I find that Microsoft hatred pretty sad. And, most of the times I hear it, it's coming from people who just installed the trendy GNU/Linux distro of the week but who have never contributed a single line of code.
As pointed in other comments, Stallman's vision was to give people freedom (I'm more of a BSD person but I admire him for standing on his principles), not about destroying Microsoft, they weren't a big player back then.
The easiest way to make people run away from OSS zealots is to pester them with "You must use this and that because everything Microsoft does is evil!". Instead, try to educate the user, show them the added value that some OSS apps have, show them how much better FireFox is, its security, the tabbed browising, etc. Don't try to force people, don't write free software to drive evil corporations out of business. If that's your objective, then you're not better than Microsoft.
I write free software because I love programming. I write those programs for myself, then I release them so I can give back fo the community (the FreeBSD one, in my case) who has given me so much (a rock solid operating system I use daily). As long as others find your code useful, that's all I ask for. But never because I want to drive proprietary software makers out of business.
I take you don't contribute to any large open source project then. For example, FreeBSD has several committers from Taiwan, China and other asian countries. It has developers from all over the world. By banning netblocks you're reducing the chance of ever getting in contact with people from those countries. Why?
Just today I've tried to answer a question on the freebsd-questions mailing list and the recipient's SMTP server has rejected my message because they use a stupid non-working dnsbl system that thinks my IP is dynamic.
I find it funny that this article talks about China, 90+% of the spam I get comes from residential DSL and Cable computers from... yes, USA. It's compromised Windows boxes that do the job these days, and there are thousands of them everywhere, not just in China and Korea.
Even though that Belluzo idiot nearly killed the company they still kick some ass in the high end graphics arena. Almost every film made in Hollywood is edited with Inferno on high end SGI Onyx boxen. Movie quality image processing requires insane amounts of bandwidth and storage, and SGI still reigns supreme there. Some day the PC will catch up, but not just yet.
No, all they have is your public key. That key can only be used to encrypt stuff. Since you're the only one who has the private key and its pass phrase, only you can decrypt it. That's the point of public key cryptography.:)
Hey, I do agree with you on that. Actually I also agree with the documentation point. I was recently implementing drag and drop on one of my programs and found the lack of documentation a bit frustrating, ended up looking at how other programs did it (gedit, some GTK+ examples, etc). The good news is that you can contribute to the project and make a difference:)
This especially bites when using automounted directories, as the directory I want to go to WON'T EXIST until I try to go to it - thus there IS no entry to click on in the new Gnome File Selector.
Just press Ctrl-L and type the location. Quite easy, isn't it?
As a matter of fact, GTK+ offers the two file browser widgets. It's up to the developer to choose which one she'll use in her app. I've moved all my software to the new one, and everyone I've asked thinks it's an improvement over the older code.
No, it isn't. Development is not that active anymore, the code is a total mess. Why? The networking portions are an afterthought, so there's a lot of duplicated code. It has tons of problems (ever tried renaming a file and keeping its history?). But it does the job, that's why a lot of people use it. The OpenBSD guys rely on CVS to do their job, but if it's an insecure piece of software then a replace is very welcomed.
While I advocate OS, I settled on Perforce (free for 2 users/2 workspaces) for my home projects more than 2 years ago and never looked back.
I say, kudos OpenBSD guys for doing this, it's a win-win situation.
They aren't trying to compete with high end 3D cards. Nobody would seriously attempt to work with this card with high end software like Catia, Maya or Softimage|XSI.
High end gaming is out of the question too. Now, what makes this card interesting? Hackability factor
and freedom of choice. By having open source drivers you're no longer tied to any CPU arch. Let's say I want to hack Linux/*BSD on e.g. a PegasosII PPC board. If I put an Nvidia card in there I can kiss 3D support goodbye. If I have the source for the driver and the whole specs of the hardware I can do it myself.
