Re:My wife uses KDE and likes it..
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 2
His first impression is that it was ugly.
This is subjective and probably caused by you using an ugly theme. Perhaps your cousin should have gone to kde-look.org and chose a look he liked?
For some reason, he didn't like Mozilla.
Did he give a reason? Again, somewhat subjective. Perhaps he'd have preferred Konqueror.
What bothered him is that he couldn't use the microphone to talk with his MSN Messenger Buddies, he could only type the messages.
This is not a fault of Linux per se, just an individual application. It's nothing to do with usability either, simply that the developers haven't added that feature yet, quite possibly because only the very basic MSN protocols are documented.
He didn't like the games much, im some games he had to use the mouse in other games he had to use the keyboard.
This is a joke right? That's been the case in all games since the beginning of time! That's definately not a usability issue. And if he didn't like the games, well Linux isn't right for him yet is it? There aren't many games out there right now, but the ones I've played haven't had any usability issues.
What bothered him most in this is that he couldn't exit some games by clicking on the X, I told him that he had to press ESC.
Once more, not a fault of Linux, you will find this is the case with most games on all platforms. In fact, there are lots of apps you can't quit using the X button, especially games. You could regard this as a usability issue, but limiting the times when a game can quit is quite normal.
In short, there's way too many usability problems. If KDE or GNOME had at least 1 usability expert helping them, they would get rid of most of those problems.
You've based this assertion on a study consisting of 1 person, your cousin who appears to not like Linux due to some vague dislikes and not complete MSN Messenger compatability. Having usability "experts" would not eliminate any of these problems, as they are caused either by application bugs, or the fact that your cousing simply doesn't like it that way.
I'd be interested to see how many of them serve up the default page too - remember how IIS was being installed by default on 2K machines without their users knowing? How many of those hits aren't actually real websites?
#3: Safe vs. unsafe code. People are being very naive about this. How many web pages do you go to that give you the warning "this page blah blah unsafe..." Yet you still enter that credit card number. Marking code as "safe" or "unsafe" is irrelevant. This is what will happen: people will write unsafe code, and it will be common enough so that end users will have to use it. The same thing happens with ActiveX controls. How many people honesty won't run an unsafe ActiveX control? Or a program that uses unsafe Word macros? The other day I had to change my security level in word so I could use a documentation tool - and I went right ahead and did it, and so will everyone else!
I'm afraid you're mixing some stuff up. In this context, safe vs unsafe is referring to memory management, not security.
Safe means that the code cannot access memory directly, instead it must do it via references that are automatically updated by the memory management system/garbage collector. Unsafe means you get direct pointers, that are not tied to the memory manager.
Java does not allow unsafe code (unless you go via the JNI) but.NET/C# allow both types to be mixed freely with a few caveats. The pros/cons of this decision are something I won't go into here, but there is are a couple of interesting articles on MSDN about safe vs unsafe.
What's happening to Slashdot!?! Just after seeming to recover from rabid Linux activism, it's been invaded by people who'll plug the Mac at any opportunity! You don't seem to mention that other platforms often support Java pretty well too.
I'm beginning to find all this Mac activism annoying. I mean it was annoying with Linux, but at least I could understand that as it has an advertising budget of next to zero, so it relies purely on word of mouth to spread. But Apple spend so much on marketing that I can't walk down the street or turn on my TV without being told to think different.
Please - feel free to promote the Mac, but at least in stories that have some relevance. I don't care what the java support on MacOS X is, if you use Sun's VM it's good on Windows, and ditto for Linux. So what?
Have any of you even looked at C# as a language? How about looking at the.NET framework itself? To attack.NET is to attack Object Pascal and Delphi. Why is this? Because C# looks like Java and C/C++, acts like Object Pascal and runs like Smalltalk. Let's admit one things first: nothing in Java is "innovative".
Well I love Delphi and use it all the time, but comparing the two is inaccurate. They -are- pretty different.
