As it happens, I think that everyone should purchase products that focus on philosophic or abstract CS thought. Unfortunately, it turns out that that's not how the vast majority of society wants to relax. Unsurprisingly, they also dislike being fed loads of PC material when they're unwinding.
Obviously Lara Croft is for gamers to ogle at. What planet do you have to be from to not know women are the ogled ones? They know it, they wear the make-up and the pretty dresses.
You know, he put it a bit harshly, but women *do* tend to take a role of passive attractor in our society. You don't see guys spending a significant chunk of their morning sitting in front of a mirror applying makeup.
Furthermore, that role is one that cannot be reasonably blamed on a lack of action on the part of males. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by women changing if they want change.
I mean, I don't hear any complaining from *guys*, despite the fact that we are the only ones that have to fill out a selective service card and face possible forced military service and death -- the most onerous of civil duties -- yet women and men both get the privilege of voting. The feminist lobby becomes remarkably silent when true equality is on the boards, instead of just the advancement of females.
So if Mad Quacker wants to make an entirely correct observation of society, abeit somwhat rude, I'd say that he's certainly justified in doing so.
You know, it's not impossible to both admire a hypersexualized image and still be able to deal with reality.
You're making the same sort of leap that irritates me with people who hate video games that contain violence -- the assumption that people won't be able to distinguish between reality and the video game.
Come on guys, you're getting off on a corporate logo. Go for something with a soul, something real, not a cartoon designed by dweebs in the marketing and design departments. Are you really that easy to control?
Try thinking for yourself more often.
And you're simply parroting propaganda put out by a couple of feminist groups. Go for what you find attractive, not for the social image that you're being molded to by a bunch of activists. Are you really that easy to control?
Try thinking for yourself more often.:-)
Seriously, images of perfect beauty have always been around. Mother goddess figures, Greek statues, paintings in the Rennaissance, mens magazines. Part of life is recognizing and dealing with life's imperfections.
Read what you just quoted from my post. I said "font formats", not "fonts".
Zooming in and out? What is that supposed to mean? With Windows you can essentially accomplish the same thing without the extra work up-front.
Because I frequently want to show someone across the room something on my screen, and instead of requiring them to come over to read it or see it, I can just flip the resolution. It's not a fundamental flaw in Windows -- theoretically, someone could write an app that does this, but it wouldn't switch as quickly, since it'd have to dump video memory to a buffer in general purpose RAM first.
You did only specify "Aqua On Linux" in the subject of your post.
Well...yes, but there isn't a more prominent place to put it, you know? I mean, I could have put "I am talking about Linux and Aqua" each couple of lines in my post, but I kind of think that shouldn't be necessary.
The rest was pure Aqua bashing.
So? That doesn't make it a troll -- I really dislike Aqua as being far too heavyweight, and think Apple made a poor engineering call in deciding on such a heavyweight UI system. Anyone who criticizes Apple is *not* automatically a troll. Could I have been more gentle? Sure. I just don't think Aqua deserves it (especially since I had a tremendous amount of respect for the people that designed the classic Mac OS UI).
How would it be any different to put Aqua on a machine with a Linux kernel instead of a Mach kernel?
Because I have the option to simply use X with Linux.
Gkrellm uses a ton of modules. It also uses an entirely bitmapped interface. Without looking into the source, I'm making a pretty safe call that it just loads all of its pixmaps into memory at the start, just in case it intends to use them during the run.
It's not like they couldn't change that and not load the things. Probably no one has complained.:-)
I want open source drivers too. But that's *only* so that I can be sure that the product will keep working with future versions of the Linux kernel.
As has been well demonstrated in the past, 3d drivers are complicated enough and enough of a PITA that volunteers are relatively uninterested in working on them. Much of the existing DRI acceleration was funded by vendors and done under contract by people like Precision Insight.
Open source doesn't provide nearly as many benefits if it's hard to drop into a program and write a patch.
Actually, I suspect that Dell just checks to find out what people pay attention to. If people buy into "silly synthetic benchmarks", then Dell will make every effort to also do so, since they'll be obtaining what people will buy. People have traditionally tended to look at CMU speed, but less at RAM quantity in a computer. Dell takes good advantage of this.
At some point, you can start doing motion blur (I'd estimate when you can render at 30x the vertical refresh rate), which reduces the choppiness in even a 60 fps game markedly.
