These days you can use the GTK-Qt theme to unify the looks regardless of what visual style you like. It has been refined for a long time and works pretty well. The remaining differences are mostly trivial and are of the level of inconsistency found in Carbon/Cocoa apps or between Explorer/IE/Office on Windows. So I don't think it's a big problem.
I for one am tired of these old outdated complaints. Nobody has to compile anything unless they want to. With the exception of gentoo no linux distrubitution requires compiling anything.
What kind of fantasy land are you living in? Sure, if you are willing to dick about all day with apt pinning and use outdated software, maybe you can avoid it. It's a bit of a mission.
But if you want to use the latest versions of things, even if you use Debian you'll have to compile sometimes. Check out the users on the Ubuntu lists bitching about how Inkscape 0.41 just missing the upstream version freeze. Check out Fyre, a cool app for generating images from de Jong maps - note the lack of a Debian package. On Fedora far more software is not in the repositories than is.
Blind fanboyism won't get us anywhere. Even if the best case scenario, which right now probably means Ubuntu, there are serious problems with desktop software installation on Linux.
There is a lot of interest in solutions from users, developers and commercial ISVs (eg LSB/OSDL member companies). There are a few projects experimenting with new approaches, check out my own: autopackage, or Thomas Leonards Zero-Install.
In particular if you want to test Fyre, try the autopackage I made of it: Fyre 0.10svn. Both Fyre and autopackage aren't quite version 1.0 yet, but both are very close.
That build needs GTK 2.4. I have a build locally I will upload soon that adapts to the GTK features available at runtime (using relaytool) and therefore only needs GTK 2.2, but can still use the new file selectors and other features if they're available at runtime.
You've clearly never actually used Helix Player, which is a totally different product and is not only Spyware free but a pretty competent media player as well.
Now what I'd really like to see is support for their commercial free radio services in GStreamer and Totem, or even XMMS as these are the media players I use. Helix is fine, but I'd rather not use many apps that are pretty much identical UI wise just because of the underlying "platform wars".
Still, commercial free radio does sound attractive. Right now I've got Digitally Imported, Music1, SwissGroove and SomaFM which are great but they do come and go. I am definitely willing to pay for high quality net radio, if the price and experience is right. IMHO Real are smart to be focussing on this area.
Yes, yes, legality concerns. This is what IBM always say, though they never bother to clarify exactly what their concerns are.
It's getting very boring seeing IBM publish un-ending reams of information that totally ignore the realities of the Windows software market. If you want to see the sort of things porters are up against go look at the recently open sourced Open Workbench, a free alternative to MS Project. Look at the source. See how dependent it is on Win32, MFC and COM, even though parts are even written in Java!
IBM constantly spread this sort of FUD about Wine, and it's sad to see a company that supports Linux on the server side so heavily be so counter-productive on the client side. IMHO either they should clarify exactly what they mean so an open and educated debate can occur, or they should shut up. If they don't they're no better than SCO.
As to code stealing - there is a CVS repository dating back many years (nearly 80,000 changesets), and one man has maintained it pretty much since the beginning. There's no evidence of Microsoft submitting their own code anonymously, so claiming it might have happened is like claiming Elvis might be living on the moon: not grounded in the real world. Would entrapment like that even be legal itself?
To be honest I think a far more likely story is that some guy high up in the IBM Linux heirarchy tried Wine in 1998, couldn't make it work, decided it was TEH SUCK and has been carrying his prejudices ever since. It would not be the first time I've seen that happen. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of people that use it every day would disagree but hey... that sort of thing never stopped stupid irrational biases before.
Sure the motivation is obvious, that doesn't change the fact that it's a dumb idea and isn't going to happen. Even when you factor Wine into the equation which makes porting for most apps actually economically feasable, you still have fun things like MFC, ATL, Visual Studio dependent build systems and so on. Such basic articles are a waste of time: any developer actually interested in doing a port could have found this information out in a few hours of research, and avoided all the mistakes in this article.
There aren't any hard statistics either which way - the few that I've seen (from IDC) show Linux either matched 1:1 with the Mac or ahead. Which doesn't surprise me - Linux is free and works on Intel PCs, and MacOS X is expensive and only works on dedicated hardware. If Linux does have higher market share that's no reflection on MacOS, just the realities of hte market.
