It depends really. Lately, the kernel has put lots of improvements for desktop frameworks. For example, 2.6.15 put forth uevent for managing devices. Wich the latest udev needs. Udev keeps being more and more powerful, and latest hal takes advantage of it, and DE like Gnome and KDE also take advantage of this. For the desktop, power management (and suspend) is the reason to go 2.6.16. Most distros still don't use these features, but I already do, and some tools already use even the 2.6.16 features (no kidding). That means you don't have to go 2.6.16 now, but eventually, distro will have to install it if they want to upgrade their desktop features on Linux. The kernel and all the Utopia framework that goes with it.
Udev is still moving fast, some distro are stuck at udev 036. We are already at udev 087 (unusable on anything below linux 2.6.15) !!
Which drivers? I've seen WiFi drivers work on one distro and not another
Only because these drivers were closed source and not supported.
I've seen them work in one version of say SuSE only to fail to work on upgraded versions
Because they were no longer supported.
The kernel has a lot to do with what works. I'm all for Dell supporting the hardware but they would have to provide several versions of the same driver to make this happen
That's true only for closed drivers, and yes, they would have to support them. What exactly is wrong with having support for hardware ?!!! I'm amazed at what you're saying. Not having the support is the bad thing. If they release free drivers, distros will support them just fine in their new version.
Like or not, he has a point. He might be using it as an excuse, which is another matter, but he makes a valid point
Like it or not, he does not have a point. He didn't do a thing to start with, so stop your nonsense. He will have a point when it happens because Dell provides support.
You can't bitch about Linux not being on the desktop when there are such varying varieties
Linux is already on lots of desktops, we just want it to be on more desktops. Some people managed to do it, how come Dell can't ? Poor excuses won't do, sorry.
I'm a huge Linux fan and have used it since about '99 or so. Yet, the Gnome/KDE wars along with the "this distro does X and this does Y" is both a great feature and a sticking point
I'm a Linux fan and have used it since '99 too. Strangely enough, I know there is no Gnome/KDE wars, these wars you talk about are only there between zealots on forums. I know that because I know the community (devs/users) now after so much years, how come you don't ? If you think there are Gnome/KDE wars going on, you're a huge Linux zealot, not a huge Linux fan.
Like it or not, the reason Microsoft has a foothold on the desktop market is because of its relative ease of use
Posts beginning with 'like it or not' are usually trolls, and yours is a big example of that. I still wonder how you people can come up with nonsense like that, when here, the problem is that no desktop Linux on Dell is easily available. You're talking about steps that are far far away from the basics we're talking there. This is everything but insightful.
A worker or home user can by taught the basics of checking their e-mail, writing documents, etc. in Windows and Office via memorization
As here, I fail to see how what you describe is ease of use.
They learned Office 95 back in the day, that training investment carries over to the latest version with just a few add-ons
This go on in a big troll. Apparently, you genuinely think that people trained in Office 95 can use Office 2000 or XP or 2003 or 12 just the same. I can because I'm used to find my way on Windows, someone who learnt through memorization just can't. Well, I can just say you're hopeless if you really think they can without retraining.
Companies do not want to invest money retraining their staff
And yet they have to for every new version of Office.
Make it "just work." Windows' big strength is that I can go to CompUSA, buy any old crappy piece of hardware, plug it in, and have it work without having to load kernel modules, edit config files, etc.
You finally caught up to the topic, that precisely what we are talking about, and what distro already do pretty well, but still need support from vendors like Dell.
Standardize it. Pick an office suite. Pick a window manager. Pick _a few_ of the hundreds of obscure GNU applications and bundle them as a standard tool set. Wrap in some administration and deployment tools that are brain-dead simple to use. No normal user wants three office suites, four window managers, etc.
Have you used a Linux distro since 2000 ?
Completely hide the guts from the end user unless they want to see it. Mac OS does a great job of this. I have the command line and access to the config files if I want it, but the GUI is more than adequate to tweak most items
Same question as before. Basically, try to talk about things that are not already done, please.
Dell's other big market is home users. The same rules apply, just more so. Home users do not have the patience to learn Linux internals. My advice would be to start with an Ubuntu-like base, and go to work making the OS just work for normal users.
HP already did that with Ubuntu, Dell could do it too. If you thought your idea was novelty, let me tell you you're years behind.
Except that Linux already have a common core platform...
Developers and the core user community are too afraid of standardization
Wrong on all counts. Developers and the core user community vie for standardization. That's why Linux DE work on more systems than Windows or Mac ones, which are very limited.
just see what's holding Linux desktop GUI back: there is no standard GUI
BS, desktop Linux GUI are sure enough not held back. Just what are you talking about ? Can you give an example ? Your false rhetoric reads like FUD. Each desktop on Linux has its one and only standard GUI, so I don't understand what you mean. If you compare with other OSs, you have at least 2 different GUI provided by Apple for Mac OS and at least 3 provided by MS for Windows (just launch Notepad, Wordpad, and Word to have at least 2). On KDE, you have 1, and on Gnome, you have 1 too. So where did you find your nonsense ? Are you mistaken because on Linux, we can actually mix several desktop apps (even Windows ones if you use Wine) ? I think that's what you can't understand, this power looks obviously alien to you.
(at least when it comes to widgets, menus, style and configuration) in the same way as on Mac
Unfortunately, like I said, even Mac have at least 2 such widget/menu/style/configuration sets, it's worse than on each Linux DE.
Why is there no standardized desktop?
Because there is and you're blind. Or rather, you don't understand what standard means. Standard does not mean monopoly (one and only one desktop environment) in case you did not know. Standard means everybody applying them can interoperate, are compatible.
Because developers and the core user community abhor any idea of such a lockdown that limits their ability to tweak the system
As your premise are false already, I'd rather say that you are so brainwashed in monopolistic ways that you can't think right or out of the box. What exactly does the choice of DE have to do with tweaking the system ?!
Imagine a situation like this: "That's a fine application there, Mr. Developer, but its user interface doesn't conform to the distribution regulations and hence we cannot include it in the distro". It's exactly the same thing with distros.
I can't understand the meaning of the situation you describe, and can't even make sense of it. People in FOSS don't do tools to be integrated in a distro, they do tools to resolve problems or scratch some itch. Distros peek the ones they prefer or need. What was your point exactly ?
An industry powerhouse like Michael Dell tells the Linux community what he wants
Said in another way, the VENDOR is telling us CLIENTS what he wants. This is BS of course, and not at all the way it works. Let's see what your conclusions are...
and how does the Linux community respond? By insisting that he's wrong and telling him what he actually wants
What ? You mean us CLIENTS are asking the VENDOR what we want ? We tell him he's wrong and tell him what we want. That looks like a very good thing to me. Now, does he listen ?
It's called listening, folks
Exactly, Dell has to listen.
Maybe if the Linux community started listening to what users are SAYING they want, instead of dictating it to them, Linux would see wider adoption
And there you lost me. The Linux community is the users you talk about here, so your sentence does not make any sense. Dell sure enough is not the user here. And basically, the GP is saying to Dell to stop assuming things about us USERS, especially because these things are BS, and that supporting any distro will do the job.
The comments to this article (so far) IMHO show why Open Source user interfaces are in such a bad shape: 90% is about some minor functionality that this-or-that package doesn't have, 9% is about graphics design.
You know what ? Linus disagree completely with you, he says that's a good thing to do. And just look at the flame wars that ensued. And then you're wrong about FOSS, as Gnome does the opposite, and lots of people sided with Linus on the flame war against Gnome. The point is that in FOSS, you have two different visions on the main DE, you have choice, and yet, you manage to say that all of FOSS UI have a problem ? I call this FUD, sorry.
Only one post discusses the reason this submission won the contest: it proposes an innovative way to present your daily work
But like you say later, it is foolish to say/. = FOSS family.
After 20+ years of research results that tell people what good user interface guidelines are, plus companies such as Apple that have products that more-or-less adhere to these guidelines, it seems that the open source community (I know, equating/. posters with the open source community is a bit of a stretch:-) still doesn't get the point
Like I said, you're wrong. And it's more than a stretch to equate reactions to a story on/. with FOSS community, it's pure FUD.
