### Does anybody actually use the beta/alpha version of it for anything?
I installed it over a year ago, worked without to much problems, sure not really production quality and a bit crashy here and there, but it there, not much complicated to install (at least not harder then gentoo) and basically works. Hardly vaporware, but sure neither much of a Linux-killer, however I found it more interesting to toy around with then any of the BSDs. And GNU/Hurds translators for sure are quite cool, Linux userspace-filesystems are still not quite there.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
### Do you really think that all this stuff you consider basic and don't even think about comes for free?
It of course doesn't come for free, but its still rather cheap, its by no means an excuse for having almost 5 sec startup time. Just look at Blender, it can do 3d modeling, video-editing, edit images and even comes with a text-editor, anti-aliased fonts too, startup time however is instantanious, a fraction of a second. Beside from that, the 5secs startup time of Gedit are already with a fully running Gnome session, so all the UI-goodiness, fonts and stuff should already be loaded into memory, which makes the startup time look even worse then its already is. As said, there is just NO excuse for such a poor startup time, its just bad optimization, nothing else. If you don't care about startup time, you will get such horrible startup times simply because its way to easy to do stupid things that cause them.
### Vim starts in a second and it shreds that "MSDOS edit" to pieces in terms of functionality.
So what? Of course you can write programms with more features then yesterdays apps without making them slower, thats the whole point, even my Emacs starts faster then Gedit.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
### That way you could compare applications that were doing nearly the same thing.
Gedit and MSDOS edit are doing basically the exact same thing, the presentation is different, but from the feature point of view they are almost exactly the same. The point is that while the CPUs have become faster, the applications themself actually have often gotten a whole lot slower, in this case actually slower the the amount of CPU speed increased, resulting in an overall slower 'computer'.
There is nothing wrong with adding feature which make use of the additionally available CPU power, but today its far to often 95% pure bloat without actually adding any features, sometimes even reducing them. There is really absolutly NO excuse for having such a trivial app like Gedit take multiple seconds to load, writing fasts apps today is still quite possible, Blender or Rox for example start in an instant, basically no Gnome or KDE app comes even close.
### For >95% of users, I see no need to have computers faster than 2Ghz.
As long as there are games and a large number of computer users who want to play them, there will be a need for faster CPUs. While on the graphic side the main work is already done by the GPU, the physics and AI are still done by the CPU. And oposed to the graphics, where games are already quite advanced, AI and physics tends still to be rather primitive in games and will for sure need a lot of additional CPU.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
### The limits are high enough now to not care.
The throuble is that this is assumption is wrong. The computers would in theory be fast enough to not care about optimization all over the place, the throuble is that a lot of bad programming doesn't result in just linear decrease of speed. If I use linear lookup instead of a hash-table, speed will go down, quite a bit more down then the amount of speed of the CPU increases over time.
Simple example, Gedit, an extremly basic text-editor takes 4-5 seconds to load on a 1Ghz Athlon, MSDOS edit on the other side on 386er started in a fraction of a second. From a feature point of view both do basically the same. Gedit for sure has some more advanced rendering and GUI and isn't a text-mode application like MSDOS edit, however shouldn't it be possible with todays CPUs which are quite a bit faster then back then to have an application that has better rendering then text-mode, but still be at least as fast or faster then back then?
### Face it, Transmeta dosn't make anything that people want.
I know quite a lot of people who would have loved to have a low power CPU that is x86 compatible in their desktop computers, the throuble is that Transmeta failed completly to sell their stuff. You simply couldn't by a mainboard with a Transmeta CPU, the only stuff that got ever released were some sub-notebooks in japan.
That transmeta CPU also fall a bit short when it comes to speed is of course another issue, but simply because you couldn't buy the CPUs at all in the first place is the reason why they completly failed to sell.
### A lot of people keep saying this. I don't know if it is trolling or misinformation.
Might be bad information, I don't know, but I couldn't find, beside the packages-iso-image, any official binaries for gentoo. And as said, the packages-iso wasn't of much use, since the binary packages where for most part outdated and thus not used and even if they would have worked they would only cover an very small fraction of the complete portage tree.
To make it short, where can I find binaries for the complete portage tree? I would like to try gentoo again, but I am not really interested in keeping my computer busy with compiling for multiple days just for a basic install.
