Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux. It's true, many aren't. For many of them, there are alternatives that are at least good enough for most people. For many others, particularly custom and specialised software there are no alternatives apart from running them in Wine.
There isn't any easy way to change this, and there is no way at all for Canonical to change this; it's not even their job to try, IMO. It's also not that big of a deal. Your graphics designer friends are probably the very last people who'd be willing to drop Photoshop in favor of the GIMP, for a variety of reasons, simple UI entrenchment among them. Most people aren't graphic designers, and the GIMP's feature set far exceeds what most people need. And while the interface might need some work -- and is, in fact, being worked on -- you're deluding yourself if you think Photoshop's interface was that much more intuitive. To a novice user, both applications are cryptic.
As for you, well, you only allude to your workflow. There are applications that cover MS Office, most of what Adobe's CS does; I don't know about Sound Forge. If you think they don't cover everything you do with them, maybe Linux isn't for you as of yet. I'm not sure what Canonical can do about that, short of financing development of a whole bunch of professional applications, which really isn't within their abilities.
True. But having home on a seperate partition probably isn't the way Ubuntu sets up the hard disk on a clean install.
However, you can leave/home intact even if it's not sitting on it's own partition. AFAIK the installer actually lets you do this in manual mode, just be sure to unmark the format checkbox. I think I used this once, even though it's considered a Bad Idea (I've since repartitioned). Maybe Canonical could look at why it's considered a bad idea and work out the kinks -- I don't see why it should be that problematic. Of course some additional work would have to be done to detect the users from the previous install, so that, ideally, you see your old directory on the first boot and not a blank one because you decided to use a different login.
Of course you can change it. And after you change it back to Google (or whatever), which takes all of one second, it ought to remain the default even after an upgrade. Some people just get really aggravated arguing that since most people use Google now, most people would prefer to use Google in the future, and thus the change to another search engine is not in most people's immediate best interest. Which is true, and if it weren't about such a triviality, I might agree with them.
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively on my home desktop for a few years now; I've never used another distro for more than a couple of days. So -- are Fedora and OpenSUSE seriously different from Ubuntu in fixing some stuff while breaking other stuff?
For instance, I've also had power management issues in various releases (at the moment it's mostly working), and I've always attributed it to the fact that, well, suspend and hibernate remain a bit flaky on Linux, mostly due to problematic devices/drivers. I assume most problems have to be fixed upstream, and aren't the result of the integration Ubuntu does. With some exceptions, of course, like partially broken Pulseaudio setups.
I (honestly) agree with most things you're saying and I think Ubuntu should switch to KDE once they've gotten around to creating a nice UI with all that innovation and technology. So around version 5, I guess. Cause right now, with the combination of vanilla Gnome, (Gnome-)Do and Compiz I have never been happier with a windowing environment. It looks good and gets the fuck out of my way most of the time. OTOH in the office we use KDE4 and it looks horrible and plays much the same. Looking at my phone, one of Nokia's current "flagships", I guess having them as a corporate sponsor doesn't really help designing pleasant UIs...
Then again, chances are the Gnome UI will only get worse as time goes on -- what I've seen so far from Gnome Shell wasn't exactly promising (I'm keeping an open mind, though). So maybe the balance will tip towards Qt earlier...
Huh, that's the first time I've heard that nspluginwrapper incurs a noticable performance penalty. Couldn't find good benchmark results either. Maybe I ought to try the 64-bit alpha then. Although I can't complain too badly about Flash performance, fullscreen runs fine, except for the rare 1080p videos. In fact, the performance increase would have to be pretty significant for me to give up the convenient isolation of the notoriously unstable flash plugin (killall npviewer.bin ftw).
For what it's worth, I think there are a lot of things they could do wrong (on purpose or more likely by accident) in their crypto implementation that'd make things a lot easier for someone trying to decrypt it. And these implementation things wouldn't necessarily be occurant to someone reverse enineering the format. Saying that it's AES-128/256 only provides an upper limit for the strength.
Exactly! If they don't know the rules exist, they certainly don't know they were implemented before! You can charge those fools for re-implementing them once things start to break down!
