I wouldn't read too much into the growth of tablets just yet. They are a handy auxiliary device for when you want to view things, but most still want a desktop to get real work done.
Well first off I was talking about the growth in x86 laptops with capacitive or capacitive & resistive touchscreen not pure tablets. Second though tablets are being used for "real work" more and more. It is not that most people don't need a desktop/laptop sometime but they need it fewer of their hours. So for example in the home market we are seeing a shift back away from 1 computer per family member to 1 computer shared for the family. Internet usage and other home apps are taking place on phones and tablets which is what is making this possible.
In the workplace we are seeing employees move away from 1+ computer (often a desktop and laptop) to 1 or even sharing.
The decline in PC sales is not so much because people aren't using PCs any more as much as it is that last year's PC is doing just fine. There's just not enough new capability to drive people to upgrade rather than wait to replace when the old PC fails.
As far as needing a desktop / laptop we are seeing usage drop off not just sales. Certainly the lifecycle is also going up which doesn't help.
And finally, the handoff. There have so far been two forks of Gnome done without invitation. One forked Gnome 2 and hopes to add the few advancements that seem worth it, the other forked Gnome 3 and hopes to build it back to usability. Both seem to be doing decently well so far. It seems there is plenty of interest there.
I agree Cinnamon and Mate are successful projects aimed to handle the needs of Linux desktop users. Which is one of the reasons I don't think Gnome is going the wrong thing. Those users are being covered.
It's more a matter of moving an XP user's food bowl, MS FUD, and specific software they must (or think they must) run. If anything, Gnome 3 is costing converts by making people disappointed with Win8 believe that Linux is just more of the same.
I don't know many people who were on XP for years who are now trying Linux at all. I'm not sure where the source for the Linux desktop is anymore but I doubt it is the ultra conservatives who skipped Vista and Windows 7. That being said I do believe that Microsoft's strategy could open up the bottom 1/3rd of the PC market to Linux, as they need to drive up hardware costs. Obviously Gnome 3 isn't a fit since that system is designed for the same hardware as Windows 8/9 will be.
Pulling back a bit, perhaps they just need to come out with their own OS based on the Linux distro of their choice. They can pack it full of dependancies on systemd and kernel modules written by people Linus had to put in the penalty box and whatever other crap they might care for. That way they can screw up all they want and nobody will care.
People are going to care because the Gnome developers refuse to work on something like Gnome 2. It is open source and the developers aren't interested in doing what their userbase wants. Developers scratching their own itch and conservative users who want the same thing with minor enhancements aren't mixing well. Cinnamon and Mate though should mostly bridge this problem so that now the Gnome 3 hatred comes from people who just don't own the right hardware. Once 25% of slashdoters have good x86 tablets with good touchscreens this whole attack on Gnome 3 will be over.
No I don't think people are the same as they are. The horrors of the civil war were inconceivable to the people who started the civil war. Today we know what such a war looks like. That's real change.
The issue of Federal property would get settled by some sort of agreement. The property gets sold to Texas or leased or... I think everyone involved would want to avoid war. The south was reckless the north was aggressive and slavery made compromise difficult. There is no more slavery and both sides would be careful.
How precisely Russia threatening to swallow up any of its neighbors' territory because ethnic Russians live there differs from Anschluss escapes.me.
The main difference is there was far less support in Austria for union with Germany. I suspect if you polled in Austria you'd have something like 30-45% support while Crimea it 70-90% support. So in Austria it wasn't self determination as much as a popular conquest. The analogy would be more apt if Russia took over all of Ukraine again.
American Constitution does not provide for territories leaving the Union. At the least, it would require a Constitutional Amendment.
No it wouldn't. Congress doesn't appropriate money to fight a war against Texas and they leave. When we had our revolution we didn't check with what the British government's rules were.
Now try imagining Russia letting Kurils Islands go.
I was alive 20 years ago when Russia (the Soviet Union) let 14 Republicans go. I have no trouble imagining them letting territory go.
Russia has shown to Chechnya's vote for independence 20 years ago. We know, how that played out, don't we?
Yes there is an example where Russia held territory by force. As far as I understand it the primary issues were oil, minority protection and unclear borders. The Russians were willing to give Chechnya a great deal of independence but the government was rather incompetent on top of everything else. Certainly that's an example that self determination is not universal but I wasn't arguing self determination was always honored just that it can be and would likely be in the USA.
What we did 150 years ago is not what we are likely to do today. The American Civil War the states breaking away wanted to maintain slavery. Had they not been slave states it is entirely possible that the moral case for the civil war would have turned out quite differently.
Nuclear weapons require a lot of upkeep that's very expensive. Ukraine's military budget in 2013 was $1.9 billion. With any fraction (or even all of it) their weapons would be worthless today.
Moreover Soviet Ukraine's defense establishment was manned by the same Russian nationals who are voting to join Russia. Do you think Ukraine would be safer if the Russian separatists in Ukraine had nuclear weapons today?
Russia handled this badly in a lot of ways. But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine. I see no reason that people should be trapped in a country they don't want to be a part of. I believe self determination gives people, not just states, the right to change borders.
