You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe? Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search? Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org? I really don't know what's so bad about KDE or what's so good about Gnome. I guess if you don't have complex searches for documents or all you write are text files, yeah, Gnome fits the bill.
If Windows 7 got rad software reviews because of its cool interface, I can't imagine what the "specialized press" people would write about KDE.
Now, if anyone is low on resources and wants a kewl, rad, slick desktop that is not a toy project, then please do checkout Enlightenment. If it was good enough for Yellow Dog Linux to choose it for their PS3 Linux distro (in the days before Sony betrayed us all - fuck you Sony, I will buy an XBox just out of spite), presenting cool graphics on those 8 parallel-processing chips, then it's good enough for the rest of us.
But, really, Gnome 3 looks like it's same-old, same-old. Polishing an old shoe does not make it turn into a new shoe.
The problem with Gnome is that it was predicated on the human interface guidelines copied from Mac OS 8. The updates they've done, IIRC, are not substantial, and very ad hoc. Nothing in Gnome seems to indicate they're knowledgeable in the area of human-computer interfaces. Meanwhile, KDE embraces a state of the art artificial intelligence project in usability (the KDE implementation of NEPOMUK - Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)... KDE has cooler graphics too...I (and a lot of people) would argue. Furthermore, Gnome hasn't conducted any serious usability studies (only ones with sample sizes so small they don't count). For a company that had a millionaire astronaut supporting it (indirectly through Ubuntu) and used to have Red Hat's support, it's too little, too late.
On my laptop, my Mandriva ("mandreeva") runs Nepomuk semantic ontology-based file archiving and search on KDE. This is real innovation. Definitely not impressed with Gnome 3. From what I saw, there wasn't anything much there except nice cosmetics, which your post confirms. Besides, I still think Gnome eats too much visual space. Nah. Sticking to my KDE.
On the other hand the "virality" which the GPL is accused of pays big dividens (on things I'm interested in). For a hobbyist project (like Linux was back in the day or like many other projects right now) probably the GPL is a deterrent for corporate involvement, but it's a hobbyist project after all
Man, where have you been all these years? Linux succeeded out of dumb luck: lawsuits hampering the BSD camp and the corporations that rallied against Sun Microsystems to kill the Solaris OS, using the GPL as a shield.
Linux was always a shitty design. Linux was always a liability, from the standpoint of security - they have a bad track record to show it too (want a solid track record? Head to www.openbsd.org). That, and the hippie Stallman, a jobless man who travels the world converting jobless students to his holy war - but please do look at the track record the GNU project has - Apple took the Mach kernel and made the best user-friendly Unix in history - but GNU is still struggling to get threads working with their Mach prototype - what a fucking joke.
Linux was/is nothing but a huge strike of luck - much more an epiphenomenon, riding on dumb luck than anything else - but I'm sure Linux Torvalds thinks he's as bright as Thomas Edison.
The GPL has totally killed the possibility off having an ecosystem of software houses producing or the Linux market. There is no "Linux", but a hodge-podge of amalgamated software called "distros", with GNOME and GNU libraries that break ABIs every 6 months or so. It's a mess. When they say "Linux won", typically they'll say stuff such as "look at Android", and then cross their fingers hoping they'll see some source code.
I say too bad "Linux won". It could have been better. Too bad Sun went under. BSDs, OTOH, you can wish they die, but they just won't die. Why? Corporate backing, like Linux? (corporate support for Linux was just using the GPL as a collective rallying strategy to kill Sun Microsystems) No. BSDs are alive and proud today because they have quality, no matter what the underpaid Linux a-dime-a-dozen pseudoadmin thinks.
When you say "we stop by using capabilites" I just know you are referring to FreeBSD and not Linux, because Linux is weak in the capabilities arena. As a matter of fact, the new Capsicum framework is implemented in FreeBSD. Again, one of those things, such as Dtrace, ZFS, MAC and Jails that are ready for consumption in FreeBSD but not even on the radar of the high-browse superior Linoox crowd.
Bullshit. In the early days you would have to have the whole specs for every piece of hardware you had. That included modems. Fuck, you had to sent out modem command just to get a connection.
