I use both W2K and KDE3.3.2 on my home-machine, and the two are about as fast. Well, KDE has more functionality and eye-candy, but it's not one bit slower than W2K is. So I really see no problems with KDE's responsivness.
I use XP on my work-machine, and I don't really see any difference in performance there either.
There will be alot more changes than that in 4.0. They just didn't list them all, because they haven't decided everything yet. Hell, 4.0 is still very much in the air. And I bet that feature-plan for 3.4 doesn't list all the changes either.
I know what you mean, it is a powerful tool to attract new linux users, but beyond that, shouldn't the focus move more towards better apps?
KDE already has some kick-ass apps. K3B is propably the best CD-burning-app on Linux, Amarok is among the best music-players, Juk is a great jukebox-app, Konqueror is a good web-browser/filemanager, Kstars is propably the best desktop planetarium on Linux, Kopete is a great IM-client, Quanta+ is a great web-developement-app, Kdevelop is a great IDE, Kontact is a great PIM etc. etc.
I remember not long ago when people complained that while KDE is a great desktop, it doesn't hae great apps. That area has dramatically improved over the last few years.
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...
on
KDE 3.4 goes Beta
·
· Score: 1
I don't see why you should get your panties in a bunch if someone uses Gentoo. Does it somehow "ruin the Linux-experience" for you, if you know that somewhere, someone is using Gentoo and he's *gasp* compiling?
Apprently compiling is a big no-no for you, and you chose your distro accordingly. Compiling is NOT a problem for me, so I can run Gentoo just fine. And what are you going to do about it? Hit me in the face for not seeing the true light? Does it annoy you that I'm "wasting my life"? You can take comfort from the fact that I don't feel like wasting my life. Really, compiling does not make my life one bit harder. Hell, it doesn't even make my Linux-use one bit harder! I can leave the system compiling overnight, or I can do some other stuff with the computer while it compiles (Linux has this magical feature called "multitasking"). Or, I can (heaven forbid!) step away from the computer for few hours!
I wont die if I don't have latest and greatest version of KDE up&running 5 minutes after it's been released. And I think that in the end Gentoo-users are NOT "behind the curve" when it comes to the software they run, quite the contrary! Gentoo usually release new version quite fast, so it could be that by the time binary-packages are available for some binary-distro, Gentoo-users are already using the new version, even though it takes them _few hours_ to compile it.
Really, KDE is just about as big as they come, and it's written in C++ (GCC is slow with C++). And it takes me about... 6-7 hours to compile it. Oh the humanity! How can I tolerate it??? I'm obviously missing out on something great since I have to wait for _so long_ to get KDE!
I used to run Debian before I switched to Gentoo, so I know of the goodness of apt-get. I also remember that it took Debian something like 1 year to get KDE3, they were stuck at 2.2.2 for a long time.
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...
on
KDE 3.4 goes Beta
·
· Score: 1
It's fine for geeks, but normal folk just want to install it and be using it 5 minutes later.
"Normal folks" can run Mandrake, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse etc. etc., while the geeks can run Gentoo. I mean, it's not like there's no choice when it comes to Linux-distros. And for those geeks who choose to use Gentoo, the compile-times are not really a problem. They made a conscious decision to use Gentoo, and they knew it involves compiling. So apparently compiling is not a problem for them. If it is a problem for someone, he can use some other distro.
I really fail to see the problem here. Don't like source-based distro? Use a binary-based distro then!
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...
on
KDE 3.4 goes Beta
·
· Score: 1
Well, you only do it once (really, just leave it compiling overnight or something). After that, you just upgrade. And while you upgrade, the older versions of the desktop, word-processor and browser are at your disposal.
If you want to have all the apps available right away, may I suggest Knoppix?
You can get a half-gig flash based mp3 player for under 50 bucks.
And those players are crap, plain and simple.
Compare to This for 349 - oh, this comes with a 17" Flat CRT
I did a comparison of the Gateway-machine to the $599 Mac Mini. I made these changes to the Gateway in order to make them more comparable in specs:
XP Pro instead of XP Home (+79.99) 48x/32x/48x CD-RW/DVD combo drive (+45.00) Desktop Value Service Plan (+59.99) No monitor (-80.00) Total: +104.98
So, the PC costs $673.97 (including shipping) Substract from that the rebates (do you get them if you customize the machine? Anyway...) and you have a total price of $523.97. So the Mac is still a bit more expensive. What do you get with that extra money?