A quick glance at what 3D software I use (Blender, bzflag, crack-attack and a couple more)
shows that I don't need (or would use) the latest and greatest in 3D hardware, so I'm a potential customer for this kind of thing. And I know there are other people in this situation.
Hmm, BSD was created before Linux. Heck, Bill Joy of Sun fame used to sell the BSD tapes. The lawsuit was one of the reasons why Linux was created. BSD hackers do BSD because they enjoy it, nobody in BSD land is running a crusade against Linux (contrast this with some vocal Linux advocates who want to destroy Microsoft).
About the license, I seriously doubt that Solaris will be released under a BSD license. It will probably be a large and restrictive license. And I'm sure there are tons of 3rd party code that need to be pulled out or bought for them to be released a OSS.
Solaris (the kernel) is very, very different from any of the BSDs. I'm not sure if they'd gain anything. NetBSD and FreeBSD already have kernel-assisted threading. Perhaps the high performance TCP stack could be interesting to see how they do their stuff but again, FreeBSD's TCP stack is one of the finest in the world. NetBSD was recently used as the OS for the Internet2 landline speed record, so their stack is pretty good too.
My server runs OpenBSD and my desktops run FreeBSD and NetBSD. I do my gaming on my PS2:-)
HL2? Will give it a go at a friend's house in a few days mainly because, as a coder, I find the engine extremely interesting, FPS games bore me to death, even the HL series.
FreeBSD's root shell is/bin/csh (which is in fact tcsh), and it's quite usable.
Your other points simply show your lack of experience with Solaris. Yes, it's different from Linux, so what. Yes, the first thing a good Solaris admin does is lock down the box and remove unnecessary services.
Most desktop installs of Solaris are usually integrated into a NIS/YP network, with NFS mounts for user accounts. All those defaults that seemed weird to you are there because that's how most people in large Solaris shops do things.
bash, gcc and other pieces of OSS are in the companion CDs, but they get old pretty soon, so I'd suggest using NetBSD's pkgsrc system, which works beautifully on Solaris.
Give a BSD a try some day (OpenBSD is a good start) and see how others do their stuff. What you experienced is comparable to and old BSD fart trying a Linux distro for the first time, everything is in the wrong place!:)
This might have changed, but at least in Solaris 8, the first CD booted into a graphical and slow install, while booting off the second one used a curses install, much faster and convenient.
It is the only solution when the ISP will do nothing to stop the spammer on their network.
I agree with this, but I do think that it's no longer true. Why? In my experience, most of the spam is delivered via compromised Windows machines these days. These are the people who haven't been educated yet and are still victims of the worm du jour.
Maybe the ISPs could block outgoing port 25 (to any other server than the ISP MX servers) by default and open if for people who explicitly request it. Whatever solution is adopted somebody will complain about it.
Soon after I started posting to some mailing lists (mainly FreeBSD ones) my spam/ham ratio started to skyrocket. That forced me to install spamassassin. One day, out of curiosity, I started checking where spam was coming from. Surprise surprise, it was no longer from bullet proof hosting sites, but from dsl/cable Windows boxes. As an experiment I redirected connections to my SMTP server that were coming from Windows boxes to OpenBSD's spamd (like I've said in the previous comment it's very easy to do with pf's passive OS fingerprinting) and voila! The number of spam pieces dropped from 100 a day to 3. Most spam is trapped in spamd and never delivered. The SPF check catches 2-3 a day as well. I haven't had any problem with this solution so far (been using it for some months now).
Those lists, by themselves, do not block any email at all. Those lists are used by people who are fed up with trying to get ISP's to deal with their spammers.
Yes, you're right, but they can be a dangerous tool when used by admins who don't fully understand the consequences of doing so. There have also been cases of people who got assigned an IP previously used by a spammer that was in some of those black lists. And getting delisted can be pretty hard sometimes. About ISPs dealing with their spammers, well, I think that has changed, so perhaps we should say ISPs babysitting uneducated Windows users?
