That's not going to happen for some time. This GTK patch won't be going into the mainstream releases most likely, it was purely a wet-afternoon hack (it's been around for a while btw).
Proper non-sucky transparency requires support from XFree, which doesn't exist yet. Until then both this unofficial patch and the broken support KDE ships with will just be a quick hack.
Actually Stallman originally wanted to call it Alix, after a girlfriend of his at the time (who remarked that it'd be cool to have an OS kernel named after her).
Unfortunately, the guy who was working on the microkernel at the time liked the name Hurd better, because, well, I dunno. Because he was a fool, so the Hurd it became.
So where is the latest version of QuickTime for MacOS X 10.0?
Picking some random app off VersionTracker (Wine XT) I find it needs 10.2, and nothing lower will do, etc etc.
I'd note that not all their iApps are "free", they are only "free" when you upgrade the OS, which costs money. If you want to get the latest version for older copies of MacOS, you often have to pay.
Anyway, my original point was that characterising Windows as not having any free functionality updates is just plain old wrong.
Actually, so do Microsoft (issue bugs, security updates etc through windows update).
Service Packs do have bug fixes yes, but often also increased hardware support, and they sometimes add new features as well (see fast user switching in XP).
It's also worth remembering that up until recently at any rate, most large scale updates to Windows were free (many still are). DirectX, DCOM, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, MSXML, ADO - these are all free for many versions of Windows.
That policy has the added advantage for the users that they rarely have to upgrade their OS to get new apps, in contrast to the situation on MacOS X.
You have to be smoking something. The FreeType team had to spend literally years working on an autohinter because Apple would not waive the patent on TrueType bytecode hinting. This is despite using practically the entirety of XFree as an OS level feature to sell more of their kit.
There have already been features that people wanted to implement in Gnome at least, but were scared off by Apples patents. They know all about this, but choose not to budge.
The fact is that Apple would be massively worse than Microsoft were their positions reversed. Say what you like about Microsoft but they have zero history of patent or lawsuit abuse.
How does this document have any credibility left when Apple seem stuck in a cycle of 1) violate our own rules, 2) change them to suit, 3) goto 1
The least you could expect is that after having published these guidelines, they'd try and stick to them. If even their creator doesn't, why should anybody else?
Innovation for its own sake is a bit pointless, if nobody wants it, it's not innovation, it's just being different for the sake of it.
OK. So Microsoft are making big changes in Longhorn - cool. But will that be successful? Dunno. How many XP users do you know that switched back to the "classic" theme, that rearranged stuff to be more like how they were used to?
Of course, you can't use the excuse familiarity to stop people usign new ideas. But I see people say things like "Desktop Linux is sooooo non-innovative". Actually, there are quite a few innovations in there, it's just that most people don't know about them.
File type detection based on content, as opposed to file extensions? Strong network enabled filing systems (think kio_slaves)? Model/View/Controller based configuration systems? Automatic package installers/resolvers?
Yup, you saw them all on Linux first. But people look at the default Red Hat desktop and go "ooh look, it's kind of like Windows, these guys clearly can't innovate". Well obviously that isn't entirely fair, Red Hat deliberately change the defaults of both desktops to make them resemble each other, and the lowest common denominator they can both manage happens to resemble Windows (compare default gnome desktop to default red hat desktop for instance). But people say it anyway.
Anyway, as the basic stuff gradually gets nailed (stuff like multimedia, proper file associations, shared config etc) you'll start seeing more branching out, experimentation and so on. Right now of course all the work is focussed on making something that is a strong desktop, UI research can wait until that's sorted out.
Remember - being different for its own sake isn't innovative. It's a pain in the arse. Linux is built for people to use, not as a research lab.
First to make a PositronGTK (you'd need a better name) gets a collective round of beer!
Even better, make a PositronFS using LUFS so it's possible to just drag and drop files in and out of it (don't use kio or gnome-vfs though), with automounting etc.
Finally, integrate it with RhythmBox/XMMS/JuK/whatever.
Hopefully Neuros owners won't be stuck with the command line UI for long.
Now I just have to ponder whether I can really afford one....
For example. Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first.