- Nice case made of adonized aluminium, instead of that horrible tower on the Gateway - Tiny machine that fits everywhere - Silent machine, instead of one that has fans - iLife - OS X - Radeon 9200 instead of a crappy integrated vid-card.
Gateway offers:
- Keyboard and mouse - Expansion-slots
Really, the Mini is NOT a bad deal! Hell, I'm thinking of buying one myself (my first Apple-machine in fact). If you want to compare it to something, compare it to one of those Mini-ITX-machines that use a VIA-CPU.
More attention from the people selling the hardware in question? I would hope not, for the company making it's sake.
Well, the drivers in the kernel (or other open-source drivers in other projects like X.org) receive more attention than third-party drivers do. Case in point: NVIDIA-drivers. The binary-drivers provided by NVIDIA only work on mainstream-systems (x86 and x86-64). Want to use those drivers in a PPC-system? Tough luck! Even though NVIDIA-hardware works just fine on PPC-machines that use OS X for example. Butthe open-source drivers inside X.org work just fine in PPC-systems.
Yes, the drivers are NVIDIA's bread 'n butter in a way, since they sell the hardware. But Linux on PPC is such a niche-market that it's not worthwhile for them to invest on it. If the drivers were open, that problem would most likely not exist.
The worst politics of all is the Linus'es stance against driver ABIs. That's one reason behind the device support is still slumbering.
I bet that Linux has alot better device-support out of the box than Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 has. Windows relies on third-party drivers that may or may not work, whereas in Linux they are already in the Kernel, where they receive more attention than third-party drivers would receive. And that's thanks to Linus's stance on drive ABI's. Without that, we would have a kernel that had minimal device-support and which needed flaky third-party drivers just to get a functional system. And those drivers would only work on x86-systems. Why would the OEM's spend time developing driver for PPC or Sparc, since those are niche-systems? But since they are in the kernel, they work on more exotic architectures as well.
An unprivileged local user can DoS a Linux box to death with malloc and memset, so the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK bug isn't particularly exceptional. All the others require root anyway.
I'll pass this on to appropriate people, see if we can get this all fixed up, thanks.
Personally, I'd rather wait for the media to pick up Jobs' marketting spin, filter it, rince it and present it for what it is - hardware and software with more or less value.
I find your faith in media disturbing.
Seriously, I don't own any Apple-hardware, yet I enjoy watching Steve Jobs's keynotes. Why? He's an extremely talented and charismatic speaker. And like it or not, the products he usually talks about ARE cool.
What makes him an expert on communism? Because he lived in Poland? And what makes you think that Poland had communism? Just because some bureaucrats in Poland said that their country was communist-country does not make it in to one.
My suggestion to these wanna-be Commies is that they go live in an actual Communist country for awhile.
I'm a liberal (AKA libertarian in the USA), but still: could you name one communist country, past or present, that has existed? USSR? China? North-Korea? Perverted dictatorships that were "communist" in name only. Just because they said they were communists, were they really? USSR was an "Union of Republics", was it really that? You can call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that you really are what you say you are.
Really, saying "communism doesn't work and it's evil!" is rather pointless, since we haven't had _real_ communist country on this planet. AFAIK the communist manifesto doesn't say one thing about one-party rule or sending people to gulaks. Neither does it say anything about state owning the means of production. Those things were something that Russian revolutionaries and Stalin thought up. Instead of really giving the power to the people, they decided that The Party represents the people and it can have all the power and the means of production. And the fact was that The Party did not in fact represent the people, it represented The Party.
Hell, it's just as pointless to say "capitalism and free-market are the greatest thing since sliced bread!" since we haven't had any pure capitalist or free-market-systems in this planet! USA? Sorry, government interferes in business, you have to think of something else! We can't know for certain that would pure capitalism be all that good, since we haven't had a system that implements it. Same thing with communism. We had one attempt (Russia) that got perverted in it's infancy, and it then spread elsewhere (China, Cuba etc.). Your comment of "Communism sucks, and as proof, I present my girlfriend from Latvia!" misses the mark 100%, since Latvia had very little to do with communism.