I remember me and my buddy stayed up for two whole days because I had a Toshiba laptop and he had a Texas Instrument one and getting X to work was some scary shit - mess it up and it could cost you your LCD screen. I was such a noob when I found that typing "emacs" on the shell prompt would bring out the editor I was in rapture! (We kept reading "emacs", "emacs" - where the fuck was that darn thing? Gee, we were clueless).
Linux wasn't easy at all. I just didn't really know about BSD. I read about Linux in Wired and this local Linux shop (Connectiva) sold boxed editions that me and my buddy split the cash in order to buy it. Those days Internet connections were a major PITA, and it was easier to buy a box than to download the whole of Linux.
Back in 90-smth I used to be a Debian user. I used to ask a lot on Usenet and lists. That's because the system was so bad, and the documentation so shitty (Linux users back them used to use the "LDP" - Linux Documentation Project - which in effect was a bunch of badly written and outdated documents.
Then some dude from a Debian LUG (I helped begin, BTW) talked greatly about the virtues of FreeBSD. I never looked back. Right he was, indeed. Soo much better than Debian. I actually felt a sort of relief. You don't know your in the shit when you're always in the shit...And then, Mac OS X came out (borrowing stuf from FreeBSD, of course), and they set the bar higher for "Unix".
The reason you don't hear much about FreeBSD from users in forums is because the documentation is good and the system so solid and easy to understand design-wise, that you never hear that incessant bruhaha you get in Linux distros, where everything is always breaking from one upgrade to another (or the never-ending infighting that goes on). If you head out to a BSD forum without having read the thorough documentation (a trait all BSD distros share), then it turns out you are one lazy moron. There's no excuse, like there is in Linux distros, where typically the manual page was last written in 1998.
and could be used in anything written by Torvalds or Stallman. The reverse is not true, since the Linux kernel and anything Stallman touches are GPL.
Which means that the BSD code is more "viral" in a way. Oh, I'm sorry! I guess logic went the opposite way of what you had expected!
In fact, Microsoft has used the BSD TCP stack (considered to be the reference implementation). And when Microsoft uses high-quality BSD code, the world becomes a safer place.
BTW, Apple took the Mach kernel and actually did something useful out of it, unlike GNU, which sits with its ass on it for almost 2 decades.
Maybe, if GNU wasn't so rabid about their beloved viral license, they could head over to the Darwin port and attempt to learn something. At which point could cease his pathetic attempts to call the system "GNU/Linux".
Apart from userland bug fixing? Well, there's that whole security auditing framework you ain't never heard of, because you are really about talking out of your ass - if you were really interested, you would know that Apple has hired FreeBSD developers...
Linux without IBM would be nothing. You guys kid yourselves. You were pawns in a huge strategy to run Sun out of business. But you are too stupid to notice. Most Linux developers work for IBM and Red Hat (Red Hat, BTW, sells per seat user licenses - just like Microsoft does - but that never seems to bother you.)
Are you crazy? Do you read? Linux doesn't even scratch the surface of Microsoft's dominance. Thanks to that stupid GPL, it never will.
Did you ever have a vendor trying to convince you to *not* use their Linux version, because they couldn't guarantee it wouldn't break a year from now? I had.
If Linux were so good, and Microsoft so destined for the stupid crowd, then explain this: 90% of engineering departments worldwide run Windows, not Linux. Funny that, huh? Why? Because M$ developers have a commitment to not-ramdomly-breaking-shit-up. (Oh, you don't believe me? Must be because you never set foot in an engineering department - but here's an idea: go and investigate for what platform the people who make software for engineers develop for. Hint: doesn't start with "L").
Linux is just something that's plugged in virtualization software. The virtualization sotware you pay for. Linux is cheap, since it was funded by competitors of the now-defunct Sun Microsystems. And they make most of their revenue not from Linux, but from their proprietary solution (hey, go check out what IBM is churning out, ok?). And you guys think "Linux won" based on its own merits....
You guys really ought to emulate Linux Torvalds and start thinking you're all geniuses because you use Linux....
