The G4 PowerBooks are nice. However, getting a laptop that runs Linux well isn't all that hard. Just like you buy a laptop from a particular company (Apple) to get OSX running well, you can buy laptops actually from several companies that run Linux well.
All my laptops over the last few years have run Linux very well (mostly IBM and HP). I'm also pretty happy with my OSX PowerBook, although there is a lot more software available for Linux (at least of the kind I'm interested in).
A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.
Statements like these, from the paper, are also pure rethoric:
"Before the Pentagon and other federal agencies make uninformed decisions to alter the very foundation of computer security, they should study the potential consequences carefully."
What it comes down to is that a group of people with a pompous name, a conservative ax to grind, with funding from Microsoft, and with few security-related credentials put out a paper saying that the government shouldn't use open source and linking open source to terrorism in some underhanded way. What a surprise. The conservatives in this country have been using fear of terrorism to push a pro-corporate and anti-democractic agenda since 9/11.
I mean obviously there are times when graphics are important;
Yes, there are some games like that. But if we couldn't get the open source artists, there would still be a huge world of excellent games to be written.
Given how many free levels and total conversions there are for commercial games, I don't think this is even a problem, however.
Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though?
No, but you could probably get UT-like gameplay with very simple graphics. And if you put out a UT-like engine and give users the hooks to add complex environments and landscapes, they will do it.
I think you undervalue the role of artists in the creation of a successful game.
I was talking about what I consider "good" games, not "commercially successful" ones. Civ and Myst are commercially successful, but I don't think they are very good ones.
But for many types of games, where character, atmosphere, and story play a more prominent role, I think artists ARE indispensible.
Well, I didn't claim that no game ever benefits from graphics, I merely stated that I think that many excellent games can be written with no or minimal graphics. And those are the games that open source developers might concentrate on if they can't find open source artists.
No, I'm saying that any graphics can make a game less interesting because it removes an element of the imagination (I was comparing it to nethack, in which some scary monsters look like "V", "c", "&", and "h"). What is scary or interesting or beautiful to even the most skilled artist may just not be so for you or me. Symbolic representations let me use my imagination.
That isn't to say that good graphics are automatically bad, I'm just saying that elaborate graphics are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good game.
My point is that if there were some standard that manufacturers adhered to, there wouldn't be a need to scan hardware compatibility lists before buying, there wouldn't be a need to reinvent the wheel and write a new driver every time a new piece of hardware is released
Well, it's the market that decides these things in America. If you want cards for which it is easy to write Linux support, you have to check the compatibility lists and buy the cards with Linux support. Every incompatible card you buy encourages manufacturers to build more incompatible cards. So, we might say, that you yourself are responsible for all that incompatible hardware out there. I know it sucks sometimes, but that's the way a market economy works, and it beats the alternatives.
Good graphics do not automatically make for a playable and interesting game (a common mistake made by game development companies). In fact, in many cases, I find that cheesy commercial graphics detracts from good game play and imagination. Some of the most enduring and interesting battle games (e.g., chess, go, etc.) are very simple and abstract.
So, does the open source community have good computer game designers? I would argue that it not only does, but that many, if not most, commercial games available today originated as commercial copies of software originally developed freely by students and hobbyists. In fact, the open source process works extremely well for creating games that "flow" right; just look at the history of games like Nethack and how they have gotten tuned and enhanced by generations of students.
Good open source games take years to mature, but the end result is something that's a lot of fun and that you can play over and over again. That's not what can be said for most of the commercial stuff out there.
Well, again, just look around for another card. There are many boards with nVidia and ATI chips that give excellent performance and are very cheap. Quake3 on Linux with one of those cards runs as well as it does on Windows, for example.
You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.
I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.
If you keep repeating that it's hard to get accelerated OpenGL under Linux, someone might start believing you.
In the real world, the great majority of installed cards have accelerated OpenGL working for them under Linux. Even all my laptops just came with graphics cards that give me accelerated OpenGL, and I wasn't even looking for that.
If you really have some very old or obscure graphics card that either lacks drivers or is software-only, you can buy a usable, supported card for under $50.
