair bit of bandwidth you'll be playing with an up and running FreeBSD box in about 30 minutes. Your mileage may vary based on how much stuff you check off to install, and how big a pipe ya really got.
Personally, I recommend installing very little from the sysinstall menu. Better to cvsup everything to the latest greatest and build all the rest from the ports tree. Takes a little longer, but it sure is worth it. For the quicker route, just install from the binary packages. They install from across the Internet as well.
If I never see another f**king RPM file again with it's dependencies to totally unknown files belonging to unnamed packages it'll be way too soon. I do not miss RedHat. On the other hand, I am still very curious to see Debian's magic in motion with them get-apt things. Maybe some time this summer between rolling blackouts.
As a one time RedHat user and now fully FreeBSD when not on my NT Workstation I suppose I can kinda see why the perception is the way it is. The RedHat installer walks you through from an empty system to a graphical logon straight into Gnome. At this point in time if a user isn't taken straight to a GUI, then it must be a server kinda machine.
Personally, I feel that RedHat's hand holding actually hurt me in the long run. I never felt comfortable going any where near the command line when using it. I couldn't figure out why the directories were structured the way they were. Oh boy, then there was the couple of times that X crashed and left me at a blinking command prompt. Reboot!
With FreeBSD I was forced to get at least somewhat comfortable with getting around without a GUI. Due to it's being a bit harder to get going it actually made things easier for me in the long run. The real problem with this is that you're never going to manage to convince someone who isn't willing to put in the time of this.
One issue that folks like bringing up is the lack of hardware support for FreeBSD. Not only has this not had any impact on me, but I've actually found FreeBSD to be a good bit smarter. For example, on my RH box I had 128meg of RAM installed, where only 64meg was being seen. A kind soul over on #LinuxHelp walked me through configuring the system to see the rest of the memory. If my life depended on it I couldn't recall all the steps that went into fixing this. FreeBSD just picked up whatever was in the box and ran with it! When I've needed to add support for something, doing up a custom kernel was surprisingly easy.
As it is now, I'm writing this using Konqueror under KDE 2.1 with FreeBSD 4-STABLE and doing just fine. Occasionally I use the Linux version of Netscape for the better plugin support, as well as a few other Linux only apps. StarOffice works just fine here. I also keep Apache, PHP, and MySQL going in the background for stuff I'm developing. I just can't see going back to any distro of Linux any time soon.
When IBM went a shopping for a DOS for their IBM PC, everybody and their brother fully expected it to sport a CP/M DOS since IBM made it known that they weren't going to develop their own. Lo and behold, Microsoft emerged with the contract using a CP/M rip-off they bought for a paltry $50K
... yah. Sure. What were you doing during the 1980s? Sucking your thumb and soiling your diapers?
One more try at bat here. First off, nobody knew that IBM was shopping for an OS for a new PC platform. IBM was very strict about non-disclosure agreements. Folks had assumed that if such a project were going on CP/M would be on there. Those folks included Microsoft. In fact, it was Microsoft that referred IBM to GDR for CP/M. It was GDR that turned IBM away, not MS stealing anything.
The only reason MS took on the project at all was to have a platform to sell their development languages on. They didn't have the man power or time to do it, so they bought it. No evil conspiracies, just a major screw up by GDR that changed history.
They did? Do you use a mouse? GUI? Memory mapped graphics? Multiple monitors? Synthetic sound?
The notion of a GUI, MM Graphics, and synth sound easily pre-date Mac, and out in the general public I might also add.
Virtually everything you take for granted on your desktop machine is there because Apple developed it. And don't whine about how they "stole" it from Xerox PARC because (a) Apple paid for the privilege of examining what PARC was doing
If it was all so clean, why did Xerox end up suing Apple then? Xerox lost, pretty much on the same grounds that would decide a defeat against Apple when they tried the same on Microsoft. Sorry, Apple is not the Alpha and Omega of all things GUI. They did some very interesting things based on the work of others, as has Microsoft, Gnome, KDE and others. That doesn't excuse them for being assholes with lawyers.