It is not about how many thousand things your application can do, it is not about beautiful screen layouts, it is about enabling the end user to complete the task they have set themselves with the minimal amount of hassle (especially if s/he has done a similar thing many times before), and helping them with that task as much as possible (especially if s/he is doing something for the first time)
I have problem understanding what you mean, it just seems impossible to do. I just take grep. Grep completes its task with a minimum amount of hassle on the command line (it's just impossible to be as fast grepping with a GUI), it can do many thousand things, it does not do beautiful screen layouts by itself, and I wonder if you think the 'grep --help' is enough to help a beginner with the task. Does grep have a good UI ? A lot of/. people seems to disagree, as these people always disparage the command line. I know they are ignorant people, but those are the same that says FOSS is doomed if you have to use the command line. What you say is theory, in real world, trade-off have to be made.
Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now
Wrong. MS already said they would have a better search than Google one or two years ago. IIRC it was in 2003, and it was to be up in end of 2003 (but I may be wrong, perhaps it was 2004). We are still waiting !!! I didn't hold my breath back then, I still won't.
It was a general attitude of, "Linux rocks, and if you don't see that, you're lame. If you want to do something that can't be done on Linux, you're doing something wrong. Not me
Not you, I agree. What you want is free tools to do professional work, and people would stare blank at you in dismissal, thinking : "this man thinks I will lose hours of time developing free tools for him, he must be mad, I'm not his slave". But you could not understand that, with your very bad attitude.
This has changed quite a bit now. It seems most Linuxers are now aware that there are weak areas
They always were. You are the one that never understood what you where asking for, while they worked to at least get the basics right.
OpenOffice has the office suite thing wrapped up, but there are still areas out there where there are no programs to do more than amateur level work
That's because FOSS is not free labor for you.
There's Kino, but if you want to do professional video editing, you're S.O.L.
Wrong, there are commercial (very expensive) solutions used even in movie studios, but what you want is free slaves.
Gimp works, but has a frustrating interface, and the developers don't understand why anyone would want anything different. At least someone created GimpShop.
So you use GimpShop right ?
I wish I could just plug and unplug my ramdisks, but I have to mount and umount them
That's what I do and I don't have to mount or unmount them (though it's often more secure for your data to unmount them, oh, excuse me, "remove them reliably").
Linux will stay off the desktops until more developers look at things like, for example, KDE does
They thought about this before you and are already at an advanced stage (inotify, uevent for example), while you were babbling about what Linux need to do.
On the other hand, if you're talking about all those extra features nobody uses, KDE has that, too, just like Windows!
Windows does not even have the basics that people need, you must be kidding !! I have yet to find one person that is satisfied with what Windows offers out of the box. On the other hand a Linux distro is enough most of the time. The few people I know that did not pirate anything on Windows have very little apps and they pay through the nose for everything, and get viruses. I can tell you they are not so happy. That's cool because I am the one getting all these free laptops and PC after that.
My very standard HP Laserjet Series II has never worked with Linux. No problem with any version of windows, or MS-DOS.
HP Laserjet Series II works perfectly out of the box on Linux, HP even developed the free driver, try better next time.
Even getting a DVD to really work can be a pain with Linux. Hate to even think about a DVD-RW
DVD works perfectly out of the box on Mandriva I installed for all my users, try better next time.
Scanners are a pain. Those multi-function printer/copier/scanners, almost never work
Most scanners works perfectly out of the box too (except perhaps newest high end ones). The multifunction printer (an Epson one) of my brothers had a problem, the scanner was not recognised because too recent. It was the matter of adding it to a text file to make the scanner recognised and work rigth away (so that's not to say Epson support would have been hard, just modifying a text file !!!). Mandriva 2006 fixed that.
About 50% of the USA population still uses dial-up, and you can't count on linux to work with a win-modems. Sorry to say, win-modems are the stardard.
I'm not worried about this at all. Linux is most powerful with high speed connexions anyway, so no problem for me if people with winmodems stay on Windows. And stop the nonsense, if winmodems were a standard, one driver would be enough on Linux to make them all work. Fact is, what you say is that once you're winmodem is dead, these people have to throw away their laptop ?
A lot of drivers that you can find for Linux are crappy, like ATI.
And ? You gave an example that is the same problem on Windows. Have other examples ? I guessed you didn't. Pitiful.
I have installed several version of Linux side-by-side with several different versions of Windows. In every case, windows has a snappy crisp feel, while the Linux GUI seems a bit sluggish by comparison
Which GUI ? You mean, the GUI that have AA fonts, is full themable up to the way it works, full instant i18n/l10n change with lots of iput method, is more secure, is consistant, always keep the same speed (doesn't decay), works on several OS and arch, is less buggy (inverse copy/paste anyone ? + in explorer tree view when there are no more folders anyone ?), restores your session how it was when you logged off, updates on the fly without reboot,... this GUI is sluggish, that's what you mean ?
Here is a test I often do: open a browser to some web-page, open another window on top the browser, grab the window by the taskbar, shake the window and look for tracing. I usually get some tracing in Linux, but not Windows. Anyway, that's been my experience.
Why, you move windows on top of your browser all day on Windows ? Are you a moron ? We Linux users are productive on our desktop, you know !
My version of Linux: Debian 3.1 unstable with IceWM. And please don't recomend another distro. 1) I'm sick to death of Linux advocates giving that as the answer to everything. 2) I've tried several versions of Linux, they all have their different problems. My system AMD 1600+ with 512MB of RAM.
The version I recently upgraded all my users too : Mandriva 2006, and they never had your stupid problems, because they are productive too, they don't load Linux distro to try to find flaw to troll about.
Software. By far the biggest reason not to use Linux on the desktop. It seems that there are always a few MS applications that many users feel they must have
No. Actually, these users you talk about, I only saw them as trolls on forums or on Slashdot. All the users I migrated to Linux did not have such apps as soon as I stopped supporting their Windows. They magically did not need them anymore, they just wanted an OS that works. I discovered they are also well capable of finding another app that suits their need.
using emulators; are all inadequate solutions
They are perfectly adequate solutions that lots of people use. Stop the FUD please, Windows is full of Windows only devices that emulates hardware by software, slowing Windows to a crawl, and it never seems to annoy users...
they wouldn't be able to this particular game, or that particular application
Only a newcomer would become so tied to a closed application. I've been there, and as soon as it's discontinued, you're more than toast. What do these users do then, suicide ? Seriously ! These kind of situation is one of the big reasons I switched to Linux.
Hardware. Since Linux only commands about one quarter of 1% of the desktop market, it stands to reason that hardware manufacturers are not overly concerned with making Linux compatible products
That's just not true. Lots of hardware manufacturers provide standard or Linux compatible products. But they are very bad at promoting them (fear of MS retaliating ?).
Linux will always lag MS in this area
Let me correct you : hardware manufacturers will always lag on this point for Linux. Linux is not the problem here.
I don't think I have seen Linux drivers included with any PC hardware
I have. Actually, most of the time, the driver is already in the Linux kernel, which is even better.
It is possible to put together a Linux box that runs all the hardware you need, but it takes a lot of careful planning
No it does not. It does only for exotic hardware (like WiFi, which, believe it or not, is not standardized at all).
With windows, hardware is not an issue, the OS is typically pre-installed, and any PC hardware comes with windows drivers
You're plain wrong ! Go tell this to the manufacturers of my TV card, scanner, gamepad adapter (and I forgot one) hardware ! Or it's just more lies from you. Windows is not the dream picture you people paint about it.
You can read right on the box which windows versions will work with the peripheral. With Linux you have to look it up, or guess
Why, you don't look it up before going to buy in store for Windows ? Come on, don't BS me. But sure it's a problem, problem which is AGAIN entirely the fault of the vendor, not the fault of Linux.
Even if a driver does exist, you may have to go all the web to find it, you may also have to compile the driver - which most average users don't want to do
Or just ask your distro vendor...
Cost. Practically all PCs come with MS operating systems installed. PC buyers will never get their money back for those operating systems. Which mean Linux is just an additional expense. You may also have to buy an emulator if you want to run your windows apps, or partition magic if you want to dual boot. Yes, OS-less systems do exist, but none of the majors sell them (Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, Apple)
Some facts for you. I bought my latest HP/Compaq laptop without OS (it came with Ubuntu too, but I would have had to wait). You don't have to buy any emulator or any partition magic either to dual-boot, what is this FUD ? For home usage, at most you would need Cedega I agree.
Performance. Without a GUI, Linux is very fast, and will run with minimum hardware. But, once you run KDE or GNOME, Linux performance is much worse than windows. I know there are other trimmed down GUIs, but they don't general
It's a shame that people in the OpenSource community get so easily worked up when people say they want "unneccessary" features. All it tells me is that no one has taken a really good hard look at Office.
I use Office 2003 every day at work... It's a shame people like you spread so much half truth about this suite.