Well, that's partly correct. But it's also partly because KDE kind of forces it to be there, and GNOME which doesn't had to have a similar layout.
In fact the default GNOME layout doesn't look much like anything else. It has a vaguely Mac style panel at the top and a vaguely MS style window list thingy at the bottom. You can put the window list up at the top as well if you like, in fact I know quite a few people who do that. It tends to be a bit cramped though.
Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.
*shrug* look at Gnumeric or AbiWord. The fact that OpenOffice looks like MS Office is because originally Star Division were trying to sell to business, and they believed they had to keep things exactly the same if they weren't to scare people off through retraining costs etc.
Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.
Tru dat. See GNU C extensions. I'm not convinced that those are a power play though, as all too often the Microsoft extensions seem to be.
Considering that Red Hat doesn't ship non-free software either (and I think this is true of Mandrake also), remind me why Debian is "more concerned with liberty" again? Because they have a bunch of almost-lawyers arguing over the definition of invariant clauses?
There is no "gaim2". There's Gaim 0.64, which is based on gtk2. To make it install on Mandrake 9, just do the usual routine - install its dependencies, then install Gaim itself. Compile or use packages for each, it doesn't really matter.
Too bad some people persist in believing that fairly vague things like ease of use and immaturity are the biggest problems that desktop linux has today. They are problems yes, but the biggest is, and always will be most likely, compatability.
Look, we know it's a problem but you are accusing Linux of things that can only be caused by a wierd setup or lack of knowledge. It took an entire day to compile Kopete? My machine is only a bit faster than that, and it can compile the entirety of gnome in less than a day. Something went pretty badly wrong. That's not the normal experience.
The same thing - you say "I had to upgrade Mandrake to install Gaim, Linux is so screwed". Well that is just not true, you could have installed Gaim on Mandrake 9.0 just fine, but you chose not to.
No, that guys problem was needing a higher versioned ABI than he had. Basically, if you compile on Mandrake 9.1, you will need the glibc ABI from that version of glibc - while other libraries can be sideloaded, glibc cannot be. Recompiling the app essentially "rewinds" the ABI in use.
So, old binaries will/should run fine on newer boxes, but the reverse is not true. For autopackage we are working on tools that let you compile against an older set of glibc symbol versions so that users don't have to upgrade their OS in order to get the new ABI. It's not all that hard.
Kernel development has nothing to do with this - we are talking about applications, not drivers. Also, the kernel doesn't even maintain source compatability, don't know where you got that idea from.
It got so bad recetly that i had to reinstall my mandrake 9.0 syatem with 9.1 just to use gaim
Then you don't know what you're doing. That sounds harsh, and is. It's easy to get confused by Linux software installation. There are people working on making this a lot easier, but it's not there yet. Until it does, please don't extrapolate your mistakes into "problems with Linux" which don't actually exist.
Also just try using mandrake 8.x.. hardly any precompiled packages off the web will work fo you.
That's due to the fact that developers use the latest versions. You can always compile it yourself. In fact over time with increased awareness of how to compile in a portable fashion, this problem should decline and eventually mostly disappear.
Its really sad becasue all of the resinatlling and crashing drove me to the point that i swotched to OSX so i sould use a satble desktop.
You've gotta be kidding me. OS X doesn't know the meaning of binary stability. Mac users regularly find that they have to upgrade their entire OS because application packages start requiring minor point releases of the it. The lack of any real core API sideloading makes the problem about a gazillion times worse than it is on Linux or Windows.
Let's see what you think the "major problems" are. 1. Gcc changes - s/changes/change/, which only affects C++ apps. This is a one off, and the problem disappears if you compile from source.
2. Glibc changes - glibc always preserves binary compatability. The only time things break is when the apps were broken and relying on wierd facets or bugs in glibc (postgresql springs to mind). Wine is something of a special case, in that before NPTL Linux threading was too primitive to support it, so it had to take a back route.
3. libpng changes (2 and 3 are not compatible on the same machine) - they are actually, what you mean is that major versions 2 and 3 conflict when loaded into the same process image. Recompile the application and the problem will disappear. This one is due to the quirky scoping rules of ELF, and problems like it are extremely rare.