Uh
No, I was actually putting a lot of the platforms you mentioned to use first hand, to include the Mac. I know, if I refer to the crap things that Apple has done in their past I must either be 15, ignorant of computers, or what not. How can anyone not see the true glory that Steve Jobs has brought down from the mountain to us? Yes, I'll drink the kool-aid!
Right. History has shown the superior product always wins over the inferior one with superior marketing.
Are you meaning to suggest that Apple didn't pour big bucks into marketing? They ran a LOT more ads on both TV and in movie theaters for the Mac when it came out then MS did for Win95. Today Apple has another huge marketing blitz on the iMac and now the new G4's. Somehow, I don't think MS is especially worried about it.
Apple sells hardware and software as a single package because it makes the final product far more coherent.
Eeyup, that's the standard line for ANY proprietary hardware platform. So?
Microsoft isn't probably going to open source anything anytime soon, but Apple has open sourced all kinds of stuff.
Oh really? I guess all that XML that MS was integral in the development of must all be "closed source" then. How about USB devices, which again MS was a major player in the development of. Both of which are readily evident on free OS's and software right now, today.
With all that Apple is doing for open source software, I suppose I should be able to load up some of them things on my FreeBSD box. Like a QuickTime player, or a Firewire adapter, or something! Hell, at least the Linux world got a journaling file system out of IBM.
Oh, and doing a quick search through the FreeBSD ports collection (that's the OS that Apple is giving SO much back to with the single developer on staff with commit rights to the FreeBSD tree) no sign of a QuickTime server actually produced by Apple. One server is in there that somebody hacked together... the web site was dead though.
By contrast, a substantial amount of OSX is built on open standards -- TCP/IP, Apache, NetInfo, OpenGL, I/O Kit, Java, BSD, Mach.
OpenGL was out for NT LONG before Mac, which was a serious problem for Apple as they were losing market share in the graphics realm for a while due to this. All the rest is JUST now going in, on layers behind the fluff that was the older Mac OS's without any of that stuff.
With Windows, you have to deal with NetBios, WINS, IIS, DirectX, ActiveX, and kernel source that nobody can look at.
You got the source code to Mac OS9? Wow! And you don't have to deal with AppleTalk, Network Seeding and all that? Get real. Also, you're not gonna get much of a peek at anything but Darwin for MacOSX anyway.
Actually, Microsoft has no plans to allow third party developers/users to create new themes for Windows XP.
Personally, I have no intention at this point of ever running XP, but this sounds like FUD. Care to back this up with some facts? A link to an MS FAQ on XP, interview with an actual MS employee? Anything at all?
Actually, they purchased Q-DOS
You are quite right. I stand corrected.
Okay, I know it's a bit off the topic of Linux and all, but isn't TrustedBSD working in ACL's into FreeBSD 5.0? I need to go back and read that interview again.
For myself, I know that ACL's are the #1 reason why my primary file server at work is still an NT. Maybe I just don't fully grasp all the ways you can tweak *nix file permissions. I just don't see how you can assign one group ownership rights, one group read/write, and yet another group read only while not allowing "everyone" any kind of access. How about allowing a group of folks the right to write to a file, but not delete it?
I do prefer FreeBSD for specific server tasks. Web serving is certainly the top of that list. Thing is, without the granularity of ACL's I can't leave NTFS behind when it comes to the more complex task of file sharing to a bunch of users on a LAN.
Additionally, I've gotten quite used to the notion of leaving the OS permissions to Everyone on my files on the server, then restrict access via the share permissions. The server itself is physically locked in a room so I'm not normally concerned with local security. As cool as Samba is, it makes no provisions for implementing permissions of any sort. Heck, for 95% of my ACL needs, they could be implemented in Samba and never touch the FS.
If my deciphering of that is correct, you're saying that the MS OS helped Compaq clone the IBM PC.
Your deciphering is not quite correct. Compaq certainly worked alone on hacking the BIOS. Then what? They've got themselves a BIOS that's all hacked, but no product to put on the market. MS comes into play after this point, bringing the other piece of the puzzle into play. Neither company could have done this alone.
And there's always the allegation that Gates & co. didn't even write DOS, but stole it.