I don't know about other debugging GUIs, but Eclipse can easily evaluate an expression without crutches like the immediate window or watches. Mark the expression and press Ctrl-D for a toString or Ctrl-I for an inspection window of the evaluation result. I assume most other modern IDEs can do this.
Going to definitions is... a start, but it's really the bare minimum. I wouldn't want to program in an editor that doesn't also find references, create a call hierarchy, find sub-/super-classes etc. I don't think this means I'm stupid; stupid is creating highly structured data with an editor that doesn't understand this and doesn't let you browse the data along it's structural links.
As for using a profiler, they do other things beyond finding speed bottlenecks. E.g. they can visualize object relations, and it's often clear which objects/classes are central to the application and which are peripheral. I never tried to understand unknown code with the help of a profiles, but it's an interesting idea. Would need strong integration into the IDE for me, otherwise it's just a chore.
Yes, so what? Video plug-ins were bad. Doesn't mean they can't be better. Not sure how "seamless" (ie integrated into the site in terms of styling and extra functionality, I guess?) the video tag looks so far. For instance, does YouTube display those annoying text popups when using native video? I guess it could be done using JavaScript. Stuff like that might mean that using a video plug-in in Firefox will be different from the usual content plug-ins, the video plug-ins will probably integrated a bit more tightly.
Unlike the blueprint you link to, the other one is not explicitly limited to the ARM distribution. It's also far more broad in scope, dealing not just with OpenOffice but with a range of other (useful) apps, as well. OTOH, it contains as one to-do "Add Cheese", which is weird, since I'm fairly sure Cheese is already part of the default install of UNR. So maybe it really does deal with some variant. That would be a relief, because for the x86 distribution removing those apps is kind of... insane... Especially considering that as far as I can tell you need a Google account to use Google docs.
That doesn't make sense at all. The absolute number of square miles is irrelevant -- obviously the US has more square miles of coverage, it's a much much larger country than both combined (in fact, it's more than 17x larger).
When you consider the population density or the subscriber density into account that you get a somewhat meaningful train of thought. Sweden actually has a lower population density than the US (22 vs 34 persons/km^2), of course, South Korea is off the chart (490 persons/km^2). Given those numbers, it'd be interesting to know what percentage of the area of the three countries is covered by 2G/3G wireless.
Civ4 isn't my first Civ, I think I've pretty much played all of them, particularly Civ2 and Civ4. It's been a while since I've played Civ2, though, so I'm sure returning to those rules will be very odd. Was Civ2 the one where decommissioning units would gain you production in that tile's city? I remember rushing wonders that way.
I started playing Civ4 last week for a couple of games -- it runs very well in Wine, incidently -- and I'm wondering how FreeCiv compares. Obviously the graphics aren't there, but after a couple of games that seems less and less important. The gameplay mechanics are what matters, and I think they work very very well in Civ4. And is the AI any good? Wikipedia seems to imply that diplomacy is a bit simple.
Anybody got "in-depth" experience with both games?
Whatever. It's still one second. It's trivial, it's a non-issue, nobody with any sense cares. Even if it adds up to a big number when you multiply it by 8 million. If it helps Canonical make some money and continue release a great distribution, it's fine. Paying one second, once, is not an unfair price. And those people who don't know how to do it/take more than a second are those people most likely to not care, anyway.
No, the user doesn't have to do anything -- except wait. Ok, many people do something productive most of the time, but some don't, and even a split second every day will some up to something a lot more than one second once (or even once per update).
There'll be a lot less Ubuntu users if Canonical doesn't find a way to make money. Besides, there are many, many, many ways to optimise a default Ubuntu install in order to safe users one second. Shaving off a quarter second from the boot time will easily offset the time to change the search engine.
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Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux. It's true, many aren't. For many of them, there are alternatives that are at least good enough for most people. For many others, particularly custom and specialised software there are no alternatives apart from running them in Wine.