Does anyone remember how much Java 1.0 sucked compared to the Java of today? I sure do, because I was one of them! Does ANYONE get version 1.0 perfect? So why do we expect this from Microsoft? Yes, they're bugs are more public because more people use Windows than there are Christians on this planet, but everyone else's 1.0 products are the same! Security? Please! UNIX had 30 years to improve security. My dad tells me horror stories of all the security bugs in the original systems he'd worked on at Bell Labs!
True to some extent but consider Apache. It has a higher market share than IIS but where is the Apache version of Code Red? I seem to recall IIS in on version 6, or is it 7? I can't remember. But Apache is just about to reach v2.
Gosling is a joke if he thinks he's anyting special. He got his "fellow" status because of Java, but only once it took off. Other than that, he'd be pretty obscure. Is there anything innovative anymore? Everything is a culmination of ideas. It's like evolution, new species don't just appear, they're based on previous ideas.
So why did Java take off in such a big way and Smalltalk didn't? Don't believe it was just marketing, because it wasn't. The fact is, that Java was the right product at the right time. There are languages out there that are so "innovative" they are barely usable for real world projects. So it didn't include hundreds of good ideas - but it did combine those ideas in a way that had mass appeal. I consider that innovative in a way.
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows(TM) for my computing work.
LOL! This is a troll right? I'll bite. Maybe you have a point and Windows is right for you, but maybe you work for Microsoft, as they are the only people I ever see who write Windows(tm). You sound like you just walked out of a TV advert!
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows(TM) for my computing work. The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the Windows(TM) Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is willing to pay for.
What cross platform standarisations? I don't see any. In fact, I'll think you'll find that EVERY major OS out there other than windows is based on unix.
One thing I have wondered using OpenOffice (and als o Mozilla) is: How do they manage to make them so slow?!
Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform. This means that they cannot take for granted ANY system services at all. With Mozilla for instance they reimplemented COM (into XPCOM) because only Windows has such a component model. They created XUL (as far as I'm concerned the coolness value makes that worth the effort alone) because at the time there were no robust enough XP GUI toolkits under the right type of license. Qt would have been ideal, but I think there were problems with the legalese.
So they used their kick-ass rendering engine to do the GUIs. But this makes it larger, as all the widget logic has to be contained within the software. I'm amazed Moz is as small as it is.
OpenOffice is the same - they created their own component model, not sure about the widget set, but because they could assume nothing they had to make a lot of stuff pure Windows/Linux/Mac developers can take for granted.
Mod this as Offtopic if you like, but I've been wondering lately what happens "after" linux. As an OS it's clearly on a roll, and is heading for even greater things, but it's still based on a design that is 20 years old.
I can't help thinking - would it be possible to do it again? But this time, instead of basing it on the solid, well known but old and unadventerous unix, use new ideas, incorporate the latest technologies and so on. Would the open source community be willing to move away from Linux to this new open OS, or is the momentum behind it too strong to abandon?
OEone sell their desktop environment (which is based on redhat btw) for about $40 if i recall correctly. Try it out - it's damn nice, esp if you've got a family member who doesn't need the power+expense of Windows/Office and who can't/won't get to grips with Linux. You know, the type who just write the odd email, browse the web, chat to friends, type up a letter etc.
Mozilla is for testing only - it is for use by us geeks, and nobody else. Why else do you think it has a Debug and QA menu, a JavaScript debugger, but no instant messaging client huh?
Here's a golden rule: NEVER EVER RECOMMEND MOZILLA TO ANY NON-GEEK!. There, I had to get that off my chest. Instead, recommend Netscape 6.x - I believe soon 6.5 will come out which is (apparently) going to be based on 1.0. But that's all idle gossip and rumours.
So the plugins issue is a non-issue, because iirc Netscape 6 comes with all that stuff just like IE does. It also has an AIM client too. If you want your friends/parents etc to use Mozilla, tell them about this wondrous new product called Netscape 6 that is soooo much better than IE and Outlook. And install it for them:) Be a good scout today, okay? No mozilla for them.
Choices choices! Now I can have MS Office, StarOffice, KOffice, gobeProductive, this is great! But... if I don't know what suite my friends are using, what format should I use. RTF is the closest we have to being a standard, but it's limited. XHTML is good, but not designed really for word processing and MS Office invariably screws it up bigtime when saving it again.
