Linux is doing fine as a server OS. It is doing poorly as a workstation in most fields.
Aaaactually that's untrue. Macintosh fans love to think it because of the Steve connection, but most desktops in Pixar are GNOME (not that the desktop's really important there. It's about the apps.). Dreamworks are all Linux. Most of the big boys are using GNOME. For some reason.
1: iPods work under linux. Through the hard, evidently thankless, work of people reverse engineering them. Depending on which distribution you use, when you plug your iPod in, the icon that pops up on the desktop will be the correct model and colour.
2: iTunes will never work under linux, unless under wine or similar. iTunes is Apple Computer Inc.'s proprietary music distribution service. It is not open to outsiders. There have been several efforts to make compatible clients through reverse engineering so you can buy music off the music store ( not sure why you'd want to ), but this will not be iTunes. It won't have the branding, and it won't be exactly the same. Which is what you people clearly want and won't stop complaining until you get.
Standard installers, well, I'd like to see you try and argue that Windows' software "management" uses a standard installer. Last time I used windows, everything was still using random different Install Shields and Install Shield clones. Which are still just effectively "stuff all these files here and hope it works" shell scripts with a wizard sitting on top of them. Package management and behaviour within distributions is very consistant. After all, that's the whole point of a distribution. To make loads of different bits of software cooperate in a sane way.
FTA:
They do have to have a common API; they've got to have a common installer. If those things don't exist, it will not be a competitive market again.
I find it ironic that he mentions a competitive market here, because that is exactly why and how different desktop frameworks exist. The only thing stopping the Free desktop becoming stale and complacent* is the friendly competition between the frameworks and the fact that desktop projects are free to develop on their own, instead of having to wait to ratify API changes with your competitor, who usually wants to do things differently anyway, and stick with ancient design errors which you can't fix because of 'compatibility'.
That's not to say there shouldn't be some common elements - HAL, DBUS, Tango, GStreamer and various other freedesktop standards have all shown their worth in recent years.
* Particularly talking about the situation once the Free desktop becomes the incumbant.
They (and by "they" I mean Islamist terrorists) want everyone in Dar al-Harb to either become Muslim and join the Dar al-Islam, or die.
No they do not. You're showing a complete lack of knowledge of the radical Islamist movement. They hate liberalism. What they want is a swing to conservatism and religious subjugation in the west. Which is exactly what they've got. They're just using Islam as their bandwagon.
a) A kernel with a binary blob inserted is near impossible to debug
b) Free drivers escape the dangers of a vendor discontinuing support an older product, with the drivers slowly becoming incompatible with modern systems.
Bullshit. Being given an excuse to cryptographically ball up their formats and have the power to say what their users do and don't do is the best trick Microsoft ever came up with.
And if you try to crack it, that's a DMCA violation, so it's a prison sentence for you.
Yeah, because if you'd taken the time to actually debug the behaviour, you could have tracked it down, seeing as the communication between all the components is out in the open, as opposed to proprietary systems where it's all hidden in a black box. Once something goes wrong, there is often no way of finding the source of problems.
And then you could have got the bug fixed so nobody else ran into this.
You're going to be pretty depressed in a few years if Apple Computer Inc. becomes big enough for you to realise that their behaviour is almost as bad as Microsoft's. But for now they just have a 'cool' image, and that's all that's important to hipsters these days. And Apple's DRM is super extra good DRM.
Why can't Microsoft use its position in the software industry to leverage content providers away from DRM.
DRM is the best thing that's ever happened to Microsoft. It allows them to lock their customers ( & people who aren't even their customers [yet] ) into proprietary formats that are not only hard to reverse engineer, but are cryptographically secure.
I believe that Vector Icons and Fonts are a target for KDE4.
Not quite. Vector icons won't be as good as pixmap icons until a computer is as good at doing hinting at small icon sizes as an human artist is. That's a long way off.
As for vector fonts, well it's called truetype and it's been around in KDE (& other desktops) for a long time. While it's 'vector', it'll render each glyph in each size once, then jam the resultant pixmaps together on the screen as needed. That's generally a better solution than rasterising from vector every glyph every time it's needed.
As a software developer you should not make packages. That is not your job.
A distribution's job is to make sure a whole pile of software (nearing 10,000 packages for debian) works together in a consistent and reliable way. This is one of the reasons why freenix systems are so reliable. The resultant system is not a hodge-podge of different software authors' wills trying to bend the system to their personal tastes.
So, unless you know every distribution better than the distribution's developers, you shouldn't build your own packages. That's not to say you shouldn't be helpful to packagers.
I think OSX has it pretty much right with software installation - drag this "file" into your Applications directory. Done.
Isn't that better than MSI or make/make install?