In a communistic people aren't rewarded by the amount/quality of work they produce. A doctor in a communist society gets paid the same amount as a janitor. Where is the incentive to learn new skills? Why bother if you're going to get the same money anyway?
Well, last time I checked, USSR had doctors and janitors. They also had top-notch aerospace-engineers, software-developers, composers etc. etc. So it seems to me that they had no problems getting people to study more for more advanced tasks.
One thing I don't get is where are they going to get the head from?
From the user. This machine is intended for people who want to switch from Windows to Mac but are afraid of the price. Now they can have a cheap Mac, and they can use their existing monitor with it (since they are already running Windows, they naturally own a monitor). eMac is not an option since it uses a bulky tube and it would render their existing monitor useless. iMac costs too much and it too would render their existing monitor useless. And with this machine they could replace the monitor with something better if they want to, something that is not possible with either eMac or iMac.
I already have a computer with Linux and W2K coupled with a nice TFT. And if this rumour is true, I would consider buying this as an additional machine. And I would also recommend it to some of my relatives who might be interested in replacing their aging PC's with something more modern. Since they already have a monitor, there's no problem.
There are hundreds on a lot of platforms (a dozen on MS windows alone) since it is a well over decade old published standard.
No shit Sherlock! How about telling me something that I didn't know?
Project politics.
License-incompatibility, stagnating developement, kicking put good developers (like Keith Packard) while hanging on to useless deadbeats (like Dave Wexelblat who uses Windows these days and doesn't do a thing when it comes to Xfree).
I think I am completely correct in saying that the inmplementation of X produced by XFree86 has survived a split and gone onto better things as X.org.
Yep. And Xfree the project is dead, while the code they wrote still exists. And I fail to see how that contradicts with my comments.
f you have only used X on linux you may not be aware that there are a very large number of implementations of X.
Well, excuse me if I didn't explicitly mention each and every X-implementation. I'm well aware that there are several (Accelerated-X, Metro-X and others).
What I am referring to, is the codebase from XFree86 which is alive and well and living in x.org, and not a dead and buried project.
Well, if the codebase of Xfree did not survive the fork, why would they fork in the first place? Just because right after the fork, the "old" codebase is alive and doing well, does not mean that the old project survived. And besides, the Xfree-code is being rewritten as we speak.
So, of course that the old Xfree-codebase isn't going to disappear right away. You can still get and use the original Xfree, and it takes time to rewrite the Xfree-code in X.org. But, as time progresses, there will be less and less Xfree-code in X.org. And as time progresses, Xfree will be more and more obsolete.
As a whole, Xfree did not survive the fork. I believe just about all the distros moved to X.org from Xfree, and about 90% of Xfree-developers moved to X.org. Sure, Xfree still exists, but for all intents and purposes it's a dead project.
X.org is mostly identical to Xfree before the license change. The newest version has a bit more changes (like COMPOSITE- and DAMAGE-extensions), and the difference between the two is getting bigger and bigger as X.org evolves whereas Xfree stands still.
Of course, if you are referring to X, then it's doing just fine, if not better. But just because X is doing well, does not mean that Xfree is doing well. Xfree is just another X-implementation, just like X.org is. But Xfree is, for all intents and purposes, dead. It lost most of it's users and it's developers.
It's not GPL for commercial development.
Smells fishy to me.
The Linux-kernel is ALWAYS GPL'ed. You can't have any other license, it's either GPL or nothing. With Qt you have GPL-version of it. Or, if you so choose, you can have a commercial license that costs money. How exactly is that "fishy"? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
So you could say that with Qt you have more freedoms than you do with the Kernel. Either you can use the GPL-version (like with the Kernel), or you can purchase a commercial license (not possible with the Kernel). But hey, if that's so suspicious to you, use a different toolkit!
Microsoft has been developing Windows with a media player included since the days of Windows 3.1
Back in those days Microsoft was not a monopoly.
Given the above, I think it's been established that Microsoft has been shipping Windows + media player for a very, very long time.
