but if the content is locked out of the Mac for that reason, do I really want it anyway?
Who knows, but I expect some people will try and figure out a way around it anyway. Look at how much effort has been put into cracking QuickTime in order to allow Linux users to watch.... adverts? Trailors and Apple ads basically. So I guess the answer is whether people want content or not isn't really related to the technology used.
I know someone mentionned the excellent hardware detection found in Knoppix, but I'd like to know why other distributions don't have this level of simplicity?
Umm, well they do mostly. Try installing Redhat 8 or Suse 8 for instance. It's all automatic. I didn't have to tell it anything about my hardware as far as I remember. I think you've been trying the wrong distros.
Re:doubts about future of wine
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Fun With Wine
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· Score: 2
That's not true at all, Wine has loads of NT calls, in fact if you look you'll see ntkernel.dll right there in the Wine installation. Wine automatically provides the right calls to the application based on what they need.
Re:Wonderful.
on
Fun With Wine
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hmm, odd. Make sure Wine is set to be emulating Windows 98 not 95
Re:Why run the whole thing under x86?
on
Fun With Wine
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· Score: 2
Er, because 1) it's slow as hell, and 2) you have to pay for Windows?
I see a lot of posts saying how Wine never works for them etc, how Wine will never catch up with Microsoft and so on. I'd like to dispel a few myths I see.
The first one is that Wine is hard to make work. Well, it's like Linux you know, if you go get a release from WineHQ it's like getting Debian or Gentoo, great for power users but it requires quite a lot of effort to make it work well. It's all there though, you can sit down and beat WineHQ releases into running Office or IE. It just takes effort and skill.
For the rest of us, companies like CodeWeavers are for Wine what RedHat is for Linux. They add bits, integrate it nicely, give you support. As a concrete example of what they add, they have a nice app (officesetup) which presents you with a list of apps that are installed a la "Add/Remove programs". If you use this program to install an app as opposed to running the setup.exe directly, icons will be added to your menus and desktop, and file associations will be automatically setup for you. Wine doesn't have this (yet).
Another thing is that WineHQ has no code for automatically performing a "reboot". Stuff like IE needs some actions to be performed when you reboot the machine (the RunOnce sections). WineHQ releases don't have any code for this, so you'd have to manually read the registry entries and files and do it yourself, hence the fact that most people fail.
WineHQ will get this code. One of the targets for Wine 1.0 is that it's easy to use. For now though, you need to buy CrossOver Office for the best overall Wine experience. It's unfortunate that you have to buy a separate product for games, but that's one of the perils of BSD licensing, it allows forks like that (fyi wine is now lgpl).
Another myth is that wine can never catch up with Microsoft. That actually isn't true, if anything we're moving as fast as, if not faster than Microsoft right now. There are a few large projects left and then Wine basically has a mostly complete implementation of the Windows APIs. Such projects include a richedit control (effectively a mini word processor), RPC (being worked on now), DirectX (an lgpl implementation, parts are available but d3d is only like 10% done), a WinHelp app and so on. After that, it's pure bugfixing all the way.
So what are Microsoft doing? Well they're working on.NET of course, the Windows APIs are horrible and.NET is a way of making them easier to use. But we have that covered as well with Mono, in fact for System.Windows.Forms Mono is using the Wine controls library. Mono is moving at an astonishing pace, it has lots of volunteers working on it. But it needs more developers as always (wine that is), and one problem is that getting Wine working well enough to hack on it is hard. Catch 22 in a way. Don't be put off though. Wine is cool, and remarkably advanced.
Wine is not usable on a Mac, and probably won't be for a very very long time. I believe that it was a lot of work just to get Winelib working on Linux PPC (ie so you can recompile windows apps if you have the source on linux/ppc), mainly because Wine does funky stuff with assembler, various low level things and so on. If you're on a Mac, you'll have to use Virtual PC to run Windows apps, and buy a copy of Windows.
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough
on
Fun With Wine
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· Score: 3, Informative
Anyone here work on WineHQ and can comment on this?
Actually the WineHQ site is being redesigned at the moment (I'm not a major contributor but am on the lists).
The best tip for using wine is simply - buy it. WineHQ wine hasn't had much effort put into end user usability, it's much like the raw Linux kernel, it needs wrapping up with lots of utilities and quite a few "hack patches" for it to do everything the users demand. I have 2 installations of Wine on my machine, CrossOver and Wine CVS. Guess which works better.