While the other license has proven to enable an explosion in applications and devices from an array of corporations and individuals (...)
Do you mean Microsoft? That's the only corporation with an "explosion in applications".
See, that's the problem with Linux fanboys - you gotta stick your heads out of your own asses sometimes and just check out what the competition is doing...You might be surprised...
Now, I'm kinda of a Unix minor geek myself, but Microsoft has some cool shit that's years ahead of Linux, such as formal verification of driver software. Yet, as I write this, I realize you are probably completely clueless as to what "formal software verification" may mean...You probably think it's about writing Ruby unit tests - and if you do, well, I must compliment you - I didn't think you go that far in your thinking...
I what regards embedded Linux, I defy Richard Stallman to obtain the source code - or point to the community where said source code is - for the top 3 embedded Linuxen.
Whoopee. Good for you, dude. But the fact lie elsewhere: Linux has been a huge pile of broken-security shitware. Linux never was as advanced as Solaris. Any admin with Solaris experience under their belt will tell you that. The only reason Linux is so dominant is because firms such as IBM were hell-bent on killing Sun Solaris. They couldn't do that with BSD-licensed software, so they rallied behind the GPL. Red Hat has made money selling fucking *per seat* licenses (just like Mr. Gates' enterprise), but Stallman and his Church never once complained...
To this day, Linux distros are a complete mess...Not of of them delivers...All play their fanboys like fools: Debian went to hell years ago, to the point they needed a face lift only made possible by a money-loosing millionaire; Fedora is "experimental", as they say, i.e., they have no commitment to their userbase, they just want to push trial-and-break software to roll them back to Red Hat and its per-seat licenses. Slackware? Gone for good (a one man job it was). What's left? Jokes like Gentoo? Mandriva (Mandrake+Conectiva), which is a distro geared by braindead business people who are utterly unable to tie commercial deals with the very few who dare make commercial Linux software? SuSE? SuSE only speaks Deutsch. No. Linux has gone to hell, except as a server.
Years later and Linux still fails everyone on the desktop. No one well ever approach GPLed software commercially.
The only things worth considering are non-Linux Unixens - look elsewhere for best-of-breed pure-bloods and innovators. A Linux monoculture is a death trap in so many ways...
The more one reads about other free Unixens out there, the more one realizes that Linux was one bad design from the start, and Linus and his (IBM-sponsored) crew just stuck to it, it being more of the same again and again...
I'm sorry, but I have to agree with the non-Linux fanboys - there wasn't much in it that was innovative, and it nurtured a cultured of bad design and bad execution - Gnome, Debian, etc. ad nauseum.
Let's face it, Linux was never as interesting as the *BSDs, Minix 3 or what Solaris had to offer. All it had was a huge hype machine that went viral because of Stallman and his Church, the mom-and-dad-sponsored no-job students, and the IBM-sponsored RP stealth-injected press stories about how cool it was (and, uh, RedHat stock in Nasdaq - a testimony not to quality but to the strength of the American stock market), which was strategic in killing Sun Microsystems...When in fact, Linux was poorly built, poorly designed, and ever since its inception date a veritable Swiss cheese full of security holes....(Major breaches in GNU and Debian, and kernel trojans just about every single month...There's no denying that shitty track record)
I just checked the facts now, and Ray Kurzweil (AI + future-tech guru/genius/entrepreneur/benefactor/cyborg ) has a whole company specializing in assistive reading technologies.
This product is no longer in development, because they have moved to using cell-phones (you just gotta love this cell-phone age we're in). BTW, don't waste your time looking at products made by people without the expertise in this field of AI and assistive technology. You need a real solution for a real problem...
For reading and using the computer, advanced software exists (Windows platform - don't let anyone make you waste your time with open source, it's not for grandpa - yet). If he can identify elements in the screen and is able to locate where text is, he can just use something like TextAloud.
As macular degeneration progresses, though, he will want to move into software specifically tailored for the blind. In fact, I would suggest getting acquainted with the following software before total blindness. JAWS is the major-league player in this category.