And given their modus operandi of "leveraging Windows" (just look at what happened to Netscape), I think it's safe to say they would use their OS-dominance to push their own media-player, codecs and DRM. In the Netscape-case, courts closed the doors AFTER the horses had ran away. That is, they acted after MS managed to annihilate their competition. In this case, they are acting BEFORE MS has had the chance to do so. This is the way it should be done. Or should we stand around untill MS crushes Real and others, and then say "ooops, it looks like MS has abused their monopoly again and crushed all competition. Isn't that a shame?"
Now here's Apple. Apple have been shipping Quicktime with their OS for many, many years. They are not a monopoly now, but who knows.. they may be in the future.
Yes, they MIGHT be a monopoly in the some vague point in the future. But we can't act because of something that MIGHT happen. We already know that MS is a monopoly RIGHT NOW. And we already know that they have routinely "leveraged Windows" to gain more market-share elsewhere.
Given the previous statement on the vast presence of QT/RM sites on the web, though, I don't think they'd really have much of a basis for complaining.
That might be the case NOW. Will it be so in few years time? What MS is doing (taking over one market, by leveraing another market where they have a monopoly) is illegal. That is a fact and it cannot be disputed. Should we stop this illegal activity before they manage to seriously damage the competition, or should we wait around untill they gain dominance in this market as well and then act?
If I were to give someone credit for the PC-revolution, that would propably be IBM. The reason why we now have dirt-cheap computers is because prices of hardware came crashing down. And while that happened, price of the software (in this case, Microsoft-software) has remained steady.
If Microsoft had become another Apple in the early days, they wouldn't be the monopoly they are today. Apple at least had value-added features in their systems: the GUI. What would Microsoft have in those early days? MS would have competed against Commodore and Apple, both of which has OS'es that mopped the floor with DOS, not to mention their hardware when compared to x86 of the time.
And besides: I find very little comfort in the "Hey, it could be alot worse!"-statement, when situation today is what it is.
Quicktime is tightly integrated with Mac OS X. Does this mean Apple has committed an equally horrible crime?
No, since Apple is not a monopoly.
In fact, most operating systems come with a bunch of integrated technologies. I fail to see why this is bad.
Only one of those operating systems is a monopoly. And antitrust-law says that using your monopoly in one area to gain monopoly in other areas is against the law. MS used their OS-monopoly to gain monopoly in web-browsers. Now they tried to gain monopoly in the streaming-media markets, by using their OS-monopoly. And that is against the law.
I find it really surprising that some people simply do not "get it".
It's really hard to come up with a "positive view" of Microsoft, after you get screwed by them. Over and over again. No, they are not a "almost-monopoly". They are a monopoly. That is a fact that has been upheld in a court of law. they are criminals, and I don't want to give my hard-earned money to a bunch of criminals
Why exactly should I have "positive view" about them? They are a monopoly, they use illegal methods to maintain their monopoly. They use their OS-monopoly to gain monopoly in other areas (which is illegal), they charge too much for their crappy, virus-ridden software, they use lies and deceit to undermine competition, they push closed proprietary standards, while trying to squash open standards and they stifle innovation.
Pray tell: what "positive view" should I have? Well, the mice they make are OK, I'll grant you that.
Slashdot Mirror
I use both W2K and KDE3.3.2 on my home-machine, and the two are about as fast. Well, KDE has more functionality and eye-candy, but it's not one bit slower than W2K is. So I really see no problems with KDE's responsivness.
I use XP on my work-machine, and I don't really see any difference in performance there either.
There will be alot more changes than that in 4.0. They just didn't list them all, because they haven't decided everything yet. Hell, 4.0 is still very much in the air. And I bet that feature-plan for 3.4 doesn't list all the changes either.
KDE already has some kick-ass apps. K3B is propably the best CD-burning-app on Linux, Amarok is among the best music-players, Juk is a great jukebox-app, Konqueror is a good web-browser/filemanager, Kstars is propably the best desktop planetarium on Linux, Kopete is a great IM-client, Quanta+ is a great web-developement-app, Kdevelop is a great IDE, Kontact is a great PIM etc. etc.