As for software implementations being inefficient, that depends on what you mean by "OpenGL". Today, you can implement OpenGL features in software that required high-end hardware a decade ago. Of course, if you want today's high-end OpenGL features, you do need today's high-end hardware.
Programmers and software companies have gotten used to a level of pay and profit that is simply not economically justified. Right now, software companies are reaping enormous profits by re-selling the same software over and over again, as well as through various monopolistic practices. Like any other industry, profit in the software industry should tend towards zero as the industry matures. And open source is a good way of getting there: with open source, you just pay for the increment in functionality you need. If the mechanism weren't open source, it would be something else: industry consortia, government mandates, software buyers organizations, etc. On balance, open source is probably by far the best mechanism of making the software market efficient.
That doesn't mean that people can't earn a living at doing software. Even with open source (or other, equivalent mechanisms of an efficient software market) customers still pay for enhancements, consulting, deployment, training, and documentation. But it means that what you will earn with software is the equivalent of a decent hourly wage as for any other profession; instant riches through the stock market or persistent market domination must sooner or later become a thing of the past for software.
That's a pretty narrow definition of "experiment", certainly most astronomers, geologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. would disagree with you.
They can call it whatever they want, the fact remains that it is qualitatively different from what constitutes an experiment in other disciplines. There are certain inferences that simply cannot be drawn reliably from observation alone; being able to change the initial conditions is necessary for being able to prove or disprove some theories.
As for evolutionary biologists, they are, in fact, performing real experiments these days; they aren't just relying on observation anymore.
The Microsoft-dominated CLR is not really suitable for open source on Linux either - unless you want to make your software dependent on Microsoft's API - which may have "proprietary extensions" added at any time.
Of course, Microsoft will extend the hell out of C#/CLR, just like Sun keeps adding APIs to Java. Both are trying to make their platforms so big and complex that they are unclonable and that they stay in complete control.
The difference is that for C#/CLR, we get an open, well-defined standard: ECMA C#. It defines a lot more APIs than standards for, say, C or C++. It's a good basis to start from. Furthermore, most people just won't care whether their Mono code runs with Microsoft's C# implementation or not--it just isn't relevant what Microsoft does.
As I said in my previous post, I don't know whether C#/CLR will work out for open source development. It may well not. Give it a year or two. What I do know is that Java definitely isn't working out: Sun has failed to follow through on most of their commitments, and technically, Java has failed to evolve much as well.
I'd trust Sun over Microsoft any day.
I consider it foolish to trust either company. What I trust is a standards process and an open source implementation of the standard with a well-defined license. ECMA C# has both.
The list of already existing and completely open VM and class library ports at Kaffe.org
So? Kaffe is not an implementation of the Java platform. It is a VM with a bunch of classes that conforms to nothing in particular. In fact, as far as VMs go, there are better open source VMs out there; Intel's ORP, for example, beats Sun's JVM on many benchmarks. But a VM is not an implementation of the Java platform, it is only a tiny component.
Sun's Community Source license [sun.com]. This explains the terms on which Sun's own code is shared. Note that this license has proven open enough for the Blackdown Linux [blackdown.org] port to be developed.
I suggest you actually read the SCL some time. You will see that Sun retains all the important rights. Of course, they let Blackdown do a port for now. If Java on Linux stops suiting Sun, they can shut down the effort easily.
Attempts by Mono developers and other interested parties to discredit Java-on-Linux should be treated with great caution. Not only do they try to represent Sun and IBM as imposing more restrictions on open developments than Microsoft
I made no such claims; you are arguing a straw man.
Any open app that uses a Dotnet GUI (Windows Forms or Web Forms) or database API (ADO.NET) is not using standard mechanisms
So? And your point is what? With ECMA C#, we at least get a set of standard libraries that is considerably more complete than what other language standards (e.g., C, C++, CommonLisp) offer. There is nothing comparable for Java. For Java, we only get Sun's proprietary documentation and a bunch of books.
these APIs, and in fact over 1000 of the 1200 classes in Dotnet today, are entirely proprietary and are protected by patents.
Can you back up those claims with some facts?
Anyone contemplating developing Java on Linux applications should read the following to set their mind at rest:
I think anybody following your advice is a fool. When choosing a language and environment for open source development, we need binding commitments that it remains open and a well-defined language and library standard. ECMA C# represents such a binding commitment and standard. There is nothing equivalent for even the smallest part of Java.