### For the life of me, I still can't quite figure out what all the hype is about desktop search.
I for one have around one million files in my home directory alone, doing a simple 'find' on the filenames alone takes like 10-30mins, searching for file content is way bejoint was is tolerable for interactive use. A proper implemented desktop search on the other side could give me results in a fraction of a second.
Now how does this improve the work flow? Simple, ever tried to find some letter, email or whatever that you typed a few month ago? With a proper desktop search you could simply type-ahead your way directly to the email in a matter of seconds, without it you will have a half an hour trip throught all kinds of old data.
More importantly such a search will not only be usefull in case you 'lost' stuff, it might in addition to that also make it faster simply to reach stuff. No more clicking through multiple levels of directory structure, just type what you want and the computer will show it.
Due to the lack of desktop search on Linux I today tend to simply use google when I search for my stuff, sure only works for stuff that I have published on the net, but for those its way faster then trying to hunt down on my harddisk.
find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "somestring"
and get basically the same, but the above command will run for like half a day, a proper indexed based search engine on the other side can give me the results I need in a fraction of a second, which makes a pretty gigantic difference in terms of usability. Sooner or later such search engines might become the normal way to access your file, no more hunting through deep directory structures, you just type ahead and it will display what you want.
SuSE is IMHO still the best for a newb, since it comes with plenty of graphical configuration tools, which seem to be much higher quality then what most of the other distros provide. So if you want to configure your mouse, you click your way through quite well done config menus, while many other distros force you to 'vi/etc/X11/XF86Config' sooner or later.
Alternative is Debian, while it lacks all those tools, its the easiest to use in the long run, since once configured its completly painless to upgrade, it also comes with the huges package tree, so you extremly seldomly run into the need to compile stuff yourself.
Havn't tried Redhat, but Mandrake comes with a horrible, almost unuseable, default menu structure and overall really didn't gave much of a good impression. Ubuntu on the other side is basically a small collection of Debian packages plus a little bit of better desktop configuration, but the difference between Debian and Ubuntu is rather small. I however found Ubuntu provided a way to small number of packages to be much useable, you can via universe/multiverse in Ubuntu bascially include everything that Debian provides, but it gave an overall rather unstable impression, since the packages are then simply tacken directly out of Debian without much quality control, much better to use real Debian in the first place.
There is also Knoppix with gives you a nice Live-CD which is worth a look.
So overall, SuSE if you don't want to mess with shity config files, Debian if you don't fear to waste some time till stuff works and Knoppix when you just want to take a look.
I meant 'basic install' as in KDE + Gnome + Mozilla + XFree86 (ie. basic stuff you expect to be on a desktop computer), not just bash and a kernel. I used both stage3 and the packages CD, which however turned out to be not much usefull at all since it was outdated and almost all stuff got recompiled from scratch.
The throuble with Gentoo is that it provides no way to get binary packages in the same sane way as Debian or FreeBSD do, Gentoo forces one to recompile basically everything, which is IMHO nothing more than a pure waste of time. I want to compile the stuff I need to tweak myself, not the stuff where I will simply use the default settings anyway.
### Open source can't survive in this market because nobody of consequence really wants it to.
OpenSource itself can survive quite good even without any market at all. However you are right, OpenSource could have it a lot easier if it moved a little bit closer to the end user, currently there is still a whole lot of elitism or hostility around against the average user and a lot of projects simply don't care about the end user at all.
### How will we get good games then, if we don't pay a whole bunch of people to make them?
Free Software is about freedom, not price. If you want Halo2, you pay people to make a Halo2 and release it under a free license once done. The only throuble here is that not releasing a game under a free license will increase the sales and thus lead to more money, which is why most people won't do it. However there is nothing that stops a group of volunteers to create a game based on the money of donations, just the lack of donations can be quite throublesome.
People have to get rid of the idea that Free Software means no price, it means that you are not forced to pay, not that you should not.
The old saying "Free Software, contribute nothing, expect nothing" as quite a bit of truth in it.
### but at some gut level I'm just not sensing the long-term head of steam and ecomonic viability of the approach (or is it lifestyle?).
Free Software is not about economic viability, its not about making money or anything. Its about giving freedom to the user to share, modify and distribute software, it is NOT about the programmer who wrote it, that one is rather irrelevant in the view of the Free Software movement.
The Open Source movement on the other side now kind of reverses it and inserts tons of marketing speach to argue how Free Software can be cheaper to maintain, to produce, better and what not, at least half of it just marketing lies and such.