And yes I think if Texas voted to join Mexico the USA would accept it. I can't imagine the USA holding millions of people and hundreds of square miles of territory by force. That would completely undermine everything else about American democracy. Americans like to have a government by the people for the people. A government imposed is not either.
I think you misunderstand the role of a Window Manager in the X11 stack. It's a very specific part of the stack with a very limited role. It take no part in most of what goes on.
I understand that, in terms of window positioning... but that's a different question then whether X11 + Window Manager + a few GUI apps is a GUI or if additional services are required.
I disagree. I use GUI to mean the whole system. The WM is one very small part of that system.
Reread what I wrote regarding the components of a GUI. Just substitute WM + X11 + other parts of X11 stack you use in. That's not going to change the rest of the argument.
GUI driver for gvim, run web browsers, sometimes Eagle Cad (most definitely a GUI), sometimes LibreOffice, the GIMP, Inkscape, etc.
You are running GUI apps, no question. But they aren't communicating with each other (LibreOffice might be an exception) and thus it isn't quite a GUI yet.
jbolden: What do you think the GStreamer library does for Gnome? Or Kstreamer does for KDELIbs. No those components are not well separated, they are meshed together where applications are just wrappers around libraries.
They play videos? I'm not sure I understand the point. The WM itself takes no part in that role. Anything GStreamer, Kstreamer, FFMPEG etc based works just fine without even a window manager running.
Of course the wm has to get involved. It has to send low level messages to the graphics card for video playback and bring codecs into the stream. Essentially block a part of RAM as a a buffer that a low level driver will pull directly into video memory bypassing X11. They get involved at the networking level. The X11 model breaks down completely when performance is needed. But that's irrelevant for our purpose, what is relevant is that offering those sorts of services is part of what GUIs do and FVWM2 (or X11+FVWM2) does not.
The X11, freedesktop.org people have created and collated a very nice set of standards which allow X11 based programs to interoperate. This is why KDE programs work perfectly with a Gnome based WM running and why they both work fine under my system.
They don't interoperate and they don't work perfectly. Some of them still run mostly and do most of their stuff but you can see the difference pretty clearly if you start to flood the hardware. Do something like play 2 BluRay video screams using a KDE and Gnome player at full 1080p resolution and rapidly pass the windows over one another. You'll see how they fail interoperate properly very quickly.
Ah fair enough. I was under the impression that things like Ruby and Python allowed some degree of functional type programming.
They do. It is easier to mix paradigms in dynamic than static since there is runtime evaluation. Getting that to compile statically is the problem solved in the last decade.
Sounds neat, though in X11 land those things (notifications etc) all work across libraries because they're defined as protocols rather than API calls.
Where? Whose notification system runs as a protocol?
They've put them back in with Gnome Extensions. The lack of configuration was a bad move and one that's been reversed.
As for Microsoft and technical brilliance. Sorry we are going to have to disagree. I think Microsoft is often right about a lot of things. For example at this point I think they are far and away the best when it comes to compiler design. I think the are doing some very interesting thing with relational databases and getting default performance sky high.... They have some solid people and some solid ideas. Their interests just often conflict with best solutions.
Anyway on this one they are right. As for it not flying off the shelves, we'll see in a few years when people have touch laptops. Gnome could find itself in a wonderful spot again where all the people who have benefited from Gnome's fall are suddenly years away from having a viable system.
Or Gnome loses and another desktop comes in and advances what they were trying for. That's OK too. It wasn't like Gnome had anything worth preserving.
Exactly. That's my feeling that the Gnome 3 haters are the Ubuntu crowd. They learned Unix from Gnome 2. They sound to me exactly like the people who didn't like Linux 1998-2004 because it was different than Windows.
As for the hardware couldn't agree more. And it more than just hardware. Many of the paradigms that exist in traditional operating systems exist for historical reasons that make no sense. The whole concept of open/save/close for files from the application comes from the world of dual floppies. I'm thrilled that Apple finally broke that paradigm completely with autosave, revert, duplicate... which are relevant to disks. The whole notion of running applications rather than all of them being started is from HDD vs. SSD. I'm all for moving forward.
I don't know whether Gnome wins or loses but I do know they are doing the right thing.
The problem you hare having is you have the wrong definition of GUI in your head where you are using it to mean using a window manager. A GUI has a bunch of features it needs to achieve: windowing system (window manager being an example), menuing system, interprocess communications, widget libraries.... Running a window manager to manager terminals doesn't mean you are using a GUI you are just using window management. When I said "you aren't even using a GUI". I wasn't being insulting or closed minded or anything else. I was simply saying the graphical setup you are using does not contain features required to classify it as a GUI.You are essentially in the pre GUI age where you have graphics on screen.
The sorts of things I were listing are examples of what a GUI does handle that a window manager doesn't handle. So absolutely a window manager doesn't do database access, but a GUI does.
The components are well separated and none of the WMs including the GNOME and KDE ones have any part in playing video streams.
What do you think the GStreamer library does for Gnome? Or Kstreamer does for KDELIbs. No those components are not well separated, they are meshed together where applications are just wrappers around libraries.
The first release was August 2012. It's the terminal that allows embedding of images and videos etc within the text amongst other things. It's a real GUI terminal.