What allegation? Hell, MS didn't even want to do the OS for them PC's. They referred IBM to GDR to put CP/M on there. It wasn't until after GDR refused to sign a non-disclosure that MS was faced with either coming up with an OS or lose a ton of market for their programming languages.
They purchased QD-DOS (Quick and Dirty DOS) from a fella working at a computer store. They put $50,000 cash in his hands for all rights to it. More money then this guy ever saw in his life. You also have to keep in mind that neither this fella nor Microsoft saw the huge cash cow that selling an OS would become.
Nothing was stolen, nothing even underhanded. There are no allegations, other than those dreamed up by folks who thought "AntiTrust" should have been an Oscar nominee.
Let's take a look at this from a purely cash flow point of view. Apple needs MS for their browser and office suite. MS feels that Linux and open source software is it's biggest threat, yet can't act directly to attack it without the justice department all over their ass.
Now Apple goes and actually tries to enforce this patent at some point in the future. In the process, the ask for a ludicrous royalty to be paid for the right to do theming. Who really loses?
Well, Microsoft can afford the licensing without breaking a sweat. On the other hand, this patent sounds a LOT like what Mozilla does with it's themes. Damn near describes exactly the operation of Gnome and other Linux style window managers. Furthermore, who do you think is going to be able to pay for the lawyers to fight this thing? A bunch of hackers working out of their bedroom? They going to be able to pay the licensing for thinking a certain way?
Microsoft isn't going to fight this. In fact, if they weren't somehow behind it they're certainly celebrating. They've got somebody else to go out there and fight for their market leads in both the OS and Browser fronts without having to get their own hands dirty.
Think Different!
How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
How about they actually produce a better product for a reasonable cost to consumers?
I just find it constantly amazing how anyone who can even entertain the notion that freedom and computing have ANY relationship to Apple Corp. Bash Microsoft all you like, but let's not forget that it was those evil folks that made it possible for the seperation of the hardware from the OS. No, some mainframe at MIT doesn't count either, nor does some kit machine. Before MS-DOS hit the streets, darn near any machine available to us consumer types had a closed architecture with a closed OS.
Because there was a Microsoft to provide an OS to them machines that Compaq managed to hack away the IP rights from IBM we all enjoy hardware advances we would have never seen otherwise. All this, at costs WAY below what would otherwise have been available.
I thank the computer gods daily that way back in the day Apple decisively lost the battle for the desktop. As is in constant evidence by their actions, they have no interest in allowing the rest of us lesser folk decide what we want in a machine or what OS will run on it. We sure as hell wouldn't have seen anything like a Linux come around.
Why not put the effort and money into something new?
That's something like saying, "why do all these movies still have light projected through them to show on a screen". All the while ignoring the fantastic advances in the technology producing those images.
The original Wolfenstein wasn't the end of all fps games, it was merely the beginning. This techology is maturing before our eyes into a genre closer to interactive movies rather than simply just a game. A good case in point would be the first couple of levels of Unreal, and even more so with Half-Life. One of the most important aspects of each of these games is that they include characters that you should not just gun down, and in many cases are a part of the interactive story.
In my mind, it's not so much the notion of inventing something new, but rather to take these wonderful technologies to the realms of artists, writers, and designers to give them depth that goes WAY beyond the media constraints of TV or movies.
Reason we're not off on to completely new paradigms for this type of gaming is that we're really just getting out of it's infancy. There are still some really great problems to get through, like how to effectively interact with other computer characters beyond just shooting them.
On a side note, was reading an article recently in PC Gamer about a new game that hopes to recreate the entirety of WWII as a multi-player game. Bringing together all these different technologies to allow you to work on strategy, tactics, FPS involvement, flight sim, and all that. Forget the name of it as I lent the mag to a bud of mine who is a huge history nut. The great thing about all this, is that we're just now seeing this kind of depth of plot and gaming coming to together.
now if this was *really* a direct sequel to doom 2, there'd be a lot more pulsing blue stuff.
Hey now, anyone who has ever wasted a few months of their life away in the world of Doom knows full well all you really need is a double barrelled shotgun. Dodge baby, dodge!
Scott, I couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but this line of thinking is rather like saying we should just ban all gasoline stations to encourage drivers to buy electric cars. If those folks making browsers put one out that has compelling enough features, those same folks WILL download and use it. Case in point, Napster wasn't exactly embedded into anyone's OS.