There are lots more mistakes like that, they leak handles in the Win32 examples and stuff. I wasn't impressed with this article when it was first posted to OSNews and I'm not impressed with it now. It's about the worst way you can port Windows software (unless you feel like scrapping your mature and tested codebase, that is).
If you do want to have a Windows program ported to Linux you could try Wine, or you could hire us to do it for you (CodeWeavers don't just make products, we also do commercial consulting and compatibility work).
You clearly don't have much idea of what porting your average Windows app involves, and if they are saying such things neither do the "FreeBSD people". Changing the build system a bit or adding a few #ifdefs is nothing compared to your average Windows port (aka rewrite).
No, not quite. They've moved mainframes running (apparently) the Domino server onto Linux from whatever UNIX they were using before. Domino is largely written in Java.
This story, in contrast, is about desktop Linux not server side Linux.
Well, you are very lucky. I can go and install games that are released and available today from places like Garage Games and they will crash or hang because of things like NPTL which did break software on a seriously large scale. There are other examples as well: currently the X compositing extension is known to break some programs, for instance. Likewise the Linux kernel sometimes has regressions, lately in the ptrace handling.
Based on my experience of Mac users I'd disagree. Every one of them either plays no games at all, or also have a PC (and for one, PC and Xbox).
Admittedly this is based on a sample size of 3. Hardly scientific. But I don't believe your average Linux user is any less likely to buy games than a Mac user is.
Think about it. Darwin/Aqua is a totally new thing that took them about five years, drawing from the same kind of open resources available to Linux at the time.
I must have missed the point at which desktop Linux had 1000+ developers working on it and a billion dollars to play with.
In five years, they had a completely new OS shipped and ready.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
On the other hand, Linux has been around for an entire decade now, and the desktops still look like they're competing with Windows 98 in a non-accelerated, 2D world of "Start" menus and taskbars.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but... wait. It has that too, albiet still an immature implementation you need a good box to run. But that's true of MacOS and Longhorn as well.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
That's a very misleading story article (surprise surprise), the actual page is search.msn.com - not the MSN.COM portal linked to above. It's a lot cleaner and smaller.
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
First, while I certainly won't defend MS's business practices, it's more than a bit short-sighted to say MS only created D3D to "lock" developers onto Windows. MS wanted to grow Windows as a gaming platform (beyond crap like WinG) so they made their own accelerated API.
Why did that mean replacing OpenGL, which at the time game developers like Carmack were perfectly happy with. In fact Carmack and others roasted the first versions of Direct3D, and petitioned Microsoft to release the OpenGL MCD.
GameDev magazine reviewed the two APIs in the early days and concluded Microsoft should just discontinue Direct3D altogether. OpenGL was clearly and unambiguously the better technology and it's widely regarded that it wasn't until DirectX 8 that it caught up. Yes, after Microsoft squashed them out of the market it stagnated: what a surprise. Just like Netscape Navigator stagnated after Microsoft killed the revenue stream from it.
One could certainly argue that the existence of D3D has pushed OpenGL to stay modern and competitive, so has been twofold beneficial.
Microsoft dropped OpenGL support entirely as soon as Direct3D started development. It didn't ship with Windows 95 at all originally. They went out of their way to kill OpenGL, so quite how that was "beneficial" to it by providing competition I do not know. Competition would have been if both OpenGL and Direct3D were fully supported on Windows, but they were not. It was never a fair fight, so to reach this conclusion is ridiculous.
So, my objection to this line of thinking is that people start thinking that the end justifies the means when it clearly does not.
If people get the idea that it's OK to horde disgusting amounts of money by breaking the law (ie, violate the will of the people) over and over again as long as you give it away at the end, then we're all fucked. That way lies madness. Let me explain.
Quite clearly this money did not appear out of nowhere. It was generated by everyone working in Western economies, and Gates acquired so much by thoroughly immoral and unethical means.
It would have been trivial for that cash to have been collected by an actual tax of say $300 on computers that went to the government or to some third party foundation, which would have arguably generated similar or greater levels of wealth, as most of Microsofts income comes from sales of Windows and Office which are preloaded. Then the $50 billion+ dollars could have been distributed according to the will of the people, as opposed to the pretty much arbitrary will of Bill Gates.