You are right about Terminology. That is substantially more advanced something like 2005 in terms of OSX and clearly quite advanced for Linux datatypes. I'd have to know more but I'd agree that isn't 90s technology.
______
As far as 1994, in 1994 I was on 64 bit Suns switching over from SunOS to Solaris. I also used AIX sometimes. I hadn't been on 8 bit in a dozen years. I started using Linux in 1995 on cheap home computers and FVWM was the window manager that was most popular then. There were cheap SGIs, SCO... Your setup is from that time. Look at Caldera Open Desktop or RedHat from the time periods. By 1999 KDE is mature enough as a GUI that people are building whole systems around it. More or less if you aren't using an integrated GUI you are pre-1999 i.e. 1990s type system.
Only vaguely. Ignoring the libraries part, I remember tinkering with Python in the 90s
Mixed paradigm languages would be things like Scala or Clojure.
I'm only dimly aware of Tizen. What would it change?
Tizen is the full GUI/OS that includes Enlightenment. What would change is all your applications and your window manager would all be using EFL so functionality like messaging and notifications could pass between layers effectively. I was saying that Terminology is not a GUI, even Enlightenment is not a GUI but Tizen does have a GUI because it layers everything on top of EFL.
I question that assertion. They've been saying that since touchscreens entered the consumer market, and it always comes down to the same problem: ape-arm.
I agree people have been saying it. There are 3 main differences:
1) The technology for good touch has been worked out. 2) These systems are resistive / capacitive often and thus offer a best of breed solution. 3) Ape arm is mainly a problem with desktops.
In any case the sales figures show solidly increasing share quarter after quarter. This time it is happening.
touchscreen laptops don't even have a real use case anymore.
Of course they do. The I need laptop features but mostly can get by with a tablet. Heck that's why I own a Surface. I need a laptop but mostly could use a tablet when traveling. 85% of the time I can treat it like a tablet with bad battery life and 15% of the time it is a laptop with a bad keyboard.
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm only trying to illustrate that dismissing people who don't like the new gnome things as "hating change" is every bit as bad as the gnome haters dismissing gnome merely because it's different.
OK but you would agree that with your profile i.e. using a mid 1990s setup with a few slight advances, you fall pretty squarely in what most people would call the "hating change" camp. Obviously you have been around long enough to deal with change better than the people freaking out about Gnome, you mostly ignore it, but I certainly don't think of you given that description as a change enthusiast or anything.
___
As far as C++/BTRFS those would be examples where you clearly are a change enthusiast. A different areas of computing.
And again, you simply ignored my impending switch to Terminology from XTerm.
Well the big changes in terminals for English speakers are transparency and tabs IMHO. It is mainly with other languages where the differences between today and 20 years ago are huge. Trying using a right to left language for comments (Hebrew, Arabic) or one where glyphs and characters are not so closely aligned (like Hindi) and you'll see a much bigger difference. Terminology, is just an Enlightenment app from the 1990s. Were you using Tizen I'd see more of a move towards a GUI and away from an admittedly cool windows manger. But you aren't even using Enlightenment across the board.
________
Your dismissal of "FVWM is not a GUI window manager" makes you sound very, very biased. FVWM is a window manger (that is precisely what it is) and a WM in general is a feature of a *graphical* user interface. Simply because I'm using one old tool (FVWM) because I consider the UI to be more suited to my needs, you have dismissed the rest of what I said without bothering to read it or verify facts. That sounds very much like the zealotry I was warning the OP against.
Ah now I see what upset you. A windows manager is a component of a GUI but a window manager is just a small fraction of a GUI. The widget set and the interaction subsystem (event handling) are mostly not part of window managers. This is the debate that happened with KDE 1, whether wanted a GUI or just wanted fully featured window managers. If I were to ask you "what facilities does FVWM2 provide for database access over a network?" or "how does FVWM queue QoS video streams vs. non-QoS video streams?" you get an idea of what FVWM2 doesn't do that means that it isn't a GUI at all. This isn't zealotry but rather the very definition of the word "GUI".
Firstly, that doesn't make any sense: FVWM is just a plain old window manager and takes no part positive or negative in the copy/paste mechanism.
Exactly. FVWM2 has no idea how cut and paste works. Object communication is what GUIs have to do.
I do use unified cross application tools, just not the sort you're thinking of. My tools consist of thingslike make, gcc, llvm, gvim and various pipeline tools, some of which I write myself. They all work very smoothly together.
The Unix command line has interprocess communication. Which is fine a communication system but it isn't one for the graphical objects. As long as your GUIs do nothing but wrap command line tools then Unix's commandline interprocess communication system works fine for interprocess communication. But if the tools actually make use of graphical objects that falls apart. Cut and paste being a perfect example of where reducing everything to commandline fails terribly.
For all of those things, I use the latest tools and techniques, so accusations of being stuck in the 1990s are clearly incorrect.
In all fairness. C++ is a rather traditional language. GCC is a rather traditional system...
