"Of course it does. You want the highest amount of project visibility possible. What is your boss going to think of you bring up something called "Xouvert?" He's going to think exactly what it sounds like--some sort of hacked-together amateur project. What happened to maintaining some semblance of professionalism? We're trying to get Linux recognized and respected, right?"
Yeah maybe he won't like the name. But that's not the point. _Why should he care?_ Why would he want to care? Let's face it: if I propose Linux he'll probably never find out what the windowing system is called. He'll just see "RedHat Linux" and maybe GNOME and KDE, and that's pretty much it.
"Of course they do. When you have non-stop gibberish names, it turns them off, and it is harder for them to keep track of it all when they are new to all this Linux stuff."
You just said it: non-stop. Xouvert is not a name you'll see non-top. The average user will only see it a few times. Or most likely: not at all. Why should they see it anyway? Clicking on buttons and menus is all they should know about. We shouldn't expose implementation details to the user.
"The names are not intuitive and friendly."
Use any modern distribution and you'll see things like: * Galeon Web Browser * Evolution Email * Gaim Instant Messenger * Konqueror (File Manager) * Kedit (Text Editor) * Quanta (Website Development)
"Unix domain sockets are not exactly a burden with this regard."
In fact, Unix Domain Sockets are just as fast as shared memory, at least on Linux. The TCP/IP stack is completely bypassed. Unix Domain Sockets are meant for local IPC.
I'm not sure. But in my experience (and benchmarks) XFree86 is just as fast as Windows when it comes to pure drawing speed. I think most of the slowness people experience are their desktop environments (GNOME and KDE), not X. On my system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz, ATI Rage 128), pure blitting and drawing graphic primitives on X isn't slow at all.
Yes it's compatible. X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. XFree86 is an implementation. Xouvert will be another implementation of the same protocol.
It's not hacked. It's a public Wiki. Which means anybody can edit the page! It's supposed to encourage users to contribute documentation. But it's sad to see that abusers from Slashdot has to abuse this for posting ASCII versions of goatse.cx.
"Are you saying that you'll remember www.xouvert.org as easily as you remember www.yahoo.com in 6 months?"
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I will, if the project gets popular. But that's not the point. If you can't remember the name anymore then that means you aren't getting exposed to it enough. When you're not getting exposed to it enough that means one of these two things: 1) You don't care. So why should you remember the name? No problem here. 2) The project died off. Why should you still remember the name? No problem here either.
"Ogg Vorbis btw, is a terrible name. I still can't tell which part stands for the codec and which is the file format."
Ogg is the file format, Vorbis is the codec. I remembered this since day 1 and I still remember it. If you can't remember that that probably means you don't care. What good will it do to you if Ogg Vorbis has an easier to remember name, if you don't care?
You're making the problem look bigger than it really is. The names of individual apps are *not* the biggest problems!
Who are you trying to market Xouvert to? To end users? Do you think they care? What are you going to tell them? To install an entire windowing system? As far as the end user is concerned, they shouldn't even *have* to know what the windowing system is called. There's no point in marketing Xouvert to end users. The only thing that matters is marketing "Mandrake Linux" or something to the end user.
I'd say the "marketing target" for Xouvert is developers. Do most developers care about the name? No, they care more about the code an openness of the project. So the name is not a big problem.
As for individual apps and the commercial world: do you think names like "Outlook Express" or "Powerpoint" are intuitive? There are only 2 reasons why people know what those apps do: 1) People told them. 2) They read the website or menu item description. If people can tolerate those non-obvious names, why can't they tolerate open source software with non-obvious names? Distribution already add a description to menu items. Examples:
"Bascially an X server that has been stripped of all the features that the "average" person doesn't use, such as running remote desktops over networks and things."
Urgh, not this again... The slowness is not caused by network transparency! Locally, XFree86 uses a Unix Domain Socket for communicating with it's clients. On Linux, that's just as fast as shared memory. That's as close as you can get to not having network transparency. Writing directly to the videocard's framebuffer is not "the modern way", it's "the 60s" way. Modern apps don't access hardware directly anymore: they do that via abstraction layers like the kernel. These abstractions don't necessarily degrade performance. But the most important of all, these abstractions provide portability and make sure that multiple applications don't conflict with each other (like, 2 apps trying to write the same hardware at the same time).