It's your server and hopefully you'll never have to suffer the 'collateral damage' of living near a spammer (network neighbourhood wise). It has happened to me a couple of times. The first time I actually spent time sending my reply from my gmail account, and told the guy about it. The second time I didn't even bother.
Netblock blacklisting is a really poor solution. In some cases a single spammer causes a/24 and then a/16 to be blocked. It doesn't make sense to me. OTOH, I discovered some time ago that blocking Windows boxes works wonderfully, and it's extremely easy to do with OpenBSD's pf:-)
Btw, do you understand that changing ISP may not be an option?
I love perforce, and have been using it for 2 years for all my home development. The free as in beer server allows 2 clients and 2 workspaces, enough for me. p4 and opera are the only proprietary pieces of software running on my systems. The day something better than p4 comes I'll switch. Until then, it's the p4 way or the highway.
I had an aging TNT I bought in 1999 that served me well for mplayer (Xv acceleration comes handy when your cpu is not that fast) and the casual bzflag game. That is, when their driver worked. What pissed me off though, was the fact that a 1999 card had no open source driver that did anything beyond basic 2d (XF86's could not even do Xv last time I checked). That and the constant crashes on FreeBSD 5 (the drivers weren't that stable at the time, they are now I've been told) made me want to look for something else. I got a Radeon 7000 for $25 at a local store. Everything works fine, tv out works, and 3D works too, all with open source DRI drivers. I'm not a gamer myself, but I'm glad I ditched my nvidia card and I know I'll never give nvidia money again.
I'll just ignore your ad hominem attacks. From the rest of your comment:
GTK is good enough for everyone else.
No, it isn't. GTK+ 1.2 is enough for almost everyone, it's light and fast. GTK+ 2.x is incredibly slow. Don't even try to use a GTK+ 2.x app over a remote X session. Qt doesn't exhibit this problem, despite being programmed in the "slower" C++ language.
How about getting with the times dude. 256MB in the minimum on new PCs. Anyone geeky enough to be running Linux should have at least twice that - minimum.
My current desktop is a dual PIII with 384MiB of RAM that I bought in November 2000. I have no reason to fork $600 for new hardware (mobo/CPU/mem) when the one I have does the job. I've been using free operating systems for all my server and desktop needs since 1995, so I'm hardly a newbie. You're also forgetting that there are plenty of places that use old hardware, not everybody lives in the USA. Free software has the nice side effect of making high quality software available for everyone at no cost but if it continues getting bloated you end up having to spend cash on hardware.
GTK+ 1.x is great, GTK+ 2.x still has a long way to go, IMHO Qt 3.3 is the best toolkit these days in terms of speed and memory usage. And this is comes from somebody who hates C++ but who has decided to use Qt on new projects instead of GTK+ 2.4.
If you haven't used windows recently, maybe you should try. It's actually gotten much faster and more stable, and it's actually very easy to cut out a lot of the bloat with just a few settings.
This is true, and I wish we already got over the BSOD jokes. Windows has gotten much better since the w2k days.
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
I'm using Arch Linux with kernel 2.6.6 (no update to.7 yet:) and, yes, I have sound, I have 3D acceleration (old ATI Radeon 7000) for when I want to play some bzflag. And I have a kickass filesystem (XFS) that I don't need to worry about if/when there's a power outage/machine goes down. Now, I'd have to spend more time setting up a Windows desktop than I did for this, just to end up using almost the same software which, incidentally was developed first for *ix (read: Mozilla stuff, emacs, etc).
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed
I'd rather *add* software after install, not remove it:) Besides, if Outlook is so flawed, what makes you think the rest isn't?