The cooperative video game is a hideously underused concept. It's a ton of fun.
Try playing Halo (Bungie had a long tradition of cooperative games before Microsoft bought them) in cooperative mode against the computer. It's fun. Both people can win, and still have a challenge.
This is a big deal to people who care -- it insults the reviewers who spent hours benchmarking their card, and it insults the users who bought/will buy their card. There are people who care, and people who do want the fastest card for a reason, and they are interested to hear from other people who care, and not the people who don't!
These are the same people that would buy Porches or Armani suits. They're status symbols. In a social vacuum, the items would have very little value relative to their far less expensive variants.
Thank you for being so bluntly honest. I suspect that you'll get modded down as a troll or flamebait, but I certainly agree with you.
Tech publications try very, very, very hard to appear to be ultimate gurus in all areas. When you talk to some of the people involved, you realize that they very much are not. They pick up a few anecdotes from people who are actually in the know, throw them down on paper in a knowing tone, slap some numbers on a piece of paper, and are done.
You know what I information I respect the most? Points that come from people that prefix some of what they say with "I think" -- which, of course, *never* occurs in journalism, even if the journalist in question does *not* know. I *think* he's expected to know because other folks do the same thing.
I'm not exactly sure why this is considered bad. GPU and driver developers are *always* designing and implementing optimizations and tricks one can use to avoid doing any work possible. That's simply part of computer science. Is using a Z buffer cheating? Is letting hardware take advantage of clipping planes cheating? Now, it's entirely possible that NVidia simply made an optimization that went too far and causes problems, and didn't pick up on it.
The way I see it, testers get cards. They then play games with them (Quake 3 used to be a popular one, but I suppose there are newer ones now). They then examine the frame rate, the smoothness, image quality, etc. If NVidia is using cards that produce a better image quality * smoothness, then more power to them -- I hope they make more of them. If they're using an optimization that degrades image quality...then the tester can complain about poor image quality. I don't think that claims of "cheating" are really warranted unless the card really is not rendering what a benchmark is feeding back -- like the driver looks for benchmark programs and actually modifies the benchmark score in memory. Hell, I wish testers wouldn't *use* benchmark programs in the first place -- if developers then optimize for that benchmark, the testers more than had it coming. Use Quake III or Tribes or something, not 3dmark2000, to do testing. Something that the end user will actually use the card for.
Consider lossy texture compression. It's becoming the standard way to deal with textures. Is that "cheating"? It degrades image quality to improve performance.
Now, I have my issues with NVidia. I won't buy any of their cards as long as their (usable) drivers are closed-source. I'm using Matrox cards (which have good open source support). I see the issue of open source drivers as a far more legitimate issue with NVidia than some claims of "cheating" on a benchmark.
Anyway, I suppose it's up to everyone to assign their own weight to these claims, but they aren't particularly interesting to me.
I've had two different machines rendered unbootable from a Windows Update, and and at least three times where an update failed partway through the update process (not the download part...the actual upload portion).
I have never had problems with "yum update"ing RPMs from a stable RH release (though installing chunks of Rawhide has caused problems).
I can't zoom the text to compensate for my bad eyesight
I don't use GUI setup tools or GNOME (the environment, not the apps) or KDE, so I can't tell you how to do this the pretty, user-friendly way to do all this.
If you're using GNOME, there should be a Fonts control panel where you set the default font used in apps, just as you can in Windows. Other programs, like Mozilla and Open Office (that take a specified font level), have zooms, just as they do in their Windows counterparts.
Distros shipping GNOME 2.0 or above include a screen magnifier...and I believe KDE has a screen magnifier as well. Try looking in Control Panels or Utilities or similar in the app menu.
Games on Linux are awful.
True. That's not due to technical flaws in X, though. There simply aren't a lot of companies releasing Linux games. An attempt to replace X would do nothing but produce an even smaller market that's less worth porting a game to.
But why should I waste time on it when I don't have to?
Because you probably don't. I don't have GNOME or KDE, but from what I've seen in the modern distros, you can configure everything from a GUI. There's no need to manually edit XF86Config if you aren't interested in doing so. In a RH 9.0 install, all the video stuff I've seen is simply autodetected -- XFree86 4.x is designed to function pretty much by autodetecting what's present each time you launch it, and the few things that do need to be configured should be done automatically by your distribution.
I personally don't care about network transparency.