I used to think Java could fill the niche of a next generation application development language on Linux. But Sun has backed out of all commitments and is instead pushing "community" processes in which they retain the ultimate control over large parts of the Java platform.
Maybe the open source C#/CLR efforts won't work out. Maybe Microsoft has some devious master plan and a bunch of aces up their sleeve. But whatever the situation with C#/CLR, I'm convinced that Java is not the answer. If you don't trust the open source C#/CLR efforts, my recommendation would be to stick with C/C++ for the time being, or use one of the many other open source languages.
I used to get asked "Do antivirus companies write viruses?" a lot. It is, of course, a very insulting question, like asking firemen if they start fires, or dentists if they're the cause of tooth decay. However, I always tried to contain my irritation at the insult (on account of my guess that most people asking me this, don't realise it's an insult) and the answer is "No."
But AV companies are still indirectly responsible for the persistence of viruses. Right now, everybody just buys Norton or Symantec. As a result, there is no pressure on companies like Microsoft to fix their operating systems, applications, and software distribution mechanisms. Why should they? Customers are considered "irresponsible" if they don't also shell out money for an AV subscription.
And the closed Java implementations on Linux and BSD are a lot more promising [...]
What do you mean by "all"? There is effectively only one closed Java implementation on any platform: the one from Sun; all others are derived from it in one way or another. Even legal issues aside, the Java platform simply isn't well-specified enough to have any interoperable, fully independent implementations.
In fact, with alternative hardware platforms such as PPC and ARM diluting the hold of x86-based Linux, anyone now writing end-user Linux apps in something other than Java should pause to consider how accessible and maintainable their products will be.
Anyone writing applications in Java (meaning, Sun's Java language and the Java2 APIs) for Linux should consider the folly of writing open source applications that depend on a proprietary runtime and set of libraries. Sun can pull the rug out from under open source Java efforts quickly by changing the licensing terms on their "standard" Java libraries.
And the closed Java implementations on Linux and BSD are a lot more promising (as in production-ready) than Mono et al.
The closed source implementation of Java is not really suitable for open source work on Linux unless you want to hand the keys to Linux to Sun. And you can guess what they would want to do with it.
The real choices for a Java-like open environment on Linux are the Java language with the JVM and non-standard libraries, or ECMA C# implementations, adding additional.NET features as needed. Neither choice is perfect, but ECMA C# is at least a well-defined target.
Sorry, but those are not "experiments", they are "observations". In an experiment, you need to be able to control the physical system before the measurement, and you need to be able to repeat the measurement with different initial conditions.
(Isn't it ironic that in the 21st century, many physicists are reduced to the equivalent of counting butterflies, while biologists are now working with repeatable, quantifiable experimental systems?)
It i not up to the JVM to implement or lack proper tail-recursion-optimization, but up to the java compiler.
No, this is not true. TRO can happen whenever a method calls another method just before returning. But the JVM lacks the primitives for expressing this concept in general and it isn't guaranteed to perform the optimization automatically, either. When a Scheme compiler performs TRO on top of the JVM, it can't be using JVM method calls.
I know that a (standard compliant) Scheme compiler has been written targeting java bytecode. The Scheme standard requires proper tail-recursion-optimization.
Java is Turing equivalent, so you can implement any language on top of it (in the worst case, as a full interpreter). The real question for CLR/JVM is whether the optimization happens naturally when you map onto its built-in notion of functions. And for JVM, the answer appears to be "no".
The CLR is clearly a knockoff of the JVM, but it is not a "cheap knockoff". With the CLR, Microsoft fixes problems that Sun has promised to address years ago but failed to do anything about. I, for one, am tired of listening to Sun's unfulfilled promises.
Microsoft has finished screwing customers, and is on to screwing programmers.
I have no doubt that if you become a Microsoft customer, you will get screwed. But the open C#/CLR implementations (Mono, P.NET) look a lot more promising than the open Java implementations (gcj, Kaffe), in terms of completeness and conformance to a published specification (ECMA C#). And the reason for that is that Sun did not want the competition and Sun did not want an open, well-defined specification, while the existence of Java forced Microsoft to be more open than they usually would be.