The ease of use and development of a databse similar to Access is created
You forgot the fact that it is not back or forward compatible (MAJOR road block), and that it is very complicated to use and buggy as soon as you want to do sth not trivial.
I've used a lot of databases, and none of match up feature-wise to Access
Lying won't make your point sorry.
But none out there use the native Operating Systems widget set to build applications
That's because they are databases. You should learn what a database is before spouting nonsense.
The interoperability of the various Office programs is unmatched
Do you even believe this BS ?
The ability to use a custom Database built in Access to pull information from the corporate server, which then uses Word to display reports, and Excel to put the information into usable formats is currently unmatched, and a bigger "unnecessary feature" than OpenSource developers give it credit for
I've never read such BS before. FYI, people produce PRODUCTION frontends (like banks, Google, other high profile sites) for the Web, cellphones, OS GUI,... with other databases that are far powerful that what you describe, that work, that keep up with the load,... Your example works in OOo too, and OOo can even provides you PDFs !!!
A long, hard, cold look needs to be taken at Office. As long as people continue to beleive that Word is "just a word processor" and Excel "just a spreadsheet", and Access is some "database throwback to the 90's" then you're never going to make any headways against office
Must be why some headways are made against MS Office then...
The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX/Acronym of the Day combo is a much more powerful set of tools than most people give it credit for
I guess that's why even MS stopped giving it credit and wants to move on to Longhorn. The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX you talk about don't work reliably and are a pile of sh*t giving all kinds of hardship to developers, and are a nest for wirus writers.
i>Hardly anyone buys Office for home. Most of them pirate it from work. As long as work drives their usage of Ofiice, it's going to stay entrenched
That's the only thing where I agree with you.
As long as companies continue to use the "unneccessary" features of Office, nothing else is going to manage to make a dent
They don't use the "unnecessary" features of Office, they are just forced to buy new versions of Office because different versions of Office are not compatible. Which means they have shackles and don't know how to get rid of them. Which is very different from the picture you try to show us.
I'm sorry to say this, but frankly as far as home desktops are concerned, the battle has been won by Windows
There's no battle, just competition, as Linux desktop was there far after Windows.
I'm not talking about power users, but just the people who want to do their office work and deal with the minimum of hassle, maybe upgrade their drivers etc but are generally not fussed
These people always have free labor at hand. Stop thinking Windows works without problem, it does not, it decays. Linux in the other hand, doesn't decay with time.
The reason for this is that Linux is, from the perspective of end users, needlessly complex, whereas Windows is for the most part easy to use and simple to understand
Of course, this is just not true, especially when saying 'Linux', because then, I can take any easy distro to prove my point.
As an example, contrast installing NVIDIA's drivers under Windows and Linux. Under Windows, you download a driver file from NVIDIA's site, run it and then reboot your PC after clicking next a few times. Done. On Linux, however, that process is more like go to NVIDIA's site, download file, kill X (not a very simple task for newbies on distros which have things like GDM and KDM), find the file you downloaded using a terminal, run it and follow the instructions
Like I said before, generalizing on Linux makes you easy to prove wrong. Your Linux example is just BS. Let me take Mandriva Linux Powerpack (that is what I install for all my users I switched to Linux). Installation of NVidia driver ? They don't even know what that means, as it was installed automagically with the OS who recognised the card automatically. So you're done before even having started. So it's far easier than in Windows. It's the same for ATI driver BTW. Far easier than on Windows. Your example would be for a system like mine which is custom, but even I have an automatic installer that streamlines the installation.
they prefer just going onto a website, downloading a file and double clicking the icon
That's not true, they prefer it done automagically like on Linux. None of my user know how to update a driver on Windows BTW.
I tried running it on a fairly new PC, running WindowMaker on Debian. It was dog slow; menus took seconds to open, rather than being instant as they are on Windows
For one, menus are not instant on Windows, and for two, there are other office apps available on Linux. People like you (I should say anti-Linux trolls) like to rant about Windows menus being instant. Sure that's true with a fresh installed Windows with nothing installed on it. As soon as you start using it and installing things, it becomes less and less true though. Actually, WinXP SP2 still have, sometimes, 10s of seconds of wait before a menu will open (this is on a 3GHz+ P4 desktop with 1 Go RAM). The difference is that on Linux desktops, the menus perhaps were slower (that's not true in KDE, and won't be true in Gnome 2.14 either) but the speed stayed the same from just after install, to today. Actually, speed of Linux desktops improves with the years.
there's a complete lack of decent MSN Messenger clients for Linux. The closest is Kopete, with Gaim frankly unusable, as Kopete has support for webcams and personal messages while Gaim does not
Gaim does have that support since some time now, but it's not in stable yet. And you're wrong. Sorry to tell you that that's the MSN Messenger users we see disconnect from time to time (because their client crashed), and few of them (for us, none of them) have webcam configured. So at least, in GAIM, the basics (no crash, several protocol supported simultaneously) works even better than the native clients. In Kopete, webcam config was automatic, and it never crashed on my wife.
But still, on both a simple task like changing your nickname, changing your personal message or setting a display picture is a darn sight harder than it really needs to be. Hell, cu
Most people have the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality
You forgot the most important part : "if it's broke (and it breaks very often), there's the slave geek next door".
So as long as Windows suits their needs, they will think why change
No, that's as long as the geek wants to lose his time to repair their Windows for free.
There are also all the costs involved in any kind of change
No cost for a Linux free distro.
I also don't think the average home user (outside of geeky types) will ever change to linux as long as Windows is what he is using at work
That's just not true. As soon I stopped supporting their Windows desktops, the people that were using me as free labor had to switch to Linux pretty fast.
He doesn't want to worry about changing formats, he wants seemless integration with home and work
BS. He wants what he was trained on.
Most of the people I know that do use a different OS at home, they use a Mac because they say they can use it without thinking about how it works
And most people I know are not power users, just normal users that don't even know what their OS is, or what Microsoft is. They know their apps though (Excel, Word basically, sometimes Money). These people migrated to Linux without problem. My wife (which also uses Linux exclusively at home since 2001) once asked me if I could install Money. She never used it, but one of her friends told her it was the best. I had no problem imposing GnuCash, as if Windows people can blindly persuade her that a closed product is best without her even trying it, I can do the same for free products without shame.
Most of us Linux users, use it because we like to know how and why it does what it does
Perhaps that's true, but it's different for me. I migrated on Linux in 2001 because that was the only and easiest OS that provided me some needed features, and it became even more true along the years. One of the best features, is that I have a true simultaneous multiuser setup with one monitor (with mixed sound and all), which is still impossible to do in Windows. Another of the best feature, is that I can leave my wife and kids on their session without fear that they will break anything or will be infected by any malware. To this day, I had exactly zero maintenance to do related to user actions.
I just wish for one thing, and that is that the Gnome and KDE people would cooperate on clipboard and drag and drop standards so that software from one would work in that department at least in the other
Which is already done for drag and drop. What lots of people, and you, don't seem to understand, is that for this to work, the applications have to implement things for each type of document you would drag and drop on them. That's the only thing that could be missing. I won't talk about clipboard as I never had a problem with it.
Re:using 2.9.13.9x for a week in Ubuntu 6.10 betas
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A Look at GNOME 2.14
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· Score: 1
I am having some trouble with dbus/hald not showing desktop icons for hard drive partitions mounted under/media
This is a hal configuration problem. There is a lack of a GUI tool to configure HAL, and I think that's because the API are still not frozen.
I set the gconf key for volumes_visible, and that works for CDs and such. But I have to restart dbus/hald after logging in to get partitions to show a desktop icon
I'm pretty sure you can do it if you change the HAL configuration, but you have to edit the XML conf files (or create your local one that takes precedence) for now. Thats' what I have done to change some mount points to french words, and change some behaviours (like mounting devices with 'users' flags, as I have several simultaneous sessions on my PC).
The French word meaning "a meeting". Maybe in your attempt at making a point you meant Bonjour
Wrong on all counts. Rendez-vous is not the french for a meeting (which would be "réunion") but the french word for an appointment or a date. Bonjour is a french word too, to say hello, and give you absolutely no idea of what the protocol is for.
The point he was making was that a perfectly meaningful name was intentionally obscured for who knows why
BS. Gnome meeting was not at all meaningful for most people on this planet. Ekiga is basically as meaningful as Gnome meeting for non american people, except for those that use the language where ekiga is from. The reasons are not even obscure either, as the name was selected among propositions from users, and everything is explained on the blog.