The UI is important stuff, and at this time I don't know of another browser that replaces NS 4.x to a reasonable extent.
Like it or not layout is important to lots of people. You're not going to change that. So we can either do it in a clean, efficient manner (CSS), or we can do it in a ugly, bulky manner (HTML + Font tags + Tables + etc).
I totally agree, and as someone who designs web pages for a living I would also love to see that come about. The problem is, this is putting the cart before the horse. Clean efficient browsers are needed BEFORE designers can take advantage of these new tools, not the other way around.
This doesn't have any basis in fact. CSS1 was solidified at the end of 1996. Netscape 4 doesn't even come close to matching those standards from five years ago. Some people are already moving on to XML/CSS.
Yes, CSS has been around a while. XML is just now getting itself solidified. Thing is though, nobody, and I mean nobody, has been able to produce a web browser that is 100% compliant with all that encompasses CSS1 and CSS2. IE maybe has something like 90-95% compatibility with CSS1, with a smattering of CSS2 tossed in. Moz has close to 100% CSS1 and some CSS2. Is full compliance with CSS even possible? There's been a lot of folks throwing in a ton of time trying to get there, yet nobody is.
HTML 3.x is heavy on inline commands to achieve formatting. This is totally backwards.
Yes it is, but it totally worked. Furthermore, browsers of the future will have to support 3.x or we might as call it NML 1.0 (New Markup Lang).
In closing here, I'm not opposed to CSS or any of the new web technologies in the least. What I am saying is that before we'll see any meaningful changes to how the web is developed we will first need to see changes in the browsers being used. It really should be the browsers leading the way, with designers following. The other way around is simply a chaotic mess.
See I have used it before with Enlightenment once upon a kernel 2.0.14 ago, and it seemed bloated as all hell to me...
As others have already pointed out, Enlightenment and Gnome were a bad combo from the get go. Sawfish has turned out to be far more complimentary to Gnome, and thus loses much of that bloated feeling. A truly fair comparison, if for only yourself, would be to run up Gnome 1.2 with Sawfish as the wm. Heck, you might also want to try Enlightenment all by itself as well.
I also primarily run KDE or BlackBox as my desktop, but there are features of Gnome that I do miss when doing so. First one in my mind is the ability to drag an application to different desktop. Being able to run my mouse to the border of the screen and have it jump to the next. On a more minor note, being able to drag and drop applets or launchers to and from how ever many toolbars you want to set up. Just a few things that KDE still doesn't do well to this day.
So why am I still primarily using KDE? I personally feel that the efforts gone into the presentation of the desktop have really shown through. The way windows respond to the user. The look and feel of the various widgets, especially stuff like drop down boxes. More importantly, I find that I really prefer many of the apps written for KDE over those for Gnome. Stuff like Konqueror, KMail, KVirc, as well as up and comers like KOffice are some of the best apps for what they do. Additionally, it seems that GTK apps run nicer in KDE than QT apps run in Gnome. This may point out a failure on KDE's part, but as an end user I'm mostly interested in whichever combination works best.
I fully intend to upgrade Gnome to 1.4 when it hits final release and give it a fair run through. Of course I'll be doing the same with KDE 2.1 as well. As others have mentioned already, try the darn things out and see what fits you. I wish I had a magic wand to wave over both of these projects to extract all the good stuff for the single perfect desktop environment. Until that wand comes off of backorder, trying out what is available is the best you can do.
Okay, there must be something I'm just missing in all the browser war talk. NS 4.76 is to this day my primary browser under NT, and my secondary on FreeBSD (Konq being my primary). If the font handling weren't so god awful it'd be my primary on FreeBSD as well.
I personally don't have the constant lock up problems I keep hearing folks complain about. I personally support around 40-50 installations of NS 4.76 at my company, and the darn thing works. To date, it still has the best E-mail client I've used on any platform, and it certainly has the best LDAP integration at there.
Yeah, IE is faster at rendering pages with gobs of emedded tables. So? NS 4.76 still processes JavaScript faster than anything else I've tested, and the right-click menus are noticeably faster. Other than ActiveX security updates, I honestly don't have a reason to move my browsing to IE, or any other browser for that matter.