I realize that there are a number of people that don't use it -- but there are also a number of people that do, and for those folks, the though of losing network transparency is incredibly frusterating.
I can't watch tv remotely with it and the web works better than X for static content.
I don't quite get what you mean...network transparency simply means that you can run a program on one computer and have it appear and work with it on another computer without the application author having to do any additional work. It shouldn't relate to the Web (or directly to TV).
X is just one more bit of complicated software that's hard to get working and I think I could get better.
Your Joe User type isn't really intended to ever manually configure X any more in a distro -- things should be autoconfigured.
from what I can tell all it does is serve fonts and networktransparancy.
X is responsible for actually rasterizing and displaying every pixel that you see on the screen. It renders fonts, yes, and very nice antialiased ones. It handles network code, yes. It (well, it and Mesa) do 3d hardware rendering -- in Windows user terms, all of the video card drivers in Windows combined with DirectX. It does hardware scaling -- if you play a movie, Xv is used to display the thing. It handles combining multiple monitors via Xinerama. It acts as the intermediary in copying and pasting data between apps. X deals with tablets, joysticks, mice, keyboards and handing off data from them to apps. X provides framebuffer access to memory. Unlike Windows, X lets you fine-tune precisely what timings are used on your monitor, if you want to squeeze the last little bit of performance possible out of your monitor.
if you want to do anything usefull you have to add a window manager
Sure. X could have included a window manager, but the folks that write it realize that different folks prefer different types of window managers. Some prefer really simple WMs like twm, metacity, or kwm. Others prefer glitz and don't care about plenty of overhead, and use enlightenment. Others like poking at and customizing their window manager, recoding bits of it while it's running (a la emacs), and use sawfish. The list goes on and on. Most *ix folks tend to feel a bit irritated when being forced to use the Windows environment -- there's no possibility of choice, and relatively little of customization.
a cut & paste manager
Well, you *can* use a multi-clipboard program, (of which there are a collection to choose from) but Windows doesn't provide this functionality natively either. Just as with window managers, this modularity is done deliberately. Distributions can prepackage a multi-clipboard program if they like -- so the end user experience can be "there's one, it's preinstalled, and I don't have to worry about it" -- but you aren't *forced* to use any single one.
a toolkit of somesort (gtk for example)
Again, Windows happens to force people to use a single widget set. I'm not a tremendous fan of chunks of the Windows set (anyone that's done gtk programming and Win32 programming knows that layout in gtk is *much* better than the forced pixel-level layout used in Win32 and the Macintosh Toolbox), but it can't really be changed for backwards compatibility reasons.
X is modular. If a widget set falls behind the times, a new one can be produced. I'm not sure if you've ever seen Athena, but it was one of the earlier widget sets available for X. I suspect that most desktop users would not like the way it operates. With Windows, you'd be stuck lugging around Athena forever. With X, you can simply move to something newer, like gtk.
hell even windows 3.1 does far more then X and can be cut down under a meg and still be 100% usefull, not to mention that adds a multitasking ( a bad one but still) to the OS (dos)
Win 3.1 and X are completely different beasts. They don't do even remotely the same task.
Win 3.1 is marketed differently. X *has* a partial equivalent in Windows, but you cannot obtain it separately from the rest of Windows. However, it's really irrelevant. You'd never use X without a kernel, so the fact that Windows 3.1 does scheduling isn't really useful.
(i.e. drag and drop doesnt work 80% of the time unless all you use is kde apps)
Drag and drop cooperation between gnome and kde is relatively new. Yes, it was added recently, and it takes a while to get in. I used Mac OS in the 7.x days, when drag and drop support was added...and the same thing happened -- actually, it was even worse, if anything.
I'm not saying that X is unilaterally more featureful than Mac OS or Windows. Drag and Drop is a particular weak point that's being added to a lot of apps right now. Overal
Slashdot Mirror
As it happens, I think that everyone should purchase products that focus on philosophic or abstract CS thought. Unfortunately, it turns out that that's not how the vast majority of society wants to relax. Unsurprisingly, they also dislike being fed loads of PC material when they're unwinding.
Obviously Lara Croft is for gamers to ogle at. What planet do you have to be from to not know women are the ogled ones? They know it, they wear the make-up and the pretty dresses.
You know, he put it a bit harshly, but women *do* tend to take a role of passive attractor in our society. You don't see guys spending a significant chunk of their morning sitting in front of a mirror applying makeup.