You are basically saying you are starting to appreciate the improvements in Linux that too place in the late 1990s. FVWM is not a GUI it is a window manager. Which means you aren't using unified cross applications tools so stuff like cut and paste for objects (what Microsoft called Object Linking and Embedding) won't work. You are mostly doing a transition but from 20 years ago which I assume means really slowly.
I don't agree with you about 18 years ago. The people who were using Linux in 1996 were mainly coming from other Unixes and already had Unix experience. They had used lots of Unix GUIs even if they settled on being Gnome fans. Gnome 1 had a userbase very different than Gnome 2. And I think the reason is Ubuntu. The people IMHO who are reacting badly to Gnome 2 are the ones who never used another Unix GUI. 18 years ago people would have just switched GUIs they were never tied tightly to Gnome to begin with.
I suspect some of these fine folk will move to FreeBSD if they feel that the Unix philosophy is threatened enough.
I see your point that as the traditional desktop becomes less viable on mainstream Linuxes the BSDs could go after that customer base. Tough to know since we are talking well over a decade in the future but yeah that does make sense.
As for being relevant. 4Q2014 25% laptops are touch. 4Q2015 50% are touch. 4Q2016 every other Linux desktop is going to be wishing they had gone through the painful transition early like Gnome did. 2020 when LXDE and XFCE no one ever runs it on anything but older hardware I think why Gnome Foundation did what they did will be clear. It was like this for Apple during the early years of the OS X transition too. Many times process take so long that you either have to be too early or too late.
I agree they maybe should have given it a different name. I said the same thing in the other post you responded to. If Microsoft had called "Windows 8" "Microsoft Metro the OS for touch systems" and made it clear that Windows 7 was a terminal product (and or done something like take the Windows 8 enhancements and roll them into Windows 7 as a cheap upgrade) I think the market would have been less confused. Similarly I think if Gnome 3 had been called Maemo GUI 2.0 it would have been much clearer what they were aiming for.
But really all they would have had to do is just be honest and say that the new products probably won't work well with old fashioned hardware. Windows 7 works better if you don't have touch. Gnome 2 or Cinnamon works better if you don't have touch. Just saying that and not pretending that it doesn't matter would have been a huge help.
As far as the desktop oriented code, an orderly handoff to whom? Who could realistically maintain that code base? With Mate that did happen the old codebase is being maintained. But ultimately what would be the point? The Linux desktop mostly failed to attract. In the end Windows XP killed most of the need for a Unix desktop and OSX became the Unix desktop of choice. Gnome 2 was the most popular Linux desktop but there were plenty of others fighting over that 1% of the market. Ultimately what is to maintain?
Well yes I said that explicitly in the post it was like Windows 8. Both Microsoft and Gnome Foundation were right. They are doing the right thing, the right thing just doesn't pay off yet. Sometimes investments take time to make sense. Talk to RIM/Blackberry or Nokia about how good the strategy of waiting till the last minute to switch works out.
Microsoft of course is the vastly more important of the 2. They have an ultimate level of influence over x86 hardware that Gnome Foundation can't hope to imitate, they just have to follow. Certainly Microsoft made the same mistake they did with Vista in not making touch mandatory for Windows 8 and thus creating the impression that Windows 8 was bad because people were using it on the wrong hardware. But having created an OS that works better for touch they've done enough to make sure that touch becomes the norm. Everything else is just the details of how fast the transition happens.
And frankly if you look at the data, it is happening at a good clip. The/. crowd is just 100% wrong about this. You look at the growth, it is has been a solid 100% growth yoy or better. 4Q2014 we are at 25% touch laptops already is not a hard number to hit. This is happening. Maybe Microsoft could have made this happen a year earlier but the idea that Microsoft did the wrong thing is just silly.
I don't see Gnome 1 or 2 having won the war for the desktop either. If you give up after you lose then... Gnome 1 didn't even beat KDE. Jave desktop failed and there was no era of Sun server / Linux desktops. Under your give up immediately standard they should have given up. Instead they did Gnome 2 and did beat KDE though still lost to Windows. They became sort of the 3rd most popular desktop solution. The best they ever were.
Today among all the Linux desktops they are the best fit for capacitive touchscreen laptops. Those laptops are likely going to be something like 50% of laptops sold by 2015 or so. So they wait till everyone, or a least a huge fraction have the right hardware.The products that do what you want will simply not fit the new hardware at all. They are going to have to go through the same painful transition as Gnome did but they'll be doing it behind the curve not ahead.
What do they go back to if they were to go back? Cinnamon exists for people who want Gnome 3 libraries with a keyboard / mouse experience. Mate exist for people who just want Gnome 2. KDE, XFCE and LCDE exist. If people want a traditional keyboard and mouse OS for Linux they have plenty of options. What is there for them to go back to now?
Hi Sri. Well this crowd are mostly the people who learned Unix from Ubuntu and thus feel betrayed. I don't know what to do. I think what you are doing with Gnome 3 is way cool, but unfortunately most of these guys don't own the right hardware for it. Anyway the cash flow issue I suspect is mainly coming from people who don't understand that having a cash flow problem because AR is doing great is standard for USA companies. What you are going through is a good not a bad thing if you were strictly domestic.