Often, a few little things can make a program work better if it doesn't work properly with a standard CodeWeavers install. For instance: WinZip works fine until you open a zip with a message in it. Why? Because it's missing a RichEdit control (wine has no replacement for it yet). You could fiddle with config files and make it use a native riched40.dll, but an easier way is to google for it, find allerasoft.com and download it from there. Run the RichEdit update.exe in Wine, and now you have the control and WinZip works perfectly.
The Apps DB is the best place to look for tips like this, each app that is known about in the database has a score and a comments section for users to swap tips.
MS Office and IE both run fine in Wine. IE of course only runs if you have an existing Windows install.
Untrue also:) Jeez, looks like half of slashdot hasn't actually used Wine. I have IE6 running at work just fine, although I do have a dual boot system CrossOver isn't using anything from my XP installation. You just need to get the installer and install it as normal. Doesn't work perfectly, but it's good enough for web development which is all I need it for.
Re:Why do you guys hate Xbox so much?
on
Xbox Live Goes Online
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· Score: 2, Redundant
Well, I for one am a bit scared of the possibility of Microsoft dominating yet another market which currently has healthy competition and quite a bit of innovation in it.
History has shown time and time again that when Microsoft go for a market, they don't tend to be happy with just being a competitor, they try their hardest to own it, then to kill the competition, then if somehow some competition gets through to stop you, the customer, from using it.
I'm not a big console user, but I kind of hope that Microsoft aren't too successful, because if they stranged another market, especially one as vibrant as the console market, it'd be a reall shame.
Try reposting those comments, but where you wrote X write GDI.
The purpose of X is to allow you to draw things to the screen and manage windows (drawing viewports). X is not a GUI, in the same way that the GDI is not a GUI, and neither is Display Postscript. Ditto for the Linux framebuffer. Enforcing UI standards is the job of the toolkit. The fact that we have 2 major widget toolkits is kind of unfortunate, but actually other operating systems have this issue as well.
For instance Microsoft Encarta has its own widget toolkit. So does MS Office. On the Mac side, the whole brushed metal look that appeared a couple of versions in is another good example - did Display Postscript enforce the beige stripes? Of course not, that wasn't its job.
X is a part of that work and brings with it some serious benefit. Again, I ask: "Why trash all of that, just so we can start all over again with a simpler and more limited system?"
You're right partially, X is here to stay for a long time yet. However, I certainly think what these guys are doing is cool, and I'm happy to see that some people are thinking about what comes after X. I mean, surely you don't think that X is perfection itself do you? That it cannot be improved upon? For now, we're happy with X I agree, it's a fine graphics engine, but maybe in the future people like Micah will give us something better.
Say what you will about Windows but at least it's a standard to work against. With Linux it seems there always some pertpetual tinkering...enough already! Enough tool building, now make some apps.
Windows? A standard? So I take it you missed the whole.NET thing (totally revamping win32 development from the ground up), the Longhorn Storage+ project (scrap ntfs, replace with database) etc etc. The very nature of open source is that it's constantly experimenting, trying to find new ways of doing things. If you think only open source does research, then you need to check out the Microsoft UI Research website.
Actually the missing parts of Wine are now mostly common controls or desktop components. For debugging low level stuff, Wine is invaluable as it can show you exactly what API calls a program is making, with parameters, filtered according to type.
If you use the #linuxhelp and #linpeople chat rooms on freenode and get flamed, let me know, my email address is in my user profile. I give support there regularly and only rarely see people get flamed, and when there is flamage it's invariably because those people were themselves being assholes. Note: a few of the more experienced people are happy to help newbies, BUT you have to appreciate that they can be busy so you might receive terse answers, ie
"Er, hi, I'm a newbiew, and I was wondering if anybody knew the answer to my question"
is a bad way to start... but
"How do I extract a.tar.gz file?"
"tar xzvf foo.tar.gz"
Actually on SuSE (and a few others) if it detects you have the nVidia drivers it'll go and download the correct RPM and install it for you automatically. On Redhat you just install the RPMS from their site and use the graphical display config tool to pick "nvidia" from the dropdown, ok, so it's not as automatic as SuSE but no text files are involved.
Yeah, about the interface consistancy thing, if you try RedHat 8 they've done a lot of good work there with BlueCurve for instance. It's too bad there isn't a theming spec so things like BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik are easier to create, but that'll be addressed with time.