I never understood why people put their faith in a "product line" that relies on a millionaire with visions of grandeur, while piggybacking on a broken product. I mean, the writing was on the wall: one day the astronaut would land and decide he had to have a profitable venture...Linux fanboys be damned. I say more power to him, but a dumbed-down Unix is not my cup of tea...Besides, Mac OS set the bar for a user-friendly Unix, and it doesn't look like Unity.
Fedora, likewise, is a platform to test-and-brake, every once in a while pissing off their user base.
That's why the only linux I use today are paid (mandriva on my notebook, but would also consider suse). At least they are committed to their customer base, guaranteeing a smoother experience and will stick to sensible choices (e.g., KDE). Other than that, I use Windows 7 (Visual Studio, right?), XP (old but still useful software), FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. These last two, IMHO, beat Linux hands down.
Besides, what a hassle it is to use these free-as-in-beer distros...There's always something awkward going on, always some fight going on...
AFAIK, openSuSE has the most advanced package manager, based on the cutting edge of academic research.
The Debian social club needs to believe they are the shat, though (then why are a lot of people using Ubuntu...wait, not Ubuntu, something new touting Gnome 2 as the new hot thing).
IMNSHO, the debian package format is over-engineered, poorly engineered (...)
Debian's package management tools are definitely not cutting edge. SuSE and Mandriva have tools with SAT solvers. FreeBSD has finer-grained control of how things are installed. And there's newer systems like PC-BSD.pbi, which is designed sort of like Mac packages or the Nix system, which in fact is a DSL for software installation that guarantees referential transparency, so that updates do not imply destructive state, which allows installation of different versions. Debian fanboys insist their solution is very safe when in truth all it takes is reading discussions like these and now and again people will report major system wreckage with apt (it will just keep going, without having the grace to even bork).
The higher barriers means that packagers just cannot fart out a crappy package.
This is really a symptom. They have to be very anal about it all. In fact, packaging for Debian is a social rite of passage. It really is a waste of human resources, so much so that true "developers" are a tiny minority, the majority are software repackagers.
The devs, packagers, icon makers and what not will continue to toil on the backside with the tools at hand
Debian only (sort of) works because there's an army of people, because the processes is needlessly labor intensive (bad design). In fact, it is a true ecosystem: the fruits of their labor are then sucked by the Ubuntu parasites, which then handle a more polished product for consumption.
You want Flash support on FreeBSD? Easy as a breeze. Since Flash is proprietary and Adobe doesn't make a version for FreeBSD - in fact, sometimes they even forget about Linux for a while and let it lag behind the Windows version, right? (BTW, you come across as very proud that Linux relies so much on that proprietary tech)
So you do the work around. See, FreeBSD devs are intelligent. So what they did is create something called "Linux Emulation Layer". What this is is basically a Linux distro that is installed inside your FreeBSD (it's in the ports tree). And then, every single call to Linux libraries is redirect to and from BSD libs. So, basically, anything that works on Linux works on FreeBSD. It's pretty fast. I've had to do that with expensive mathematical software I bought (licensed) for Linux, that then broke (as everything breaks in Linux, periodically). Didn't work on Debian, or Ubuntu, but worked like a charm with FreeBSD.
Anyways, I'm sure you're aware that Flash dominance isn't goint to last long, since HTML5 video is coming along. Which is going to be a web standard, so that Flash (and Silverlight, etc.) have their days counted. And it won't make a fucking difference if you use Linux or BSD - and then we're gonna see people choosing based on overarching system quality, and not Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who is funnier - you or the dude who modded your post as "informative"! LOL.
You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe? Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search? Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org? I really don't know what's so bad about KDE or what's so good about Gnome. I guess if you don't have complex searches for documents or all you write are text files, yeah, Gnome fits the bill.
If Windows 7 got rad software reviews because of its cool interface, I can't imagine what the "specialized press" people would write about KDE.