Every office suite has its own formats, so although I might like to I can't send in them. Where oh where is a modern word processor format that can cope with all the features of a modern powerful word processor, while remaining open?
I suppose ditto for spreadsheets too come to think of it...
Hmm, but how well do you think a machine with dual-boot linux on that cost say $60 more for another OS would do? Most people would look at it and say - I already have 1 OS, why should I pay for another included in the price of the machine?
What might be interesting is if they could do this with say Mandrake, but when you started using it there was pressure to sign up to the Mandrake Club. People get a whole OS to play with, if they like it they join the club and contribute to its development, if they don't they zap it.
I've yet to hear of any spyware for the various unices. Do marketting companies not care about us?
That's basically right - Linux/unix market share is too small, and marketing men know that Linux users typically will be able to detect such software and destroy it. We also tend to be a hard sell;)
My other question is, if no unix spyware programs exist, how long will it be? With more and more people heading to mandrake, RH, and suse, is it only a matter of time before these people start checking client info, and trying to install RPM spyware packages?
Probably not until Linux gets MUCH bigger. Also, it's much much harder to get spyware onto a unix system because of it's inbuilt security. 9 times out of 10 I find unix security a total pain in the ass, but it does have the big advantage that (unless you're logged in as root) nothing can install or tamper with your system.
Linux Qt apps though use the Qt/X11 version of Linux, which is the only GPLd and freely available version. I believe if you're not careful you'd end up paying TrollTech for the use of that particular version.
B******t. Apple has released lots of their own code. Just off the top of my head there's CoreFoundation, OpenPlay, Darwin Streaming Server, NetInfo, and their Objective-C runtime.
According to this page the following projects are open sourced under the terms of the APSL:
Darwin
Streaming Server
CDSA (parts of the os x security system)
OpenPlay - networking
Chess.app
and some kind of header generation utility
Cocoa isn't open sourced, nor is NetInfo, nor CoreFoundation according to this list. I couldn't comment on whether they contribute to apache and gcc or not.
Wine is a pain to get working too. By this path you could say that OSX is more compatible since VirtualPC runs a lot more Windows apps than Wine does (albeit probably slower).
Linux has VMWare as well, and as there is no opcode translation it's faster too. Look, any computer can emulate any other, what matters is how well. Neither OS X or Linux runs Windows apps magnificently, but I think wine is a better approach than booting up a whole new computer inside your current one.
First off, I often find I have to compile things I download for Linux as well. Second, with Fink [sourceforge.net], downloading and installing is as easy as fink install [package]. I did this on my iBook yesterday with GnuPG and it works flawlessly.
Yes, often you have to compile stuff for Linux, that's not what I meant. Porting would have been a better word. Very little linux software will work out of the box on OS X, it can be ported easily yes, but that's still something that can only be done by a programmer.
I looked at fink, it doesn't download and recompile Linux apps at all. It gives you access to (currently) 841 apps that have been ported. Compare that to the tens of thousands of Linux apps available, and I'm not impressed. I still don't count Linux apps as Mac apps.
With OroborOSX [versiontracker.com], you can run X11 apps that look like native aqua apps. It's a very nice package that is easy to use and can be launched with a simple double-click. I agree that the bloat of X11 is never desirable, but Linux has it as well.
Again not true, that program gives you an Aqua-like window manager. So it skins the titlebar and that's about it.. GTK apps will still look like GTK apps, ditto for Qt. The design of X means that unless you completely rewrite the front end for a Linux app it will never really have the Aqua look.
Well, you can count or not count whatever you want. The fact is that OSX has most of the apps on Linux, plus many of the apps on Windows, plus thousands of native MacOS X apps. For people who need Classic, it is fast and quite stable. The important thing is that OSX has all the apps that 95% of the world would ever need if they bothered to look. Everything from MS Office to a dozen email apps, best-of-class web browsers, great development environments and tools, a fast Java runtime, and tons of fun games are on the Mac (lots of stuff businesses need that they can't get for Linux). One of these days I am going to put Windows back on my Linux box, because with OSX on my G4 and my iBook I don't ever use Linux anymore for UNIX stuff.