To make it short, when you want to make lots of money and buy yourself a Ferrari, don't try to acomplish that with writing Free Software, just won't work. If on the other side you want to make good software available to the community a Free Software license might help to ensure that your software stays protected while still giving your users all kind of freedoms.
### If ATI or NVidia would publish there specs on hardware, we wouldn't have a problem.
I seriously doubt that. NVidia drivers as they are, are top-notch, yes, they come binary only which causes a little throuble here and there, but I doubt that the open source community could write anything of equal quality in a timely manner. Look for example as GLSL support, NVidia drivers provided them a few weeks after the spec was released, OpenSource MESA still doesn't support GLSL and probally won't for quite some time.
To be really a useable platform for gaming or basically any kind of desktop use, Linux needs support hardware when its released, not month or years afterwards and to do that the hardware vendors themself must produce the drivers, there is no way that some open source people will start to produce high quality drivers for not yet available complicated hardware.
That said, yes, the specs would still be nice to have, but nothing. They would be a good addition, but just having the spec doesn't make a high quality open source driver pop up out of nothing.
1) Lack of support for binary only drivers, there is no ABI for drivers in Linux so hardware manufactors have to hack their own way to get drivers more or less portable. Some hardware vendors fail doing so, others don't even try and some get it more or less done. Point is if Linux want support from hardware vendors it has to be nice to them, not pack the road to support Linux with incompatibities and hostility against binary only drivers
2) Lack of support for binary-only software, LSB is moving into the right direction, but there is still a lot of things going that make it hard to get binaries out for Linux that don't break after a distro upgrade. Many Loki titles for example are now broken, not unfixable, there are workarounds and patches, but its still quite a pain, at least a lot more then necessarry.
3) Lack of adoption by the 'comman-man', Linux is still more a freak toy or a hobby for many people on the desktop, this is of course in part caused by 1) and 2).
4) Lack of market for selling stuff for Linux. While the number of Linux installations might be quite high, the number of people actually buying software is rather small, people are just a bit to much used to get software for free.
The reasons for the lack high quality Open Source games are quite simple:
1) Lack of programmers, artists, game designers and basically all the people you need for games. As oposed to applications (Gimp, Office, etc.) you don't need just one, but basically at least a new one every month and since games are often at least as complicated as some applications its clear that there is simply a lack of man-power to get it done.
2) Lack of tools, on the 2d graphics side we only have Gimp, no alternatives. On the 3D side we have Blender and Wings3d, but there are neither much alternatives. When it comes to sound and music there are even less good applications around. And once it comes to things like level editors and such it gets extremly spare in the Open Source world.
3) Lack of people actually trying to write games, I mean there should be heaploads of story writers and good artists around, at least quite a bit more then programmer, yet very few of them seem to have the time or motivation to try a game project.
Re:What's with all this Direct X for Linux nonsens
on
Does Linux Have Game?
·
· Score: 1
### It's time to try again. This time it will work.
The throuble is not really getting back to what Loki provided, ie. ports of older Windows games. There are already some other companies around who do the same, even so with a bit less releases than Loki did. The throuble is to make the jump from being a port-only bussiness to a game-producer one. What Linux needs are either ports that happen at the same time as the original release or even better are included with them or completly original games, both of these are extremly hard to accomplished, much harder then just porting a few games.
While its true that one needs more artists, writers and designers, one also needs more programmers, much more actually. Most open source gaming projects suffer from the lack of programmers no less then they do from the lack of artists. I have also seen more then enough games that failed due to the lack of programmers, not due to the lack of artists.
### Seriously, why aren't more Open Source games developed? I'm not talking Pong I'm talking Halo 2, Doom 3 level.
Simply because OpenSource doesn't have multi millon dollar budgets. If you start writing such games with only a small handfull of volunteers, you will, even if you ever get it done, don't have a final release before something like 2020, by which time it will already look pretty outdated.
If I remember correctly Loki failed more due to the lack of good management then due to the lack of market. Sure the Linux gaming market is not huge, but enough for a company to survive. There are still companies around that port to Linux such as Epic-interactive or Tuxgames.
However all those are just porting companies, porting older Windows games to Linux, which is better than nothing, but not really all that usefull for people who still have a Windows version more or less up and running, since they would have to a) buy games again that they already own for windows and b) buy them overpriced, once the Linux version is out for 40EUR, the windows version sells often already for 10EUR or less.