As Peldor astutely points out, there are plenty of billionaires who give far less than Gates, which itself re-inforces the point that Gates is not a saint for giving that money away because it wasn't his money to begin with. For every one with his level of wealth, there are ten more who give nearly nothing.
If you are applauding Gates' generosity right now, consider this: would you be equally enthusiastic if in future all preloaded Linux computers came with a computer-tax of $300 which was sent directly to a foundation controlled by publically elected and accountable individuals? Would you praise this scheme? Or would you consider it un-american or a violation of your right to choose which charities you support?
Really there's no difference at all. Gates got his money through unethical means, and nothing he does now can make that OK. If it did, we'd be living in an anarchy.
Apple isn't benevolent in the slightest. They haven't supported Linux whatsoever, and have actively required companies writing software for Linux to license their patents.
Sorry, but of all of them only Real is actually trying to improve - Apple just coast along on the basis of their fans ludicrous brand loyalty, Microsoft coast along on the basis of their monopoly and piles of cash, meanwhile Real has been contributing to open source and cleaning up their software, as well as making it portable to Linux. I say, good for them, and I'm certainly willing to give them a second chance.
Actually it can be far more reliable than extension based detection (for binaries, etc) The reason it's done is to avoid Windows style Foobar.jpg.exe problems.
Re:Horrible colors in the text editor screenshot
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
·
· Score: 1
Actually I prefer garish colouring. The point of syntax highlighting is to let you tell different parts of the code apart easily, and as I'm partially colour blind I find striking bold colours easier to work with. I also find them aesthetically more attractive, but that is naturally a matter of pure taste.
In GTK+ 2.6 you can just start typing. It'll search in the treeview like Mozilla does typeahead find.
No, for people who shove a million files in the same directory and then use regular expressions as a replacement for, you know, folders - for them I guess it's not as good. Guess what? Those people are by no means the majority. Meanwhile real users do wacky stuff like put question marks in file names, so you really don't want to overload metacharacters with special meanings if you can avoid it.
GNOME is idealistic; KDE is practical. Guess which more people actually use.
I don't know, I can't guess. Please show me hard statistics on which is more popular. And no I don't mean bogus distro comparisons which conveniently ignore Fedora (how many times have I seen that now?). I mean hard, solid statistics.
I think you can't give me any because there are none. Now, anecdotal evidence we can chuck around all day. I know more people using GNOME than KDE. Not a lot more, but it's definitely more. I'm sure the reverse is true for you
When that happens you should report a bug and attach the misdetected file to it, so the developers can figure out what went wrong. For cpp files there should probably be no MIME sniffing at all, as I can't think of a sensible way to figure out that something is C++ just by looking at it (short of trying to parse it).
The problem with not using the LSB build system is that GNU ld will automatically choose the latest glibc symbol versions (amongst other things) so you won't get a compliant binary out if you don't use it.
When I said "major desktop distributions" I really meant "popular desktop distributions" - while the enterprise distros will get a lot more important in future right now not many people use them.
The rest of your points are pretty much right. You have a more optimistic view of the LSB than I do, but we'll see how it goes...
Slashdot Mirror
These days you can use the GTK-Qt theme to unify the looks regardless of what visual style you like. It has been refined for a long time and works pretty well. The remaining differences are mostly trivial and are of the level of inconsistency found in Carbon/Cocoa apps or between Explorer/IE/Office on Windows. So I don't think it's a big problem.
What kind of fantasy land are you living in? Sure, if you are willing to dick about all day with apt pinning and use outdated software, maybe you can avoid it. It's a bit of a mission.
But if you want to use the latest versions of things, even if you use Debian you'll have to compile sometimes. Check out the users on the Ubuntu lists bitching about how Inkscape 0.41 just missing the upstream version freeze. Check out Fyre, a cool app for generating images from de Jong maps - note the lack of a Debian package. On Fedora far more software is not in the repositories than is.
Blind fanboyism won't get us anywhere. Even if the best case scenario, which right now probably means Ubuntu, there are serious problems with desktop software installation on Linux.
There is a lot of interest in solutions from users, developers and commercial ISVs (eg LSB/OSDL member companies). There are a few projects experimenting with new approaches, check out my own: autopackage, or Thomas Leonards Zero-Install.
In particular if you want to test Fyre, try the autopackage I made of it: Fyre 0.10svn. Both Fyre and autopackage aren't quite version 1.0 yet, but both are very close.