Good for you, but those are entirely subjective opinions. There are also several web browsers, email clients, office suites, fast java runtimes, and tons of fun games for Linux. So what? I have yet to find something that I want to do for which there is no Linux application.
However, there are *far* more Mac OS X applications out there than there are Linux applications, despite your statement. This is mostly because most Linux applications happily run on OS X (and more and more are coming precompiled in a double-clickable installer).
Er, sorry? By that logic the number of Linux apps beats any OS out there by miles because any Windows app can be run under Wine (not true of course). It makes no sense:
To run a Linux app under OS X you must be a guru at recompiling (unless it's been prepackaged: not very frequent), which very few OS X users are, basically only those that migrated from Linux.
You must invariably be running an X Server. I have tried XDarwin at my Mac-lover friends house, and it'd scare the living daylights out of most Mac users. Sure, it has an installer program, but when you run it what pops up? TWM with three xterms. Most Mac users won't want to place XDarwin (which is huge) onto their systems, and keep it running in the background just to run a Linux app.
Most of the decent Linux apps these days are KDE or GNOME apps. Although in theory these could be ported, I have yet to see many people running all the KDE libraries and an X server just to use an OS X app.
Linux apps don't have the Aqua look, and there are large numbers of OS X users out there who were 'inspired' shall we say by its looks. You give them a GTK+ or Qt app and they'll puke.
Now don't get me wrong, I like OS X. But saying it has more apps than Linux or Windows is ridiculous. Actually you often can't even count Classic apps either, I know that the fact that you had to run Photoshop in classic has held back widespread OS X adoption by old-skool mac users for a long time, and my friend hates running Classic apps, would often rather wait until it's been ported in fact. So you can't really class Classic apps as OS X apps, it's just emulation of the hackiest sort (it boots the whole of OS 9 into a window).
that doesn't change that there seemed to just be very little engineering of details in KDE, and little things-- the relative placement of buttons, layout, fitt's law considerations, stuff you can't skin over
Everyone always seems to whine about fitts law, like knowing what it is automagically makes them a GUI design guru. To be honest, I prefer having smaller buttons/icons and being able to fit more on, and I think you'll find most other people do too - which is why even on OS X, that bastion of largeness, users often make the default dock icon size smaller, and the finder uses 16x16 icons in its default view.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I read a series of reviews that said that wasn't a problem, and they had both bluetooth and Wireless LANs going at full speed with almost no problems. Remember Bluetooth is based on frequency hopping with clever bits - I think they manage to avoid each other pretty well
Glad I don't live in Pennsylvania, this type of web blocking is notorius for being inaccurate.
We have an extreme version of this at our school - originally put in place to block porn, it was later extended to terrorism (fair enough), but then also anything under the "fun" category, the "online sales" category, and finally the "personal" category - laughably this last one includes ANY address with a ~ in the url.
Needless to say, the potential for abuse here, as well as complex legal arguments, is HUGE
Yep, it's produced by a guy called Adam Lock, in fact it's been around for a while.
The interesting thing about this is - it's binary interface compatible with the Trident APIs: ie it's the same as the internet explorer ActiveX control. This means if you already use the IE ActiveX you can simply replace it with the Gecko one without changing any code (in theory). Hopefully once Moz penetration goes up, you'll start seeing more of this, but to be honest I doubt it.
Unless it's possible to replace the IE Control with the Gecko one transparently why should apps switch from a rendering engine that is guaranteed to be there, to one that isn't? Makes no sense. So this is good, but for now not all that helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
This is subjective and probably caused by you using an ugly theme. Perhaps your cousin should have gone to kde-look.org and chose a look he liked?
For some reason, he didn't like Mozilla.
Did he give a reason? Again, somewhat subjective. Perhaps he'd have preferred Konqueror.
What bothered him is that he couldn't use the microphone to talk with his MSN Messenger Buddies, he could only type the messages.
This is not a fault of Linux per se, just an individual application. It's nothing to do with usability either, simply that the developers haven't added that feature yet, quite possibly because only the very basic MSN protocols are documented.