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
This is where you're wrong. See, some of us don't run Linux and BSD to feel cool, we do it because we feel more comfortable in a unix-like environment. My first Linux experience was Slackware in 1994. After fvwm I discovered WindowMaker. Over the years I've tried almost every WM/DE you can think of: KDE, Gnome, E, *box. Do you know what I use today? WindowMaker. I love unix because it's so well thought out, I love doing file management with cli tools, I do all development (C/java/C#) from inside emacs. I'm used to work that way, and that's the way I like it. If I had to use windows I'd have to install cygwin right after the install. So no, it's not about feeling cool, it's about getting the work done.
You are right that I'm not the typical gamer/casual user, and you have a point there. If you love playing the latest games, using the latest photoshop, using (only) Linux makes little sense.
In a sense it is. I used to be an amiga scener back
in the day, and recently wanted to see what the PC guys are up to these days. I can tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with most of what I've seen. I was very impressed by stuff like this, which, ironically, was coded by an ex-Amiga guy (dierk "chaos" ohlerich).
I don't mean to flame, but I've been much more impressed by what games companies are doing these days than by PC demos from the last two years. There was a time when the demoscene was ahead of game developers. I don't think this is still true.
TBL still makes demos for Amiga 1200 (060/AGA) that are quite impressive. Most PC stuff I've seen is mediocre.
Ext2/3 and reiserfs both have inbuilt defragmentation capabilities.
No, they don't. But since they borrow their design from BSD's FFS they don't need it either.
This can be seen, for instance, when you boot an ext2 system after an unclean shutdown and it checks the integrity of the filesystem. On journaled filesystems, the log is replayed. IBM's jfs also runs a modified fsck.
Erm, that's fsck. fsck doesn't do defragmentation.
In Linux, it's just not necessary (nor in any Unix derivative such as AIX or BSD that uses those filesystems).
It's true, however performance is severely degraded when disk usage reaches around 90% for classic FFS-like filesystems. While the BSDs can mount ext2 partitions none of them uses ext[23] as default. AIX uses a JFS version that's a bit different from the one you see in Linux, which was based on OS/2's code. I think you're mixing up filesystem integrity with fragmentation. In classic BSD UFS/FFS data is stored in datablocks, which are partitioned in fragments, usually 1/4th of the datablock size. A fragmented file is a file that's stored in non-contiguous fragments. Just that. The performance impact of fragmented files vs the time needed to reorganize the data shows that it's not worth running a defrag program on FFS filesystems.
I live in Spain, and yes, I use that ISP, because they were the first to offer ADSL here. Changing now would be a not so fun thing, but I might when a better ISP comes out. The others ain't better, and right now I have static IP for free, which would be an added fee if I change to another ISP.
I do run my own MTA and yes, I have a SPFrecord in my DNS entries.
Now the fun thing, do you where most of the spam I get comes from? Residential DSL/cable computers in USA.
You make some good points, and I agree with you in almost everything, except the Linux market relevance. While 99% percent of the people using Nvidia cards might be using Windows, a large percent of the guys using that hardware on Linux are doing so at an FX shop (read ILM, Digital Domain, Weta Digital). Given the trend to replace SGI workstations with off the shelf PC hardware and, more important, now that all high end 3D software runs on Linux (even Softimage|XSI with their Mainwin abomination), more and more FX houses will join the Linux desktop movement. Those customers are very important for NVidia and ATI. The side effect? It benefits us Linux desktop users.
While ATI drivers might not be as good as nvidia's, after endless problems I got an ATI card myself, the 2D is much sharper and I no longer have to deal with NV's closed source stuff.
The file manager, for example, used resizable icons. Moving a slider would make the icons bigger or smaller. Those were definitely vector graphics. I'm not 100% sure, but I'd bet those were opengl objects.
About grandparent's comment, yes, SGI created IrisGL first, then moved onto OpenGL when they opened up the specs, and had a glue library for compatibility with old apps, called Igloo (IrisGL on OpenGL)
Btw, I've tried rasterman's test on my ancient Riva TNT card and software rendering is indeed a lot faster.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that Microsoft hatred pretty sad. And, most of the times I hear it, it's coming from people who just installed the trendy GNU/Linux distro of the week but who have never contributed a single line of code.