I'll pretend you said apt-get rather than make/make install because that makes it sound like you have some clue about what you're comparing.
Not even close. 'Just dragging an application' is not package management.
With Apple Computer Inc.'s system there is no update system. What happens when $release of software acquires an exploit? Expect your user to regularly check for updates for all installed applications?
There is no form of dependency resolution. "But that's what leads to dependency hell..." - No. Software has dependencies. That's a truth. Dependencies need managing. Ignoring dependencies == ignoring the advantages of this invention called the shared library. Multiple applications can use one shared library to save disk space & memory. However the most important attribute of shared libraries is that a bugfix or security fix for the library needs to be updated precisely once and all applications which make use of it get fixed. Install multiple 'bundled' copies of a lib and you have to rely on every software maintainer making a fix and then go around fixing it n times. Good luck getting a fix for that crappy piece of shareware you installed 8 months ago and the author has no interest in anymore.
I think you've got to take your ideas a step further and imagine that the Playstation 4 or XBOX 3 not only run linux, but become very popular as general purpose communications & media devices, usurping the role of the general purpose PC. They run word processors, email, IM, DRM video on demand, DRM music managers, simple video editors, simple photo managers. They're cheap to mass produce. Eventually general purpose PCs dramatically rise in price due to smaller market of people who have need of them.
So anybody who wants to be remotely technical is stuck with paying high prices for machines which can run their software when they have a perfectly good cheap powerful machine in the living room, only it's crippled to only run 'trusted' software.
Oh right, so you're sending them food. Enough to keep them from starving - enough to keep them alive. Then what? What are they supposed to do then? Sit around and thank you for keeping them alive and hoping that you don't stop the food shipments? With no connection to the world, no tangible skills, how are they supposed to then play a part in the world and make a sustainable living in return? Sure, they could go back to subsistence farming, but what happens next time a famine hits? Do you expect them to beg for your aid again?
What about people who aren't starving, but still have no useful skills or are embargoed out of the global market by wealthier countries? What are they supposed to do? Sorry, you're not going to get any help, because there are needier people than you who we need to give a hand out to.
This might not be the case in India, where people aren't starving to death and are not totally uneducated, but this kind of thing has happened over and over again in Africa.
Ah. So India = slightly educated and well fed and Africa = everyone starving.
Thank you for expanding my incredibly narrow world view.
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Aaaactually that's untrue. Macintosh fans love to think it because of the Steve connection, but most desktops in Pixar are GNOME (not that the desktop's really important there. It's about the apps.). Dreamworks are all Linux. Most of the big boys are using GNOME. For some reason.
This article is lame. It's more ESR claptrap.
1: iPods work under linux. Through the hard, evidently thankless, work of people reverse engineering them. Depending on which distribution you use, when you plug your iPod in, the icon that pops up on the desktop will be the correct model and colour.
2: iTunes will never work under linux, unless under wine or similar. iTunes is Apple Computer Inc.'s proprietary music distribution service. It is not open to outsiders. There have been several efforts to make compatible clients through reverse engineering so you can buy music off the music store ( not sure why you'd want to ), but this will not be iTunes. It won't have the branding, and it won't be exactly the same. Which is what you people clearly want and won't stop complaining until you get.
FTA:
I find it ironic that he mentions a competitive market here, because that is exactly why and how different desktop frameworks exist. The only thing stopping the Free desktop becoming stale and complacent* is the friendly competition between the frameworks and the fact that desktop projects are free to develop on their own, instead of having to wait to ratify API changes with your competitor, who usually wants to do things differently anyway, and stick with ancient design errors which you can't fix because of 'compatibility'.
That's not to say there shouldn't be some common elements - HAL, DBUS, Tango, GStreamer and various other freedesktop standards have all shown their worth in recent years.
* Particularly talking about the situation once the Free desktop becomes the incumbant.
It is a developer platform, you imbecile. Not a consumer device.
No they do not. You're showing a complete lack of knowledge of the radical Islamist movement. They hate liberalism. What they want is a swing to conservatism and religious subjugation in the west. Which is exactly what they've got. They're just using Islam as their bandwagon.
You're also forgetting that :
a) A kernel with a binary blob inserted is near impossible to debug
b) Free drivers escape the dangers of a vendor discontinuing support an older product, with the drivers slowly becoming incompatible with modern systems.
But had you wanted to, you could have.
Although seeing as you were using nonfree drivers it's a bit of a moot point.
Or you don't have a cheap monitor that has a broken EDID implementation.
Bullshit. Being given an excuse to cryptographically ball up their formats and have the power to say what their users do and don't do is the best trick Microsoft ever came up with.
And if you try to crack it, that's a DMCA violation, so it's a prison sentence for you.