He didn't like the games much, im some games he had to use the mouse in other games he had to use the keyboard.
This is a joke right? That's been the case in all games since the beginning of time! That's definately not a usability issue. And if he didn't like the games, well Linux isn't right for him yet is it? There aren't many games out there right now, but the ones I've played haven't had any usability issues.
What bothered him most in this is that he couldn't exit some games by clicking on the X, I told him that he had to press ESC.
Once more, not a fault of Linux, you will find this is the case with most games on all platforms. In fact, there are lots of apps you can't quit using the X button, especially games. You could regard this as a usability issue, but limiting the times when a game can quit is quite normal.
In short, there's way too many usability problems. If KDE or GNOME had at least 1 usability expert helping them, they would get rid of most of those problems.
You've based this assertion on a study consisting of 1 person, your cousin who appears to not like Linux due to some vague dislikes and not complete MSN Messenger compatability. Having usability "experts" would not eliminate any of these problems, as they are caused either by application bugs, or the fact that your cousing simply doesn't like it that way.
I'd be interested to see how many of them serve up the default page too - remember how IIS was being installed by default on 2K machines without their users knowing? How many of those hits aren't actually real websites?
I'm afraid you're mixing some stuff up. In this context, safe vs unsafe is referring to memory management, not security.
Safe means that the code cannot access memory directly, instead it must do it via references that are automatically updated by the memory management system/garbage collector. Unsafe means you get direct pointers, that are not tied to the memory manager.
Java does not allow unsafe code (unless you go via the JNI) but .NET/C# allow both types to be mixed freely with a few caveats. The pros/cons of this decision are something I won't go into here, but there is are a couple of interesting articles on MSDN about safe vs unsafe.
I'm beginning to find all this Mac activism annoying. I mean it was annoying with Linux, but at least I could understand that as it has an advertising budget of next to zero, so it relies purely on word of mouth to spread. But Apple spend so much on marketing that I can't walk down the street or turn on my TV without being told to think different.
Please - feel free to promote the Mac, but at least in stories that have some relevance. I don't care what the java support on MacOS X is, if you use Sun's VM it's good on Windows, and ditto for Linux. So what?
Well I love Delphi and use it all the time, but comparing the two is inaccurate. They -are- pretty different.
Does anyone remember how much Java 1.0 sucked compared to the Java of today? I sure do, because I was one of them! Does ANYONE get version 1.0 perfect? So why do we expect this from Microsoft? Yes, they're bugs are more public because more people use Windows than there are Christians on this planet, but everyone else's 1.0 products are the same! Security? Please! UNIX had 30 years to improve security. My dad tells me horror stories of all the security bugs in the original systems he'd worked on at Bell Labs!
True to some extent but consider Apache. It has a higher market share than IIS but where is the Apache version of Code Red? I seem to recall IIS in on version 6, or is it 7? I can't remember. But Apache is just about to reach v2.
Gosling is a joke if he thinks he's anyting special. He got his "fellow" status because of Java, but only once it took off. Other than that, he'd be pretty obscure. Is there anything innovative anymore? Everything is a culmination of ideas. It's like evolution, new species don't just appear, they're based on previous ideas.
So why did Java take off in such a big way and Smalltalk didn't? Don't believe it was just marketing, because it wasn't. The fact is, that Java was the right product at the right time. There are languages out there that are so "innovative" they are barely usable for real world projects. So it didn't include hundreds of good ideas - but it did combine those ideas in a way that had mass appeal. I consider that innovative in a way.
LOL! This is a troll right? I'll bite. Maybe you have a point and Windows is right for you, but maybe you work for Microsoft, as they are the only people I ever see who write Windows(tm). You sound like you just walked out of a TV advert!
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows(TM) for my computing work. The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the Windows(TM) Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is willing to pay for.
What cross platform standarisations? I don't see any. In fact, I'll think you'll find that EVERY major OS out there other than windows is based on unix.