The ivory tower thing: this has to be one of the biggest misunderstandings around. Frequently Linux users (especially in tech support channels) are painted as arrogant and unwilling to help. In my experience (and I give a lot of support on #linuxhelp) this simply isn't true. Usually, when somebody comes to me and says "I got flamed by arrogant geeks in IRC" it turns out they caused the flameage in the first place. A few things that can be done to avoid this (and please don't get me wrong, i'm not suggesting your colleagues did these things, but it's a common problem):
Getting frustrated if your problem isn't solved straight away. I've seen people who start getting angry because after a few mins and a couple of repeats, they still get no answer. Typically if you don't get an answer, it's because nobody who knows one is paying attention to IRC at the moment. It's a common misconception that we all spend our time with our eyes glued to IRC.
Getting frustrated if the solution to your problem seems "too hard". You made a good point about how sometimes Linux users weren't interested in helping you if you weren't a programmer - it can certainly seem this way, but it's not true. More often, there is only an easy solution to the problem if you are a programmer, and because of that users who stamp their feet and say "Why is there no GUI for this like Windows, Linux sucks!" don't get a good response, for obvious reasons
RTFM! No really, please do. It's such a common response that it's become a cliche, but all too often somebody could have found their answer by looking on Google. We're all guilty of it to some extent, sometimes of course you simply need to know the correct phrase or command (and i don't see people getting flamed when this is the case) but sometimes the answer to a problem can be found just by looking for it, as opposed to thinking "it's easier to ask somebody". Note that when you're getting started with Linux, you *will* have to ask questions that could have been found out by researching through the docs, but are easier to simply ask people. I did that a lot, and as long as you're happy with a "man sed" type answer, you can normally get a lot of help from IRC. Sometimes you just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Complaining doesn't get you anywhere. I dunno why, I guess because people are used to phoning commercial tech support and insulting the people on the other end to cool off, but surprise surprise telling people their stuff sucks because you don't want to/can't invest the effort to learn it gets you flamed. In that case, you're the one being arrogant, not them. What's in front of you is the software, nothing is hidden from you. We'd all like for everything to be perfectly easy, but sometimes it isn't, and people who can't seem to accept that are the biggest cause of flamage on IRC.
I hope that little guide helps. Asking experiencied Linux users is one of the fastest ways of getting up to speed, but be careful not to abuse that facility, otherwise you will get burned.
You don't have to be a CLI geek to make good use of X
Right on! X is fantastic for tech support too, because it lets you temporarily take control of somebodies machine without interrupting their work, and without needing to setup any passwords. Several times now on IRC somebody has had a problem but hasn't been proficient enough with Linux to solve it. OK, I say, open up a terminal window and type this:
$ export DISPLAY=xxxxx.kicks-ass.net:0 $ xterm &
(that isn't my real dyndns address btw). Within a second or two an xterm appears, and even when traversing the planet xterms have very low latency. I can proceed to use the CLI or launch any graphical apps I need with no further work. When I've solved the problem, just close the xterm.
Tech support on Windows on the other hand is awful. I've actually seen my father just sit on his ass in the office because his machine was being remotely controlled (having some software installed on it) by IT, and he couldn't do anything while they were at it (single desktop system). X is fantastic, and we should market it as such, instead of always being on the defensive.
SVG is getting wide adoption in mapping technologies. I used it to implement a selectable, zoomable map at work a few weeks ago. The XML base of it made it a lot easier than working with Flash would have been.
As for why X apps are more prone to failure than vi, well yeah, they are much more complex than vi is. And besides, if you have a gnome app (take rhythmbox) that has 40+ shared lib dependancies, that's actually no different to Windows Media player. It links against the graphics layer (X/GDI), a widget toolkit (GTK+/comctl32), a media framework (directshow/gstreamer) and so on and so forth. You're right that more libs increases the chance of bugs, but that's just part of the nature of software development.
I remain to be convinced that writing apps for X is any harder or more error prone than for Windows. X and GDI are both graphics layers at the end of the day, and if anything the neutral stance of X forces better interface design (the extensions have to be portable between x servers). As to why other operating systems didn't use X: QNX is a realtime OS, doesn't need it, BeOS was written back before XFree was any good, and they didn't have the resources to make a decent X server, and MacOS X doesn't use it because it (at the time) didn't support enough eyecandy, also I suspect because it'd have made it easier to port Mac apps to Linux.