The people are contributing for the various programs like OPW. This is just cash flow. Seriously if there were purely in the USA this wouldn't even be an issue, they just borrow against receivables. It is only because they are international that they are making this complex for themselves. Don't try and read into it.
Well first off there have been Maemo phones that sold. So it wasn't 0%. Android did win but at the time of Maemo and right after it wasn't clear. Android, Gnome (Maemo v2) iOS, Symbian, MeeGo, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, QNX/Blackberry.... it wasn't clear who would make it. I think it made sense for Gnome to throw their hat in the ring. But they didn't win. I think lots of competent people lost BlackBerry / RIM was certainly competent and they still lost.
As far as them releasing a desktop first that was a mistake. Nokia dropped them. Had that not happened I suspect Gnome 3 would have come out on a phone first (or at least primarily). Instead their play now is confused. But that's a different question that what Gnome 3 was designed for. Gnome 3.10 has lots of features for X86 touch laptops that are cool. I don't think there is much play in the x86 space but on the right hardware Gnome 3 will be far far better than stuff like XFCE.
1) Sending specific bits/bytes (like a malformed packet) out a ethernet card to a server. Very hard to do in Windows absolutely trivial to do in Linux. And BTW very useful for testing networking equipment.
2) Sending specific signals to the bus. So for example if you want to manual reinitialize something plugged in on a plug and play system that's very hard to do with PowerShell and trivial with Unix Shells.
3) Sending arbitrary input streams to an application i.e. generic piping.
how is it supposedly increasing productivity if I have to lift my hand off keyboard and mouse to aim for a spot on the screen with my finger?
You aren't supposed to be using a keyboard and mouse. That's just stupid. You would be using something resistive with a pen in place of a mouse. http://www.slashgear.com/wp-co.... If it is a desktop then you are using a tablet which miniaturizes the screen http://cdn2.digitalartsonline....
You don't use a hardware solution that makes no sense. Rather what Windows 8 allows for is hardware solution that makes sense being usable. The problem is, as I said you've probably never used proper Windows 8 hardware and so think that keyboard and mouse are the best solution while in reality that is very rarely the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well first off I was talking about the growth in x86 laptops with capacitive or capacitive & resistive touchscreen not pure tablets. Second though tablets are being used for "real work" more and more. It is not that most people don't need a desktop/laptop sometime but they need it fewer of their hours. So for example in the home market we are seeing a shift back away from 1 computer per family member to 1 computer shared for the family. Internet usage and other home apps are taking place on phones and tablets which is what is making this possible.
In the workplace we are seeing employees move away from 1+ computer (often a desktop and laptop) to 1 or even sharing.
As far as needing a desktop / laptop we are seeing usage drop off not just sales. Certainly the lifecycle is also going up which doesn't help.
I agree Cinnamon and Mate are successful projects aimed to handle the needs of Linux desktop users. Which is one of the reasons I don't think Gnome is going the wrong thing. Those users are being covered.
I don't know many people who were on XP for years who are now trying Linux at all. I'm not sure where the source for the Linux desktop is anymore but I doubt it is the ultra conservatives who skipped Vista and Windows 7. That being said I do believe that Microsoft's strategy could open up the bottom 1/3rd of the PC market to Linux, as they need to drive up hardware costs. Obviously Gnome 3 isn't a fit since that system is designed for the same hardware as Windows 8/9 will be.
People are going to care because the Gnome developers refuse to work on something like Gnome 2. It is open source and the developers aren't interested in doing what their userbase wants. Developers scratching their own itch and conservative users who want the same thing with minor enhancements aren't mixing well. Cinnamon and Mate though should mostly bridge this problem so that now the Gnome 3 hatred comes from people who just don't own the right hardware. Once 25% of slashdoters have good x86 tablets with good touchscreens this whole attack on Gnome 3 will be over.
No I don't think people are the same as they are. The horrors of the civil war were inconceivable to the people who started the civil war. Today we know what such a war looks like. That's real change.
The issue of Federal property would get settled by some sort of agreement. The property gets sold to Texas or leased or... I think everyone involved would want to avoid war. The south was reckless the north was aggressive and slavery made compromise difficult. There is no more slavery and both sides would be careful.
Last I checked we didn't annex Iraq.
The main difference is there was far less support in Austria for union with Germany. I suspect if you polled in Austria you'd have something like 30-45% support while Crimea it 70-90% support. So in Austria it wasn't self determination as much as a popular conquest. The analogy would be more apt if Russia took over all of Ukraine again.
No it wouldn't. Congress doesn't appropriate money to fight a war against Texas and they leave. When we had our revolution we didn't check with what the British government's rules were.
I was alive 20 years ago when Russia (the Soviet Union) let 14 Republicans go. I have no trouble imagining them letting territory go.
Yes there is an example where Russia held territory by force. As far as I understand it the primary issues were oil, minority protection and unclear borders. The Russians were willing to give Chechnya a great deal of independence but the government was rather incompetent on top of everything else. Certainly that's an example that self determination is not universal but I wasn't arguing self determination was always honored just that it can be and would likely be in the USA.
What we did 150 years ago is not what we are likely to do today. The American Civil War the states breaking away wanted to maintain slavery. Had they not been slave states it is entirely possible that the moral case for the civil war would have turned out quite differently.