Also I've never heard ZeroConf Networking Browser on any platform, but I know of Bonjour on Windows and Macintosh, as well as being listed on a lot of printer boxes lately
And I don't, despite being the more technical person around in my place. I only known recently what it actually was thanks to, guess what, Ekiga, which can use Bonjour, and waited for avahi to become usable. All of this is BS anyway, as you never have a problem to find anything in Gnome, with the descriptive name, be it ekiga or anything. You even forget the names of the programs in Gnome (happened to me several times) as everything is streamlined or automatic.
Why do so many linux programmers insist on such crazy naming conventions. Sabayon? Changing a perfectly servicable and pragmagic GNOME Meeting to "Ekiga"?
Why ? because lots of ARROGANT american speaking people like you think Linux is a solely american thing, and that everyone in the world speaks only american, and understand words like "meeting". Guess what, there are other people than american on Earth, and they have a language too, and they have words like "Ekiga" (no, it's not a random suite of letters), which they understand perfectly well, even better than "meeting", and surely more "servicable and pragmagic" to them, like you say.
I use linux both at home and at work, so I'm not some anti-linux zealot or something- I think it's a legitimate question to raise
You're just pro-american and "everybody should speak american only". I think that's worse than being anti-linux.
On my mac laptop, I have a handy app for browsing mDNS networks called Rendezvous Browser (since mDNS was once called Rendezvous). The name is simple and describes perfectly what the program does
And that's only because rendez-vous is a french word that found its way in american language. Otherwise, you would call it a random suite of letters...
I'm sure that the programmers think they've very clever by choosing a name that means something in some obscure language
"obscure language", you mean, other languages than american ? At least they made the effort to understand other languages, you do not.
Circa the FC4 desktop that I use, here are some things (I'll assume all is improved in the latest version) that I either love or hate
So you have FC4 woes, not really Gnome woes.
Music and CD playing are primative, but work. XMMS doesn't play well with Gnome... The default CD player is just kind of primative, but nicely behaved
XMMS is not the default music playing app of Gnome, rhythmbox is. There are external Gnome 2 apps like BMPx too.
Evolution is bloated. I love evolution, don't get me wrong, but it takes up a huge amount of RAM and it uses SpamAssassin for filtering spam, which is a terrible idea
Why ? You're not forced to use it. I don't, my SA is run by postfix and its friends like amavis. Ah, that's the FC4 setup's fault. My biggest problem with Evolution is the fact that it does not remember its position yet, so it's not really a good Gnome 2 app in my view.
Integration of P2P lacking. Most P2P clients these days have hooks for magnet, the URI sceme for P2P-shared entities. Gnome lacks any integration of this, sadly
This one I agree with. Basically, that's because the Gnome 2 apps (like BitTorrent) that manage these do not install them.
gnome-terminal: best terminal since xterm
Well, not for me. I still have the problem of gnome-terminal garbling output when it arrives at the bottom of the window:(.
Firefox - Firefox is not a part of the gnome project, but it has hooks for gnome's desktop tools and does an excellent job. It's hard, these days, to think of firefox as the "lightweight mozilla", but it's still a damned good browser
Firefox is not even a Gnome 2 app, and still integrates very badly with the desktop. I'll keep my Epiphany and Galeon for now.
CD writing - Not terrible, but KDE's K3B blows the doors off of gnome's CD writing capabilities. I use K3B all the time, now, and I'm very happy
Well, I still use gcombust (and have more and more incentive to migrate it to Gnome 2) because the workflow is still the fastest for me, and no Linux desktop CD burner provides me with its features.
Movies - totem, gmplayer and all of the rest of the video tools are in a relatively sad state, usability-wise. They suffer from the XMMS problem of often not playing well with gnome (gmplayer), crash OFTEN (and aren't those SEGVs a bad thing?), and don't support many formats. I'm not sure that this is unique to Gnome, but it's a black eye on the Linux desktop
I don't have these problems at all. I had only the problem that Totem with gstreamer backend could not play some files and would lock when doing fast forward in a file, but that's all. MPlayer always played every file in existence for me, even H264. That's because I regularly update ffmpeg. Which means gstreamer 0.8 should have been able to play every file, as I had gstreamer ffmpeg backend. But it didn't work, so most of the time I used gmplayer (which uses ffmpeg libavcodec from FFMPeg when compiled corectly). Now, with latest Totem and gstreamer 0.10, totem plays every video file as well.
Overall,I love gnome. It's well designed, and glib + Gtk+ is a very powerful use of C that makes relatively high-level code easy to make fairly lightweight... when the developers try
It looks like I'm going to have to admin a lab of Linux boxes soon, and I'm pleased with the progress that is coming on the nebulous "Linux desktop"
Linux desktop never stopped from progressing since 1998. Only perception of people external to it is affected, because since 1998, I see trolls saying "Linux does not have a desktop because XYZ is sh*t or does not work or exist". But the progress was always there and fast. The last troll wave was the "Vista has (not 'will', but 'has', notice the troll as Vista is not out) relegated Linux years behind, or Linux will die"... I know it's pathetic, but that's how trolls are.
Although, both Gnome and KDE are still 90'ish, at least Gnome is now knocking off OS X instead of Windows
See ? Clueless. Some big experts talk about "90'ish" desktop. What does that mean ? It means nothing actually, it's just a flamebait comment. Same for "knocking off" OS X, quickly forgetting that OS X knocked off a lot from GNU. And this "knocking off" from OS X is not even new, Gnome had a Mac orientation long ago.
Now, for the confusing part. Why was their previous allocator so lame compared to malloc()?
Because it wasn't. What is measured there is speed of allocating in multithreaded environment (which is GMemChunk known worst case), not the overall picture, which include deallocating, fragmentation, memory overhead of managing lots of chunks of memory,... This graph actually show one aspect of the picture, but there are tens of others to look at before coming to a conclusion. Gnome developers are not stupid, they would have used malloc if GMemChunk did not have benefits. GMemChunk has lots of benefits over malloc, the only thing showed by this graph, is that now, GSlice does have the same benefits, but is even faster than malloc in the worst case. With an analogy, think of DSPs and general processors. The DSP will be the fastest in what it was designed to do, perhaps with one corner case. Now the DSP has tuned everything, even the corner case. But the DSP can't be used for everything the general processor does efficiently.
Gnome2? Do you mean GTK2? there is a difference. Is there something I'm missing that links GNUcash to gnome other than they both use the same GTK2 toolkit?
What you are missing is that Gnucash 1.9.x. uses more than the gtk2 toolkit. It explicitly access gnome functions and uses Gnome components like GConf. And don't forget either that some components like gtkhtml are actually part of Gnome 2 now.
So, you want p0rn? Simple. 'P0rn wa doko desu ka'. Except that you'll probably have to spell it in Japanese lettering at some point, so 'Porunno wa doko desu ka' might be the way forward:)
Huh ? Doko is for places. I don't even know if they will understand p0rn, and they will start figuring out if there is a place named 'poruno'. As your japanese is what you picked from anime, you should have figured out that p0rn is dubbed 'H' ('etchi' in japanese) for hentai. And for things, aru is the verb for general things, so : 'hentai ha doko arimasu ka' would be more correct I think...
I don't pretend to know English or Japanese very well as none are my native language, but isn't the correct translation for "Koko ha doko desu ka" actually "Where am I", with the meaning "what is this place I'm standing in right now ?" ? Is "Where is this ?" equivalent to "Where am I ?" in american ? Does the translation come from the device or from the news submitter ? I'm confused.
It's good that the software seems so advanced. What cost will it have though ?
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm sure there's a hundred things wrong with what I've said, I'm not a hacker
You mean, like what you said there : The machine might slow or freeze but an admin will notice this process and go into the users directory (as root) and type "ps -al" to see all the existing processes. Instead, it executes your "ps" virus and subsequently, the spinlocking stops with "ps" printed to output with the super user killing "la" and thinking everything is fixed
Of course, unless the superuser deliberately destroyed the security of its Linux and added "." to his PATH, this would never happen, as it would not execute the "ps" in the user's directory. But I see your point.
I would not say that german is easy. Anyway, in japanese, you forgot the fact that the verb is not even always present in the sentence (just guessed depending on the context), and that sometimes, with the exact same sentence, subject and object are switched depending on the context too. This require some training to understand, I still did not mastered it well, and seeing lots of fansubs shows me that I'm not the only one that has not mastered this (and I'm not the worse). I guess a machine would have a really hard time with japanese (and even worse for chinese or russian).
Slashdot Mirror
It depends really.
Lately, the kernel has put lots of improvements for desktop frameworks.
For example, 2.6.15 put forth uevent for managing devices. Wich the latest udev needs.