As pointed in other comments, Stallman's vision was to give people freedom (I'm more of a BSD person but I admire him for standing on his principles), not about destroying Microsoft, they weren't a big player back then.
The easiest way to make people run away from OSS zealots is to pester them with "You must use this and that because everything Microsoft does is evil!". Instead, try to educate the user, show them the added value that some OSS apps have, show them how much better FireFox is, its security, the tabbed browising, etc. Don't try to force people, don't write free software to drive evil corporations out of business. If that's your objective, then you're not better than Microsoft.
I write free software because I love programming. I write those programs for myself, then I release them so I can give back fo the community (the FreeBSD one, in my case) who has given me so much (a rock solid operating system I use daily). As long as others find your code useful, that's all I ask for. But never because I want to drive proprietary software makers out of business.
I take you don't contribute to any large open source project then. For example, FreeBSD has several committers from Taiwan, China and other asian countries. It has developers from all over the world. By banning netblocks you're reducing the chance of ever getting in contact with people from those countries. Why?
Just today I've tried to answer a question on the freebsd-questions mailing list and the recipient's SMTP server has rejected my message because they use a stupid non-working dnsbl system that thinks my IP is dynamic.
I find it funny that this article talks about China, 90+% of the spam I get comes from residential DSL and Cable computers from... yes, USA. It's compromised Windows boxes that do the job these days, and there are thousands of them everywhere, not just in China and Korea.
Even though that Belluzo idiot nearly killed the company they still kick some ass in the high end graphics arena. Almost every film made in Hollywood is edited with Inferno on high end SGI Onyx boxen. Movie quality image processing requires insane amounts of bandwidth and storage, and SGI still reigns supreme there. Some day the PC will catch up, but not just yet.
No, all they have is your public key. That key can only be used to encrypt stuff. Since you're the only one who has the private key and its pass phrase, only you can decrypt it. That's the point of public key cryptography. :)
Hey, I do agree with you on that. Actually I also agree with the documentation point. I was recently implementing drag and drop on one of my programs and found the lack of documentation a bit frustrating, ended up looking at how other programs did it (gedit, some GTK+ examples, etc). The good news is that you can contribute to the project and make a difference :)
This especially bites when using automounted directories, as the directory I want to go to WON'T EXIST until I try to go to it - thus there IS no entry to click on in the new Gnome File Selector.
Just press Ctrl-L and type the location. Quite easy, isn't it?
As a matter of fact, GTK+ offers the two file browser widgets. It's up to the developer to choose which one she'll use in her app. I've moved all my software to the new one, and everyone I've asked thinks it's an improvement over the older code.
CVS is a solid piece of software
No, it isn't. Development is not that active anymore, the code is a total mess. Why? The networking portions are an afterthought, so there's a lot of duplicated code. It has tons of problems (ever tried renaming a file and keeping its history?). But it does the job, that's why a lot of people use it. The OpenBSD guys rely on CVS to do their job, but if it's an insecure piece of software then a replace is very welcomed.
While I advocate OS, I settled on Perforce (free for 2 users/2 workspaces) for my home projects more than 2 years ago and never looked back.
I say, kudos OpenBSD guys for doing this, it's a win-win situation.
They aren't trying to compete with high end 3D cards. Nobody would seriously attempt to work with this card with high end software like Catia, Maya or Softimage|XSI.
High end gaming is out of the question too. Now, what makes this card interesting? Hackability factor and freedom of choice. By having open source drivers you're no longer tied to any CPU arch. Let's say I want to hack Linux/*BSD on e.g. a PegasosII PPC board. If I put an Nvidia card in there I can kiss 3D support goodbye. If I have the source for the driver and the whole specs of the hardware I can do it myself.