Nuclear weapons require a lot of upkeep that's very expensive. Ukraine's military budget in 2013 was $1.9 billion. With any fraction (or even all of it) their weapons would be worthless today.
Moreover Soviet Ukraine's defense establishment was manned by the same Russian nationals who are voting to join Russia. Do you think Ukraine would be safer if the Russian separatists in Ukraine had nuclear weapons today?
Russia handled this badly in a lot of ways. But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine. I see no reason that people should be trapped in a country they don't want to be a part of. I believe self determination gives people, not just states, the right to change borders.
And yes I think if Texas voted to join Mexico the USA would accept it. I can't imagine the USA holding millions of people and hundreds of square miles of territory by force. That would completely undermine everything else about American democracy. Americans like to have a government by the people for the people. A government imposed is not either.
I understand that, in terms of window positioning... but that's a different question then whether X11 + Window Manager + a few GUI apps is a GUI or if additional services are required.
Reread what I wrote regarding the components of a GUI. Just substitute WM + X11 + other parts of X11 stack you use in. That's not going to change the rest of the argument.
You are running GUI apps, no question. But they aren't communicating with each other (LibreOffice might be an exception) and thus it isn't quite a GUI yet.
Of course the wm has to get involved. It has to send low level messages to the graphics card for video playback and bring codecs into the stream. Essentially block a part of RAM as a a buffer that a low level driver will pull directly into video memory bypassing X11. They get involved at the networking level. The X11 model breaks down completely when performance is needed. But that's irrelevant for our purpose, what is relevant is that offering those sorts of services is part of what GUIs do and FVWM2 (or X11+FVWM2) does not.
They don't interoperate and they don't work perfectly. Some of them still run mostly and do most of their stuff but you can see the difference pretty clearly if you start to flood the hardware. Do something like play 2 BluRay video screams using a KDE and Gnome player at full 1080p resolution and rapidly pass the windows over one another. You'll see how they fail interoperate properly very quickly.
They do. It is easier to mix paradigms in dynamic than static since there is runtime evaluation. Getting that to compile statically is the problem solved in the last decade.
Where? Whose notification system runs as a protocol?
They've put them back in with Gnome Extensions. The lack of configuration was a bad move and one that's been reversed.
As for Microsoft and technical brilliance. Sorry we are going to have to disagree. I think Microsoft is often right about a lot of things. For example at this point I think they are far and away the best when it comes to compiler design. I think the are doing some very interesting thing with relational databases and getting default performance sky high.... They have some solid people and some solid ideas. Their interests just often conflict with best solutions.
Anyway on this one they are right. As for it not flying off the shelves, we'll see in a few years when people have touch laptops. Gnome could find itself in a wonderful spot again where all the people who have benefited from Gnome's fall are suddenly years away from having a viable system.
Or Gnome loses and another desktop comes in and advances what they were trying for. That's OK too. It wasn't like Gnome had anything worth preserving.
Exactly. That's my feeling that the Gnome 3 haters are the Ubuntu crowd. They learned Unix from Gnome 2. They sound to me exactly like the people who didn't like Linux 1998-2004 because it was different than Windows.
As for the hardware couldn't agree more. And it more than just hardware. Many of the paradigms that exist in traditional operating systems exist for historical reasons that make no sense. The whole concept of open/save/close for files from the application comes from the world of dual floppies. I'm thrilled that Apple finally broke that paradigm completely with autosave, revert, duplicate... which are relevant to disks. The whole notion of running applications rather than all of them being started is from HDD vs. SSD. I'm all for moving forward.
I don't know whether Gnome wins or loses but I do know they are doing the right thing.
The problem you hare having is you have the wrong definition of GUI in your head where you are using it to mean using a window manager. A GUI has a bunch of features it needs to achieve: windowing system (window manager being an example), menuing system, interprocess communications, widget libraries.... Running a window manager to manager terminals doesn't mean you are using a GUI you are just using window management. When I said "you aren't even using a GUI". I wasn't being insulting or closed minded or anything else. I was simply saying the graphical setup you are using does not contain features required to classify it as a GUI.You are essentially in the pre GUI age where you have graphics on screen.
The sorts of things I were listing are examples of what a GUI does handle that a window manager doesn't handle. So absolutely a window manager doesn't do database access, but a GUI does.
What do you think the GStreamer library does for Gnome? Or Kstreamer does for KDELIbs. No those components are not well separated, they are meshed together where applications are just wrappers around libraries.
You are right about Terminology. That is substantially more advanced something like 2005 in terms of OSX and clearly quite advanced for Linux datatypes. I'd have to know more but I'd agree that isn't 90s technology.
______
As far as 1994, in 1994 I was on 64 bit Suns switching over from SunOS to Solaris. I also used AIX sometimes. I hadn't been on 8 bit in a dozen years. I started using Linux in 1995 on cheap home computers and FVWM was the window manager that was most popular then. There were cheap SGIs, SCO... Your setup is from that time. Look at Caldera Open Desktop or RedHat from the time periods. By 1999 KDE is mature enough as a GUI that people are building whole systems around it. More or less if you aren't using an integrated GUI you are pre-1999 i.e. 1990s type system.