4. people using beta perl or X11 versions to compile - then don't use their packages! Nobody forces you to use packages built by people who clearly aren't interested in compatability.
A, if not the, big problem with open source development is that it's not good at fixing usability problems
Oh what a pile of BS. Come sit in #commits on freenode for a while. The last few commits have almost all been usability related, even really small stuff like getting the use of ellipses right.
The rest of the post is just talking about OpenOffice. Yep, it has not so great usability. But OTOH neither does MS Office, I mean really the thing is riddled with problems.
You can't take ONE program, which has been open source for not very long at all, and extrapolate that to the whole world of open source code.
If you want an easy to use, HIG compliant word processor, use AbiWord 2. Most of the work done on the GTK2 frontend lately has been about HIG compliance.
It's not like it's just using Win32 like for example Winamp or Regedit would... on top of the regular stuff (GDI, Win32), it extensively uses COM/DCOM/ActiveX, and not the simple features in those either.
Well, that's quite interesting..... yes, it does use quite a lot of APIs, however after working on Wine for a bit you realise that the Win32 API is so labyrinthine that almost every app, no matter how small or obscure, will use it in a slightly different way.
In fact, Office itself isn't quite so bad compared to for instance Internet Explorer. Quite a lot of Offices stuff is kept internal for whatever reason.
If you want to see an app that REALLY uses DCOM, look at Internet Explorer or InstallShield (no kidding).
Yes, it is confusing. Most applications with a bit of work can be made to install on nearly any distro in fact.
The ruckus over Ximian Desktop was because it replaces a lot of core system packages (well, gnome/gtk packages) so must be tuned for each distribution separately. It's a bit odd that XD2 doesn't support the "Enterprise" editions of distros though.
The desktop might be polished, but they complain about a notable lack of polished apps. Essentially the author says that Evolution is about it. And, if you are going to run MS Office, what's the argument, again, for not running it under Windows?
Lower licensing costs? Easier remote administration? Freedom from vendor dependance?
The article makes it sound like if you want to use MS Office, oh well you might as well use Windows then, as if that's a tiny and insignificant thing next to the awesome power of MS Word. Not so.
VST plugins do in fact run in Ardour, via Wine. However, it generally needs to be easier to set up and have higher performance. It's covered in the FAQ, with the caveat that as a Wine developer, I'm not aware of any of the supposed work due to be completed by the end of 2003 - Wine has problems with being linked into a non-Wine process image, and it's been discussed many many times with no resolutions near in sight.
In fact, the Ardour team deal with this issue here.
Basically it boils down to the fact that (like a lot of things) while the use of external hardware sounds intuitively more sensible, it doesn't work out like that in practice.
As pointed out, virtuall all pro grade digital audio apps have appalling user interfaces. They normally try and mimic hardware, even worse. I've seen ones that spent so much CPU time on looking cool, they were limiting the number of effects you could apply!
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Proper non-sucky transparency requires support from XFree, which doesn't exist yet. Until then both this unofficial patch and the broken support KDE ships with will just be a quick hack.
Unfortunately, the guy who was working on the microkernel at the time liked the name Hurd better, because, well, I dunno. Because he was a fool, so the Hurd it became.
Picking some random app off VersionTracker (Wine XT) I find it needs 10.2, and nothing lower will do, etc etc.
I'd note that not all their iApps are "free", they are only "free" when you upgrade the OS, which costs money. If you want to get the latest version for older copies of MacOS, you often have to pay.
Anyway, my original point was that characterising Windows as not having any free functionality updates is just plain old wrong.
Service Packs do have bug fixes yes, but often also increased hardware support, and they sometimes add new features as well (see fast user switching in XP).
It's also worth remembering that up until recently at any rate, most large scale updates to Windows were free (many still are). DirectX, DCOM, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, MSXML, ADO - these are all free for many versions of Windows.
That policy has the added advantage for the users that they rarely have to upgrade their OS to get new apps, in contrast to the situation on MacOS X.
Do you guys stick your tongues out at each other too? :)
There have already been features that people wanted to implement in Gnome at least, but were scared off by Apples patents. They know all about this, but choose not to budge.