Udev keeps being more and more powerful, and latest hal takes advantage of it, and DE like Gnome and KDE also take advantage of this.
For the desktop, power management (and suspend) is the reason to go 2.6.16.
Most distros still don't use these features, but I already do, and some tools already use even the 2.6.16 features (no kidding).
That means you don't have to go 2.6.16 now, but eventually, distro will have to install it if they want to upgrade their desktop features on Linux.
The kernel and all the Utopia framework that goes with it.
Udev is still moving fast, some distro are stuck at udev 036. We are already at udev 087 (unusable on anything below linux 2.6.15) !!
Heh, I guess this is another example of slideware, vaporware through slides, presentations, articles...
Which drivers? I've seen WiFi drivers work on one distro and not another
Only because these drivers were closed source and not supported.
I've seen them work in one version of say SuSE only to fail to work on upgraded versions
Because they were no longer supported.
The kernel has a lot to do with what works. I'm all for Dell supporting the hardware but they would have to provide several versions of the same driver to make this happen
That's true only for closed drivers, and yes, they would have to support them. What exactly is wrong with having support for hardware ?!!!
I'm amazed at what you're saying. Not having the support is the bad thing. If they release free drivers, distros will support them just fine in their new version.
Like or not, he has a point. He might be using it as an excuse, which is another matter, but he makes a valid point
Like it or not, he does not have a point. He didn't do a thing to start with, so stop your nonsense. He will have a point when it happens because Dell provides support.
You can't bitch about Linux not being on the desktop when there are such varying varieties
Linux is already on lots of desktops, we just want it to be on more desktops. Some people managed to do it, how come Dell can't ? Poor excuses won't do, sorry.
I'm a huge Linux fan and have used it since about '99 or so. Yet, the Gnome/KDE wars along with the "this distro does X and this does Y" is both a great feature and a sticking point
I'm a Linux fan and have used it since '99 too. Strangely enough, I know there is no Gnome/KDE wars, these wars you talk about are only there between zealots on forums.
I know that because I know the community (devs/users) now after so much years, how come you don't ?
If you think there are Gnome/KDE wars going on, you're a huge Linux zealot, not a huge Linux fan.
Like it or not, the reason Microsoft has a foothold on the desktop market is because of its relative ease of use
Posts beginning with 'like it or not' are usually trolls, and yours is a big example of that.
I still wonder how you people can come up with nonsense like that, when here, the problem is that no desktop Linux on Dell is easily available.
You're talking about steps that are far far away from the basics we're talking there. This is everything but insightful.
A worker or home user can by taught the basics of checking their e-mail, writing documents, etc. in Windows and Office via memorization
As here, I fail to see how what you describe is ease of use.
They learned Office 95 back in the day, that training investment carries over to the latest version with just a few add-ons
This go on in a big troll. Apparently, you genuinely think that people trained in Office 95 can use Office 2000 or XP or 2003 or 12 just the same.
I can because I'm used to find my way on Windows, someone who learnt through memorization just can't.
Well, I can just say you're hopeless if you really think they can without retraining.
Companies do not want to invest money retraining their staff
And yet they have to for every new version of Office.
Make it "just work." Windows' big strength is that I can go to CompUSA, buy any old crappy piece of hardware, plug it in, and have it work without having to load kernel modules, edit config files, etc.
You finally caught up to the topic, that precisely what we are talking about, and what distro already do pretty well, but still need support from vendors like Dell.
Standardize it. Pick an office suite. Pick a window manager. Pick _a few_ of the hundreds of obscure GNU applications and bundle them as a standard tool set. Wrap in some administration and deployment tools that are brain-dead simple to use. No normal user wants three office suites, four window managers, etc.
Have you used a Linux distro since 2000 ?
Completely hide the guts from the end user unless they want to see it. Mac OS does a great job of this. I have the command line and access to the config files if I want it, but the GUI is more than adequate to tweak most items
Same question as before. Basically, try to talk about things that are not already done, please.
Dell's other big market is home users. The same rules apply, just more so. Home users do not have the patience to learn Linux internals. My advice would be to start with an Ubuntu-like base, and go to work making the OS just work for normal users.
HP already did that with Ubuntu, Dell could do it too. If you thought your idea was novelty, let me tell you you're years behind.
Common core platform for Linux will never happen
...
Except that Linux already have a common core platform
Developers and the core user community are too afraid of standardization
Wrong on all counts. Developers and the core user community vie for standardization. That's why Linux DE work on more systems than Windows or Mac ones, which are very limited.
just see what's holding Linux desktop GUI back: there is no standard GUI
BS, desktop Linux GUI are sure enough not held back. Just what are you talking about ? Can you give an example ?
Your false rhetoric reads like FUD.
Each desktop on Linux has its one and only standard GUI, so I don't understand what you mean.
If you compare with other OSs, you have at least 2 different GUI provided by Apple for Mac OS and at least 3 provided by MS for Windows (just launch Notepad, Wordpad, and Word to have at least 2).
On KDE, you have 1, and on Gnome, you have 1 too. So where did you find your nonsense ?
Are you mistaken because on Linux, we can actually mix several desktop apps (even Windows ones if you use Wine) ?
I think that's what you can't understand, this power looks obviously alien to you.
(at least when it comes to widgets, menus, style and configuration) in the same way as on Mac
Unfortunately, like I said, even Mac have at least 2 such widget/menu/style/configuration sets, it's worse than on each Linux DE.
Why is there no standardized desktop?
Because there is and you're blind. Or rather, you don't understand what standard means.
Standard does not mean monopoly (one and only one desktop environment) in case you did not know.
Standard means everybody applying them can interoperate, are compatible.
Because developers and the core user community abhor any idea of such a lockdown that limits their ability to tweak the system
As your premise are false already, I'd rather say that you are so brainwashed in monopolistic ways that you can't think right or out of the box.
What exactly does the choice of DE have to do with tweaking the system ?!
Imagine a situation like this: "That's a fine application there, Mr. Developer, but its user interface doesn't conform to the distribution regulations and hence we cannot include it in the distro". It's exactly the same thing with distros.
I can't understand the meaning of the situation you describe, and can't even make sense of it.
People in FOSS don't do tools to be integrated in a distro, they do tools to resolve problems or scratch some itch.
Distros peek the ones they prefer or need. What was your point exactly ?
This, RIGHT HERE, is the problem
...
YES !!
An industry powerhouse like Michael Dell tells the Linux community what he wants
Said in another way, the VENDOR is telling us CLIENTS what he wants. This is BS of course, and not at all the way it works.
Let's see what your conclusions are
and how does the Linux community respond? By insisting that he's wrong and telling him what he actually wants
What ? You mean us CLIENTS are asking the VENDOR what we want ? We tell him he's wrong and tell him what we want.
That looks like a very good thing to me. Now, does he listen ?
It's called listening, folks
Exactly, Dell has to listen.
Maybe if the Linux community started listening to what users are SAYING they want, instead of dictating it to them, Linux would see wider adoption
And there you lost me. The Linux community is the users you talk about here, so your sentence does not make any sense. Dell sure enough is not the user here.
And basically, the GP is saying to Dell to stop assuming things about us USERS, especially because these things are BS, and that supporting any distro will do the job.
The comments to this article (so far) IMHO show why Open Source user interfaces are in such a bad shape: 90% is about some minor functionality that this-or-that package doesn't have, 9% is about graphics design.
/. = FOSS family.
/. posters with the open source community is a bit of a stretch:-) still doesn't get the point
/. with FOSS community, it's pure FUD.
/. people seems to disagree, as these people always disparage the command line. I know they are ignorant people, but those are the same that says FOSS is doomed if you have to use the command line.
You know what ? Linus disagree completely with you, he says that's a good thing to do.
And just look at the flame wars that ensued. And then you're wrong about FOSS, as Gnome does the opposite, and lots of people sided with Linus on the flame war against Gnome.
The point is that in FOSS, you have two different visions on the main DE, you have choice, and yet, you manage to say that all of FOSS UI have a problem ?
I call this FUD, sorry.
Only one post discusses the reason this submission won the contest: it proposes an innovative way to present your daily work
But like you say later, it is foolish to say
After 20+ years of research results that tell people what good user interface guidelines are, plus companies such as Apple that have products that more-or-less adhere to these guidelines, it seems that the open source community (I know, equating
Like I said, you're wrong. And it's more than a stretch to equate reactions to a story on
It is not about how many thousand things your application can do, it is not about beautiful screen layouts, it is about enabling the end user to complete the task they have set themselves with the minimal amount of hassle (especially if s/he has done a similar thing many times before), and helping them with that task as much as possible (especially if s/he is doing something for the first time)
I have problem understanding what you mean, it just seems impossible to do.