Mixed paradigm languages would be things like Scala or Clojure.
Tizen is the full GUI/OS that includes Enlightenment. What would change is all your applications and your window manager would all be using EFL so functionality like messaging and notifications could pass between layers effectively. I was saying that Terminology is not a GUI, even Enlightenment is not a GUI but Tizen does have a GUI because it layers everything on top of EFL.
I agree people have been saying it. There are 3 main differences:
1) The technology for good touch has been worked out.
2) These systems are resistive / capacitive often and thus offer a best of breed solution.
3) Ape arm is mainly a problem with desktops.
In any case the sales figures show solidly increasing share quarter after quarter. This time it is happening.
Of course they do. The I need laptop features but mostly can get by with a tablet. Heck that's why I own a Surface. I need a laptop but mostly could use a tablet when traveling. 85% of the time I can treat it like a tablet with bad battery life and 15% of the time it is a laptop with a bad keyboard.
OK but you would agree that with your profile i.e. using a mid 1990s setup with a few slight advances, you fall pretty squarely in what most people would call the "hating change" camp. Obviously you have been around long enough to deal with change better than the people freaking out about Gnome, you mostly ignore it, but I certainly don't think of you given that description as a change enthusiast or anything.
___
As far as C++/BTRFS those would be examples where you clearly are a change enthusiast. A different areas of computing.
Well the big changes in terminals for English speakers are transparency and tabs IMHO. It is mainly with other languages where the differences between today and 20 years ago are huge. Trying using a right to left language for comments (Hebrew, Arabic) or one where glyphs and characters are not so closely aligned (like Hindi) and you'll see a much bigger difference. Terminology, is just an Enlightenment app from the 1990s. Were you using Tizen I'd see more of a move towards a GUI and away from an admittedly cool windows manger. But you aren't even using Enlightenment across the board.
________
Ah now I see what upset you. A windows manager is a component of a GUI but a window manager is just a small fraction of a GUI. The widget set and the interaction subsystem (event handling) are mostly not part of window managers. This is the debate that happened with KDE 1, whether wanted a GUI or just wanted fully featured window managers. If I were to ask you "what facilities does FVWM2 provide for database access over a network?" or "how does FVWM queue QoS video streams vs. non-QoS video streams?" you get an idea of what FVWM2 doesn't do that means that it isn't a GUI at all. This isn't zealotry but rather the very definition of the word "GUI".
Exactly. FVWM2 has no idea how cut and paste works. Object communication is what GUIs have to do.
The Unix command line has interprocess communication. Which is fine a communication system but it isn't one for the graphical objects. As long as your GUIs do nothing but wrap command line tools then Unix's commandline interprocess communication system works fine for interprocess communication. But if the tools actually make use of graphical objects that falls apart. Cut and paste being a perfect example of where reducing everything to commandline fails terribly.
In all fairness. C++ is a rather traditional language. GCC is a rather traditional system...
How is any of this proof of the reverse?
You are basically saying you are starting to appreciate the improvements in Linux that too place in the late 1990s. FVWM is not a GUI it is a window manager. Which means you aren't using unified cross applications tools so stuff like cut and paste for objects (what Microsoft called Object Linking and Embedding) won't work. You are mostly doing a transition but from 20 years ago which I assume means really slowly.
I don't agree with you about 18 years ago. The people who were using Linux in 1996 were mainly coming from other Unixes and already had Unix experience. They had used lots of Unix GUIs even if they settled on being Gnome fans. Gnome 1 had a userbase very different than Gnome 2. And I think the reason is Ubuntu. The people IMHO who are reacting badly to Gnome 2 are the ones who never used another Unix GUI. 18 years ago people would have just switched GUIs they were never tied tightly to Gnome to begin with.
I see your point that as the traditional desktop becomes less viable on mainstream Linuxes the BSDs could go after that customer base. Tough to know since we are talking well over a decade in the future but yeah that does make sense.
As for being relevant. 4Q2014 25% laptops are touch. 4Q2015 50% are touch. 4Q2016 every other Linux desktop is going to be wishing they had gone through the painful transition early like Gnome did. 2020 when LXDE and XFCE no one ever runs it on anything but older hardware I think why Gnome Foundation did what they did will be clear. It was like this for Apple during the early years of the OS X transition too. Many times process take so long that you either have to be too early or too late.
I agree they maybe should have given it a different name. I said the same thing in the other post you responded to. If Microsoft had called "Windows 8" "Microsoft Metro the OS for touch systems" and made it clear that Windows 7 was a terminal product (and or done something like take the Windows 8 enhancements and roll them into Windows 7 as a cheap upgrade) I think the market would have been less confused. Similarly I think if Gnome 3 had been called Maemo GUI 2.0 it would have been much clearer what they were aiming for.
But really all they would have had to do is just be honest and say that the new products probably won't work well with old fashioned hardware. Windows 7 works better if you don't have touch. Gnome 2 or Cinnamon works better if you don't have touch. Just saying that and not pretending that it doesn't matter would have been a huge help.