A quick glance at what 3D software I use (Blender, bzflag, crack-attack and a couple more) shows that I don't need (or would use) the latest and greatest in 3D hardware, so I'm a potential customer for this kind of thing. And I know there are other people in this situation.
Hmm, BSD was created before Linux. Heck, Bill Joy of Sun fame used to sell the BSD tapes. The lawsuit was one of the reasons why Linux was created. BSD hackers do BSD because they enjoy it, nobody in BSD land is running a crusade against Linux (contrast this with some vocal Linux advocates who want to destroy Microsoft).
About the license, I seriously doubt that Solaris will be released under a BSD license. It will probably be a large and restrictive license. And I'm sure there are tons of 3rd party code that need to be pulled out or bought for them to be released a OSS.
Solaris (the kernel) is very, very different from any of the BSDs. I'm not sure if they'd gain anything. NetBSD and FreeBSD already have kernel-assisted threading. Perhaps the high performance TCP stack could be interesting to see how they do their stuff but again, FreeBSD's TCP stack is one of the finest in the world. NetBSD was recently used as the OS for the Internet2 landline speed record, so their stack is pretty good too.
You got it backwards, dude. The card in this review speaks PCIe, that's why there's a second chip in there, it's the PCIe <-> AGP bridge. :)
My server runs OpenBSD and my desktops run FreeBSD and NetBSD. I do my gaming on my PS2 :-)
HL2? Will give it a go at a friend's house in a few days mainly because, as a coder, I find the engine extremely interesting, FPS games bore me to death, even the HL series.
FreeBSD's root shell is /bin/csh (which is in fact tcsh), and it's quite usable.
Your other points simply show your lack of experience with Solaris. Yes, it's different from Linux, so what. Yes, the first thing a good Solaris admin does is lock down the box and remove unnecessary services.
Most desktop installs of Solaris are usually integrated into a NIS/YP network, with NFS mounts for user accounts. All those defaults that seemed weird to you are there because that's how most people in large Solaris shops do things.
bash, gcc and other pieces of OSS are in the companion CDs, but they get old pretty soon, so I'd suggest using NetBSD's pkgsrc system, which works beautifully on Solaris.
Give a BSD a try some day (OpenBSD is a good start) and see how others do their stuff. What you experienced is comparable to and old BSD fart trying a Linux distro for the first time, everything is in the wrong place! :)
This might have changed, but at least in Solaris 8, the first CD booted into a graphical and slow install, while booting off the second one used a curses install, much faster and convenient.
It is the only solution when the ISP will do nothing to stop the spammer on their network.
I agree with this, but I do think that it's no longer true. Why? In my experience, most of the spam is delivered via compromised Windows machines these days. These are the people who haven't been educated yet and are still victims of the worm du jour.
Maybe the ISPs could block outgoing port 25 (to any other server than the ISP MX servers) by default and open if for people who explicitly request it. Whatever solution is adopted somebody will complain about it.
Soon after I started posting to some mailing lists (mainly FreeBSD ones) my spam/ham ratio started to skyrocket. That forced me to install spamassassin. One day, out of curiosity, I started checking where spam was coming from. Surprise surprise, it was no longer from bullet proof hosting sites, but from dsl/cable Windows boxes. As an experiment I redirected connections to my SMTP server that were coming from Windows boxes to OpenBSD's spamd (like I've said in the previous comment it's very easy to do with pf's passive OS fingerprinting) and voila! The number of spam pieces dropped from 100 a day to 3. Most spam is trapped in spamd and never delivered. The SPF check catches 2-3 a day as well. I haven't had any problem with this solution so far (been using it for some months now).
Those lists, by themselves, do not block any email at all. Those lists are used by people who are fed up with trying to get ISP's to deal with their spammers.
Yes, you're right, but they can be a dangerous tool when used by admins who don't fully understand the consequences of doing so. There have also been cases of people who got assigned an IP previously used by a spammer that was in some of those black lists. And getting delisted can be pretty hard sometimes. About ISPs dealing with their spammers, well, I think that has changed, so perhaps we should say ISPs babysitting uneducated Windows users?