What Debian IMHO needs to do is to split their distribution into different parts and release those independendly for each other (base, x11, gnome, kde, etc.).
Its simply a completly hopeless undertaking to try to get all multiple thousands packages in Debian stable stable at the same point in time, it simply won't work. And while this undertaking is already almost impossible at the release time of a new Debian stable, it gets rather pointless once the Debian stable distro got a year or more old. At that point in time upstream often has already moved much further leaving Debian stable with a outdated, sometimes incompatible and bug filled version compared to the latest upstream.
Debian really must move much closer to upstream, when upstream releases a new stable version and it doesn't come with major incompatibilites or problems it should move into the stable branch of the distri and not have to wait three years till Debian decides its a good time to release a new distri.
The concept of having a non-changing[1] and security-patched list of packages is nice and good, but it simply can't work if there are no regular new releases and often multiple years between releases. These days Debian stable is really more a 'Debian obsolete' than anything.
[1] non-changing is really the meaning of 'stable' for Debian, not to be confused with software that is stable, have been burned one time to much by buggy software that was already fixed upstream but never made it into stable.
### Parents should do their job -- raising a kid, teaching THEIR values
Yes, and thats EXACTLY why enforcing the ESRB ratings is a good thing. It gives parents the freedom to decide what their kids should play and what not without monitoring them 24/7.
If you don't enforce such things you don't give control in the hand of parents, but into the hands of video game manufactors and the marketing departments.
Remember, if the parents think their kid is ready for such games, they can always buy it for them.
I agree with that, white worm when done right is a good thing. However to be really a good thing such a white worm needs to be official, ie. signed by those who have written the valuable software, else any bad worm could come by, add a little "I patched your system" message and in reality just install a backdoor. There is of course still the danger that a evil worm got first into the system before the white worm could fix it so some audit on what changed in the system is still necessary, but it could at least stop the spreading of the bad worm.
### Patches aren't always 100% correct, and some can cause some major havoc.
If I have the choice between havoc caused by a patch and havoc caused by a hostile breakin into the system, I'll pick the havoc caused by the patch, that at least doesn't leave any hidden backdoors behind.
Slashdot Mirror
### Does anybody actually use the beta/alpha version of it for anything?
I installed it over a year ago, worked without to much problems, sure not really production quality and a bit crashy here and there, but it there, not much complicated to install (at least not harder then gentoo) and basically works. Hardly vaporware, but sure neither much of a Linux-killer, however I found it more interesting to toy around with then any of the BSDs. And GNU/Hurds translators for sure are quite cool, Linux userspace-filesystems are still not quite there.
### Do you really think that all this stuff you consider basic and don't even think about comes for free?
It of course doesn't come for free, but its still rather cheap, its by no means an excuse for having almost 5 sec startup time. Just look at Blender, it can do 3d modeling, video-editing, edit images and even comes with a text-editor, anti-aliased fonts too, startup time however is instantanious, a fraction of a second. Beside from that, the 5secs startup time of Gedit are already with a fully running Gnome session, so all the UI-goodiness, fonts and stuff should already be loaded into memory, which makes the startup time look even worse then its already is. As said, there is just NO excuse for such a poor startup time, its just bad optimization, nothing else. If you don't care about startup time, you will get such horrible startup times simply because its way to easy to do stupid things that cause them.
### Vim starts in a second and it shreds that "MSDOS edit" to pieces in terms of functionality.
So what? Of course you can write programms with more features then yesterdays apps without making them slower, thats the whole point, even my Emacs starts faster then Gedit.
### That way you could compare applications that were doing nearly the same thing.
Gedit and MSDOS edit are doing basically the exact same thing, the presentation is different, but from the feature point of view they are almost exactly the same. The point is that while the CPUs have become faster, the applications themself actually have often gotten a whole lot slower, in this case actually slower the the amount of CPU speed increased, resulting in an overall slower 'computer'.
There is nothing wrong with adding feature which make use of the additionally available CPU power, but today its far to often 95% pure bloat without actually adding any features, sometimes even reducing them. There is really absolutly NO excuse for having such a trivial app like Gedit take multiple seconds to load, writing fasts apps today is still quite possible, Blender or Rox for example start in an instant, basically no Gnome or KDE app comes even close.