I remember not long ago when people complained that while KDE is a great desktop, it doesn't hae great apps. That area has dramatically improved over the last few years.
I don't see why you should get your panties in a bunch if someone uses Gentoo. Does it somehow "ruin the Linux-experience" for you, if you know that somewhere, someone is using Gentoo and he's *gasp* compiling?
Apprently compiling is a big no-no for you, and you chose your distro accordingly. Compiling is NOT a problem for me, so I can run Gentoo just fine. And what are you going to do about it? Hit me in the face for not seeing the true light? Does it annoy you that I'm "wasting my life"? You can take comfort from the fact that I don't feel like wasting my life. Really, compiling does not make my life one bit harder. Hell, it doesn't even make my Linux-use one bit harder! I can leave the system compiling overnight, or I can do some other stuff with the computer while it compiles (Linux has this magical feature called "multitasking"). Or, I can (heaven forbid!) step away from the computer for few hours!
I wont die if I don't have latest and greatest version of KDE up&running 5 minutes after it's been released. And I think that in the end Gentoo-users are NOT "behind the curve" when it comes to the software they run, quite the contrary! Gentoo usually release new version quite fast, so it could be that by the time binary-packages are available for some binary-distro, Gentoo-users are already using the new version, even though it takes them _few hours_ to compile it.
Really, KDE is just about as big as they come, and it's written in C++ (GCC is slow with C++). And it takes me about... 6-7 hours to compile it. Oh the humanity! How can I tolerate it??? I'm obviously missing out on something great since I have to wait for _so long_ to get KDE!
I used to run Debian before I switched to Gentoo, so I know of the goodness of apt-get. I also remember that it took Debian something like 1 year to get KDE3, they were stuck at 2.2.2 for a long time.
"Normal folks" can run Mandrake, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse etc. etc., while the geeks can run Gentoo. I mean, it's not like there's no choice when it comes to Linux-distros. And for those geeks who choose to use Gentoo, the compile-times are not really a problem. They made a conscious decision to use Gentoo, and they knew it involves compiling. So apparently compiling is not a problem for them. If it is a problem for someone, he can use some other distro.
I really fail to see the problem here. Don't like source-based distro? Use a binary-based distro then!
Well, you only do it once (really, just leave it compiling overnight or something). After that, you just upgrade. And while you upgrade, the older versions of the desktop, word-processor and browser are at your disposal.
If you want to have all the apps available right away, may I suggest Knoppix?
uh, OK. Are the hands a BTO-option?
And those players are crap, plain and simple.
I did a comparison of the Gateway-machine to the $599 Mac Mini. I made these changes to the Gateway in order to make them more comparable in specs:
XP Pro instead of XP Home (+79.99)
48x/32x/48x CD-RW/DVD combo drive (+45.00)
Desktop Value Service Plan (+59.99)
No monitor (-80.00)
Total: +104.98
So, the PC costs $673.97 (including shipping) Substract from that the rebates (do you get them if you customize the machine? Anyway...) and you have a total price of $523.97. So the Mac is still a bit more expensive. What do you get with that extra money?
- Nice case made of adonized aluminium, instead of that horrible tower on the Gateway
- Tiny machine that fits everywhere
- Silent machine, instead of one that has fans
- iLife
- OS X
- Radeon 9200 instead of a crappy integrated vid-card.
Gateway offers:
- Keyboard and mouse
- Expansion-slots
Really, the Mini is NOT a bad deal! Hell, I'm thinking of buying one myself (my first Apple-machine in fact). If you want to compare it to something, compare it to one of those Mini-ITX-machines that use a VIA-CPU.
Well, the drivers in the kernel (or other open-source drivers in other projects like X.org) receive more attention than third-party drivers do. Case in point: NVIDIA-drivers. The binary-drivers provided by NVIDIA only work on mainstream-systems (x86 and x86-64). Want to use those drivers in a PPC-system? Tough luck! Even though NVIDIA-hardware works just fine on PPC-machines that use OS X for example. Butthe open-source drivers inside X.org work just fine in PPC-systems.
Yes, the drivers are NVIDIA's bread 'n butter in a way, since they sell the hardware. But Linux on PPC is such a niche-market that it's not worthwhile for them to invest on it. If the drivers were open, that problem would most likely not exist.