It's your server and hopefully you'll never have to suffer the 'collateral damage' of living near a spammer (network neighbourhood wise). It has happened to me a couple of times. The first time I actually spent time sending my reply from my gmail account, and told the guy about it. The second time I didn't even bother.
Netblock blacklisting is a really poor solution. In some cases a single spammer causes a /24 and then a /16 to be blocked. It doesn't make sense to me. OTOH, I discovered some time ago that blocking Windows boxes works wonderfully, and it's extremely easy to do with OpenBSD's pf :-)
Btw, do you understand that changing ISP may not be an option?
I love perforce, and have been using it for 2 years for all my home development. The free as in beer server allows 2 clients and 2 workspaces, enough for me. p4 and opera are the only proprietary pieces of software running on my systems. The day something better than p4 comes I'll switch. Until then, it's the p4 way or the highway.
I did switch, from Nvidia to ATI :)
I had an aging TNT I bought in 1999 that served me well for mplayer (Xv acceleration comes handy when your cpu is not that fast) and the casual bzflag game. That is, when their driver worked. What pissed me off though, was the fact that a 1999 card had no open source driver that did anything beyond basic 2d (XF86's could not even do Xv last time I checked). That and the constant crashes on FreeBSD 5 (the drivers weren't that stable at the time, they are now I've been told) made me want to look for something else. I got a Radeon 7000 for $25 at a local store. Everything works fine, tv out works, and 3D works too, all with open source DRI drivers. I'm not a gamer myself, but I'm glad I ditched my nvidia card and I know I'll never give nvidia money again.
I'll just ignore your ad hominem attacks. From the rest of your comment:
GTK is good enough for everyone else.
No, it isn't. GTK+ 1.2 is enough for almost everyone, it's light and fast. GTK+ 2.x is incredibly slow. Don't even try to use a GTK+ 2.x app over a remote X session. Qt doesn't exhibit this problem, despite being programmed in the "slower" C++ language.
How about getting with the times dude. 256MB in the minimum on new PCs. Anyone geeky enough to be running Linux should have at least twice that - minimum.
My current desktop is a dual PIII with 384MiB of RAM that I bought in November 2000. I have no reason to fork $600 for new hardware (mobo/CPU/mem) when the one I have does the job. I've been using free operating systems for all my server and desktop needs since 1995, so I'm hardly a newbie. You're also forgetting that there are plenty of places that use old hardware, not everybody lives in the USA. Free software has the nice side effect of making high quality software available for everyone at no cost but if it continues getting bloated you end up having to spend cash on hardware.
GTK+ 1.x is great, GTK+ 2.x still has a long way to go, IMHO Qt 3.3 is the best toolkit these days in terms of speed and memory usage. And this is comes from somebody who hates C++ but who has decided to use Qt on new projects instead of GTK+ 2.4.
If you haven't used windows recently, maybe you should try. It's actually gotten much faster and more stable, and it's actually very easy to cut out a lot of the bloat with just a few settings.
This is true, and I wish we already got over the BSOD jokes. Windows has gotten much better since the w2k days.
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
I'm using Arch Linux with kernel 2.6.6 (no update to .7 yet :) and, yes, I have sound, I have 3D acceleration (old ATI Radeon 7000) for when I want to play some bzflag. And I have a kickass filesystem (XFS) that I don't need to worry about if/when there's a power outage/machine goes down. Now, I'd have to spend more time setting up a Windows desktop than I did for this, just to end up using almost the same software which, incidentally was developed first for *ix (read: Mozilla stuff, emacs, etc).
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed
I'd rather *add* software after install, not remove it :) Besides, if Outlook is so flawed, what makes you think the rest isn't?