Generally, open-source projects charge forward with new features and new enhancements while leaving many critical flaws for later. In this respect, they're the same as what Microsoft does - get the software out the door, make sure it's pretty, and try to get some good press. The truth is often far different.
That's a big generalization. Perhaps a few of the smaller, less professional projects do that, but I know in mine we focus on fixing bugs first, then adding features. KDE/GNOME etc have formal policies on this stuff. Obviously if it's just joe-hackers-random-mp3-player then this might be true. And besides, like I said, if a bug is annoying enough somebody will fix it.
No matter how fast they make the drivers, no matter how much they optimize it - a client-server based desktop environment is ALWAYS going to be slower than a non-c/s solution
First mistake. Measured statistics have shown that X is actually faster at some operatons (like line drawing etc) than the GDI on Windows. X is fast. Some drivers are not fast. If you have speed problems with X that are not purely psychology (i think it is slow, therefore it feels slow) then there's a bug somewhere that should be fixed with a driver/toolkit/application.
The second biggest problem I have with Linux is stability. Linux itself is a rock, but I have not used a single X app that hasn't crashed at least once. It's a dismal record
Uhh, well, umm, dunno what to say to that. I guess no Microsoft app ever crashes either? Linux is the OS and is pretty stable. The stability of an OS isn't related to the stability of the apps (snide jokes about 98/macos 9 aside), anybody can write a buggy app. So far most OS level software I've used on Linux has been solid. Some pure userlevel apps, ie chat apps etc sometimes crash but most are pretty good. If you're expecting every piece of software written for Linux to be uncrashable then you'll never be happy with it, so I guess you'll have to stick with Windows.
There's no accountability for bugs, so they're only fixed when someone feels like it.
And if a bug is annoying enough, somebody tends to feel like fixing it. This sounds more like a "my favourite bug/feature isn't fixed yet" rant.
I want Linux to succeed. I really do. I don't see how it's ever going to do it relying on X, and I don't see the desktop environments coming anywhere near more polished corporate-funded alternatives.
What is it with the mindless X bashing? Linux has already "succeeded" in many areas, and is busy succeeding on the desktop too. I don't understand what you mean by these comments about the desktop environments, to me GNOME2 feels pretty polished, albiet a tad light in features. X has nothing to do with polish OK, and FYI both KDE and GNOME have oodles of corporate funding. So your point is kind of invalid.
Ditch X and come up with a really solid desktop environment that doesn't require it, and I'll be back in a heartbeat.
Ditch X and replace it with what?? A non network transparent windowing system? That would be a major step backwards and I promise you, you wouldn't notice any speed difference (try installing directfb, something that you seemingly want, and see for yourself).
How much do you think Microsoft lost on Internet Explorer through its first three or four versions?
On the first three or four versions??? Internet Explorer has never made a profit, only massive massive losses. Why? Because some starry eyed futurist over at Redmond HQ got scared that maybe oneday the web would become a kickass way of building applications. They were terrified that somehow, magically, the dire NS4 codebase would turn into an easier way to write apps than Windows was.
How much did that end up costing Netscape?
It cost them everything.
Rather amusingly, Microsoft made it a self fulfilling prophecy, by destroying Netscape the Mozilla project was born, and what have the Mozilla team done? Why, only gone and built a kickass applications platform based on web technologies! The irony is too great really, if they'd just left Netscape along the old NS4 codebase would never have been scrapped in the way it was, and today we wouldn't have XUL/XBL/RDF Templates and the rest.
Of course, even taking the dynamics of the bubble into consideration, Sony has much deeper pockets than Netscape ever did...
Yes, but these guys are playing with hardware, not software, and hardware is far more expensive than software - it's a similar situation but on a larger scale.
I just don't think that purposefully loses should count like a standard lost. They know that this $177m they drop now, it's an expense. Not a loss. They will get it back.....
Correction, they think they will get it back. By this definition, no dotcom ever made a loss, because they all expected they were going to get it back.
Nah, they'd just give away free burgers to schoolkids and students, but sprinkle them liberally with crack, uh, I mean DirectPlay Food Center Edition(tm).
The government allowing Microsoft to deduct losses now is an attempt to help Microsoft to become profitable in the future. Profitable in the future means revenues to the government. It doesn't do the government any good if they kill companies in the start-up phases before they get a chance to produce taxes.