The fact is that Apple would be massively worse than Microsoft were their positions reversed. Say what you like about Microsoft but they have zero history of patent or lawsuit abuse.
How does this document have any credibility left when Apple seem stuck in a cycle of 1) violate our own rules, 2) change them to suit, 3) goto 1
The least you could expect is that after having published these guidelines, they'd try and stick to them. If even their creator doesn't, why should anybody else?
OK. So Microsoft are making big changes in Longhorn - cool. But will that be successful? Dunno. How many XP users do you know that switched back to the "classic" theme, that rearranged stuff to be more like how they were used to?
Of course, you can't use the excuse familiarity to stop people usign new ideas. But I see people say things like "Desktop Linux is sooooo non-innovative". Actually, there are quite a few innovations in there, it's just that most people don't know about them.
File type detection based on content, as opposed to file extensions? Strong network enabled filing systems (think kio_slaves)? Model/View/Controller based configuration systems? Automatic package installers/resolvers?
Yup, you saw them all on Linux first. But people look at the default Red Hat desktop and go "ooh look, it's kind of like Windows, these guys clearly can't innovate". Well obviously that isn't entirely fair, Red Hat deliberately change the defaults of both desktops to make them resemble each other, and the lowest common denominator they can both manage happens to resemble Windows (compare default gnome desktop to default red hat desktop for instance). But people say it anyway.
Anyway, as the basic stuff gradually gets nailed (stuff like multimedia, proper file associations, shared config etc) you'll start seeing more branching out, experimentation and so on. Right now of course all the work is focussed on making something that is a strong desktop, UI research can wait until that's sorted out.
Remember - being different for its own sake isn't innovative. It's a pain in the arse. Linux is built for people to use, not as a research lab.
Even better, make a PositronFS using LUFS so it's possible to just drag and drop files in and out of it (don't use kio or gnome-vfs though), with automounting etc.
Finally, integrate it with RhythmBox/XMMS/JuK/whatever. Hopefully Neuros owners won't be stuck with the command line UI for long.
Now I just have to ponder whether I can really afford one....
Well, that's partly correct. But it's also partly because KDE kind of forces it to be there, and GNOME which doesn't had to have a similar layout.
In fact the default GNOME layout doesn't look much like anything else. It has a vaguely Mac style panel at the top and a vaguely MS style window list thingy at the bottom. You can put the window list up at the top as well if you like, in fact I know quite a few people who do that. It tends to be a bit cramped though.
Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.
*shrug* look at Gnumeric or AbiWord. The fact that OpenOffice looks like MS Office is because originally Star Division were trying to sell to business, and they believed they had to keep things exactly the same if they weren't to scare people off through retraining costs etc.
Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.
Tru dat. See GNU C extensions. I'm not convinced that those are a power play though, as all too often the Microsoft extensions seem to be.
True, but the very fact that they believe they'd lose that contract for being "disloyal" says a lot about how Microsoft treat their suppliers.
Considering that Red Hat doesn't ship non-free software either (and I think this is true of Mandrake also), remind me why Debian is "more concerned with liberty" again? Because they have a bunch of almost-lawyers arguing over the definition of invariant clauses?
The main problems with using Debian as a reference distro are:
a) Not as popular as some other distros (which is not btw just because the clueless masses are stupid, give people some credit).
b) They don't have any real problem breaking binary compat with other distros, see their decision over the libdb mess.
c) The LSB already does it, and is widely accepted, has test cases etc.
There is no "gaim2". There's Gaim 0.64, which is based on gtk2. To make it install on Mandrake 9, just do the usual routine - install its dependencies, then install Gaim itself. Compile or use packages for each, it doesn't really matter.
Too bad some people persist in believing that fairly vague things like ease of use and immaturity are the biggest problems that desktop linux has today. They are problems yes, but the biggest is, and always will be most likely, compatability.
The same thing - you say "I had to upgrade Mandrake to install Gaim, Linux is so screwed". Well that is just not true, you could have installed Gaim on Mandrake 9.0 just fine, but you chose not to.
So, old binaries will/should run fine on newer boxes, but the reverse is not true. For autopackage we are working on tools that let you compile against an older set of glibc symbol versions so that users don't have to upgrade their OS in order to get the new ABI. It's not all that hard.