And dropping network transparency will piss off a lot of people, including corporations, and including Slashdot! Look at GNOME: at version 2 they took a new path and are now walking towards simplicity. They're now aiming the average users instead of geeks. And what do you see? Slashdot geeks are massively upset about this because GNOME is not targeting them anymore! In other words, even if you drop network transparency, Slashdotters won't stop complaining. I suspect that more and more people will by then start crying about putting back network transparency. And when Microsoft or Apple puts support for network transparency natively in their windowing systems, Slashdotters will suddenly complain that we need network transparency in order to succeed on the desktop!
It doesn't matter whether the name "sucks" or not. Does it matter to users? No: they don't actually care! Heck, they shouldn't even have to care. All they should know is that it works. Does it matter to distributors? No: if Xouvert is good, Linux distributions will include it, no matter whether the name "sucks" or not. Does it matter to developers? I don't think they, they care more about the code and the openness of the projects.
So, where is the problem?
"Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming"
Vi and Emacs are not popular outside the Unix commandline community because they're console apps, not because of their names! You can rename Emacs to "PowerEdit 2000" but it's marketshare won't change!
The name is certainly not the most important thing. Many people say that Ogg Vorbis will fail just because of it's name. And what do we see? More and more MP3 player manufactures are adopting Ogg Vorbis. And again: users don't care. If they can use the technology easily, they will, no matter the name.
But when done right, they can release often but still have stable released. See the GNOME project. They have a very strict policy in not breaking compatibility between minor versions and not changing big things during freezes. As a result, the GNOME 2.x series are more stable than any previous GNOME releases. Compare the stability of GNOME 1.0 with 2.0: huge difference!
If you've ever managed a reasonably large open source project then you know that making everything public from the beginning won't necessarily be a good thing! You can't just dump some stuff somewhere on the net and then expect people to contribute. You have to prepare a lot of things, so that people can easily contribute without getting lost in the mess!
And I don't know who moderated you up but those moderators certainly didn't read the website. I quote: "Sat Aug 16 00:59:49 PDT 2003 - You can't download anything yet. We have this website, XWIN is providing Wiki space, and Savannah is providing mailing list and bug tracking services. We are importing the Xfree86 source code into an arch repository right now; the current job is making a script to tag the source files every time a CVS checkout is done. The IRC logging bot still needs to be set up, and code written to archive the logs daily." The website has only been up since yesterday! Accusing them for "keeping it secret" and shoot down their image is just stupid, when they've just started recently.
Even Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP keeps sending expose events (or the Win32 equivalent of expose events) to an app when one of it's windows is unobscured. People always praise how fast WinXP is. The X way is no different than the Win32 way. Yet somehow you still say X is slow?
(I'll now wait what the hundreds of rabid anti-XFree zealots have to say)
The Linux kernel allocates more memory for an app than it really needs to run, for efficiency reasons. A lot of memory are just caches and buffers, which are cleared if you run low on memory. Also, the reported memory usage (by any tool) includes shared memory. That's why memory usage *appears* to be high. Also note that high memory usage does not always equal slow. For example, if you're running a video player, and the kernel pre-reads the rest of the video from disk and loads them into memory (thus making memory usage higher), your video will run smoother because RAM is much faster than the harddisk. Linux allocates a lot memory on purpose to make things faster.
"Startup notification in GNOME tends to screw up. That's why I like turning it off."
You mean startup notification in GNOME 1. Startup notification in GNOME 2 is different. Let me remind you of GNOME's design philosophy: don't add "unbreak me" preferences. They know that if you would want to disable startup notification, then there's something wrong with that feature. So instead, they've worked hard to make startup notification work correctly. And indeed it does.
"Hell, 'Normal' users don't use Linux."
Yet. Or are you suggesting that we should not design for normal users because we don't have much of them yet? If we do that we can be sure that they will never come.
"GNOME seems to be getting slower. Nautilus is a bit piece of crap."