Only superficially all.NET languages are different, only superficially they are like their originals (syntax etc).
F# is a language with type variables, type inference, and lexical closures. Those are real differences, not just syntax. I'd be overjoyed if, say, Java had support for them, but it doesn't.
(C# + CLR) which is 100% like Java + the JVM
No, C#/CLR are not "100% like" Java/JVM. C#/CLR is clearly based on Java/JVM, but Microsoft added a few features that make some difference. Among others, the CLR offers support for value types, pointer manipulation, and (experimentally) genericity. Those features do change the runtime significantly relative to the JVM (whether for better or for worse is a separate debate).
No, "all this shit" has not been around in Smalltalk. OCAML incorporates a lot of ideas and technologies developed in the 1980's and 1990's, after Smalltalk was designed. Whether you need the extra power of OCAML or whether it gets in your way is a separate question, but OCAML is not a subset of Smalltalk and Smalltalk is not the be-all-and-end-all of all ideas in programming.
I don't know what Apple did, but anti-aliasing in Quartz is broken: diagonal lines in some fonts are much weaker than they should be. Windows XP's anti-aliasing is a little better, but not quite up-to-snuff either. Even with correctly implemented anti-aliasing, it does not help readability anyway.
Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you can just check Linux on Laptops before buying.
All my laptops over the last few years have run Linux very well (mostly IBM and HP). I'm also pretty happy with my OSX PowerBook, although there is a lot more software available for Linux (at least of the kind I'm interested in).
In any case, I'm not sure I believe any of this, but I think it's good that there are people thinking outside the mainstream.
Statements like these, from the paper, are also pure rethoric:
What it comes down to is that a group of people with a pompous name, a conservative ax to grind, with funding from Microsoft, and with few security-related credentials put out a paper saying that the government shouldn't use open source and linking open source to terrorism in some underhanded way. What a surprise. The conservatives in this country have been using fear of terrorism to push a pro-corporate and anti-democractic agenda since 9/11.
Yes, there are some games like that. But if we couldn't get the open source artists, there would still be a huge world of excellent games to be written.
Given how many free levels and total conversions there are for commercial games, I don't think this is even a problem, however.
Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though?
No, but you could probably get UT-like gameplay with very simple graphics. And if you put out a UT-like engine and give users the hooks to add complex environments and landscapes, they will do it.
I was talking about what I consider "good" games, not "commercially successful" ones. Civ and Myst are commercially successful, but I don't think they are very good ones.
But for many types of games, where character, atmosphere, and story play a more prominent role, I think artists ARE indispensible.
Well, I didn't claim that no game ever benefits from graphics, I merely stated that I think that many excellent games can be written with no or minimal graphics. And those are the games that open source developers might concentrate on if they can't find open source artists.
No, I'm saying that any graphics can make a game less interesting because it removes an element of the imagination (I was comparing it to nethack, in which some scary monsters look like "V", "c", "&", and "h"). What is scary or interesting or beautiful to even the most skilled artist may just not be so for you or me. Symbolic representations let me use my imagination.
That isn't to say that good graphics are automatically bad, I'm just saying that elaborate graphics are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good game.
Well, it's the market that decides these things in America. If you want cards for which it is easy to write Linux support, you have to check the compatibility lists and buy the cards with Linux support. Every incompatible card you buy encourages manufacturers to build more incompatible cards. So, we might say, that you yourself are responsible for all that incompatible hardware out there. I know it sucks sometimes, but that's the way a market economy works, and it beats the alternatives.
Actually, my previous post gave a bizarre error message and didn't show up for a few minutes... something odd about /.'s software.
So, does the open source community have good computer game designers? I would argue that it not only does, but that many, if not most, commercial games available today originated as commercial copies of software originally developed freely by students and hobbyists. In fact, the open source process works extremely well for creating games that "flow" right; just look at the history of games like Nethack and how they have gotten tuned and enhanced by generations of students.
Good open source games take years to mature, but the end result is something that's a lot of fun and that you can play over and over again. That's not what can be said for most of the commercial stuff out there.
Well, again, just look around for another card. There are many boards with nVidia and ATI chips that give excellent performance and are very cheap. Quake3 on Linux with one of those cards runs as well as it does on Windows, for example.