### For >95% of users, I see no need to have computers faster than 2Ghz.
As long as there are games and a large number of computer users who want to play them, there will be a need for faster CPUs. While on the graphic side the main work is already done by the GPU, the physics and AI are still done by the CPU. And oposed to the graphics, where games are already quite advanced, AI and physics tends still to be rather primitive in games and will for sure need a lot of additional CPU.
### The limits are high enough now to not care.
The throuble is that this is assumption is wrong. The computers would in theory be fast enough to not care about optimization all over the place, the throuble is that a lot of bad programming doesn't result in just linear decrease of speed. If I use linear lookup instead of a hash-table, speed will go down, quite a bit more down then the amount of speed of the CPU increases over time.
Simple example, Gedit, an extremly basic text-editor takes 4-5 seconds to load on a 1Ghz Athlon, MSDOS edit on the other side on 386er started in a fraction of a second. From a feature point of view both do basically the same. Gedit for sure has some more advanced rendering and GUI and isn't a text-mode application like MSDOS edit, however shouldn't it be possible with todays CPUs which are quite a bit faster then back then to have an application that has better rendering then text-mode, but still be at least as fast or faster then back then?
### Face it, Transmeta dosn't make anything that people want.
I know quite a lot of people who would have loved to have a low power CPU that is x86 compatible in their desktop computers, the throuble is that Transmeta failed completly to sell their stuff. You simply couldn't by a mainboard with a Transmeta CPU, the only stuff that got ever released were some sub-notebooks in japan.
That transmeta CPU also fall a bit short when it comes to speed is of course another issue, but simply because you couldn't buy the CPUs at all in the first place is the reason why they completly failed to sell.
### A lot of people keep saying this. I don't know if it is trolling or misinformation.
Might be bad information, I don't know, but I couldn't find, beside the packages-iso-image, any official binaries for gentoo. And as said, the packages-iso wasn't of much use, since the binary packages where for most part outdated and thus not used and even if they would have worked they would only cover an very small fraction of the complete portage tree.
To make it short, where can I find binaries for the complete portage tree? I would like to try gentoo again, but I am not really interested in keeping my computer busy with compiling for multiple days just for a basic install.
### For the life of me, I still can't quite figure out what all the hype is about desktop search.
I for one have around one million files in my home directory alone, doing a simple 'find' on the filenames alone takes like 10-30mins, searching for file content is way bejoint was is tolerable for interactive use. A proper implemented desktop search on the other side could give me results in a fraction of a second.
Now how does this improve the work flow? Simple, ever tried to find some letter, email or whatever that you typed a few month ago? With a proper desktop search you could simply type-ahead your way directly to the email in a matter of seconds, without it you will have a half an hour trip throught all kinds of old data.
More importantly such a search will not only be usefull in case you 'lost' stuff, it might in addition to that also make it faster simply to reach stuff. No more clicking through multiple levels of directory structure, just type what you want and the computer will show it.
Due to the lack of desktop search on Linux I today tend to simply use google when I search for my stuff, sure only works for stuff that I have published on the net, but for those its way faster then trying to hunt down on my harddisk.
Its a matter of speed, sure I can do:
find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "somestring"
and get basically the same, but the above command will run for like half a day, a proper indexed based search engine on the other side can give me the results I need in a fraction of a second, which makes a pretty gigantic difference in terms of usability. Sooner or later such search engines might become the normal way to access your file, no more hunting through deep directory structures, you just type ahead and it will display what you want.
SuSE is IMHO still the best for a newb, since it comes with plenty of graphical configuration tools, which seem to be much higher quality then what most of the other distros provide. So if you want to configure your mouse, you click your way through quite well done config menus, while many other distros force you to 'vi /etc/X11/XF86Config' sooner or later.
Alternative is Debian, while it lacks all those tools, its the easiest to use in the long run, since once configured its completly painless to upgrade, it also comes with the huges package tree, so you extremly seldomly run into the need to compile stuff yourself.
Havn't tried Redhat, but Mandrake comes with a horrible, almost unuseable, default menu structure and overall really didn't gave much of a good impression. Ubuntu on the other side is basically a small collection of Debian packages plus a little bit of better desktop configuration, but the difference between Debian and Ubuntu is rather small. I however found Ubuntu provided a way to small number of packages to be much useable, you can via universe/multiverse in Ubuntu bascially include everything that Debian provides, but it gave an overall rather unstable impression, since the packages are then simply tacken directly out of Debian without much quality control, much better to use real Debian in the first place.