Are you kidding? GNOME has become a lot *faster* since 1.x, not slower. Especially Nautilus, which has become significantly faster. Nautilus is getting better and better with each release, not worse.
Because big buttons are easier to click on. Fitt's Law remember? And those big buttons are only used in dialogs, that don't contain much data anyway. In main windows, the only large buttons are toolbar buttons with labels. But that makes sense since it will be immediately obvious what those buttons are for; you don't have to mouseover them and look at the tooltips. And this can be changed: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Menus and Toolbars->Text Besides Icons
It makes a lot of sense to make normal buttons bigger.
Because FireBird is part of the Mozilla project, and does not integrate properly with GNOME. And FireBird cannot link to the GNOME libraries because people will scream "bloat! bloat!" or "omg more dependancies!!"
I do agree that Slashdotters have a double standard. This goes for pro/anti-MSness too. Have you noticed that most of the post that say "Slashdot always mods anti-MS comments down and pro-Linux comments up! I will get moderated down for saying this!" always get modded *up*? Slashdot isn't even an anti-MS pro-Linux site anymore.
That's only what you think you see. What I see all the time is: 1) People who complain about Linux. 2) People who complain that pro-Linux comments get modded up and anti-MS comments get modded down. These posts usually have the highest moderation points! 3) People complaining about the Linux community.
Sorry but the anti-MS pro-Linux era has passed. For quite a while now. That is a fact, open your eyes and look at reality.
Ah, but you're talking about Slashdotters bitching. Those people are just that: Slashdot flamers. They're not the developers behind GNOME and GTK+. The GNOME and GTK+ projects follow a very strict set of rules in not breaking compatibility.
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first: How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically. Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able? And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of course it does. You want the highest amount of project visibility possible. What is your boss going to think of you bring up something called "Xouvert?" He's going to think exactly what it sounds like--some sort of hacked-together amateur project. What happened to maintaining some semblance of professionalism? We're trying to get Linux recognized and respected, right?"
Yeah maybe he won't like the name. But that's not the point. _Why should he care?_ Why would he want to care?
Let's face it: if I propose Linux he'll probably never find out what the windowing system is called. He'll just see "RedHat Linux" and maybe GNOME and KDE, and that's pretty much it.
"Of course they do. When you have non-stop gibberish names, it turns them off, and it is harder for them to keep track of it all when they are new to all this Linux stuff."
You just said it: non-stop. Xouvert is not a name you'll see non-top. The average user will only see it a few times. Or most likely: not at all.
Why should they see it anyway? Clicking on buttons and menus is all they should know about. We shouldn't expose implementation details to the user.
"The names are not intuitive and friendly."
Use any modern distribution and you'll see things like:
* Galeon Web Browser
* Evolution Email
* Gaim Instant Messenger
* Konqueror (File Manager)
* Kedit (Text Editor)
* Quanta (Website Development)
"DVD Decrypter, Wordpad, Office, Lotus Notes, WinDVD"
Excel, Outlook Express, Powerpoint, ASPack, ARMS Refrigerator, Sandra SiSoft...
"Unix domain sockets are not exactly a burden with this regard."
In fact, Unix Domain Sockets are just as fast as shared memory, at least on Linux. The TCP/IP stack is completely bypassed. Unix Domain Sockets are meant for local IPC.
I'm not sure. But in my experience (and benchmarks) XFree86 is just as fast as Windows when it comes to pure drawing speed.
I think most of the slowness people experience are their desktop environments (GNOME and KDE), not X. On my system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz, ATI Rage 128), pure blitting and drawing graphic primitives on X isn't slow at all.
Yes it's compatible. X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. XFree86 is an implementation. Xouvert will be another implementation of the same protocol.
It's not hacked. It's a public Wiki. Which means anybody can edit the page!
It's supposed to encourage users to contribute documentation. But it's sad to see that abusers from Slashdot has to abuse this for posting ASCII versions of goatse.cx.
"Are you saying that you'll remember www.xouvert.org as easily as you remember www.yahoo.com in 6 months?"
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I will, if the project gets popular.
But that's not the point. If you can't remember the name anymore then that means you aren't getting exposed to it enough. When you're not getting exposed to it enough that means one of these two things:
1) You don't care. So why should you remember the name? No problem here.