I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.
In the real world, the great majority of installed cards have accelerated OpenGL working for them under Linux. Even all my laptops just came with graphics cards that give me accelerated OpenGL, and I wasn't even looking for that.
If you really have some very old or obscure graphics card that either lacks drivers or is software-only, you can buy a usable, supported card for under $50.
As for software implementations being inefficient, that depends on what you mean by "OpenGL". Today, you can implement OpenGL features in software that required high-end hardware a decade ago. Of course, if you want today's high-end OpenGL features, you do need today's high-end hardware.
That doesn't mean that people can't earn a living at doing software. Even with open source (or other, equivalent mechanisms of an efficient software market) customers still pay for enhancements, consulting, deployment, training, and documentation. But it means that what you will earn with software is the equivalent of a decent hourly wage as for any other profession; instant riches through the stock market or persistent market domination must sooner or later become a thing of the past for software.
They can call it whatever they want, the fact remains that it is qualitatively different from what constitutes an experiment in other disciplines. There are certain inferences that simply cannot be drawn reliably from observation alone; being able to change the initial conditions is necessary for being able to prove or disprove some theories.
As for evolutionary biologists, they are, in fact, performing real experiments these days; they aren't just relying on observation anymore.
Of course, Microsoft will extend the hell out of C#/CLR, just like Sun keeps adding APIs to Java. Both are trying to make their platforms so big and complex that they are unclonable and that they stay in complete control.
The difference is that for C#/CLR, we get an open, well-defined standard: ECMA C#. It defines a lot more APIs than standards for, say, C or C++. It's a good basis to start from. Furthermore, most people just won't care whether their Mono code runs with Microsoft's C# implementation or not--it just isn't relevant what Microsoft does.
As I said in my previous post, I don't know whether C#/CLR will work out for open source development. It may well not. Give it a year or two. What I do know is that Java definitely isn't working out: Sun has failed to follow through on most of their commitments, and technically, Java has failed to evolve much as well.
I'd trust Sun over Microsoft any day.
I consider it foolish to trust either company. What I trust is a standards process and an open source implementation of the standard with a well-defined license. ECMA C# has both.
So? Kaffe is not an implementation of the Java platform. It is a VM with a bunch of classes that conforms to nothing in particular. In fact, as far as VMs go, there are better open source VMs out there; Intel's ORP, for example, beats Sun's JVM on many benchmarks. But a VM is not an implementation of the Java platform, it is only a tiny component.
Sun's Community Source license [sun.com]. This explains the terms on which Sun's own code is shared. Note that this license has proven open enough for the Blackdown Linux [blackdown.org] port to be developed.
I suggest you actually read the SCL some time. You will see that Sun retains all the important rights. Of course, they let Blackdown do a port for now. If Java on Linux stops suiting Sun, they can shut down the effort easily.
Attempts by Mono developers and other interested parties to discredit Java-on-Linux should be treated with great caution. Not only do they try to represent Sun and IBM as imposing more restrictions on open developments than Microsoft
I made no such claims; you are arguing a straw man.
Any open app that uses a Dotnet GUI (Windows Forms or Web Forms) or database API (ADO.NET) is not using standard mechanisms
So? And your point is what? With ECMA C#, we at least get a set of standard libraries that is considerably more complete than what other language standards (e.g., C, C++, CommonLisp) offer. There is nothing comparable for Java. For Java, we only get Sun's proprietary documentation and a bunch of books.
these APIs, and in fact over 1000 of the 1200 classes in Dotnet today, are entirely proprietary and are protected by patents.
Can you back up those claims with some facts?
Anyone contemplating developing Java on Linux applications should read the following to set their mind at rest:
I think anybody following your advice is a fool. When choosing a language and environment for open source development, we need binding commitments that it remains open and a well-defined language and library standard. ECMA C# represents such a binding commitment and standard. There is nothing equivalent for even the smallest part of Java.
I used to think Java could fill the niche of a next generation application development language on Linux. But Sun has backed out of all commitments and is instead pushing "community" processes in which they retain the ultimate control over large parts of the Java platform.