There is also Knoppix with gives you a nice Live-CD which is worth a look.
So overall, SuSE if you don't want to mess with shity config files, Debian if you don't fear to waste some time till stuff works and Knoppix when you just want to take a look.
I meant 'basic install' as in KDE + Gnome + Mozilla + XFree86 (ie. basic stuff you expect to be on a desktop computer), not just bash and a kernel. I used both stage3 and the packages CD, which however turned out to be not much usefull at all since it was outdated and almost all stuff got recompiled from scratch.
The throuble with Gentoo is that it provides no way to get binary packages in the same sane way as Debian or FreeBSD do, Gentoo forces one to recompile basically everything, which is IMHO nothing more than a pure waste of time. I want to compile the stuff I need to tweak myself, not the stuff where I will simply use the default settings anyway.
Debian also has the little advantage that a basic install doesn't take three days to install like Gentoo does.
### Open source can't survive in this market because nobody of consequence really wants it to.
OpenSource itself can survive quite good even without any market at all. However you are right, OpenSource could have it a lot easier if it moved a little bit closer to the end user, currently there is still a whole lot of elitism or hostility around against the average user and a lot of projects simply don't care about the end user at all.
### How will we get good games then, if we don't pay a whole bunch of people to make them?
Free Software is about freedom, not price. If you want Halo2, you pay people to make a Halo2 and release it under a free license once done. The only throuble here is that not releasing a game under a free license will increase the sales and thus lead to more money, which is why most people won't do it. However there is nothing that stops a group of volunteers to create a game based on the money of donations, just the lack of donations can be quite throublesome.
People have to get rid of the idea that Free Software means no price, it means that you are not forced to pay, not that you should not.
The old saying "Free Software, contribute nothing, expect nothing" as quite a bit of truth in it.
### but at some gut level I'm just not sensing the long-term head of steam and ecomonic viability of the approach (or is it lifestyle?).
Free Software is not about economic viability, its not about making money or anything. Its about giving freedom to the user to share, modify and distribute software, it is NOT about the programmer who wrote it, that one is rather irrelevant in the view of the Free Software movement.
The Open Source movement on the other side now kind of reverses it and inserts tons of marketing speach to argue how Free Software can be cheaper to maintain, to produce, better and what not, at least half of it just marketing lies and such.
To make it short, when you want to make lots of money and buy yourself a Ferrari, don't try to acomplish that with writing Free Software, just won't work. If on the other side you want to make good software available to the community a Free Software license might help to ensure that your software stays protected while still giving your users all kind of freedoms.
### If ATI or NVidia would publish there specs on hardware, we wouldn't have a problem.
I seriously doubt that. NVidia drivers as they are, are top-notch, yes, they come binary only which causes a little throuble here and there, but I doubt that the open source community could write anything of equal quality in a timely manner. Look for example as GLSL support, NVidia drivers provided them a few weeks after the spec was released, OpenSource MESA still doesn't support GLSL and probally won't for quite some time.
To be really a useable platform for gaming or basically any kind of desktop use, Linux needs support hardware when its released, not month or years afterwards and to do that the hardware vendors themself must produce the drivers, there is no way that some open source people will start to produce high quality drivers for not yet available complicated hardware.
That said, yes, the specs would still be nice to have, but nothing. They would be a good addition, but just having the spec doesn't make a high quality open source driver pop up out of nothing.
1) Lack of support for binary only drivers, there is no ABI for drivers in Linux so hardware manufactors have to hack their own way to get drivers more or less portable. Some hardware vendors fail doing so, others don't even try and some get it more or less done. Point is if Linux want support from hardware vendors it has to be nice to them, not pack the road to support Linux with incompatibities and hostility against binary only drivers
2) Lack of support for binary-only software, LSB is moving into the right direction, but there is still a lot of things going that make it hard to get binaries out for Linux that don't break after a distro upgrade. Many Loki titles for example are now broken, not unfixable, there are workarounds and patches, but its still quite a pain, at least a lot more then necessarry.
3) Lack of adoption by the 'comman-man', Linux is still more a freak toy or a hobby for many people on the desktop, this is of course in part caused by 1) and 2).
4) Lack of market for selling stuff for Linux. While the number of Linux installations might be quite high, the number of people actually buying software is rather small, people are just a bit to much used to get software for free.