Even Mozilla, right up to last night's build, doesn't perform any faster for me where it counts, at the UI level. Again, some of the heavy table pages show up a wee bit faster, but no where near a level to compensate for a far slower UI. Oh god, and don't get me started on the mail client.
How about getting us end user types a browser that has a really sweet and fast UI that'd cause us to actually want to upgrade? This strong arming us from the top down makes the web weaker, not stronger. Dreaming up standards faster than developers can implement them is just plain annoying. How about let's all get HTML 3.0 done correctly across browsers and platforms, THEN worry about the wonders of CSS and XML? How about getting JavaScript to actually work 100% across every browser at the version it's at now? We ain't even there yet, and these folks are worried about CSS? Ack!
"This page is not viewable because you need to upgrade to IE or die! Don't like IE? Go buy another 256meg of RAM and run NS 6.0!"
Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only)
Just curious here, but I'm left wondering what kinds of things you do at the triggering of a window.close() event? It seems to me to be pretty rare for even GUI apps to need this unless they're doing some kind of memory clean up. Browser based apps generally don't need this kind of thing, so I'm just left here curious as to the need still yet.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs...
...JavaScript?
On NS 4.x and IE 5.5 there is such a button, and it's right there on the toolbar! It's the "Stop" button. Once a page has finished loading, press the stop button. This kills all the flashies dead in their tracks. I do this all the time to get away from the distractions of a xmas tree of gifs most sites have turned into.
The nice part about this is that the sites I frequent get the ad hit, which isn't an option with something like junkbuster. I rather like the notion that those sites are getting the revenue from my visit. Might mean they stay around a little longer and all that.
"...cookies..."
Konqueror is the best I've seen in this regard. Each site that asks for a cookie Konq prompts you for. I know other browsers have this option, but in Konq you can specify to allow or deny all future cookies from a specific domain. It is perhaps Konq's best feature yet.
Actually, I personally don't think we need a button to turn it off. Instead, how about simply removing that damn "window.close()" event entirely from the language? Is there any real use for this event besides throwing gobs of advertising at you as you attempt to leave a site? It's not even effective advertising, as the audience in question isn't going to be looking at the message, but instead how to deal with a browser suddenly out of control.
The other annoying aspect to JavaScript are them pop-up windows. Unfortunately, there are a number of legitimate uses for these making it difficult to say we should just get rid of them entirely. If there were some tool on a bar to deal with these that might be worthwhile. Again, I still don't think that totally disabling JS, even as a switch, is a reasonable solution when there are alternatives that haven't yet been explored.
Does BSD have anything similar to apt? Not ports.
/usr/ports/net/bind;make install, to get the new bind. Right?
Ummm, why not? It automatically pulls in the source code, applies FreeBSD specific patches to it, compiles what you downloaded as well as any other dependencies it may need.
Ports (AFAIK) are only for installing packages, not upgrading them.
Yes and no. At present there is no "make upgrade" kind of command for the ports tree. A user must first either perform a "make deinstall" or "pkg_delete" to remove the old app. At this point, all you need do is install the new version.
On an additional note, there's been a lot of talk about working in an upgrade ability to the ports tree on the FreeBSD mailing lists. I've only briefly been following the conversation, but it seems that a couple of folks have made some serious progress in this regard. It seems that much of the problems with this are with the process rather than a technical difficulty. The devil is in the details sort of thing.
For example... Say I install bind through ports. Then cvsup my ports, and the new ports contain an upgraded bind. I need to cd
Your example actually has a couple of oddities to it that you probably aren't aware of, but you've essentially got the idea. I don't see this as a weakness of the port system, nor as a strength of Debian's manner of doing things. By building this into a directory structure it allows a user to sort of browse through the apps they might be interested in. If anything, it may be time for a wider variety of port categories. For example, I have trouble thinking of StarOffice as simply an editor.
As to the oddity of your example, I believe you'd have to run a make world on the entire OS for the latest Bind updates, as they are a part of the core system. Perhaps a more experienced BSD'er can help clarify this point for both of us here. Your example is still relatively valid, as this would be the process for pretty much any other port.