Kernel development has nothing to do with this - we are talking about applications, not drivers. Also, the kernel doesn't even maintain source compatability, don't know where you got that idea from.
It got so bad recetly that i had to reinstall my mandrake 9.0 syatem with 9.1 just to use gaim
Then you don't know what you're doing. That sounds harsh, and is. It's easy to get confused by Linux software installation. There are people working on making this a lot easier, but it's not there yet. Until it does, please don't extrapolate your mistakes into "problems with Linux" which don't actually exist.
Also just try using mandrake 8.x .. hardly any precompiled packages off the web will work fo you.
That's due to the fact that developers use the latest versions. You can always compile it yourself. In fact over time with increased awareness of how to compile in a portable fashion, this problem should decline and eventually mostly disappear.
Its really sad becasue all of the resinatlling and crashing drove me to the point that i swotched to OSX so i sould use a satble desktop.
You've gotta be kidding me. OS X doesn't know the meaning of binary stability. Mac users regularly find that they have to upgrade their entire OS because application packages start requiring minor point releases of the it. The lack of any real core API sideloading makes the problem about a gazillion times worse than it is on Linux or Windows.
Let's see what you think the "major problems" are.
1. Gcc changes - s/changes/change/, which only affects C++ apps. This is a one off, and the problem disappears if you compile from source.
2. Glibc changes - glibc always preserves binary compatability. The only time things break is when the apps were broken and relying on wierd facets or bugs in glibc (postgresql springs to mind). Wine is something of a special case, in that before NPTL Linux threading was too primitive to support it, so it had to take a back route.
3. libpng changes (2 and 3 are not compatible on the same machine) - they are actually, what you mean is that major versions 2 and 3 conflict when loaded into the same process image. Recompile the application and the problem will disappear. This one is due to the quirky scoping rules of ELF, and problems like it are extremely rare.
4. people using beta perl or X11 versions to compile - then don't use their packages! Nobody forces you to use packages built by people who clearly aren't interested in compatability.
Oh what a pile of BS. Come sit in #commits on freenode for a while. The last few commits have almost all been usability related, even really small stuff like getting the use of ellipses right.
The rest of the post is just talking about OpenOffice. Yep, it has not so great usability. But OTOH neither does MS Office, I mean really the thing is riddled with problems.
You can't take ONE program, which has been open source for not very long at all, and extrapolate that to the whole world of open source code.
If you want an easy to use, HIG compliant word processor, use AbiWord 2. Most of the work done on the GTK2 frontend lately has been about HIG compliance.
Well, that's quite interesting..... yes, it does use quite a lot of APIs, however after working on Wine for a bit you realise that the Win32 API is so labyrinthine that almost every app, no matter how small or obscure, will use it in a slightly different way.
In fact, Office itself isn't quite so bad compared to for instance Internet Explorer. Quite a lot of Offices stuff is kept internal for whatever reason.
If you want to see an app that REALLY uses DCOM, look at Internet Explorer or InstallShield (no kidding).
The ruckus over Ximian Desktop was because it replaces a lot of core system packages (well, gnome/gtk packages) so must be tuned for each distribution separately. It's a bit odd that XD2 doesn't support the "Enterprise" editions of distros though.
Lower licensing costs? Easier remote administration? Freedom from vendor dependance?
The article makes it sound like if you want to use MS Office, oh well you might as well use Windows then, as if that's a tiny and insignificant thing next to the awesome power of MS Word. Not so.
VST plugins do in fact run in Ardour, via Wine. However, it generally needs to be easier to set up and have higher performance. It's covered in the FAQ, with the caveat that as a Wine developer, I'm not aware of any of the supposed work due to be completed by the end of 2003 - Wine has problems with being linked into a non-Wine process image, and it's been discussed many many times with no resolutions near in sight.
Basically it boils down to the fact that (like a lot of things) while the use of external hardware sounds intuitively more sensible, it doesn't work out like that in practice.
As pointed out, virtuall all pro grade digital audio apps have appalling user interfaces. They normally try and mimic hardware, even worse. I've seen ones that spent so much CPU time on looking cool, they were limiting the number of effects you could apply!