The reasons for the lack high quality Open Source games are quite simple:
1) Lack of programmers, artists, game designers and basically all the people you need for games. As oposed to applications (Gimp, Office, etc.) you don't need just one, but basically at least a new one every month and since games are often at least as complicated as some applications its clear that there is simply a lack of man-power to get it done.
2) Lack of tools, on the 2d graphics side we only have Gimp, no alternatives. On the 3D side we have Blender and Wings3d, but there are neither much alternatives. When it comes to sound and music there are even less good applications around. And once it comes to things like level editors and such it gets extremly spare in the Open Source world.
3) Lack of people actually trying to write games, I mean there should be heaploads of story writers and good artists around, at least quite a bit more then programmer, yet very few of them seem to have the time or motivation to try a game project.
### It's time to try again. This time it will work.
The throuble is not really getting back to what Loki provided, ie. ports of older Windows games. There are already some other companies around who do the same, even so with a bit less releases than Loki did. The throuble is to make the jump from being a port-only bussiness to a game-producer one. What Linux needs are either ports that happen at the same time as the original release or even better are included with them or completly original games, both of these are extremly hard to accomplished, much harder then just porting a few games.
While its true that one needs more artists, writers and designers, one also needs more programmers, much more actually. Most open source gaming projects suffer from the lack of programmers no less then they do from the lack of artists. I have also seen more then enough games that failed due to the lack of programmers, not due to the lack of artists.
### Seriously, why aren't more Open Source games developed? I'm not talking Pong I'm talking Halo 2, Doom 3 level. Simply because OpenSource doesn't have multi millon dollar budgets. If you start writing such games with only a small handfull of volunteers, you will, even if you ever get it done, don't have a final release before something like 2020, by which time it will already look pretty outdated.
If I remember correctly Loki failed more due to the lack of good management then due to the lack of market. Sure the Linux gaming market is not huge, but enough for a company to survive. There are still companies around that port to Linux such as Epic-interactive or Tuxgames.
However all those are just porting companies, porting older Windows games to Linux, which is better than nothing, but not really all that usefull for people who still have a Windows version more or less up and running, since they would have to a) buy games again that they already own for windows and b) buy them overpriced, once the Linux version is out for 40EUR, the windows version sells often already for 10EUR or less.
What Debian IMHO needs to do is to split their distribution into different parts and release those independendly for each other (base, x11, gnome, kde, etc.).
Its simply a completly hopeless undertaking to try to get all multiple thousands packages in Debian stable stable at the same point in time, it simply won't work. And while this undertaking is already almost impossible at the release time of a new Debian stable, it gets rather pointless once the Debian stable distro got a year or more old. At that point in time upstream often has already moved much further leaving Debian stable with a outdated, sometimes incompatible and bug filled version compared to the latest upstream.
Debian really must move much closer to upstream, when upstream releases a new stable version and it doesn't come with major incompatibilites or problems it should move into the stable branch of the distri and not have to wait three years till Debian decides its a good time to release a new distri.
The concept of having a non-changing[1] and security-patched list of packages is nice and good, but it simply can't work if there are no regular new releases and often multiple years between releases. These days Debian stable is really more a 'Debian obsolete' than anything.
[1] non-changing is really the meaning of 'stable' for Debian, not to be confused with software that is stable, have been burned one time to much by buggy software that was already fixed upstream but never made it into stable.
### Parents should do their job -- raising a kid, teaching THEIR values
Yes, and thats EXACTLY why enforcing the ESRB ratings is a good thing. It gives parents the freedom to decide what their kids should play and what not without monitoring them 24/7.
If you don't enforce such things you don't give control in the hand of parents, but into the hands of video game manufactors and the marketing departments.
Remember, if the parents think their kid is ready for such games, they can always buy it for them.
I agree with that, white worm when done right is a good thing. However to be really a good thing such a white worm needs to be official, ie. signed by those who have written the valuable software, else any bad worm could come by, add a little "I patched your system" message and in reality just install a backdoor. There is of course still the danger that a evil worm got first into the system before the white worm could fix it so some audit on what changed in the system is still necessary, but it could at least stop the spreading of the bad worm.
### Patches aren't always 100% correct, and some can cause some major havoc.
If I have the choice between havoc caused by a patch and havoc caused by a hostile breakin into the system, I'll pick the havoc caused by the patch, that at least doesn't leave any hidden backdoors behind.