Sheesh, I'm way too easily trolled. -sigh-
Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform. This means that they cannot take for granted ANY system services at all. With Mozilla for instance they reimplemented COM (into XPCOM) because only Windows has such a component model. They created XUL (as far as I'm concerned the coolness value makes that worth the effort alone) because at the time there were no robust enough XP GUI toolkits under the right type of license. Qt would have been ideal, but I think there were problems with the legalese.
So they used their kick-ass rendering engine to do the GUIs. But this makes it larger, as all the widget logic has to be contained within the software. I'm amazed Moz is as small as it is.
OpenOffice is the same - they created their own component model, not sure about the widget set, but because they could assume nothing they had to make a lot of stuff pure Windows/Linux/Mac developers can take for granted.
Possibly, but you're assuming that all Linux developers had previous experience with Unix. Some did this is true,but by no means all.
I can't help thinking - would it be possible to do it again? But this time, instead of basing it on the solid, well known but old and unadventerous unix, use new ideas, incorporate the latest technologies and so on. Would the open source community be willing to move away from Linux to this new open OS, or is the momentum behind it too strong to abandon?
OEone sell their desktop environment (which is based on redhat btw) for about $40 if i recall correctly. Try it out - it's damn nice, esp if you've got a family member who doesn't need the power+expense of Windows/Office and who can't/won't get to grips with Linux. You know, the type who just write the odd email, browse the web, chat to friends, type up a letter etc.
Mozilla is for testing only - it is for use by us geeks, and nobody else. Why else do you think it has a Debug and QA menu, a JavaScript debugger, but no instant messaging client huh?
Here's a golden rule: NEVER EVER RECOMMEND MOZILLA TO ANY NON-GEEK!. There, I had to get that off my chest. Instead, recommend Netscape 6.x - I believe soon 6.5 will come out which is (apparently) going to be based on 1.0. But that's all idle gossip and rumours.
So the plugins issue is a non-issue, because iirc Netscape 6 comes with all that stuff just like IE does. It also has an AIM client too. If you want your friends/parents etc to use Mozilla, tell them about this wondrous new product called Netscape 6 that is soooo much better than IE and Outlook. And install it for them :) Be a good scout today, okay? No mozilla for them.
Try K-Meleon - I think it's time to find satans phone number ;)
Every office suite has its own formats, so although I might like to I can't send in them. Where oh where is a modern word processor format that can cope with all the features of a modern powerful word processor, while remaining open?
I suppose ditto for spreadsheets too come to think of it...
What might be interesting is if they could do this with say Mandrake, but when you started using it there was pressure to sign up to the Mandrake Club. People get a whole OS to play with, if they like it they join the club and contribute to its development, if they don't they zap it.
That's basically right - Linux/unix market share is too small, and marketing men know that Linux users typically will be able to detect such software and destroy it. We also tend to be a hard sell ;)
My other question is, if no unix spyware programs exist, how long will it be? With more and more people heading to mandrake, RH, and suse, is it only a matter of time before these people start checking client info, and trying to install RPM spyware packages?
Probably not until Linux gets MUCH bigger. Also, it's much much harder to get spyware onto a unix system because of it's inbuilt security. 9 times out of 10 I find unix security a total pain in the ass, but it does have the big advantage that (unless you're logged in as root) nothing can install or tamper with your system.
Linux Qt apps though use the Qt/X11 version of Linux, which is the only GPLd and freely available version. I believe if you're not careful you'd end up paying TrollTech for the use of that particular version.
According to this page the following projects are open sourced under the terms of the APSL:
Cocoa isn't open sourced, nor is NetInfo, nor CoreFoundation according to this list. I couldn't comment on whether they contribute to apache and gcc or not.
Linux has VMWare as well, and as there is no opcode translation it's faster too. Look, any computer can emulate any other, what matters is how well. Neither OS X or Linux runs Windows apps magnificently, but I think wine is a better approach than booting up a whole new computer inside your current one.
First off, I often find I have to compile things I download for Linux as well. Second, with Fink [sourceforge.net], downloading and installing is as easy as fink install [package]. I did this on my iBook yesterday with GnuPG and it works flawlessly. Yes, often you have to compile stuff for Linux, that's not what I meant. Porting would have been a better word. Very little linux software will work out of the box on OS X, it can be ported easily yes, but that's still something that can only be done by a programmer.