Furthermore, that role is one that cannot be reasonably blamed on a lack of action on the part of males. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by women changing if they want change.
I mean, I don't hear any complaining from *guys*, despite the fact that we are the only ones that have to fill out a selective service card and face possible forced military service and death -- the most onerous of civil duties -- yet women and men both get the privilege of voting. The feminist lobby becomes remarkably silent when true equality is on the boards, instead of just the advancement of females.
So if Mad Quacker wants to make an entirely correct observation of society, abeit somwhat rude, I'd say that he's certainly justified in doing so.
When was the last time you had a telemarketer ask for the "head of the household"?
The US is not a patriarchy.
You know, it's not impossible to both admire a hypersexualized image and still be able to deal with reality.
:-)
You're making the same sort of leap that irritates me with people who hate video games that contain violence -- the assumption that people won't be able to distinguish between reality and the video game.
Come on guys, you're getting off on a corporate logo. Go for something with a soul, something real, not a cartoon designed by dweebs in the marketing and design departments. Are you really that easy to control?
Try thinking for yourself more often.
And you're simply parroting propaganda put out by a couple of feminist groups. Go for what you find attractive, not for the social image that you're being molded to by a bunch of activists. Are you really that easy to control?
Try thinking for yourself more often.
Seriously, images of perfect beauty have always been around. Mother goddess figures, Greek statues, paintings in the Rennaissance, mens magazines. Part of life is recognizing and dealing with life's imperfections.
I guess I should have said that the Win32 widgets cannot be *removed*, not *changed*, for backwards compatibility reasons.
Good catch.
Support for more fonts?
Read what you just quoted from my post. I said "font formats", not "fonts".
Zooming in and out? What is that supposed to mean? With Windows you can essentially accomplish the same thing without the extra work up-front.
Because I frequently want to show someone across the room something on my screen, and instead of requiring them to come over to read it or see it, I can just flip the resolution. It's not a fundamental flaw in Windows -- theoretically, someone could write an app that does this, but it wouldn't switch as quickly, since it'd have to dump video memory to a buffer in general purpose RAM first.
You did only specify "Aqua On Linux" in the subject of your post.
Well...yes, but there isn't a more prominent place to put it, you know? I mean, I could have put "I am talking about Linux and Aqua" each couple of lines in my post, but I kind of think that shouldn't be necessary.
The rest was pure Aqua bashing.
So? That doesn't make it a troll -- I really dislike Aqua as being far too heavyweight, and think Apple made a poor engineering call in deciding on such a heavyweight UI system. Anyone who criticizes Apple is *not* automatically a troll. Could I have been more gentle? Sure. I just don't think Aqua deserves it (especially since I had a tremendous amount of respect for the people that designed the classic Mac OS UI).
How would it be any different to put Aqua on a machine with a Linux kernel instead of a Mach kernel?
Because I have the option to simply use X with Linux.
Gkrellm uses a ton of modules. It also uses an entirely bitmapped interface. Without looking into the source, I'm making a pretty safe call that it just loads all of its pixmaps into memory at the start, just in case it intends to use them during the run.
:-)
It's not like they couldn't change that and not load the things. Probably no one has complained.
Your video card isn't doing that.
xv or whatever you used to set the background scaled it ahead of time. Your graphics card isn't doing any heavy lifting at all.
The difference is that Windows 2k's sucks, not that the Windows ATI drivers are worse than the Linux ATI drivers.
The quattro has the same core as NVidia's consumer line. Dunno about FireGL
I want open source drivers too. But that's *only* so that I can be sure that the product will keep working with future versions of the Linux kernel.
As has been well demonstrated in the past, 3d drivers are complicated enough and enough of a PITA that volunteers are relatively uninterested in working on them. Much of the existing DRI acceleration was funded by vendors and done under contract by people like Precision Insight.
Open source doesn't provide nearly as many benefits if it's hard to drop into a program and write a patch.
Actually, I suspect that Dell just checks to find out what people pay attention to. If people buy into "silly synthetic benchmarks", then Dell will make every effort to also do so, since they'll be obtaining what people will buy. People have traditionally tended to look at CMU speed, but less at RAM quantity in a computer. Dell takes good advantage of this.
At some point, you can start doing motion blur (I'd estimate when you can render at 30x the vertical refresh rate), which reduces the choppiness in even a 60 fps game markedly.