That build needs GTK 2.4. I have a build locally I will upload soon that adapts to the GTK features available at runtime (using relaytool) and therefore only needs GTK 2.2, but can still use the new file selectors and other features if they're available at runtime.
Now what I'd really like to see is support for their commercial free radio services in GStreamer and Totem, or even XMMS as these are the media players I use. Helix is fine, but I'd rather not use many apps that are pretty much identical UI wise just because of the underlying "platform wars".
Still, commercial free radio does sound attractive. Right now I've got Digitally Imported, Music1, SwissGroove and SomaFM which are great but they do come and go. I am definitely willing to pay for high quality net radio, if the price and experience is right. IMHO Real are smart to be focussing on this area.
It's getting very boring seeing IBM publish un-ending reams of information that totally ignore the realities of the Windows software market. If you want to see the sort of things porters are up against go look at the recently open sourced Open Workbench, a free alternative to MS Project. Look at the source. See how dependent it is on Win32, MFC and COM, even though parts are even written in Java!
IBM constantly spread this sort of FUD about Wine, and it's sad to see a company that supports Linux on the server side so heavily be so counter-productive on the client side. IMHO either they should clarify exactly what they mean so an open and educated debate can occur, or they should shut up. If they don't they're no better than SCO.
As to code stealing - there is a CVS repository dating back many years (nearly 80,000 changesets), and one man has maintained it pretty much since the beginning. There's no evidence of Microsoft submitting their own code anonymously, so claiming it might have happened is like claiming Elvis might be living on the moon: not grounded in the real world. Would entrapment like that even be legal itself?
To be honest I think a far more likely story is that some guy high up in the IBM Linux heirarchy tried Wine in 1998, couldn't make it work, decided it was TEH SUCK and has been carrying his prejudices ever since. It would not be the first time I've seen that happen. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of people that use it every day would disagree but hey ... that sort of thing never stopped stupid irrational biases before.
Sure the motivation is obvious, that doesn't change the fact that it's a dumb idea and isn't going to happen. Even when you factor Wine into the equation which makes porting for most apps actually economically feasable, you still have fun things like MFC, ATL, Visual Studio dependent build systems and so on. Such basic articles are a waste of time: any developer actually interested in doing a port could have found this information out in a few hours of research, and avoided all the mistakes in this article.
There aren't any hard statistics either which way - the few that I've seen (from IDC) show Linux either matched 1:1 with the Mac or ahead. Which doesn't surprise me - Linux is free and works on Intel PCs, and MacOS X is expensive and only works on dedicated hardware. If Linux does have higher market share that's no reflection on MacOS, just the realities of hte market.
Or what, did you really think we could run apps like Office and iTunes without such a basic sync primitive?
If you do want to have a Windows program ported to Linux you could try Wine, or you could hire us to do it for you (CodeWeavers don't just make products, we also do commercial consulting and compatibility work).
You clearly don't have much idea of what porting your average Windows app involves, and if they are saying such things neither do the "FreeBSD people". Changing the build system a bit or adding a few #ifdefs is nothing compared to your average Windows port (aka rewrite).
This story, in contrast, is about desktop Linux not server side Linux.
Well, you are very lucky. I can go and install games that are released and available today from places like Garage Games and they will crash or hang because of things like NPTL which did break software on a seriously large scale. There are other examples as well: currently the X compositing extension is known to break some programs, for instance. Likewise the Linux kernel sometimes has regressions, lately in the ptrace handling.
Admittedly this is based on a sample size of 3. Hardly scientific. But I don't believe your average Linux user is any less likely to buy games than a Mac user is.
By your previous logic all Mac gamers have a PC or console lying around as well. Because they're serious about games, y'know.
I don't think your argument holds together all that well, it's not like rebooting into Windows is a hassle-free experience.
I must have missed the point at which desktop Linux had 1000+ developers working on it and a billion dollars to play with.
In five years, they had a completely new OS shipped and ready.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
On the other hand, Linux has been around for an entire decade now, and the desktops still look like they're competing with Windows 98 in a non-accelerated, 2D world of "Start" menus and taskbars.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but ... wait. It has that too, albiet still an immature implementation you need a good box to run. But that's true of MacOS and Longhorn as well.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
You can use Wine to install MSI files.