If I ever get back to trying Linux again, it'll most likely be Debian. Darn near installed it to play around a while back. The installation instructions just zoomed over my head at the time, where as FreeBSD was 2 floppies and a handful of menus. Today, FreeBSD is doing pretty much everything I wanted a Unix based box for, so I doubt I'll have a reason to give Debian another try any time soon.
As you said, each to their own.
mm. you don't think inertia had anything to do with that? most businesses used IBM's since the mid-80's.
Of course I think inertia had something to do with it. Inertia had a LOT to do with it. Unlike many of their competitors at that time, Microsoft managed to ride that inertia away from over priced OEM hardware solutions. They were simply the first to fully recognize the importance of both supporting the old stuff while building a structure in which any component manufacturer could play.
Along these lines, Compaq deserves equal or higher billing for this very same understanding of what the future of the computer market would become. Well, here we are in the future, and it turns out that folks like Compaq and Microsoft were right. All the while, Apple is still based on the notion of a closed architecture.
Apple once asked the world to think different. The world has, and that different kinda thinking has lead us to a world in which thousands of companies can compete, succeed, and fail to provide the components that make a computer. Thank whatever god you pray to that the likes of Apple and IBM lost big time to those funky upstarts over at Microsoft and Compaq. Otherwise, our computer experiences would still be getting dictated to us by those that truly controlled all aspects of the platforms we use.
People migrating from Windows to *nix, and Linux in particular, are wasting their time if they never leave GNOME/KDE/whatever.
My first introduction to the *nix world was RedHat. Had it running for months, and didn't learn a damn thing about Unix. Problem was, the install worked so darn smoothly it just dumped me right into Gnome. I still vividly recall X crashing and dumping me to a CL prompt. I had no idea what to do, or even how to get X started again. I rebooted.
Later on my hard drive crashed, through no fault of Linux I might add. I decided to give FreeBSD a try since I'd heard a lot about it. Following the install, there I was on the command line. This was when I really started learning something about Unix.
I don't mean this as a BSD vs. Linux kind of post at all. The point here is that by one making things too easy up front it actually made it harder for later on.
I rather like GUI's for most things that I do with a computer. I personally thought it was a mistake for Microsoft to completely bypass the DOS prompt for Win95 and WinNT. With a bit more Unix experience under my belt, I have to say that I also feel it's a mistake to bypass the CLI entirely with a jazzed up XDM display to take a user straight into a GUI. In the long run, it makes life harder on the user, whether they realize it up front or not.
While I find some of your arguments here have merit, I believe that you're looking at this with a sort of CLI blinder on. That, and breaking your post up into paragraphs would certainly help it's readability.
Yes, many applications that are GUI only tend to be so not due to any need beyond that's where the audience is. Folks used to think, why in the world would I need a spreadsheet run from a GUI? Then those same folks got to seeing all the other information that can be derived from changing a cell color, altering a font, or porting the information to a variety of graphs. Let's face it, the GUI spreadsheet was the real selling point of Windows back in the early days.
As to remote access, from a dial up modem I'm able to log into my office computer running NT and LapLink and utilize it. Delays in typing up stuff like E-mail is annoying, but only slightly more so than logging in via SSH to a remote BSD box and typing in Pine. In each case it just ain't like being there when you're doing the dial up thing.
I will firmly agree with one point you seem to be driving at though. There is an over reliance upon the mouse in many GUI based apps that actually hinder the usability. I personally find that NT does a better job of keyboard support than either KDE or Gnome. Of the two, I find that KDE seems to do a better job with keyboard support, but there's a fair amount of work still to be done.
As a FreeBSD user, I personally don't see a lot of front line CLI based office apps for it. No, I do not count EMACS as a word processor. Nothing even approaching the level of VisiCalc on the spreadsheet front either. I'd love to see more work done on this myself, but the fact is that most folks today simply don't feel comfortable unless there's a GUI running the app. The only thing that will even dent this kind of paradigm are compelling tools for a CLI that folks will want to use. No amount of preaching will have as dramatic an impact as that.
Feel free to read my other reply. More importantly, you might try reading a book or two.