I bet that Linux has alot better device-support out of the box than Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 has. Windows relies on third-party drivers that may or may not work, whereas in Linux they are already in the Kernel, where they receive more attention than third-party drivers would receive. And that's thanks to Linus's stance on drive ABI's. Without that, we would have a kernel that had minimal device-support and which needed flaky third-party drivers just to get a functional system. And those drivers would only work on x86-systems. Why would the OEM's spend time developing driver for PPC or Sparc, since those are niche-systems? But since they are in the kernel, they work on more exotic architectures as well.
Well, I have been here for a while already, but I'm not politically correct
I find your faith in media disturbing.
Seriously, I don't own any Apple-hardware, yet I enjoy watching Steve Jobs's keynotes. Why? He's an extremely talented and charismatic speaker. And like it or not, the products he usually talks about ARE cool.
What makes him an expert on communism? Because he lived in Poland? And what makes you think that Poland had communism? Just because some bureaucrats in Poland said that their country was communist-country does not make it in to one.
I'm a liberal (AKA libertarian in the USA), but still: could you name one communist country, past or present, that has existed? USSR? China? North-Korea? Perverted dictatorships that were "communist" in name only. Just because they said they were communists, were they really? USSR was an "Union of Republics", was it really that? You can call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that you really are what you say you are.
Really, saying "communism doesn't work and it's evil!" is rather pointless, since we haven't had _real_ communist country on this planet. AFAIK the communist manifesto doesn't say one thing about one-party rule or sending people to gulaks. Neither does it say anything about state owning the means of production. Those things were something that Russian revolutionaries and Stalin thought up. Instead of really giving the power to the people, they decided that The Party represents the people and it can have all the power and the means of production. And the fact was that The Party did not in fact represent the people, it represented The Party.
Hell, it's just as pointless to say "capitalism and free-market are the greatest thing since sliced bread!" since we haven't had any pure capitalist or free-market-systems in this planet! USA? Sorry, government interferes in business, you have to think of something else! We can't know for certain that would pure capitalism be all that good, since we haven't had a system that implements it. Same thing with communism. We had one attempt (Russia) that got perverted in it's infancy, and it then spread elsewhere (China, Cuba etc.). Your comment of "Communism sucks, and as proof, I present my girlfriend from Latvia!" misses the mark 100%, since Latvia had very little to do with communism.
Well, last time I checked, USSR had doctors and janitors. They also had top-notch aerospace-engineers, software-developers, composers etc. etc. So it seems to me that they had no problems getting people to study more for more advanced tasks.
From the user. This machine is intended for people who want to switch from Windows to Mac but are afraid of the price. Now they can have a cheap Mac, and they can use their existing monitor with it (since they are already running Windows, they naturally own a monitor). eMac is not an option since it uses a bulky tube and it would render their existing monitor useless. iMac costs too much and it too would render their existing monitor useless. And with this machine they could replace the monitor with something better if they want to, something that is not possible with either eMac or iMac.
I already have a computer with Linux and W2K coupled with a nice TFT. And if this rumour is true, I would consider buying this as an additional machine. And I would also recommend it to some of my relatives who might be interested in replacing their aging PC's with something more modern. Since they already have a monitor, there's no problem.
P.S. Sorry for late reply.
No shit Sherlock! How about telling me something that I didn't know?
License-incompatibility, stagnating developement, kicking put good developers (like Keith Packard) while hanging on to useless deadbeats (like Dave Wexelblat who uses Windows these days and doesn't do a thing when it comes to Xfree).
Yep. And Xfree the project is dead, while the code they wrote still exists. And I fail to see how that contradicts with my comments.
Well, excuse me if I didn't explicitly mention each and every X-implementation. I'm well aware that there are several (Accelerated-X, Metro-X and others).
Well, if the codebase of Xfree did not survive the fork, why would they fork in the first place? Just because right after the fork, the "old" codebase is alive and doing well, does not mean that the old project survived. And besides, the Xfree-code is being rewritten as we speak.