There isn't any easy way to change this, and there is no way at all for Canonical to change this; it's not even their job to try, IMO. It's also not that big of a deal. Your graphics designer friends are probably the very last people who'd be willing to drop Photoshop in favor of the GIMP, for a variety of reasons, simple UI entrenchment among them. Most people aren't graphic designers, and the GIMP's feature set far exceeds what most people need. And while the interface might need some work -- and is, in fact, being worked on -- you're deluding yourself if you think Photoshop's interface was that much more intuitive. To a novice user, both applications are cryptic.
As for you, well, you only allude to your workflow. There are applications that cover MS Office, most of what Adobe's CS does; I don't know about Sound Forge. If you think they don't cover everything you do with them, maybe Linux isn't for you as of yet. I'm not sure what Canonical can do about that, short of financing development of a whole bunch of professional applications, which really isn't within their abilities.
True. But having home on a seperate partition probably isn't the way Ubuntu sets up the hard disk on a clean install.
However, you can leave /home intact even if it's not sitting on it's own partition. AFAIK the installer actually lets you do this in manual mode, just be sure to unmark the format checkbox. I think I used this once, even though it's considered a Bad Idea (I've since repartitioned). Maybe Canonical could look at why it's considered a bad idea and work out the kinks -- I don't see why it should be that problematic. Of course some additional work would have to be done to detect the users from the previous install, so that, ideally, you see your old directory on the first boot and not a blank one because you decided to use a different login.
Of course you can change it. And after you change it back to Google (or whatever), which takes all of one second, it ought to remain the default even after an upgrade. Some people just get really aggravated arguing that since most people use Google now, most people would prefer to use Google in the future, and thus the change to another search engine is not in most people's immediate best interest. Which is true, and if it weren't about such a triviality, I might agree with them.
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively on my home desktop for a few years now; I've never used another distro for more than a couple of days. So -- are Fedora and OpenSUSE seriously different from Ubuntu in fixing some stuff while breaking other stuff?
For instance, I've also had power management issues in various releases (at the moment it's mostly working), and I've always attributed it to the fact that, well, suspend and hibernate remain a bit flaky on Linux, mostly due to problematic devices/drivers. I assume most problems have to be fixed upstream, and aren't the result of the integration Ubuntu does. With some exceptions, of course, like partially broken Pulseaudio setups.
I (honestly) agree with most things you're saying and I think Ubuntu should switch to KDE once they've gotten around to creating a nice UI with all that innovation and technology. So around version 5, I guess. Cause right now, with the combination of vanilla Gnome, (Gnome-)Do and Compiz I have never been happier with a windowing environment. It looks good and gets the fuck out of my way most of the time. OTOH in the office we use KDE4 and it looks horrible and plays much the same. Looking at my phone, one of Nokia's current "flagships", I guess having them as a corporate sponsor doesn't really help designing pleasant UIs...
Then again, chances are the Gnome UI will only get worse as time goes on -- what I've seen so far from Gnome Shell wasn't exactly promising (I'm keeping an open mind, though). So maybe the balance will tip towards Qt earlier...
I think the plan is to wait for another couple of years until PC gaming has finished destroying itself with DRM and piracy. (Dons NOMEX suit.)
Huh, that's the first time I've heard that nspluginwrapper incurs a noticable performance penalty. Couldn't find good benchmark results either. Maybe I ought to try the 64-bit alpha then. Although I can't complain too badly about Flash performance, fullscreen runs fine, except for the rare 1080p videos. In fact, the performance increase would have to be pretty significant for me to give up the convenient isolation of the notoriously unstable flash plugin (killall npviewer.bin ftw).
For what it's worth, I think there are a lot of things they could do wrong (on purpose or more likely by accident) in their crypto implementation that'd make things a lot easier for someone trying to decrypt it. And these implementation things wouldn't necessarily be occurant to someone reverse enineering the format. Saying that it's AES-128/256 only provides an upper limit for the strength.
Exactly! If they don't know the rules exist, they certainly don't know they were implemented before! You can charge those fools for re-implementing them once things start to break down!