As far as the desktop oriented code, an orderly handoff to whom? Who could realistically maintain that code base? With Mate that did happen the old codebase is being maintained. But ultimately what would be the point? The Linux desktop mostly failed to attract. In the end Windows XP killed most of the need for a Unix desktop and OSX became the Unix desktop of choice. Gnome 2 was the most popular Linux desktop but there were plenty of others fighting over that 1% of the market. Ultimately what is to maintain?
Well yes I said that explicitly in the post it was like Windows 8. Both Microsoft and Gnome Foundation were right. They are doing the right thing, the right thing just doesn't pay off yet. Sometimes investments take time to make sense. Talk to RIM/Blackberry or Nokia about how good the strategy of waiting till the last minute to switch works out.
Microsoft of course is the vastly more important of the 2. They have an ultimate level of influence over x86 hardware that Gnome Foundation can't hope to imitate, they just have to follow. Certainly Microsoft made the same mistake they did with Vista in not making touch mandatory for Windows 8 and thus creating the impression that Windows 8 was bad because people were using it on the wrong hardware. But having created an OS that works better for touch they've done enough to make sure that touch becomes the norm. Everything else is just the details of how fast the transition happens.
And frankly if you look at the data, it is happening at a good clip. The /. crowd is just 100% wrong about this. You look at the growth, it is has been a solid 100% growth yoy or better. 4Q2014 we are at 25% touch laptops already is not a hard number to hit. This is happening. Maybe Microsoft could have made this happen a year earlier but the idea that Microsoft did the wrong thing is just silly.
I don't see Gnome 1 or 2 having won the war for the desktop either. If you give up after you lose then ... Gnome 1 didn't even beat KDE. Jave desktop failed and there was no era of Sun server / Linux desktops. Under your give up immediately standard they should have given up. Instead they did Gnome 2 and did beat KDE though still lost to Windows. They became sort of the 3rd most popular desktop solution. The best they ever were.
Today among all the Linux desktops they are the best fit for capacitive touchscreen laptops. Those laptops are likely going to be something like 50% of laptops sold by 2015 or so. So they wait till everyone, or a least a huge fraction have the right hardware.The products that do what you want will simply not fit the new hardware at all. They are going to have to go through the same painful transition as Gnome did but they'll be doing it behind the curve not ahead.
What do they go back to if they were to go back? Cinnamon exists for people who want Gnome 3 libraries with a keyboard / mouse experience. Mate exist for people who just want Gnome 2. KDE, XFCE and LCDE exist. If people want a traditional keyboard and mouse OS for Linux they have plenty of options. What is there for them to go back to now?
Hi Sri. Well this crowd are mostly the people who learned Unix from Ubuntu and thus feel betrayed. I don't know what to do. I think what you are doing with Gnome 3 is way cool, but unfortunately most of these guys don't own the right hardware for it. Anyway the cash flow issue I suspect is mainly coming from people who don't understand that having a cash flow problem because AR is doing great is standard for USA companies. What you are going through is a good not a bad thing if you were strictly domestic.
The people are contributing for the various programs like OPW. This is just cash flow. Seriously if there were purely in the USA this wouldn't even be an issue, they just borrow against receivables. It is only because they are international that they are making this complex for themselves. Don't try and read into it.
Well first off there have been Maemo phones that sold. So it wasn't 0%. Android did win but at the time of Maemo and right after it wasn't clear. Android, Gnome (Maemo v2) iOS, Symbian, MeeGo, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, QNX/Blackberry.... it wasn't clear who would make it. I think it made sense for Gnome to throw their hat in the ring. But they didn't win. I think lots of competent people lost BlackBerry / RIM was certainly competent and they still lost.
As far as them releasing a desktop first that was a mistake. Nokia dropped them. Had that not happened I suspect Gnome 3 would have come out on a phone first (or at least primarily). Instead their play now is confused. But that's a different question that what Gnome 3 was designed for. Gnome 3.10 has lots of features for X86 touch laptops that are cool. I don't think there is much play in the x86 space but on the right hardware Gnome 3 will be far far better than stuff like XFCE.
You want a concrete example...
1) Sending specific bits/bytes (like a malformed packet) out a ethernet card to a server. Very hard to do in Windows absolutely trivial to do in Linux. And BTW very useful for testing networking equipment.
2) Sending specific signals to the bus. So for example if you want to manual reinitialize something plugged in on a plug and play system that's very hard to do with PowerShell and trivial with Unix Shells.
3) Sending arbitrary input streams to an application i.e. generic piping.
4) Chaining scripts together simply.
Gnome 3 is not a desktop machine project. You are just wrong about that. The primary goal was tablets and smaller. Desktop was a secondary interface.
You aren't supposed to be using a keyboard and mouse. That's just stupid. You would be using something resistive with a pen in place of a mouse. http://www.slashgear.com/wp-co.... If it is a desktop then you are using a tablet which miniaturizes the screen http://cdn2.digitalartsonline....
You don't use a hardware solution that makes no sense. Rather what Windows 8 allows for is hardware solution that makes sense being usable. The problem is, as I said you've probably never used proper Windows 8 hardware and so think that keyboard and mouse are the best solution while in reality that is very rarely the case.