The cooperative video game is a hideously underused concept. It's a ton of fun.
Try playing Halo (Bungie had a long tradition of cooperative games before Microsoft bought them) in cooperative mode against the computer. It's fun. Both people can win, and still have a challenge.
This is a big deal to people who care -- it insults the reviewers who spent hours benchmarking their card, and it insults the users who bought/will buy their card. There are people who care, and people who do want the fastest card for a reason, and they are interested to hear from other people who care, and not the people who don't!
These are the same people that would buy Porches or Armani suits. They're status symbols. In a social vacuum, the items would have very little value relative to their far less expensive variants.
You know, the insinuation that Intel's QA group is crap compared to you is more than a little bit arrogant.
I'm not trying to attack you as a good developer, just bring reality back to the discussion.
Thank you for being so bluntly honest. I suspect that you'll get modded down as a troll or flamebait, but I certainly agree with you.
Tech publications try very, very, very hard to appear to be ultimate gurus in all areas. When you talk to some of the people involved, you realize that they very much are not. They pick up a few anecdotes from people who are actually in the know, throw them down on paper in a knowing tone, slap some numbers on a piece of paper, and are done.
You know what I information I respect the most? Points that come from people that prefix some of what they say with "I think" -- which, of course, *never* occurs in journalism, even if the journalist in question does *not* know. I *think* he's expected to know because other folks do the same thing.
I'm not exactly sure why this is considered bad. GPU and driver developers are *always* designing and implementing optimizations and tricks one can use to avoid doing any work possible. That's simply part of computer science. Is using a Z buffer cheating? Is letting hardware take advantage of clipping planes cheating? Now, it's entirely possible that NVidia simply made an optimization that went too far and causes problems, and didn't pick up on it.
The way I see it, testers get cards. They then play games with them (Quake 3 used to be a popular one, but I suppose there are newer ones now). They then examine the frame rate, the smoothness, image quality, etc. If NVidia is using cards that produce a better image quality * smoothness, then more power to them -- I hope they make more of them. If they're using an optimization that degrades image quality...then the tester can complain about poor image quality. I don't think that claims of "cheating" are really warranted unless the card really is not rendering what a benchmark is feeding back -- like the driver looks for benchmark programs and actually modifies the benchmark score in memory. Hell, I wish testers wouldn't *use* benchmark programs in the first place -- if developers then optimize for that benchmark, the testers more than had it coming. Use Quake III or Tribes or something, not 3dmark2000, to do testing. Something that the end user will actually use the card for.
Consider lossy texture compression. It's becoming the standard way to deal with textures. Is that "cheating"? It degrades image quality to improve performance.
Now, I have my issues with NVidia. I won't buy any of their cards as long as their (usable) drivers are closed-source. I'm using Matrox cards (which have good open source support). I see the issue of open source drivers as a far more legitimate issue with NVidia than some claims of "cheating" on a benchmark.
Anyway, I suppose it's up to everyone to assign their own weight to these claims, but they aren't particularly interesting to me.
I like yum -y update
I've had two different machines rendered unbootable from a Windows Update, and and at least three times where an update failed partway through the update process (not the download part...the actual upload portion).
I have never had problems with "yum update"ing RPMs from a stable RH release (though installing chunks of Rawhide has caused problems).
That's okay. It's still pretty trivial, unworthy-of-Slashdot news.
Won't SOMEBODY please post SOMETHING with which I can violently and profanely disagree?
George W. Bush is an erudite and effective president.
No, it really is a troll...
How is my post a troll? It said "Aqua on Linux", and you're comparing OS X to *Windows*!
The fonts still don't look very good
What about them doesn't look good?
I can't zoom the text to compensate for
my bad eyesight
I don't use GUI setup tools or GNOME (the environment, not the apps) or KDE, so I can't tell you how to do this the pretty, user-friendly way to do all this.
If you're using GNOME, there should be a Fonts control panel where you set the default font used in apps, just as you can in Windows. Other programs, like Mozilla and Open Office (that take a specified font level), have zooms, just as they do in their Windows counterparts.
Distros shipping GNOME 2.0 or above include a screen magnifier...and I believe KDE has a screen magnifier as well. Try looking in Control Panels or Utilities or similar in the app menu.
Games on Linux are awful.
True. That's not due to technical flaws in X, though. There simply aren't a lot of companies releasing Linux games. An attempt to replace X would do nothing but produce an even smaller market that's less worth porting a game to.