Why did that mean replacing OpenGL, which at the time game developers like Carmack were perfectly happy with. In fact Carmack and others roasted the first versions of Direct3D, and petitioned Microsoft to release the OpenGL MCD.
GameDev magazine reviewed the two APIs in the early days and concluded Microsoft should just discontinue Direct3D altogether. OpenGL was clearly and unambiguously the better technology and it's widely regarded that it wasn't until DirectX 8 that it caught up. Yes, after Microsoft squashed them out of the market it stagnated: what a surprise. Just like Netscape Navigator stagnated after Microsoft killed the revenue stream from it.
One could certainly argue that the existence of D3D has pushed OpenGL to stay modern and competitive, so has been twofold beneficial.
Microsoft dropped OpenGL support entirely as soon as Direct3D started development. It didn't ship with Windows 95 at all originally. They went out of their way to kill OpenGL, so quite how that was "beneficial" to it by providing competition I do not know. Competition would have been if both OpenGL and Direct3D were fully supported on Windows, but they were not. It was never a fair fight, so to reach this conclusion is ridiculous.
If people get the idea that it's OK to horde disgusting amounts of money by breaking the law (ie, violate the will of the people) over and over again as long as you give it away at the end, then we're all fucked. That way lies madness. Let me explain.
Quite clearly this money did not appear out of nowhere. It was generated by everyone working in Western economies, and Gates acquired so much by thoroughly immoral and unethical means.
It would have been trivial for that cash to have been collected by an actual tax of say $300 on computers that went to the government or to some third party foundation, which would have arguably generated similar or greater levels of wealth, as most of Microsofts income comes from sales of Windows and Office which are preloaded. Then the $50 billion+ dollars could have been distributed according to the will of the people, as opposed to the pretty much arbitrary will of Bill Gates.
As Peldor astutely points out, there are plenty of billionaires who give far less than Gates, which itself re-inforces the point that Gates is not a saint for giving that money away because it wasn't his money to begin with. For every one with his level of wealth, there are ten more who give nearly nothing.
If you are applauding Gates' generosity right now, consider this: would you be equally enthusiastic if in future all preloaded Linux computers came with a computer-tax of $300 which was sent directly to a foundation controlled by publically elected and accountable individuals? Would you praise this scheme? Or would you consider it un-american or a violation of your right to choose which charities you support?
Really there's no difference at all. Gates got his money through unethical means, and nothing he does now can make that OK. If it did, we'd be living in an anarchy.
Sorry, but of all of them only Real is actually trying to improve - Apple just coast along on the basis of their fans ludicrous brand loyalty, Microsoft coast along on the basis of their monopoly and piles of cash, meanwhile Real has been contributing to open source and cleaning up their software, as well as making it portable to Linux. I say, good for them, and I'm certainly willing to give them a second chance.
Actually it can be far more reliable than extension based detection (for binaries, etc) The reason it's done is to avoid Windows style Foobar.jpg.exe problems.
Actually I prefer garish colouring. The point of syntax highlighting is to let you tell different parts of the code apart easily, and as I'm partially colour blind I find striking bold colours easier to work with. I also find them aesthetically more attractive, but that is naturally a matter of pure taste.
No, for people who shove a million files in the same directory and then use regular expressions as a replacement for, you know, folders - for them I guess it's not as good. Guess what? Those people are by no means the majority. Meanwhile real users do wacky stuff like put question marks in file names, so you really don't want to overload metacharacters with special meanings if you can avoid it.
I don't know, I can't guess. Please show me hard statistics on which is more popular. And no I don't mean bogus distro comparisons which conveniently ignore Fedora (how many times have I seen that now?). I mean hard, solid statistics.
I think you can't give me any because there are none. Now, anecdotal evidence we can chuck around all day. I know more people using GNOME than KDE. Not a lot more, but it's definitely more. I'm sure the reverse is true for you
When that happens you should report a bug and attach the misdetected file to it, so the developers can figure out what went wrong. For cpp files there should probably be no MIME sniffing at all, as I can't think of a sensible way to figure out that something is C++ just by looking at it (short of trying to parse it).
When I said "major desktop distributions" I really meant "popular desktop distributions" - while the enterprise distros will get a lot more important in future right now not many people use them.
The rest of your points are pretty much right. You have a more optimistic view of the LSB than I do, but we'll see how it goes ...