That's right in a general sense, but as Microsoft doesn't pay any income tax, for reasons that can be found elsewhere so I won't go into here, the US government arguably loses money due to Microsoft as they spend tax dollars on Windows and Office licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows, but I expect some people will try and figure out a way around it anyway. Look at how much effort has been put into cracking QuickTime in order to allow Linux users to watch .... adverts? Trailors and Apple ads basically. So I guess the answer is whether people want content or not isn't really related to the technology used.
Umm, well they do mostly. Try installing Redhat 8 or Suse 8 for instance. It's all automatic. I didn't have to tell it anything about my hardware as far as I remember. I think you've been trying the wrong distros.
That's not true at all, Wine has loads of NT calls, in fact if you look you'll see ntkernel.dll right there in the Wine installation. Wine automatically provides the right calls to the application based on what they need.
Hmm, odd. Make sure Wine is set to be emulating Windows 98 not 95
Er, because 1) it's slow as hell, and 2) you have to pay for Windows?
The first one is that Wine is hard to make work. Well, it's like Linux you know, if you go get a release from WineHQ it's like getting Debian or Gentoo, great for power users but it requires quite a lot of effort to make it work well. It's all there though, you can sit down and beat WineHQ releases into running Office or IE. It just takes effort and skill.
For the rest of us, companies like CodeWeavers are for Wine what RedHat is for Linux. They add bits, integrate it nicely, give you support. As a concrete example of what they add, they have a nice app (officesetup) which presents you with a list of apps that are installed a la "Add/Remove programs". If you use this program to install an app as opposed to running the setup.exe directly, icons will be added to your menus and desktop, and file associations will be automatically setup for you. Wine doesn't have this (yet).
Another thing is that WineHQ has no code for automatically performing a "reboot". Stuff like IE needs some actions to be performed when you reboot the machine (the RunOnce sections). WineHQ releases don't have any code for this, so you'd have to manually read the registry entries and files and do it yourself, hence the fact that most people fail.
WineHQ will get this code. One of the targets for Wine 1.0 is that it's easy to use. For now though, you need to buy CrossOver Office for the best overall Wine experience. It's unfortunate that you have to buy a separate product for games, but that's one of the perils of BSD licensing, it allows forks like that (fyi wine is now lgpl).
Another myth is that wine can never catch up with Microsoft. That actually isn't true, if anything we're moving as fast as, if not faster than Microsoft right now. There are a few large projects left and then Wine basically has a mostly complete implementation of the Windows APIs. Such projects include a richedit control (effectively a mini word processor), RPC (being worked on now), DirectX (an lgpl implementation, parts are available but d3d is only like 10% done), a WinHelp app and so on. After that, it's pure bugfixing all the way.
So what are Microsoft doing? Well they're working on .NET of course, the Windows APIs are horrible and .NET is a way of making them easier to use. But we have that covered as well with Mono, in fact for System.Windows.Forms Mono is using the Wine controls library. Mono is moving at an astonishing pace, it has lots of volunteers working on it. But it needs more developers as always (wine that is), and one problem is that getting Wine working well enough to hack on it is hard. Catch 22 in a way. Don't be put off though. Wine is cool, and remarkably advanced.
Wine is not usable on a Mac, and probably won't be for a very very long time. I believe that it was a lot of work just to get Winelib working on Linux PPC (ie so you can recompile windows apps if you have the source on linux/ppc), mainly because Wine does funky stuff with assembler, various low level things and so on. If you're on a Mac, you'll have to use Virtual PC to run Windows apps, and buy a copy of Windows.
Actually the WineHQ site is being redesigned at the moment (I'm not a major contributor but am on the lists).
The best tip for using wine is simply - buy it. WineHQ wine hasn't had much effort put into end user usability, it's much like the raw Linux kernel, it needs wrapping up with lots of utilities and quite a few "hack patches" for it to do everything the users demand. I have 2 installations of Wine on my machine, CrossOver and Wine CVS. Guess which works better.
Often, a few little things can make a program work better if it doesn't work properly with a standard CodeWeavers install. For instance: WinZip works fine until you open a zip with a message in it. Why? Because it's missing a RichEdit control (wine has no replacement for it yet). You could fiddle with config files and make it use a native riched40.dll, but an easier way is to google for it, find allerasoft.com and download it from there. Run the RichEdit update .exe in Wine, and now you have the control and WinZip works perfectly.