I don't know about other debugging GUIs, but Eclipse can easily evaluate an expression without crutches like the immediate window or watches. Mark the expression and press Ctrl-D for a toString or Ctrl-I for an inspection window of the evaluation result. I assume most other modern IDEs can do this.
Going to definitions is... a start, but it's really the bare minimum. I wouldn't want to program in an editor that doesn't also find references, create a call hierarchy, find sub-/super-classes etc. I don't think this means I'm stupid; stupid is creating highly structured data with an editor that doesn't understand this and doesn't let you browse the data along it's structural links.
As for using a profiler, they do other things beyond finding speed bottlenecks. E.g. they can visualize object relations, and it's often clear which objects/classes are central to the application and which are peripheral. I never tried to understand unknown code with the help of a profiles, but it's an interesting idea. Would need strong integration into the IDE for me, otherwise it's just a chore.
That's such an awkward solution that I was always amazed it was allowed to appear in an Apple product. Or any other product for that matter.
Yes, so what? Video plug-ins were bad. Doesn't mean they can't be better. Not sure how "seamless" (ie integrated into the site in terms of styling and extra functionality, I guess?) the video tag looks so far. For instance, does YouTube display those annoying text popups when using native video? I guess it could be done using JavaScript. Stuff like that might mean that using a video plug-in in Firefox will be different from the usual content plug-ins, the video plug-ins will probably integrated a bit more tightly.
This is the one. It's in TFA, I thought it was in the summary or I would have linked to it in the first place.
Unlike the blueprint you link to, the other one is not explicitly limited to the ARM distribution. It's also far more broad in scope, dealing not just with OpenOffice but with a range of other (useful) apps, as well. OTOH, it contains as one to-do "Add Cheese", which is weird, since I'm fairly sure Cheese is already part of the default install of UNR. So maybe it really does deal with some variant. That would be a relief, because for the x86 distribution removing those apps is kind of... insane... Especially considering that as far as I can tell you need a Google account to use Google docs.
Are you crazy? Obviously the two encryptions would cancel out each other!
That doesn't make sense at all. The absolute number of square miles is irrelevant -- obviously the US has more square miles of coverage, it's a much much larger country than both combined (in fact, it's more than 17x larger).
When you consider the population density or the subscriber density into account that you get a somewhat meaningful train of thought. Sweden actually has a lower population density than the US (22 vs 34 persons/km^2), of course, South Korea is off the chart (490 persons/km^2). Given those numbers, it'd be interesting to know what percentage of the area of the three countries is covered by 2G/3G wireless.
Hey, I didn't know about /fast. That's pretty cool, thanks.
Civ4 isn't my first Civ, I think I've pretty much played all of them, particularly Civ2 and Civ4. It's been a while since I've played Civ2, though, so I'm sure returning to those rules will be very odd. Was Civ2 the one where decommissioning units would gain you production in that tile's city? I remember rushing wonders that way.
I started playing Civ4 last week for a couple of games -- it runs very well in Wine, incidently -- and I'm wondering how FreeCiv compares. Obviously the graphics aren't there, but after a couple of games that seems less and less important. The gameplay mechanics are what matters, and I think they work very very well in Civ4. And is the AI any good? Wikipedia seems to imply that diplomacy is a bit simple.
Anybody got "in-depth" experience with both games?
Outside of the UK? I couldn't find much.
Whatever. It's still one second. It's trivial, it's a non-issue, nobody with any sense cares. Even if it adds up to a big number when you multiply it by 8 million. If it helps Canonical make some money and continue release a great distribution, it's fine. Paying one second, once, is not an unfair price. And those people who don't know how to do it/take more than a second are those people most likely to not care, anyway.
No, the user doesn't have to do anything -- except wait. Ok, many people do something productive most of the time, but some don't, and even a split second every day will some up to something a lot more than one second once (or even once per update).
There'll be a lot less Ubuntu users if Canonical doesn't find a way to make money. Besides, there are many, many, many ways to optimise a default Ubuntu install in order to safe users one second. Shaving off a quarter second from the boot time will easily offset the time to change the search engine.
I don't know; if I had more common sense, I'd probably switch to anything BUT Google since they know decidedly too much about me.