Now, if anyone is low on resources and wants a kewl, rad, slick desktop that is not a toy project, then please do checkout Enlightenment. If it was good enough for Yellow Dog Linux to choose it for their PS3 Linux distro (in the days before Sony betrayed us all - fuck you Sony, I will buy an XBox just out of spite), presenting cool graphics on those 8 parallel-processing chips, then it's good enough for the rest of us.
But, really, Gnome 3 looks like it's same-old, same-old. Polishing an old shoe does not make it turn into a new shoe.
The problem with Gnome is that it was predicated on the human interface guidelines copied from Mac OS 8.
The updates they've done, IIRC, are not substantial, and very ad hoc. Nothing in Gnome seems to indicate they're knowledgeable in the area of human-computer interfaces. Meanwhile, KDE embraces a state of the art artificial intelligence project in usability (the KDE implementation of NEPOMUK - Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)...
KDE has cooler graphics too...I (and a lot of people) would argue.
Furthermore, Gnome hasn't conducted any serious usability studies (only ones with sample sizes so small they don't count). For a company that had a millionaire astronaut supporting it (indirectly through Ubuntu) and used to have Red Hat's support, it's too little, too late.
On my laptop, my Mandriva ("mandreeva") runs Nepomuk semantic ontology-based file archiving and search on KDE.
This is real innovation.
Definitely not impressed with Gnome 3. From what I saw, there wasn't anything much there except nice cosmetics, which your post confirms. Besides, I still think Gnome eats too much visual space.
Nah. Sticking to my KDE.
Semantic sense for the desktop: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21840/?a=f
Goals and objectives of the Nepomuk project: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Project+Objectives
On the other hand the "virality" which the GPL is accused of pays big dividens (on things I'm interested in). For a hobbyist project (like Linux was back in the day or like many other projects right now) probably the GPL is a deterrent for corporate involvement, but it's a hobbyist project after all
Man, where have you been all these years? Linux succeeded out of dumb luck: lawsuits hampering the BSD camp and the corporations that rallied against Sun Microsystems to kill the Solaris OS, using the GPL as a shield.
Linux was always a shitty design. Linux was always a liability, from the standpoint of security - they have a bad track record to show it too (want a solid track record? Head to www.openbsd.org). That, and the hippie Stallman, a jobless man who travels the world converting jobless students to his holy war - but please do look at the track record the GNU project has - Apple took the Mach kernel and made the best user-friendly Unix in history - but GNU is still struggling to get threads working with their Mach prototype - what a fucking joke.
Linux was/is nothing but a huge strike of luck - much more an epiphenomenon, riding on dumb luck than anything else - but I'm sure Linux Torvalds thinks he's as bright as Thomas Edison.
The GPL has totally killed the possibility off having an ecosystem of software houses producing or the Linux market. There is no "Linux", but a hodge-podge of amalgamated software called "distros", with GNOME and GNU libraries that break ABIs every 6 months or so. It's a mess. When they say "Linux won", typically they'll say stuff such as "look at Android", and then cross their fingers hoping they'll see some source code.
I say too bad "Linux won". It could have been better. Too bad Sun went under. BSDs, OTOH, you can wish they die, but they just won't die. Why? Corporate backing, like Linux? (corporate support for Linux was just using the GPL as a collective rallying strategy to kill Sun Microsystems) No. BSDs are alive and proud today because they have quality, no matter what the underpaid Linux a-dime-a-dozen pseudoadmin thinks.
And Jail, MAC, Dtrace port and Capsicum.
When you say "we stop by using capabilites" I just know you are referring to FreeBSD and not Linux, because Linux is weak in the capabilities arena. As a matter of fact, the new Capsicum framework is implemented in FreeBSD. Again, one of those things, such as Dtrace, ZFS, MAC and Jails that are ready for consumption in FreeBSD but not even on the radar of the high-browse superior Linoox crowd.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
Bullshit. In the early days you would have to have the whole specs for every piece of hardware you had. That included modems. Fuck, you had to sent out modem command just to get a connection.
I remember me and my buddy stayed up for two whole days because I had a Toshiba laptop and he had a Texas Instrument one and getting X to work was some scary shit - mess it up and it could cost you your LCD screen. I was such a noob when I found that typing "emacs" on the shell prompt would bring out the editor I was in rapture! (We kept reading "emacs", "emacs" - where the fuck was that darn thing? Gee, we were clueless).