Maybe the open source C#/CLR efforts won't work out. Maybe Microsoft has some devious master plan and a bunch of aces up their sleeve. But whatever the situation with C#/CLR, I'm convinced that Java is not the answer. If you don't trust the open source C#/CLR efforts, my recommendation would be to stick with C/C++ for the time being, or use one of the many other open source languages.
But AV companies are still indirectly responsible for the persistence of viruses. Right now, everybody just buys Norton or Symantec. As a result, there is no pressure on companies like Microsoft to fix their operating systems, applications, and software distribution mechanisms. Why should they? Customers are considered "irresponsible" if they don't also shell out money for an AV subscription.
Use "rpm --verify" on RedHat.
What do you mean by "all"? There is effectively only one closed Java implementation on any platform: the one from Sun; all others are derived from it in one way or another. Even legal issues aside, the Java platform simply isn't well-specified enough to have any interoperable, fully independent implementations.
In fact, with alternative hardware platforms such as PPC and ARM diluting the hold of x86-based Linux, anyone now writing end-user Linux apps in something other than Java should pause to consider how accessible and maintainable their products will be.
Anyone writing applications in Java (meaning, Sun's Java language and the Java2 APIs) for Linux should consider the folly of writing open source applications that depend on a proprietary runtime and set of libraries. Sun can pull the rug out from under open source Java efforts quickly by changing the licensing terms on their "standard" Java libraries.
And the closed Java implementations on Linux and BSD are a lot more promising (as in production-ready) than Mono et al.
The closed source implementation of Java is not really suitable for open source work on Linux unless you want to hand the keys to Linux to Sun. And you can guess what they would want to do with it.
The real choices for a Java-like open environment on Linux are the Java language with the JVM and non-standard libraries, or ECMA C# implementations, adding additional .NET features as needed. Neither choice is perfect, but ECMA C# is at least a well-defined target.
(Isn't it ironic that in the 21st century, many physicists are reduced to the equivalent of counting butterflies, while biologists are now working with repeatable, quantifiable experimental systems?)
No, this is not true. TRO can happen whenever a method calls another method just before returning. But the JVM lacks the primitives for expressing this concept in general and it isn't guaranteed to perform the optimization automatically, either. When a Scheme compiler performs TRO on top of the JVM, it can't be using JVM method calls.
I know that a (standard compliant) Scheme compiler has been written targeting java bytecode. The Scheme standard requires proper tail-recursion-optimization.
Java is Turing equivalent, so you can implement any language on top of it (in the worst case, as a full interpreter). The real question for CLR/JVM is whether the optimization happens naturally when you map onto its built-in notion of functions. And for JVM, the answer appears to be "no".
The CLR is clearly a knockoff of the JVM, but it is not a "cheap knockoff". With the CLR, Microsoft fixes problems that Sun has promised to address years ago but failed to do anything about. I, for one, am tired of listening to Sun's unfulfilled promises.
Microsoft has finished screwing customers, and is on to screwing programmers.
I have no doubt that if you become a Microsoft customer, you will get screwed. But the open C#/CLR implementations (Mono, P.NET) look a lot more promising than the open Java implementations (gcj, Kaffe), in terms of completeness and conformance to a published specification (ECMA C#). And the reason for that is that Sun did not want the competition and Sun did not want an open, well-defined specification, while the existence of Java forced Microsoft to be more open than they usually would be.
F# is a language with type variables, type inference, and lexical closures. Those are real differences, not just syntax. I'd be overjoyed if, say, Java had support for them, but it doesn't.
(C# + CLR) which is 100% like Java + the JVM
No, C#/CLR are not "100% like" Java/JVM. C#/CLR is clearly based on Java/JVM, but Microsoft added a few features that make some difference. Among others, the CLR offers support for value types, pointer manipulation, and (experimentally) genericity. Those features do change the runtime significantly relative to the JVM (whether for better or for worse is a separate debate).
No, "all this shit" has not been around in Smalltalk. OCAML incorporates a lot of ideas and technologies developed in the 1980's and 1990's, after Smalltalk was designed. Whether you need the extra power of OCAML or whether it gets in your way is a separate question, but OCAML is not a subset of Smalltalk and Smalltalk is not the be-all-and-end-all of all ideas in programming.
Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.