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
This is where you're wrong. See, some of us don't run Linux and BSD to feel cool, we do it because we feel more comfortable in a unix-like environment. My first Linux experience was Slackware in 1994. After fvwm I discovered WindowMaker. Over the years I've tried almost every WM/DE you can think of: KDE, Gnome, E, *box. Do you know what I use today? WindowMaker. I love unix because it's so well thought out, I love doing file management with cli tools, I do all development (C/java/C#) from inside emacs. I'm used to work that way, and that's the way I like it. If I had to use windows I'd have to install cygwin right after the install. So no, it's not about feeling cool, it's about getting the work done.You are right that I'm not the typical gamer/casual user, and you have a point there. If you love playing the latest games, using the latest photoshop, using (only) Linux makes little sense.
In a sense it is. I used to be an amiga scener back in the day, and recently wanted to see what the PC guys are up to these days. I can tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with most of what I've seen. I was very impressed by stuff like this, which, ironically, was coded by an ex-Amiga guy (dierk "chaos" ohlerich).
I don't mean to flame, but I've been much more impressed by what games companies are doing these days than by PC demos from the last two years. There was a time when the demoscene was ahead of game developers. I don't think this is still true.
TBL still makes demos for Amiga 1200 (060/AGA) that are quite impressive. Most PC stuff I've seen is mediocre.
Well, it is open source. Perhaps you mean it's not free software. Different meaning.
What are you talking about?
No, they don't. But since they borrow their design from BSD's FFS they don't need it either.
Erm, that's fsck. fsck doesn't do defragmentation.
It's true, however performance is severely degraded when disk usage reaches around 90% for classic FFS-like filesystems. While the BSDs can mount ext2 partitions none of them uses ext[23] as default. AIX uses a JFS version that's a bit different from the one you see in Linux, which was based on OS/2's code. I think you're mixing up filesystem integrity with fragmentation. In classic BSD UFS/FFS data is stored in datablocks, which are partitioned in fragments, usually 1/4th of the datablock size. A fragmented file is a file that's stored in non-contiguous fragments. Just that. The performance impact of fragmented files vs the time needed to reorganize the data shows that it's not worth running a defrag program on FFS filesystems.
This paper has some more info on the subject.
I live in Spain, and yes, I use that ISP, because they were the first to offer ADSL here. Changing now would be a not so fun thing, but I might when a better ISP comes out. The others ain't better, and right now I have static IP for free, which would be an added fee if I change to another ISP.
I do run my own MTA and yes, I have a SPFrecord in my DNS entries.
Now the fun thing, do you where most of the spam I get comes from? Residential DSL/cable computers in USA.
Those are part of the C99 standard, which gcc complies to. You can e.g. make constructs like:
for(int foo=0; foo<100; foo++) { yada yada }
You make some good points, and I agree with you in almost everything, except the Linux market relevance. While 99% percent of the people using Nvidia cards might be using Windows, a large percent of the guys using that hardware on Linux are doing so at an FX shop (read ILM, Digital Domain, Weta Digital). Given the trend to replace SGI workstations with off the shelf PC hardware and, more important, now that all high end 3D software runs on Linux (even Softimage|XSI with their Mainwin abomination), more and more FX houses will join the Linux desktop movement. Those customers are very important for NVidia and ATI. The side effect? It benefits us Linux desktop users.
While ATI drivers might not be as good as nvidia's, after endless problems I got an ATI card myself, the 2D is much sharper and I no longer have to deal with NV's closed source stuff.
The file manager, for example, used resizable icons. Moving a slider would make the icons bigger or smaller. Those were definitely vector graphics. I'm not 100% sure, but I'd bet those were opengl objects.
About grandparent's comment, yes, SGI created IrisGL first, then moved onto OpenGL when they opened up the specs, and had a glue library for compatibility with old apps, called Igloo (IrisGL on OpenGL)
Btw, I've tried rasterman's test on my ancient Riva TNT card and software rendering is indeed a lot faster.
Building E17 from CVS right now :)