Linux wasn't easy at all. I just didn't really know about BSD. I read about Linux in Wired and this local Linux shop (Connectiva) sold boxed editions that me and my buddy split the cash in order to buy it. Those days Internet connections were a major PITA, and it was easier to buy a box than to download the whole of Linux.
Back in 90-smth I used to be a Debian user. I used to ask a lot on Usenet and lists. That's because the system was so bad, and the documentation so shitty (Linux users back them used to use the "LDP" - Linux Documentation Project - which in effect was a bunch of badly written and outdated documents.
Then some dude from a Debian LUG (I helped begin, BTW) talked greatly about the virtues of FreeBSD. I never looked back. Right he was, indeed. Soo much better than Debian. I actually felt a sort of relief. You don't know your in the shit when you're always in the shit...And then, Mac OS X came out (borrowing stuf from FreeBSD, of course), and they set the bar higher for "Unix".
The reason you don't hear much about FreeBSD from users in forums is because the documentation is good and the system so solid and easy to understand design-wise, that you never hear that incessant bruhaha you get in Linux distros, where everything is always breaking from one upgrade to another (or the never-ending infighting that goes on). If you head out to a BSD forum without having read the thorough documentation (a trait all BSD distros share), then it turns out you are one lazy moron. There's no excuse, like there is in Linux distros, where typically the manual page was last written in 1998.
and could be used in anything written by Torvalds or Stallman. The reverse is not true, since the Linux kernel and anything Stallman touches are GPL.
Which means that the BSD code is more "viral" in a way. Oh, I'm sorry! I guess logic went the opposite way of what you had expected!
In fact, Microsoft has used the BSD TCP stack (considered to be the reference implementation). And when Microsoft uses high-quality BSD code, the world becomes a safer place.
BTW, Apple took the Mach kernel and actually did something useful out of it, unlike GNU, which sits with its ass on it for almost 2 decades.
Maybe, if GNU wasn't so rabid about their beloved viral license, they could head over to the Darwin port and attempt to learn something. At which point could cease his pathetic attempts to call the system "GNU/Linux".
What has OS X done for BSD?
Apart from userland bug fixing? Well, there's that whole security auditing framework you ain't never heard of, because you are really about talking out of your ass - if you were really interested, you would know that Apple has hired FreeBSD developers...
Linux without IBM would be nothing. You guys kid yourselves. You were pawns in a huge strategy to run Sun out of business. But you are too stupid to notice. Most Linux developers work for IBM and Red Hat (Red Hat, BTW, sells per seat user licenses - just like Microsoft does - but that never seems to bother you.)
Are you crazy? Do you read? Linux doesn't even scratch the surface of Microsoft's dominance. Thanks to that stupid GPL, it never will.
Did you ever have a vendor trying to convince you to *not* use their Linux version, because they couldn't guarantee it wouldn't break a year from now? I had.
If Linux were so good, and Microsoft so destined for the stupid crowd, then explain this: 90% of engineering departments worldwide run Windows, not Linux. Funny that, huh? Why? Because M$ developers have a commitment to not-ramdomly-breaking-shit-up. (Oh, you don't believe me? Must be because you never set foot in an engineering department - but here's an idea: go and investigate for what platform the people who make software for engineers develop for. Hint: doesn't start with "L").
Linux is just something that's plugged in virtualization software. The virtualization sotware you pay for. Linux is cheap, since it was funded by competitors of the now-defunct Sun Microsystems. And they make most of their revenue not from Linux, but from their proprietary solution (hey, go check out what IBM is churning out, ok?). And you guys think "Linux won" based on its own merits....
You guys really ought to emulate Linux Torvalds and start thinking you're all geniuses because you use Linux....
True. Simple as that. Hype and low cash, that's all...
While the other license has proven to enable an explosion in applications and devices from an array of corporations and individuals (...)
Do you mean Microsoft? That's the only corporation with an "explosion in applications".