But why should I waste
time on it when I don't have to?
Because you probably don't. I don't have GNOME or KDE, but from what I've seen in the modern distros, you can configure everything from a GUI. There's no need to manually edit XF86Config if you aren't interested in doing so. In a RH 9.0 install, all the video stuff I've seen is simply autodetected -- XFree86 4.x is designed to function pretty much by autodetecting what's present each time you launch it, and the few things that do need to be configured should be done automatically by your distribution.
I personally don't care about network
transparency.
I realize that there are a number of people that don't use it -- but there are also a number of people that do, and for those folks, the though of losing network transparency is incredibly frusterating.
I can't watch tv remotely with it
and the web works better than X for static
content.
I don't quite get what you mean...network transparency simply means that you can run a program on one computer and have it appear and work with it on another computer without the application author having to do any additional work. It shouldn't relate to the Web (or directly to TV).
X is just one more bit of
complicated software that's hard to get
working and I think I could get better.
Your Joe User type isn't really intended to ever manually configure X any more in a distro -- things should be autoconfigured.
from what I can tell all it does is serve fonts and networktransparancy.
X is responsible for actually rasterizing and displaying every pixel that you see on the screen. It renders fonts, yes, and very nice antialiased ones. It handles network code, yes. It (well, it and Mesa) do 3d hardware rendering -- in Windows user terms, all of the video card drivers in Windows combined with DirectX. It does hardware scaling -- if you play a movie, Xv is used to display the thing. It handles combining multiple monitors via Xinerama. It acts as the intermediary in copying and pasting data between apps. X deals with tablets, joysticks, mice, keyboards and handing off data from them to apps. X provides framebuffer access to memory. Unlike Windows, X lets you fine-tune precisely what timings are used on your monitor, if you want to squeeze the last little bit of performance possible out of your monitor.
if you want to do anything usefull you have to add a window manager
Sure. X could have included a window manager, but the folks that write it realize that different folks prefer different types of window managers. Some prefer really simple WMs like twm, metacity, or kwm. Others prefer glitz and don't care about plenty of overhead, and use enlightenment. Others like poking at and customizing their window manager, recoding bits of it while it's running (a la emacs), and use sawfish. The list goes on and on. Most *ix folks tend to feel a bit irritated when being forced to use the Windows environment -- there's no possibility of choice, and relatively little of customization.
a cut & paste manager
Well, you *can* use a multi-clipboard program, (of which there are a collection to choose from) but Windows doesn't provide this functionality natively either. Just as with window managers, this modularity is done deliberately. Distributions can prepackage a multi-clipboard program if they like -- so the end user experience can be "there's one, it's preinstalled, and I don't have to worry about it" -- but you aren't *forced* to use any single one.
a toolkit of somesort (gtk for example)
Again, Windows happens to force people to use a single widget set. I'm not a tremendous fan of chunks of the Windows set (anyone that's done gtk programming and Win32 programming knows that layout in gtk is *much* better than the forced pixel-level layout used in Win32 and the Macintosh Toolbox), but it can't really be changed for backwards compatibility reasons.
X is modular. If a widget set falls behind the times, a new one can be produced. I'm not sure if you've ever seen Athena, but it was one of the earlier widget sets available for X. I suspect that most desktop users would not like the way it operates. With Windows, you'd be stuck lugging around Athena forever. With X, you can simply move to something newer, like gtk.
hell even windows 3.1 does far more then X and can be cut down under a meg and still be 100% usefull, not to mention that adds a multitasking ( a bad one but still) to the OS (dos)
Win 3.1 and X are completely different beasts. They don't do even remotely the same task.
Win 3.1 is marketed differently. X *has* a partial equivalent in Windows, but you cannot obtain it separately from the rest of Windows. However, it's really irrelevant. You'd never use X without a kernel, so the fact that Windows 3.1 does scheduling isn't really useful.
(i.e. drag and drop doesnt work 80% of the time unless all you use is kde apps)
Drag and drop cooperation between gnome and kde is relatively new. Yes, it was added recently, and it takes a while to get in. I used Mac OS in the 7.x days, when drag and drop support was added...and the same thing happened -- actually, it was even worse, if anything.
I'm not saying that X is unilaterally more featureful than Mac OS or Windows. Drag and Drop is a particular weak point that's being added to a lot of apps right now. Overal