Yeah, because if you'd taken the time to actually debug the behaviour, you could have tracked it down, seeing as the communication between all the components is out in the open, as opposed to proprietary systems where it's all hidden in a black box. Once something goes wrong, there is often no way of finding the source of problems.
And then you could have got the bug fixed so nobody else ran into this.
You're going to be pretty depressed in a few years if Apple Computer Inc. becomes big enough for you to realise that their behaviour is almost as bad as Microsoft's. But for now they just have a 'cool' image, and that's all that's important to hipsters these days. And Apple's DRM is super extra good DRM.
DRM is the best thing that's ever happened to Microsoft. It allows them to lock their customers ( & people who aren't even their customers [yet] ) into proprietary formats that are not only hard to reverse engineer, but are cryptographically secure.
Not quite. Vector icons won't be as good as pixmap icons until a computer is as good at doing hinting at small icon sizes as an human artist is. That's a long way off.
As for vector fonts, well it's called truetype and it's been around in KDE (& other desktops) for a long time. While it's 'vector', it'll render each glyph in each size once, then jam the resultant pixmaps together on the screen as needed. That's generally a better solution than rasterising from vector every glyph every time it's needed.
Ok, that's great, but I was really implying a linux kernel, seeing as the parent was talking about building a linux system without GNU.
This is a fictional exaggeration that never happens. Stop perpetuating it.
SuSE has always come with a very good dead tree manual. Ubuntu has a good guide and FAQ. The online manpages are the best manuals ever written.
Novell, Canonical or Redhat will be happy to arrange such a support contract.
You are pulling this stuff our of your arse.
As a software developer you should not make packages. That is not your job.
A distribution's job is to make sure a whole pile of software (nearing 10,000 packages for debian) works together in a consistent and reliable way. This is one of the reasons why freenix systems are so reliable. The resultant system is not a hodge-podge of different software authors' wills trying to bend the system to their personal tastes.
So, unless you know every distribution better than the distribution's developers, you shouldn't build your own packages. That's not to say you shouldn't be helpful to packagers.
I'll pretend you said apt-get rather than make/make install because that makes it sound like you have some clue about what you're comparing.
Not even close. 'Just dragging an application' is not package management.
With Apple Computer Inc.'s system there is no update system. What happens when $release of software acquires an exploit? Expect your user to regularly check for updates for all installed applications?
There is no form of dependency resolution. "But that's what leads to dependency hell..." - No. Software has dependencies. That's a truth. Dependencies need managing. Ignoring dependencies == ignoring the advantages of this invention called the shared library. Multiple applications can use one shared library to save disk space & memory. However the most important attribute of shared libraries is that a bugfix or security fix for the library needs to be updated precisely once and all applications which make use of it get fixed. Install multiple 'bundled' copies of a lib and you have to rely on every software maintainer making a fix and then go around fixing it n times. Good luck getting a fix for that crappy piece of shareware you installed 8 months ago and the author has no interest in anymore.
Care less than what about ACID2 compliance?
I think you've got to take your ideas a step further and imagine that the Playstation 4 or XBOX 3 not only run linux, but become very popular as general purpose communications & media devices, usurping the role of the general purpose PC. They run word processors, email, IM, DRM video on demand, DRM music managers, simple video editors, simple photo managers. They're cheap to mass produce. Eventually general purpose PCs dramatically rise in price due to smaller market of people who have need of them.
So anybody who wants to be remotely technical is stuck with paying high prices for machines which can run their software when they have a perfectly good cheap powerful machine in the living room, only it's crippled to only run 'trusted' software.
Good luck replacing gcc. Even the BSDs use gcc.
And no, icc cannot reliably compile a runnable kernel.
Oh right, so you're sending them food. Enough to keep them from starving - enough to keep them alive. Then what? What are they supposed to do then? Sit around and thank you for keeping them alive and hoping that you don't stop the food shipments? With no connection to the world, no tangible skills, how are they supposed to then play a part in the world and make a sustainable living in return? Sure, they could go back to subsistence farming, but what happens next time a famine hits? Do you expect them to beg for your aid again?
What about people who aren't starving, but still have no useful skills or are embargoed out of the global market by wealthier countries? What are they supposed to do? Sorry, you're not going to get any help, because there are needier people than you who we need to give a hand out to.
Ah. So India = slightly educated and well fed and Africa = everyone starving.
Thank you for expanding my incredibly narrow world view.
It's even complete with proprietary lockin and DRM!
IP stacks can be really significant when you're dealing with gigabit ethernet.
AoE is simple enough to make relatively inexpensive single drive interfaces possible.
Ah, ok. I didn't know libata's hotswap code was reliable yet.