See, that's the problem with Linux fanboys - you gotta stick your heads out of your own asses sometimes and just check out what the competition is doing...You might be surprised...
Now, I'm kinda of a Unix minor geek myself, but Microsoft has some cool shit that's years ahead of Linux, such as formal verification of driver software. Yet, as I write this, I realize you are probably completely clueless as to what "formal software verification" may mean...You probably think it's about writing Ruby unit tests - and if you do, well, I must compliment you - I didn't think you go that far in your thinking...
I what regards embedded Linux, I defy Richard Stallman to obtain the source code - or point to the community where said source code is - for the top 3 embedded Linuxen.
Do it. Full source code with no bullshit.
Whoopee. Good for you, dude. But the fact lie elsewhere: Linux has been a huge pile of broken-security shitware. Linux never was as advanced as Solaris. Any admin with Solaris experience under their belt will tell you that. The only reason Linux is so dominant is because firms such as IBM were hell-bent on killing Sun Solaris. They couldn't do that with BSD-licensed software, so they rallied behind the GPL. Red Hat has made money selling fucking *per seat* licenses (just like Mr. Gates' enterprise), but Stallman and his Church never once complained...
To this day, Linux distros are a complete mess...Not of of them delivers...All play their fanboys like fools: Debian went to hell years ago, to the point they needed a face lift only made possible by a money-loosing millionaire; Fedora is "experimental", as they say, i.e., they have no commitment to their userbase, they just want to push trial-and-break software to roll them back to Red Hat and its per-seat licenses. Slackware? Gone for good (a one man job it was). What's left? Jokes like Gentoo? Mandriva (Mandrake+Conectiva), which is a distro geared by braindead business people who are utterly unable to tie commercial deals with the very few who dare make commercial Linux software? SuSE? SuSE only speaks Deutsch. No. Linux has gone to hell, except as a server.
Years later and Linux still fails everyone on the desktop. No one well ever approach GPLed software commercially.
The only things worth considering are non-Linux Unixens - look elsewhere for best-of-breed pure-bloods and innovators. A Linux monoculture is a death trap in so many ways...
The more one reads about other free Unixens out there, the more one realizes that Linux was one bad design from the start, and Linus and his (IBM-sponsored) crew just stuck to it, it being more of the same again and again...
I'm sorry, but I have to agree with the non-Linux fanboys - there wasn't much in it that was innovative, and it nurtured a cultured of bad design and bad execution - Gnome, Debian, etc. ad nauseum.
Let's face it, Linux was never as interesting as the *BSDs, Minix 3 or what Solaris had to offer. All it had was a huge hype machine that went viral because of Stallman and his Church, the mom-and-dad-sponsored no-job students, and the IBM-sponsored RP stealth-injected press stories about how cool it was (and, uh, RedHat stock in Nasdaq - a testimony not to quality but to the strength of the American stock market), which was strategic in killing Sun Microsystems...When in fact, Linux was poorly built, poorly designed, and ever since its inception date a veritable Swiss cheese full of security holes....(Major breaches in GNU and Debian, and kernel trojans just about every single month...There's no denying that shitty track record)
Check this out:
I just checked the facts now, and Ray Kurzweil (AI + future-tech guru/genius/entrepreneur/benefactor/cyborg ) has a whole company specializing in assistive reading technologies.
K–NFB Reading Technology
http://www.knfbreader.com/
The original OCR reader for blind people he developed is presented here:
http://www.knfbreader.com/products-classic.php
This product is no longer in development, because they have moved to using cell-phones (you just gotta love this cell-phone age we're in). BTW, don't waste your time looking at products made by people without the expertise in this field of AI and assistive technology. You need a real solution for a real problem...
For reading and using the computer, advanced software exists (Windows platform - don't let anyone make you waste your time with open source, it's not for grandpa - yet). If he can identify elements in the screen and is able to locate where text is, he can just use something like TextAloud.
As macular degeneration progresses, though, he will want to move into software specifically tailored for the blind. In fact, I would suggest getting acquainted with the following software before total blindness. JAWS is the major-league player in this category.
http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp
I wish all the best for your girlfriend's grandfather. Tell him he's not the only in that situation and that there are solutions out there.