The Apps DB is the best place to look for tips like this, each app that is known about in the database has a score and a comments section for users to swap tips.
Untrue also :) Jeez, looks like half of slashdot hasn't actually used Wine. I have IE6 running at work just fine, although I do have a dual boot system CrossOver isn't using anything from my XP installation. You just need to get the installer and install it as normal. Doesn't work perfectly, but it's good enough for web development which is all I need it for.
History has shown time and time again that when Microsoft go for a market, they don't tend to be happy with just being a competitor, they try their hardest to own it, then to kill the competition, then if somehow some competition gets through to stop you, the customer, from using it.
I'm not a big console user, but I kind of hope that Microsoft aren't too successful, because if they stranged another market, especially one as vibrant as the console market, it'd be a reall shame.
The purpose of X is to allow you to draw things to the screen and manage windows (drawing viewports). X is not a GUI, in the same way that the GDI is not a GUI, and neither is Display Postscript. Ditto for the Linux framebuffer. Enforcing UI standards is the job of the toolkit. The fact that we have 2 major widget toolkits is kind of unfortunate, but actually other operating systems have this issue as well.
For instance Microsoft Encarta has its own widget toolkit. So does MS Office. On the Mac side, the whole brushed metal look that appeared a couple of versions in is another good example - did Display Postscript enforce the beige stripes? Of course not, that wasn't its job.
You're right partially, X is here to stay for a long time yet. However, I certainly think what these guys are doing is cool, and I'm happy to see that some people are thinking about what comes after X. I mean, surely you don't think that X is perfection itself do you? That it cannot be improved upon? For now, we're happy with X I agree, it's a fine graphics engine, but maybe in the future people like Micah will give us something better.
Windows? A standard? So I take it you missed the whole .NET thing (totally revamping win32 development from the ground up), the Longhorn Storage+ project (scrap ntfs, replace with database) etc etc. The very nature of open source is that it's constantly experimenting, trying to find new ways of doing things. If you think only open source does research, then you need to check out the Microsoft UI Research website.
Actually the missing parts of Wine are now mostly common controls or desktop components. For debugging low level stuff, Wine is invaluable as it can show you exactly what API calls a program is making, with parameters, filtered according to type.
"Er, hi, I'm a newbiew, and I was wondering if anybody knew the answer to my question"
is a bad way to start... but
"How do I extract a .tar.gz file?"
"tar xzvf foo.tar.gz"
is clearly what you're looking for.
Actually on SuSE (and a few others) if it detects you have the nVidia drivers it'll go and download the correct RPM and install it for you automatically. On Redhat you just install the RPMS from their site and use the graphical display config tool to pick "nvidia" from the dropdown, ok, so it's not as automatic as SuSE but no text files are involved.
The ivory tower thing: this has to be one of the biggest misunderstandings around. Frequently Linux users (especially in tech support channels) are painted as arrogant and unwilling to help. In my experience (and I give a lot of support on #linuxhelp) this simply isn't true. Usually, when somebody comes to me and says "I got flamed by arrogant geeks in IRC" it turns out they caused the flameage in the first place. A few things that can be done to avoid this (and please don't get me wrong, i'm not suggesting your colleagues did these things, but it's a common problem) :
I hope that little guide helps. Asking experiencied Linux users is one of the fastest ways of getting up to speed, but be careful not to abuse that facility, otherwise you will get burned.
Right on! X is fantastic for tech support too, because it lets you temporarily take control of somebodies machine without interrupting their work, and without needing to setup any passwords. Several times now on IRC somebody has had a problem but hasn't been proficient enough with Linux to solve it. OK, I say, open up a terminal window and type this:
(that isn't my real dyndns address btw). Within a second or two an xterm appears, and even when traversing the planet xterms have very low latency. I can proceed to use the CLI or launch any graphical apps I need with no further work. When I've solved the problem, just close the xterm.
Tech support on Windows on the other hand is awful. I've actually seen my father just sit on his ass in the office because his machine was being remotely controlled (having some software installed on it) by IT, and he couldn't do anything while they were at it (single desktop system). X is fantastic, and we should market it as such, instead of always being on the defensive.
SVG is getting wide adoption in mapping technologies. I used it to implement a selectable, zoomable map at work a few weeks ago. The XML base of it made it a lot easier than working with Flash would have been.