I just take grep. Grep completes its task with a minimum amount of hassle on the command line (it's just impossible to be as fast grepping with a GUI), it can do many thousand things, it does not do beautiful screen layouts by itself, and I wonder if you think the 'grep --help' is enough to help a beginner with the task. Does grep have a good UI ? A lot of
What you say is theory, in real world, trade-off have to be made.
Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now
Wrong. MS already said they would have a better search than Google one or two years ago. IIRC it was in 2003, and it was to be up in end of 2003 (but I may be wrong, perhaps it was 2004).
We are still waiting !!!
I didn't hold my breath back then, I still won't.
It was a general attitude of, "Linux rocks, and if you don't see that, you're lame. If you want to do something that can't be done on Linux, you're doing something wrong. Not me
Not you, I agree. What you want is free tools to do professional work, and people would stare blank at you in dismissal, thinking : "this man thinks I will lose hours of time developing free tools for him, he must be mad, I'm not his slave". But you could not understand that, with your very bad attitude.
This has changed quite a bit now. It seems most Linuxers are now aware that there are weak areas
They always were. You are the one that never understood what you where asking for, while they worked to at least get the basics right.
OpenOffice has the office suite thing wrapped up, but there are still areas out there where there are no programs to do more than amateur level work
That's because FOSS is not free labor for you.
There's Kino, but if you want to do professional video editing, you're S.O.L.
Wrong, there are commercial (very expensive) solutions used even in movie studios, but what you want is free slaves.
Gimp works, but has a frustrating interface, and the developers don't understand why anyone would want anything different. At least someone created GimpShop.
So you use GimpShop right ?
I wish I could just plug and unplug my ramdisks, but I have to mount and umount them
That's what I do and I don't have to mount or unmount them (though it's often more secure for your data to unmount them, oh, excuse me, "remove them reliably").
Linux will stay off the desktops until more developers look at things like, for example, KDE does
They thought about this before you and are already at an advanced stage (inotify, uevent for example), while you were babbling about what Linux need to do.
On the other hand, if you're talking about all those extra features nobody uses, KDE has that, too, just like Windows!
Windows does not even have the basics that people need, you must be kidding !!
I have yet to find one person that is satisfied with what Windows offers out of the box. On the other hand a Linux distro is enough most of the time.
The few people I know that did not pirate anything on Windows have very little apps and they pay through the nose for everything, and get viruses.
I can tell you they are not so happy. That's cool because I am the one getting all these free laptops and PC after that.
My experience:
... this GUI is sluggish, that's what you mean ?
You meant "my troll", as it shows there.
My very standard HP Laserjet Series II has never worked with Linux. No problem with any version of windows, or MS-DOS.
HP Laserjet Series II works perfectly out of the box on Linux, HP even developed the free driver, try better next time.
Even getting a DVD to really work can be a pain with Linux. Hate to even think about a DVD-RW
DVD works perfectly out of the box on Mandriva I installed for all my users, try better next time.
Scanners are a pain. Those multi-function printer/copier/scanners, almost never work
Most scanners works perfectly out of the box too (except perhaps newest high end ones).
The multifunction printer (an Epson one) of my brothers had a problem, the scanner was not recognised because too recent. It was the matter of adding it to a text file to make the scanner recognised and work rigth away (so that's not to say Epson support would have been hard, just modifying a text file !!!). Mandriva 2006 fixed that.
About 50% of the USA population still uses dial-up, and you can't count on linux to work with a win-modems. Sorry to say, win-modems are the stardard.
I'm not worried about this at all. Linux is most powerful with high speed connexions anyway, so no problem for me if people with winmodems stay on Windows.
And stop the nonsense, if winmodems were a standard, one driver would be enough on Linux to make them all work. Fact is, what you say is that once you're winmodem is dead, these people have to throw away their laptop ?
A lot of drivers that you can find for Linux are crappy, like ATI.
And ? You gave an example that is the same problem on Windows. Have other examples ? I guessed you didn't. Pitiful.
I have installed several version of Linux side-by-side with several different versions of Windows. In every case, windows has a snappy crisp feel, while the Linux GUI seems a bit sluggish by comparison
Which GUI ? You mean, the GUI that have AA fonts, is full themable up to the way it works, full instant i18n/l10n change with lots of iput method, is more secure, is consistant, always keep the same speed (doesn't decay), works on several OS and arch, is less buggy (inverse copy/paste anyone ? + in explorer tree view when there are no more folders anyone ?), restores your session how it was when you logged off, updates on the fly without reboot,
Here is a test I often do: open a browser to some web-page, open another window on top the browser, grab the window by the taskbar, shake the window and look for tracing. I usually get some tracing in Linux, but not Windows. Anyway, that's been my experience.
Why, you move windows on top of your browser all day on Windows ? Are you a moron ?
We Linux users are productive on our desktop, you know !
My version of Linux: Debian 3.1 unstable with IceWM. And please don't recomend another distro. 1) I'm sick to death of Linux advocates giving that as the answer to everything. 2) I've tried several versions of Linux, they all have their different problems. My system AMD 1600+ with 512MB of RAM.
The version I recently upgraded all my users too : Mandriva 2006, and they never had your stupid problems, because they are productive too, they don't load Linux distro to try to find flaw to troll about.
Software. By far the biggest reason not to use Linux on the desktop. It seems that there are always a few MS applications that many users feel they must have
...
...
No. Actually, these users you talk about, I only saw them as trolls on forums or on Slashdot. All the users I migrated to Linux did not have such apps as soon as I stopped supporting their Windows. They magically did not need them anymore, they just wanted an OS that works. I discovered they are also well capable of finding another app that suits their need.
using emulators; are all inadequate solutions
They are perfectly adequate solutions that lots of people use.
Stop the FUD please, Windows is full of Windows only devices that emulates hardware by software, slowing Windows to a crawl, and it never seems to annoy users
they wouldn't be able to this particular game, or that particular application
Only a newcomer would become so tied to a closed application. I've been there, and as soon as it's discontinued, you're more than toast. What do these users do then, suicide ? Seriously ! These kind of situation is one of the big reasons I switched to Linux.
Hardware. Since Linux only commands about one quarter of 1% of the desktop market, it stands to reason that hardware manufacturers are not overly concerned with making Linux compatible products
That's just not true. Lots of hardware manufacturers provide standard or Linux compatible products. But they are very bad at promoting them (fear of MS retaliating ?).
Linux will always lag MS in this area
Let me correct you : hardware manufacturers will always lag on this point for Linux. Linux is not the problem here.
I don't think I have seen Linux drivers included with any PC hardware
I have. Actually, most of the time, the driver is already in the Linux kernel, which is even better.
It is possible to put together a Linux box that runs all the hardware you need, but it takes a lot of careful planning
No it does not. It does only for exotic hardware (like WiFi, which, believe it or not, is not standardized at all).
With windows, hardware is not an issue, the OS is typically pre-installed, and any PC hardware comes with windows drivers
You're plain wrong ! Go tell this to the manufacturers of my TV card, scanner, gamepad adapter (and I forgot one) hardware !
Or it's just more lies from you. Windows is not the dream picture you people paint about it.
You can read right on the box which windows versions will work with the peripheral. With Linux you have to look it up, or guess
Why, you don't look it up before going to buy in store for Windows ? Come on, don't BS me. But sure it's a problem, problem which is AGAIN entirely the fault of the vendor, not the fault of Linux.
Even if a driver does exist, you may have to go all the web to find it, you may also have to compile the driver - which most average users don't want to do
Or just ask your distro vendor
Cost. Practically all PCs come with MS operating systems installed. PC buyers will never get their money back for those operating systems. Which mean Linux is just an additional expense. You may also have to buy an emulator if you want to run your windows apps, or partition magic if you want to dual boot. Yes, OS-less systems do exist, but none of the majors sell them (Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, Apple)
Some facts for you. I bought my latest HP/Compaq laptop without OS (it came with Ubuntu too, but I would have had to wait).
You don't have to buy any emulator or any partition magic either to dual-boot, what is this FUD ?
For home usage, at most you would need Cedega I agree.
Performance. Without a GUI, Linux is very fast, and will run with minimum hardware. But, once you run KDE or GNOME, Linux performance is much worse than windows. I know there are other trimmed down GUIs, but they don't general
It's a shame that people in the OpenSource community get so easily worked up when people say they want "unneccessary" features. All it tells me is that no one has taken a really good hard look at Office.