2) The project died off. Why should you still remember the name? No problem here either.
"Ogg Vorbis btw, is a terrible name. I still can't tell which part stands for the codec and which is the file format."
Ogg is the file format, Vorbis is the codec. I remembered this since day 1 and I still remember it.
If you can't remember that that probably means you don't care. What good will it do to you if Ogg Vorbis has an easier to remember name, if you don't care?
You're making the problem look bigger than it really is. The names of individual apps are *not* the biggest problems!
Who are you trying to market Xouvert to? To end users? Do you think they care? What are you going to tell them? To install an entire windowing system? As far as the end user is concerned, they shouldn't even *have* to know what the windowing system is called. There's no point in marketing Xouvert to end users. The only thing that matters is marketing "Mandrake Linux" or something to the end user.
I'd say the "marketing target" for Xouvert is developers. Do most developers care about the name? No, they care more about the code an openness of the project. So the name is not a big problem.
As for individual apps and the commercial world: do you think names like "Outlook Express" or "Powerpoint" are intuitive? There are only 2 reasons why people know what those apps do:
1) People told them.
2) They read the website or menu item description.
If people can tolerate those non-obvious names, why can't they tolerate open source software with non-obvious names? Distribution already add a description to menu items. Examples:
* Galeon Web Browser
* Evolution Email
* Gaim Instant Messenger
* kedit (Text Editor)
* Konqueror (File Manager)
"Bascially an X server that has been stripped of all the features that the "average" person doesn't use, such as running remote desktops over networks and things."
Urgh, not this again...
The slowness is not caused by network transparency!
Locally, XFree86 uses a Unix Domain Socket for communicating with it's clients. On Linux, that's just as fast as shared memory. That's as close as you can get to not having network transparency.
Writing directly to the videocard's framebuffer is not "the modern way", it's "the 60s" way. Modern apps don't access hardware directly anymore: they do that via abstraction layers like the kernel. These abstractions don't necessarily degrade performance. But the most important of all, these abstractions provide portability and make sure that multiple applications don't conflict with each other (like, 2 apps trying to write the same hardware at the same time).
And dropping network transparency will piss off a lot of people, including corporations, and including Slashdot!
Look at GNOME: at version 2 they took a new path and are now walking towards simplicity. They're now aiming the average users instead of geeks. And what do you see? Slashdot geeks are massively upset about this because GNOME is not targeting them anymore!
In other words, even if you drop network transparency, Slashdotters won't stop complaining. I suspect that more and more people will by then start crying about putting back network transparency. And when Microsoft or Apple puts support for network transparency natively in their windowing systems, Slashdotters will suddenly complain that we need network transparency in order to succeed on the desktop!
It doesn't matter whether the name "sucks" or not. Does it matter to users? No: they don't actually care! Heck, they shouldn't even have to care. All they should know is that it works.
Does it matter to distributors? No: if Xouvert is good, Linux distributions will include it, no matter whether the name "sucks" or not.
Does it matter to developers? I don't think they, they care more about the code and the openness of the projects.
So, where is the problem?
"Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming"
Vi and Emacs are not popular outside the Unix commandline community because they're console apps, not because of their names! You can rename Emacs to "PowerEdit 2000" but it's marketshare won't change!
The name is certainly not the most important thing. Many people say that Ogg Vorbis will fail just because of it's name. And what do we see? More and more MP3 player manufactures are adopting Ogg Vorbis. And again: users don't care. If they can use the technology easily, they will, no matter the name.
But when done right, they can release often but still have stable released. See the GNOME project. They have a very strict policy in not breaking compatibility between minor versions and not changing big things during freezes. As a result, the GNOME 2.x series are more stable than any previous GNOME releases. Compare the stability of GNOME 1.0 with 2.0: huge difference!
If you've ever managed a reasonably large open source project then you know that making everything public from the beginning won't necessarily be a good thing!
You can't just dump some stuff somewhere on the net and then expect people to contribute. You have to prepare a lot of things, so that people can easily contribute without getting lost in the mess!