I remain to be convinced that writing apps for X is any harder or more error prone than for Windows. X and GDI are both graphics layers at the end of the day, and if anything the neutral stance of X forces better interface design (the extensions have to be portable between x servers). As to why other operating systems didn't use X: QNX is a realtime OS, doesn't need it, BeOS was written back before XFree was any good, and they didn't have the resources to make a decent X server, and MacOS X doesn't use it because it (at the time) didn't support enough eyecandy, also I suspect because it'd have made it easier to port Mac apps to Linux.
Generally, open-source projects charge forward with new features and new enhancements while leaving many critical flaws for later. In this respect, they're the same as what Microsoft does - get the software out the door, make sure it's pretty, and try to get some good press. The truth is often far different.
That's a big generalization. Perhaps a few of the smaller, less professional projects do that, but I know in mine we focus on fixing bugs first, then adding features. KDE/GNOME etc have formal policies on this stuff. Obviously if it's just joe-hackers-random-mp3-player then this might be true. And besides, like I said, if a bug is annoying enough somebody will fix it.
First mistake. Measured statistics have shown that X is actually faster at some operatons (like line drawing etc) than the GDI on Windows. X is fast. Some drivers are not fast. If you have speed problems with X that are not purely psychology (i think it is slow, therefore it feels slow) then there's a bug somewhere that should be fixed with a driver/toolkit/application.
The second biggest problem I have with Linux is stability. Linux itself is a rock, but I have not used a single X app that hasn't crashed at least once. It's a dismal record
Uhh, well, umm, dunno what to say to that. I guess no Microsoft app ever crashes either? Linux is the OS and is pretty stable. The stability of an OS isn't related to the stability of the apps (snide jokes about 98/macos 9 aside), anybody can write a buggy app. So far most OS level software I've used on Linux has been solid. Some pure userlevel apps, ie chat apps etc sometimes crash but most are pretty good. If you're expecting every piece of software written for Linux to be uncrashable then you'll never be happy with it, so I guess you'll have to stick with Windows.
There's no accountability for bugs, so they're only fixed when someone feels like it.
And if a bug is annoying enough, somebody tends to feel like fixing it. This sounds more like a "my favourite bug/feature isn't fixed yet" rant.
I want Linux to succeed. I really do. I don't see how it's ever going to do it relying on X, and I don't see the desktop environments coming anywhere near more polished corporate-funded alternatives.
What is it with the mindless X bashing? Linux has already "succeeded" in many areas, and is busy succeeding on the desktop too. I don't understand what you mean by these comments about the desktop environments, to me GNOME2 feels pretty polished, albiet a tad light in features. X has nothing to do with polish OK, and FYI both KDE and GNOME have oodles of corporate funding. So your point is kind of invalid.
Ditch X and come up with a really solid desktop environment that doesn't require it, and I'll be back in a heartbeat.
Ditch X and replace it with what?? A non network transparent windowing system? That would be a major step backwards and I promise you, you wouldn't notice any speed difference (try installing directfb, something that you seemingly want, and see for yourself).
On the first three or four versions??? Internet Explorer has never made a profit, only massive massive losses. Why? Because some starry eyed futurist over at Redmond HQ got scared that maybe oneday the web would become a kickass way of building applications. They were terrified that somehow, magically, the dire NS4 codebase would turn into an easier way to write apps than Windows was.
How much did that end up costing Netscape?
It cost them everything.
Rather amusingly, Microsoft made it a self fulfilling prophecy, by destroying Netscape the Mozilla project was born, and what have the Mozilla team done? Why, only gone and built a kickass applications platform based on web technologies! The irony is too great really, if they'd just left Netscape along the old NS4 codebase would never have been scrapped in the way it was, and today we wouldn't have XUL/XBL/RDF Templates and the rest.
Of course, even taking the dynamics of the bubble into consideration, Sony has much deeper pockets than Netscape ever did...
Yes, but these guys are playing with hardware, not software, and hardware is far more expensive than software - it's a similar situation but on a larger scale.
Correction, they think they will get it back. By this definition, no dotcom ever made a loss, because they all expected they were going to get it back.
Nah, they'd just give away free burgers to schoolkids and students, but sprinkle them liberally with crack, uh, I mean DirectPlay Food Center Edition(tm).
That's right in a general sense, but as Microsoft doesn't pay any income tax, for reasons that can be found elsewhere so I won't go into here, the US government arguably loses money due to Microsoft as they spend tax dollars on Windows and Office licenses.