... It's a shame people like you spread so much half truth about this suite.
... with other databases that are far powerful that what you describe, that work, that keep up with the load, ...
...
I use Office 2003 every day at work
The ease of use and development of a databse similar to Access is created
You forgot the fact that it is not back or forward compatible (MAJOR road block), and that it is very complicated to use and buggy as soon as you want to do sth not trivial.
I've used a lot of databases, and none of match up feature-wise to Access
Lying won't make your point sorry.
But none out there use the native Operating Systems widget set to build applications
That's because they are databases. You should learn what a database is before spouting nonsense.
The interoperability of the various Office programs is unmatched
Do you even believe this BS ?
The ability to use a custom Database built in Access to pull information from the corporate server, which then uses Word to display reports, and Excel to put the information into usable formats is currently unmatched, and a bigger "unnecessary feature" than OpenSource developers give it credit for
I've never read such BS before. FYI, people produce PRODUCTION frontends (like banks, Google, other high profile sites) for the Web, cellphones, OS GUI,
Your example works in OOo too, and OOo can even provides you PDFs !!!
A long, hard, cold look needs to be taken at Office. As long as people continue to beleive that Word is "just a word processor" and Excel "just a spreadsheet", and Access is some "database throwback to the 90's" then you're never going to make any headways against office
Must be why some headways are made against MS Office then
The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX/Acronym of the Day combo is a much more powerful set of tools than most people give it credit for
I guess that's why even MS stopped giving it credit and wants to move on to Longhorn. The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX you talk about don't work reliably and are a pile of sh*t giving all kinds of hardship to developers, and are a nest for wirus writers.
i>Hardly anyone buys Office for home. Most of them pirate it from work. As long as work drives their usage of Ofiice, it's going to stay entrenched
That's the only thing where I agree with you.
As long as companies continue to use the "unneccessary" features of Office, nothing else is going to manage to make a dent
They don't use the "unnecessary" features of Office, they are just forced to buy new versions of Office because different versions of Office are not compatible.
Which means they have shackles and don't know how to get rid of them. Which is very different from the picture you try to show us.
I'm sorry to say this, but frankly as far as home desktops are concerned, the battle has been won by Windows
There's no battle, just competition, as Linux desktop was there far after Windows.
I'm not talking about power users, but just the people who want to do their office work and deal with the minimum of hassle, maybe upgrade their drivers etc but are generally not fussed
These people always have free labor at hand. Stop thinking Windows works without problem, it does not, it decays. Linux in the other hand, doesn't decay with time.
The reason for this is that Linux is, from the perspective of end users, needlessly complex, whereas Windows is for the most part easy to use and simple to understand
Of course, this is just not true, especially when saying 'Linux', because then, I can take any easy distro to prove my point.
As an example, contrast installing NVIDIA's drivers under Windows and Linux. Under Windows, you download a driver file from NVIDIA's site, run it and then reboot your PC after clicking next a few times. Done. On Linux, however, that process is more like go to NVIDIA's site, download file, kill X (not a very simple task for newbies on distros which have things like GDM and KDM), find the file you downloaded using a terminal, run it and follow the instructions
Like I said before, generalizing on Linux makes you easy to prove wrong. Your Linux example is just BS.
Let me take Mandriva Linux Powerpack (that is what I install for all my users I switched to Linux). Installation of NVidia driver ? They don't even know what that means, as it was installed automagically with the OS who recognised the card automatically. So you're done before even having started. So it's far easier than in Windows. It's the same for ATI driver BTW. Far easier than on Windows.
Your example would be for a system like mine which is custom, but even I have an automatic installer that streamlines the installation.
they prefer just going onto a website, downloading a file and double clicking the icon
That's not true, they prefer it done automagically like on Linux. None of my user know how to update a driver on Windows BTW.
I tried running it on a fairly new PC, running WindowMaker on Debian. It was dog slow; menus took seconds to open, rather than being instant as they are on Windows
For one, menus are not instant on Windows, and for two, there are other office apps available on Linux.
People like you (I should say anti-Linux trolls) like to rant about Windows menus being instant. Sure that's true with a fresh installed Windows with nothing installed on it. As soon as you start using it and installing things, it becomes less and less true though. Actually, WinXP SP2 still have, sometimes, 10s of seconds of wait before a menu will open (this is on a 3GHz+ P4 desktop with 1 Go RAM). The difference is that on Linux desktops, the menus perhaps were slower (that's not true in KDE, and won't be true in Gnome 2.14 either) but the speed stayed the same from just after install, to today. Actually, speed of Linux desktops improves with the years.
there's a complete lack of decent MSN Messenger clients for Linux. The closest is Kopete, with Gaim frankly unusable, as Kopete has support for webcams and personal messages while Gaim does not
Gaim does have that support since some time now, but it's not in stable yet. And you're wrong. Sorry to tell you that that's the MSN Messenger users we see disconnect from time to time (because their client crashed), and few of them (for us, none of them) have webcam configured. So at least, in GAIM, the basics (no crash, several protocol supported simultaneously) works even better than the native clients. In Kopete, webcam config was automatic, and it never crashed on my wife.
But still, on both a simple task like changing your nickname, changing your personal message or setting a display picture is a darn sight harder than it really needs to be. Hell, cu
Most people have the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality
You forgot the most important part : "if it's broke (and it breaks very often), there's the slave geek next door".
So as long as Windows suits their needs, they will think why change
No, that's as long as the geek wants to lose his time to repair their Windows for free.
There are also all the costs involved in any kind of change
No cost for a Linux free distro.
I also don't think the average home user (outside of geeky types) will ever change to linux as long as Windows is what he is using at work
That's just not true. As soon I stopped supporting their Windows desktops, the people that were using me as free labor had to switch to Linux pretty fast.
He doesn't want to worry about changing formats, he wants seemless integration with home and work
BS. He wants what he was trained on.
Most of the people I know that do use a different OS at home, they use a Mac because they say they can use it without thinking about how it works
And most people I know are not power users, just normal users that don't even know what their OS is, or what Microsoft is.
They know their apps though (Excel, Word basically, sometimes Money).
These people migrated to Linux without problem.
My wife (which also uses Linux exclusively at home since 2001) once asked me if I could install Money. She never used it, but one of her friends told her it was the best.
I had no problem imposing GnuCash, as if Windows people can blindly persuade her that a closed product is best without her even trying it, I can do the same for free products without shame.
Most of us Linux users, use it because we like to know how and why it does what it does
Perhaps that's true, but it's different for me.
I migrated on Linux in 2001 because that was the only and easiest OS that provided me some needed features, and it became even more true along the years.
One of the best features, is that I have a true simultaneous multiuser setup with one monitor (with mixed sound and all), which is still impossible to do in Windows.
Another of the best feature, is that I can leave my wife and kids on their session without fear that they will break anything or will be infected by any malware.
To this day, I had exactly zero maintenance to do related to user actions.
I just wish for one thing, and that is that the Gnome and KDE people would cooperate on clipboard and drag and drop standards so that software from one would work in that department at least in the other
Which is already done for drag and drop. What lots of people, and you, don't seem to understand, is that for this to work, the applications have to implement things for each type of document you would drag and drop on them. That's the only thing that could be missing.
I won't talk about clipboard as I never had a problem with it.
I am having some trouble with dbus/hald not showing desktop icons for hard drive partitions mounted under /media
This is a hal configuration problem. There is a lack of a GUI tool to configure HAL, and I think that's because the API are still not frozen.
I set the gconf key for volumes_visible, and that works for CDs and such. But I have to restart dbus/hald after logging in to get partitions to show a desktop icon
I'm pretty sure you can do it if you change the HAL configuration, but you have to edit the XML conf files (or create your local one that takes precedence) for now.
Thats' what I have done to change some mount points to french words, and change some behaviours (like mounting devices with 'users' flags, as I have several simultaneous sessions on my PC).
The French word meaning "a meeting". Maybe in your attempt at making a point you meant Bonjour
Wrong on all counts. Rendez-vous is not the french for a meeting (which would be "réunion") but the french word for an appointment or a date. Bonjour is a french word too, to say hello, and give you absolutely no idea of what the protocol is for.
The point he was making was that a perfectly meaningful name was intentionally obscured for who knows why
BS. Gnome meeting was not at all meaningful for most people on this planet. Ekiga is basically as meaningful as Gnome meeting for non american people, except for those that use the language where ekiga is from. The reasons are not even obscure either, as the name was selected among propositions from users, and everything is explained on the blog.