And I don't know who moderated you up but those moderators certainly didn't read the website. I quote:
"Sat Aug 16 00:59:49 PDT 2003 - You can't download anything yet. We have this website, XWIN is providing Wiki space, and Savannah is providing mailing list and bug tracking services. We are importing the Xfree86 source code into an arch repository right now; the current job is making a script to tag the source files every time a CVS checkout is done. The IRC logging bot still needs to be set up, and code written to archive the logs daily."
The website has only been up since yesterday! Accusing them for "keeping it secret" and shoot down their image is just stupid, when they've just started recently.
Those are X extensions, not forks.
Even Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP keeps sending expose events (or the Win32 equivalent of expose events) to an app when one of it's windows is unobscured.
People always praise how fast WinXP is. The X way is no different than the Win32 way. Yet somehow you still say X is slow?
(I'll now wait what the hundreds of rabid anti-XFree zealots have to say)
But that doesn't mean most microorganisms are diseases. That Strain 122 will probably die in your body.
The Linux kernel allocates more memory for an app than it really needs to run, for efficiency reasons. A lot of memory are just caches and buffers, which are cleared if you run low on memory. Also, the reported memory usage (by any tool) includes shared memory. That's why memory usage *appears* to be high.
Also note that high memory usage does not always equal slow. For example, if you're running a video player, and the kernel pre-reads the rest of the video from disk and loads them into memory (thus making memory usage higher), your video will run smoother because RAM is much faster than the harddisk. Linux allocates a lot memory on purpose to make things faster.
"Startup notification in GNOME tends to screw up. That's why I like turning it off."
You mean startup notification in GNOME 1. Startup notification in GNOME 2 is different.
Let me remind you of GNOME's design philosophy: don't add "unbreak me" preferences. They know that if you would want to disable startup notification, then there's something wrong with that feature. So instead, they've worked hard to make startup notification work correctly. And indeed it does.
"Hell, 'Normal' users don't use Linux."
Yet. Or are you suggesting that we should not design for normal users because we don't have much of them yet? If we do that we can be sure that they will never come.
"GNOME seems to be getting slower. Nautilus is a bit piece of crap."
Are you kidding? GNOME has become a lot *faster* since 1.x, not slower. Especially Nautilus, which has become significantly faster. Nautilus is getting better and better with each release, not worse.
Because big buttons are easier to click on. Fitt's Law remember? And those big buttons are only used in dialogs, that don't contain much data anyway.
In main windows, the only large buttons are toolbar buttons with labels. But that makes sense since it will be immediately obvious what those buttons are for; you don't have to mouseover them and look at the tooltips. And this can be changed: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Menus and Toolbars->Text Besides Icons
It makes a lot of sense to make normal buttons bigger.
Because FireBird is part of the Mozilla project, and does not integrate properly with GNOME. And FireBird cannot link to the GNOME libraries because people will scream "bloat! bloat!" or "omg more dependancies!!"
I do agree that Slashdotters have a double standard. This goes for pro/anti-MSness too. Have you noticed that most of the post that say "Slashdot always mods anti-MS comments down and pro-Linux comments up! I will get moderated down for saying this!" always get modded *up*? Slashdot isn't even an anti-MS pro-Linux site anymore.
That's only what you think you see. What I see all the time is:
1) People who complain about Linux.
2) People who complain that pro-Linux comments get modded up and anti-MS comments get modded down. These posts usually have the highest moderation points!
3) People complaining about the Linux community.
Sorry but the anti-MS pro-Linux era has passed. For quite a while now. That is a fact, open your eyes and look at reality.
My patch also has a Bookmarks button. You can navigate to any directory easily instead of just a few hardcoded directories.
Ah, but you're talking about Slashdotters bitching. Those people are just that: Slashdot flamers. They're not the developers behind GNOME and GTK+.
The GNOME and GTK+ projects follow a very strict set of rules in not breaking compatibility.
Hm? I kinda like those icons. If you don't like them, just change your icon theme.
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first:
How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically.
Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able?
And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
Startup notification is implemented in the new Nautilus. There's no configuration option, it's always on.
You *can* configure for single click. In Nautilus:
Edit->Preferences->Behavior->Single click to activate items.