So, of course that the old Xfree-codebase isn't going to disappear right away. You can still get and use the original Xfree, and it takes time to rewrite the Xfree-code in X.org. But, as time progresses, there will be less and less Xfree-code in X.org. And as time progresses, Xfree will be more and more obsolete.
As a whole, Xfree did not survive the fork. I believe just about all the distros moved to X.org from Xfree, and about 90% of Xfree-developers moved to X.org. Sure, Xfree still exists, but for all intents and purposes it's a dead project.
X.org is mostly identical to Xfree before the license change. The newest version has a bit more changes (like COMPOSITE- and DAMAGE-extensions), and the difference between the two is getting bigger and bigger as X.org evolves whereas Xfree stands still.
Of course, if you are referring to X, then it's doing just fine, if not better. But just because X is doing well, does not mean that Xfree is doing well. Xfree is just another X-implementation, just like X.org is. But Xfree is, for all intents and purposes, dead. It lost most of it's users and it's developers.
The Linux-kernel is ALWAYS GPL'ed. You can't have any other license, it's either GPL or nothing. With Qt you have GPL-version of it. Or, if you so choose, you can have a commercial license that costs money. How exactly is that "fishy"? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
So you could say that with Qt you have more freedoms than you do with the Kernel. Either you can use the GPL-version (like with the Kernel), or you can purchase a commercial license (not possible with the Kernel). But hey, if that's so suspicious to you, use a different toolkit!
Back in those days Microsoft was not a monopoly.
And given their modus operandi of "leveraging Windows" (just look at what happened to Netscape), I think it's safe to say they would use their OS-dominance to push their own media-player, codecs and DRM. In the Netscape-case, courts closed the doors AFTER the horses had ran away. That is, they acted after MS managed to annihilate their competition. In this case, they are acting BEFORE MS has had the chance to do so. This is the way it should be done. Or should we stand around untill MS crushes Real and others, and then say "ooops, it looks like MS has abused their monopoly again and crushed all competition. Isn't that a shame?"
Yes, they MIGHT be a monopoly in the some vague point in the future. But we can't act because of something that MIGHT happen. We already know that MS is a monopoly RIGHT NOW. And we already know that they have routinely "leveraged Windows" to gain more market-share elsewhere.
That might be the case NOW. Will it be so in few years time? What MS is doing (taking over one market, by leveraing another market where they have a monopoly) is illegal. That is a fact and it cannot be disputed. Should we stop this illegal activity before they manage to seriously damage the competition, or should we wait around untill they gain dominance in this market as well and then act?
If I were to give someone credit for the PC-revolution, that would propably be IBM. The reason why we now have dirt-cheap computers is because prices of hardware came crashing down. And while that happened, price of the software (in this case, Microsoft-software) has remained steady.
If Microsoft had become another Apple in the early days, they wouldn't be the monopoly they are today. Apple at least had value-added features in their systems: the GUI. What would Microsoft have in those early days? MS would have competed against Commodore and Apple, both of which has OS'es that mopped the floor with DOS, not to mention their hardware when compared to x86 of the time.
And besides: I find very little comfort in the "Hey, it could be alot worse!"-statement, when situation today is what it is.
No, since Apple is not a monopoly.
Only one of those operating systems is a monopoly. And antitrust-law says that using your monopoly in one area to gain monopoly in other areas is against the law. MS used their OS-monopoly to gain monopoly in web-browsers. Now they tried to gain monopoly in the streaming-media markets, by using their OS-monopoly. And that is against the law.
I find it really surprising that some people simply do not "get it".
It's really hard to come up with a "positive view" of Microsoft, after you get screwed by them. Over and over again. No, they are not a "almost-monopoly". They are a monopoly. That is a fact that has been upheld in a court of law. they are criminals, and I don't want to give my hard-earned money to a bunch of criminals
Why exactly should I have "positive view" about them? They are a monopoly, they use illegal methods to maintain their monopoly. They use their OS-monopoly to gain monopoly in other areas (which is illegal), they charge too much for their crappy, virus-ridden software, they use lies and deceit to undermine competition, they push closed proprietary standards, while trying to squash open standards and they stifle innovation.
Pray tell: what "positive view" should I have? Well, the mice they make are OK, I'll grant you that.