Also I've never heard ZeroConf Networking Browser on any platform, but I know of Bonjour on Windows and Macintosh, as well as being listed on a lot of printer boxes lately
And I don't, despite being the more technical person around in my place.
I only known recently what it actually was thanks to, guess what, Ekiga, which can use Bonjour, and waited for avahi to become usable. All of this is BS anyway, as you never have a problem to find anything in Gnome, with the descriptive name, be it ekiga or anything. You even forget the names of the programs in Gnome (happened to me several times) as everything is streamlined or automatic.
Why do so many linux programmers insist on such crazy naming conventions. Sabayon? Changing a perfectly servicable and pragmagic GNOME Meeting to "Ekiga"?
...
Why ? because lots of ARROGANT american speaking people like you think Linux is a solely american thing, and that everyone in the world speaks only american, and understand words like "meeting".
Guess what, there are other people than american on Earth, and they have a language too, and they have words like "Ekiga" (no, it's not a random suite of letters), which they understand perfectly well, even better than "meeting", and surely more "servicable and pragmagic" to them, like you say.
I use linux both at home and at work, so I'm not some anti-linux zealot or something- I think it's a legitimate question to raise
You're just pro-american and "everybody should speak american only". I think that's worse than being anti-linux.
On my mac laptop, I have a handy app for browsing mDNS networks called Rendezvous Browser (since mDNS was once called Rendezvous). The name is simple and describes perfectly what the program does
And that's only because rendez-vous is a french word that found its way in american language. Otherwise, you would call it a random suite of letters
I'm sure that the programmers think they've very clever by choosing a name that means something in some obscure language
"obscure language", you mean, other languages than american ?
At least they made the effort to understand other languages, you do not.
Circa the FC4 desktop that I use, here are some things (I'll assume all is improved in the latest version) that I either love or hate
:(.
So you have FC4 woes, not really Gnome woes.
Music and CD playing are primative, but work. XMMS doesn't play well with Gnome... The default CD player is just kind of primative, but nicely behaved
XMMS is not the default music playing app of Gnome, rhythmbox is. There are external Gnome 2 apps like BMPx too.
Evolution is bloated. I love evolution, don't get me wrong, but it takes up a huge amount of RAM and it uses SpamAssassin for filtering spam, which is a terrible idea
Why ? You're not forced to use it. I don't, my SA is run by postfix and its friends like amavis.
Ah, that's the FC4 setup's fault. My biggest problem with Evolution is the fact that it does not remember its position yet, so it's not really a good Gnome 2 app in my view.
Integration of P2P lacking. Most P2P clients these days have hooks for magnet, the URI sceme for P2P-shared entities. Gnome lacks any integration of this, sadly
This one I agree with. Basically, that's because the Gnome 2 apps (like BitTorrent) that manage these do not install them.
gnome-terminal: best terminal since xterm
Well, not for me. I still have the problem of gnome-terminal garbling output when it arrives at the bottom of the window
Firefox - Firefox is not a part of the gnome project, but it has hooks for gnome's desktop tools and does an excellent job. It's hard, these days, to think of firefox as the "lightweight mozilla", but it's still a damned good browser
Firefox is not even a Gnome 2 app, and still integrates very badly with the desktop. I'll keep my Epiphany and Galeon for now.
CD writing - Not terrible, but KDE's K3B blows the doors off of gnome's CD writing capabilities. I use K3B all the time, now, and I'm very happy
Well, I still use gcombust (and have more and more incentive to migrate it to Gnome 2) because the workflow is still the fastest for me, and no Linux desktop CD burner provides me with its features.
Movies - totem, gmplayer and all of the rest of the video tools are in a relatively sad state, usability-wise. They suffer from the XMMS problem of often not playing well with gnome (gmplayer), crash OFTEN (and aren't those SEGVs a bad thing?), and don't support many formats. I'm not sure that this is unique to Gnome, but it's a black eye on the Linux desktop
I don't have these problems at all. I had only the problem that Totem with gstreamer backend could not play some files and would lock when doing fast forward in a file, but that's all. MPlayer always played every file in existence for me, even H264. That's because I regularly update ffmpeg. Which means gstreamer 0.8 should have been able to play every file, as I had gstreamer ffmpeg backend. But it didn't work, so most of the time I used gmplayer (which uses ffmpeg libavcodec from FFMPeg when compiled corectly). Now, with latest Totem and gstreamer 0.10, totem plays every video file as well.
Overall,I love gnome. It's well designed, and glib + Gtk+ is a very powerful use of C that makes relatively high-level code easy to make fairly lightweight... when the developers try
I agree.
It looks like I'm going to have to admin a lab of Linux boxes soon, and I'm pleased with the progress that is coming on the nebulous "Linux desktop"
... I know it's pathetic, but that's how trolls are.
...
Linux desktop never stopped from progressing since 1998. Only perception of people external to it is affected, because since 1998, I see trolls saying "Linux does not have a desktop because XYZ is sh*t or does not work or exist". But the progress was always there and fast.
The last troll wave was the "Vista has (not 'will', but 'has', notice the troll as Vista is not out) relegated Linux years behind, or Linux will die"
Although, both Gnome and KDE are still 90'ish, at least Gnome is now knocking off OS X instead of Windows
See ? Clueless. Some big experts talk about "90'ish" desktop. What does that mean ? It means nothing actually, it's just a flamebait comment. Same for "knocking off" OS X, quickly forgetting that OS X knocked off a lot from GNU. And this "knocking off" from OS X is not even new, Gnome had a Mac orientation long ago.
Now, for the confusing part. Why was their previous allocator so lame compared to malloc()?
Because it wasn't. What is measured there is speed of allocating in multithreaded environment (which is GMemChunk known worst case), not the overall picture, which include deallocating, fragmentation, memory overhead of managing lots of chunks of memory,
This graph actually show one aspect of the picture, but there are tens of others to look at before coming to a conclusion. Gnome developers are not stupid, they would have used malloc if GMemChunk did not have benefits. GMemChunk has lots of benefits over malloc, the only thing showed by this graph, is that now, GSlice does have the same benefits, but is even faster than malloc in the worst case.
With an analogy, think of DSPs and general processors. The DSP will be the fastest in what it was designed to do, perhaps with one corner case. Now the DSP has tuned everything, even the corner case.
But the DSP can't be used for everything the general processor does efficiently.
Gnome2? Do you mean GTK2? there is a difference. Is there something I'm missing that links GNUcash to gnome other than they both use the same GTK2 toolkit?
What you are missing is that Gnucash 1.9.x. uses more than the gtk2 toolkit. It explicitly access gnome functions and uses Gnome components like GConf. And don't forget either that some components like gtkhtml are actually part of Gnome 2 now.
So, you want p0rn? Simple. 'P0rn wa doko desu ka'. Except that you'll probably have to spell it in Japanese lettering at some point, so 'Porunno wa doko desu ka' might be the way forward :)
...
Huh ?
Doko is for places. I don't even know if they will understand p0rn, and they will start figuring out if there is a place named 'poruno'. As your japanese is what you picked from anime, you should have figured out that p0rn is dubbed 'H' ('etchi' in japanese) for hentai.
And for things, aru is the verb for general things, so : 'hentai ha doko arimasu ka' would be more correct I think
I don't pretend to know English or Japanese very well as none are my native language, but isn't the correct translation for "Koko ha doko desu ka" actually "Where am I", with the meaning "what is this place I'm standing in right now ?" ?
Is "Where is this ?" equivalent to "Where am I ?" in american ?
Does the translation come from the device or from the news submitter ?
I'm confused.
It's good that the software seems so advanced.
What cost will it have though ?
I'm sure there's a hundred things wrong with what I've said, I'm not a hacker
You mean, like what you said there :
The machine might slow or freeze but an admin will notice this process and go into the users directory (as root) and type "ps -al" to see all the existing processes. Instead, it executes your "ps" virus and subsequently, the spinlocking stops with "ps" printed to output with the super user killing "la" and thinking everything is fixed
Of course, unless the superuser deliberately destroyed the security of its Linux and added "." to his PATH, this would never happen, as it would not execute the "ps" in the user's directory.
But I see your point.
I would not say that german is easy.
Anyway, in japanese, you forgot the fact that the verb is not even always present in the sentence (just guessed depending on the context), and that sometimes, with the exact same sentence, subject and object are switched depending on the context too.
This require some training to understand, I still did not mastered it well, and seeing lots of fansubs shows me that I'm not the only one that has not mastered this (and I'm not the worse).
I guess a machine would have a really hard time with japanese (and even worse for chinese or russian).