I looked at fink, it doesn't download and recompile Linux apps at all. It gives you access to (currently) 841 apps that have been ported. Compare that to the tens of thousands of Linux apps available, and I'm not impressed. I still don't count Linux apps as Mac apps. With OroborOSX [versiontracker.com], you can run X11 apps that look like native aqua apps. It's a very nice package that is easy to use and can be launched with a simple double-click. I agree that the bloat of X11 is never desirable, but Linux has it as well.
Again not true, that program gives you an Aqua-like window manager. So it skins the titlebar and that's about it.. GTK apps will still look like GTK apps, ditto for Qt. The design of X means that unless you completely rewrite the front end for a Linux app it will never really have the Aqua look. Well, you can count or not count whatever you want. The fact is that OSX has most of the apps on Linux, plus many of the apps on Windows, plus thousands of native MacOS X apps. For people who need Classic, it is fast and quite stable. The important thing is that OSX has all the apps that 95% of the world would ever need if they bothered to look. Everything from MS Office to a dozen email apps, best-of-class web browsers, great development environments and tools, a fast Java runtime, and tons of fun games are on the Mac (lots of stuff businesses need that they can't get for Linux). One of these days I am going to put Windows back on my Linux box, because with OSX on my G4 and my iBook I don't ever use Linux anymore for UNIX stuff.
Good for you, but those are entirely subjective opinions. There are also several web browsers, email clients, office suites, fast java runtimes, and tons of fun games for Linux. So what? I have yet to find something that I want to do for which there is no Linux application.
Er, sorry? By that logic the number of Linux apps beats any OS out there by miles because any Windows app can be run under Wine (not true of course). It makes no sense:
Now don't get me wrong, I like OS X. But saying it has more apps than Linux or Windows is ridiculous. Actually you often can't even count Classic apps either, I know that the fact that you had to run Photoshop in classic has held back widespread OS X adoption by old-skool mac users for a long time, and my friend hates running Classic apps, would often rather wait until it's been ported in fact. So you can't really class Classic apps as OS X apps, it's just emulation of the hackiest sort (it boots the whole of OS 9 into a window).
Every version of KDE i've ever seen has been, well, sort of inherently ugly-- the worst abuses of the motif, windows, and aqua mindsets combined.
You telling me that this is ugly? Or this?
that doesn't change that there seemed to just be very little engineering of details in KDE, and little things-- the relative placement of buttons, layout, fitt's law considerations, stuff you can't skin over
Everyone always seems to whine about fitts law, like knowing what it is automagically makes them a GUI design guru. To be honest, I prefer having smaller buttons/icons and being able to fit more on, and I think you'll find most other people do too - which is why even on OS X, that bastion of largeness, users often make the default dock icon size smaller, and the finder uses 16x16 icons in its default view.
Yeah, except Google wrote back to them and told them explicitly it was because of the DMCA, not google-bombing
Actually, I'm pretty sure I read a series of reviews that said that wasn't a problem, and they had both bluetooth and Wireless LANs going at full speed with almost no problems. Remember Bluetooth is based on frequency hopping with clever bits - I think they manage to avoid each other pretty well
We have an extreme version of this at our school - originally put in place to block porn, it was later extended to terrorism (fair enough), but then also anything under the "fun" category, the "online sales" category, and finally the "personal" category - laughably this last one includes ANY address with a ~ in the url.
Needless to say, the potential for abuse here, as well as complex legal arguments, is HUGE
Umm, since when do the KDE/Gnome people base their UI design on the writings/ramblings of Spolsky? News to me.
The interesting thing about this is - it's binary interface compatible with the Trident APIs: ie it's the same as the internet explorer ActiveX control. This means if you already use the IE ActiveX you can simply replace it with the Gecko one without changing any code (in theory). Hopefully once Moz penetration goes up, you'll start seeing more of this, but to be honest I doubt it.
Unless it's possible to replace the IE Control with the Gecko one transparently why should apps switch from a rendering engine that is guaranteed to be there, to one that isn't? Makes no sense. So this is good, but for now not all that helpful.