I hope this helps.
May you score many Internet Points points with your future father-in-law, too ;-)
I never understood why people put their faith in a "product line" that relies on a millionaire with visions of grandeur, while piggybacking on a broken product. I mean, the writing was on the wall: one day the astronaut would land and decide he had to have a profitable venture...Linux fanboys be damned. I say more power to him, but a dumbed-down Unix is not my cup of tea...Besides, Mac OS set the bar for a user-friendly Unix, and it doesn't look like Unity.
Fedora, likewise, is a platform to test-and-brake, every once in a while pissing off their user base.
That's why the only linux I use today are paid (mandriva on my notebook, but would also consider suse). At least they are committed to their customer base, guaranteeing a smoother experience and will stick to sensible choices (e.g., KDE). Other than that, I use Windows 7 (Visual Studio, right?), XP (old but still useful software), FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. These last two, IMHO, beat Linux hands down.
Besides, what a hassle it is to use these free-as-in-beer distros...There's always something awkward going on, always some fight going on...
AFAIK, openSuSE has the most advanced package manager, based on the cutting edge of academic research.
The Debian social club needs to believe they are the shat, though (then why are a lot of people using Ubuntu...wait, not Ubuntu, something new touting Gnome 2 as the new hot thing).
It does happen. People have researched this. It's a fact, but the Debian social club needs to live in denial.
Ask the rpm camp if they think their tools are so bad...(BTW, the majority of major distros have chosen rpm-based systems).
My guess is they'll say they have finer granulation than dpkg...
People keep talking about rpm tools as if they were still the same as the early 90s, when Debian was in fact superior.
IMNSHO, the debian package format is over-engineered, poorly engineered (...)
Debian's package management tools are definitely not cutting edge. SuSE and Mandriva have tools with SAT solvers. FreeBSD has finer-grained control of how things are installed. And there's newer systems like PC-BSD .pbi, which is designed sort of like Mac packages or the Nix system, which in fact is a DSL for software installation that guarantees referential transparency, so that updates do not imply destructive state, which allows installation of different versions.
Debian fanboys insist their solution is very safe when in truth all it takes is reading discussions like these and now and again people will report major system wreckage with apt (it will just keep going, without having the grace to even bork).
The higher barriers means that packagers just cannot fart out a crappy package.
This is really a symptom. They have to be very anal about it all. In fact, packaging for Debian is a social rite of passage. It really is a waste of human resources, so much so that true "developers" are a tiny minority, the majority are software repackagers.
The devs, packagers, icon makers and what not will continue to toil on the backside with the tools at hand
Debian only (sort of) works because there's an army of people, because the processes is needlessly labor intensive (bad design). In fact, it is a true ecosystem: the fruits of their labor are then sucked by the Ubuntu parasites, which then handle a more polished product for consumption.
You want Flash support on FreeBSD? Easy as a breeze. Since Flash is proprietary and Adobe doesn't make a version for FreeBSD - in fact, sometimes they even forget about Linux for a while and let it lag behind the Windows version, right? (BTW, you come across as very proud that Linux relies so much on that proprietary tech)
So you do the work around. See, FreeBSD devs are intelligent. So what they did is create something called "Linux Emulation Layer". What this is is basically a Linux distro that is installed inside your FreeBSD (it's in the ports tree). And then, every single call to Linux libraries is redirect to and from BSD libs. So, basically, anything that works on Linux works on FreeBSD. It's pretty fast. I've had to do that with expensive mathematical software I bought (licensed) for Linux, that then broke (as everything breaks in Linux, periodically). Didn't work on Debian, or Ubuntu, but worked like a charm with FreeBSD.
Anyways, I'm sure you're aware that Flash dominance isn't goint to last long, since HTML5 video is coming along. Which is going to be a web standard, so that Flash (and Silverlight, etc.) have their days counted. And it won't make a fucking difference if you use Linux or BSD - and then we're gonna see people choosing based on overarching system quality, and not Flash.